We are halfway through the year as June draws to a close, and it is time for me once again to take a look back at what I’ve been up to for the last month. It is certainly less than in recent months, but that was intentional after the big push I had in the last few months in getting enough of the Automators Obsidian Vault up to date that I felt it had enough for a minimum viable release. But there has certainly been some things going on. Doing less does not mean doing nothing at all. I really need an outlet for such things otherwise I’ll get antsy.
ThoughtAsylum
There is just the one blog post this month, and it is about previewing Markdown content. In fact much of it is about some tooling I am now using this very moment to write this post. Every month I write this “what have I done in the past month” post on Buy Me a Coffee (BMAC), and I write it in Drafts. I don’t tend to use Drafts for longer form writing, but I have built a number of automations in Drafts and Apple Shortcuts that make the whole process simpler. I really can’t help myself but bring automation into ‘all the things’.
I had been using Marked 2 by Brett Terpstra to preview my posts as I created them, but there we’re a few “sticker” points in my previous usage. Back in April, Brett released a framework utility called “Conductor” (good name 😉) to use with Marked 2 for custom processing and pre-processing. I hadn’t had a chance until now to check it out, and it has enabled a few things for me, one of them being able to introduce more tailoring to my BMAC monthly post drafting process in terms of the preview capability.
Other than Brett’s own work, I hadn’t seen anyone sharing anything about what they were setting up, so now I’ve got this first phase in (yes I do have more in mind), I decided to share it in a blog post to help others take advantage of this.
You can follow the entire walkthrough in my Setting up Marked 2 Conductor for Drafts post.
Since posting this, Brett read it and has added an AutoLink( ) filter that can be used in place of my script to convert plain URLs (not specified as Markdown links) into Markdown URLs.
Forums
As well as working a little less on my own projects, I’ve also spent a bit more time lurking than answering queries on my usual forum haunts this month. But the notable ones I have contributed to are listed out below.
Drafts
A new forum poster asked how to add a random quote to an e-mail signature in a mail action step. Greg set out a few lines of script to create a “quote” tag, and I helped sort out some subsequent mail formatting issues.
I helped with a bit of testing to confirm a bug where the show/hide drafts list script code is not working as expected on iPad.
There are a couple of script-driven queries around the longstanding tip on creating new drafts with templates. There was some interesting date tagging in the second query.
Ever had an inability to search for newly installed actions? Well there are some explanations and fixes.
One user was asking about accessing contacts information from Drafts. I think they maybe missed that the client application and the account are not necessarily one and the same when it comes to Google Mail ( and most others).
I still haven’t updated Doctor Drafts just yet to utilise this, but I did make a suggestion to a user on how to work around a Python issue with Doctor Drafts.
One forum user was looking to append a date to the end of a second line in a draft using Shortcuts and I provided a different approach for the solution.
Automators
I happen to have written several posts relate to the theme of how to keep track of your automations, so it was pretty easy to add my own take into a topic geared to this question.
The mysterious forced app refresh issue discussion from May picked up again, and I made some further suggestions.
One user was looking for a utility to quickly disable a camera on macOS. I found a crude (key press) Keyboard Maestro macro, but I can’t help thinking that maybe using a virtual camera for the particular app the user is ultimately wanting to work with, and then just switching that between the actual camera and another source as the input to the virtual camera, or an actual lens cover if overall security is the deal maker.
I gave one forum poster a hand with viewing rendered HTML inside of a Shortcuts shortcut.
I went back and added a follow-up to a query on podcast transcripts for the Automators podcast - this is included in the Automators Obsidian Vault, but I hadn’t launched it a few weeks earlier when the question was asked.
There was a look at Scriptable and getting JSON from an API for a widget that took shows some debugging of a curious issue.
I had a go at directing a user on an automobile price check automation. The trick sometimes is not to dig deeper, but to dig in more places.
Are your Shortcuts conditional statements spontaneously resetting their nested actions? Not happening for me and by the lack of responses on the thread I get the feeling it is a minimal occurrence at best and user error at worst. Do you experience this behaviour? If so, add to the topic.
Back once again are queries and questions in relation to a WhatsApp message via automation error. But it looks like we maybe got everything sorted - just remember “garbage in, garbage out”; make sure your data is right before you test.
Haw hard is it to automate adjusting the width of a column in Apple Mail or Finder list view? Well, not as simple as one might hope.
An edge case on bunch naming came up for Cluster, my Alfred Workflow for Working with the Bunch app - just why did it have such a hard time with one user’s bunches?
There was a question on how to trigger shortcuts' Services/quick actions from any application that I made a suggestion on.
Being someone who employs an old Intel Mac mini as a home server (in fact all my Macs are still Intel - Apple stuff is expensive!), a question on using an old Mac Mini M1 as a home server and setting up monitors was something I could definitely talk about my setup for, and something where I do wonder - is an M1 device really now thought of as “old”?
Other
Alfred
I have spent a little bit of time in the past month tinkering with some of the Alfred workflows I have not yet finished building out.
One of them is the Obsidian workflow I started on months ago. I’m making slow but steady progress on what I want to do with it. One is a simple one for dealing with command line remote connections, and I just need to tidy it up. The final one I have spent a bit of time working on is for working as a utility to help control another app, an app that is often used in partnership with another app that I have an Alfred workflow for.
These last two should be making an appearance before too long.
Automators Obsidian Vault
For those of you who listened to episode 155 of The Automators, you will have gained some idea of the automation I ahem built into the creation of the Automators Obsidian Vault. However, hopefully what also came across is that there is a lot of manual work that goes into this too. The vault is much more than just a set of spell-checked transcribed episodes.
With each episode, there are a bunch of topics that are discussed that people might want to reference. Some of these will have come up before. Some will not. This means that I spend a lot of time building out this additional content. As such, even though the episodes tend to drop on a Friday evening and the transcription is ready by the early hours of Saturday morning, there is a lot of work to do to cross-reference and most of them time, create the additional content to accompany the episode.
Over time, as I build out more and more of the back catalogue of episodes, I expect this to reduce. But every time there’s a new area, new app, or new set of topics that comes up, that generates a whole batch of extra content to create, and I need to fit this around the other things in my day.
In a nutshell, that’s why it is taking me over a week after the episode drops to release the update. But episode 156 was released (along with more than two dozen new pages cross-referenced back through the older episodes), and episode 158 is in progress.
… and episode 157 … well, it appears the Automators had a technical hiccup on that one. Maybe we’ll find out more in episode 159?
Upcoming
Over the coming month I would very much like to get some traction on some of the Alfred workflows I’ve been working on. It would be nice to spend a bit more time with the new Home Assistant functionality from the last few months, and I do have an idea or two for what I want to do in my second phase of Conductor for Marked 2 use.
I also have a couple of trips to London planned in this month. The first one is a business trip where I am now not only attending a platform customer user group as a delegate, but also as a speaker. Its is only a small event, but I’m hoping it will be interesting and help me build a few contacts and relationships.
Towards the end of the month I will be travelling down to London again on a personal trip as I have a ticket for the Relay 10 year anniversary event, and I may well add a post about that sometime soon after.
Thank you once again to everyone who has bought me coffee. It is always rewarding to see I am helping others and the coffees are very much appreciated and really do help keep me caffeinated while I fix my own technology shortfalls and then crank out all all of the extra parts for the wider community to get the advantage too through a hopefully more polished experience.