Is it normal to feel this tired only three months into the year? I think the pressures and pace of my day job this year have been noticeably higher (expectedly so given how 2023 ended), and I have only just realised that other than the Easter weekend (which is coming to a close as I write this) has been my first time off since New Year’s Day. Fortunately I am feeling more relaxed and a little refreshed, though it remains to see if I still feel that way by the time this week is over.
But how does that mean March went? Was all my energy spent on the day job? Well, no. Not all of it. It has actually been a very productive month outside of work too. Not everything is exactly shareable, but I have various lessons learned as you’ll glean from my home tech saga (below), which I think I have now re-stabilised, and there are definitely tangible things, if virtual “stuff” can be called tangible, for you if you are interested in Drafts, Apple Shortcuts, or Obsidian. Longer term there will definitely be more spawned from this past month’s efforts.
ThoughtAsylum
I have not had much time this past month to blog, or at least, I fell short by a few hours on how much time I’d have. The funny thing is because I post this separate to my usual site, I always forget about this monthly review being an actual blog, and writing this always takes me 4–6 hours. I had hoped to get one long and one short post out this month but I simply ran out of time. But, I did get one blog post out, and I did make sure it was the longer one, so I don’t feel too bad about this.
In 2023 I attended several technology events for work purposes across the year. It seems that attending these same events in 2024 has resulted in a bit of a shift, with all of the events occurring within three months. Based on prior experience and some experience/friction at the one I attended this past month I decided to address some of my underlying concerns by developing a new workflow. One that will allow me to travel a little lighter around conference venues, capture information whether I’m sitting watching a session or standing chatting at a booth, and have me integrate images into the right place in my notes even when Internet connectivity is almost non-existent.
I tend in general not to share my own workflows, but rather the components to allow people to develop their own, but for this one, everything was soo deeply linked, it made more sense to walk through the whole thing, and you can read about it here - A Drafts Workflow for Conferences
Forums
The usual forums have felt a bit busier this month, and there are definitely more new posters appearing on the Automators forum - where I get the feeling that the quality of query and perhaps even answer has begun to decline a little with a lot of people making suggestions for things that they have not tested, but could easily have tested. That simply adds noise and will propagate information that I suspect unsophisticated AI could offer up as solutions to issues in the future.
Drafts
There was an interesting request about using dot commands in Drafts, and made a couple of suggestions for alternatives (dot commands I believe as stated would be impractical) including slash commands - a working solution I posted about several years ago.
A request for a Simple Match and Replace Script lead to the discovery of a bug in drafts on the Mac. Like in physics, the observer effect also can sometimes be discovered when debugging.
Would you like to edit in live preview in Drafts? What might the impact be on your workflow and the app architecture?
I made a suggestion on resolving an issue with the Raindrop.io API.
A discussion about Tasks In Drafts brought the topic of future dated content to the fore once again.
There was a long discussion about add content to Tana from Drafts and a recent API change. Worth a read if only to spot the unfortunate typo of an “o” being substituted for an “I” and entirely changing the gist of something someone was linking to 🤣
Sometimes when posting replies to queries its like they don’t get read - as an example, someone had an error running a shortcut from an action and the possible reasons were limited.
One user had a problem with copying as rich text action/make rich text from markdown in shortcuts not working. A restart seemed to sort things out, but there was a shortcut too that I think I figured out the issue with, and you can find out how I managed to figure out where the poster lived from just the shortcut even though there was no location information in it 😱
I created a DEVONthink action for a user who was having problems exporting to DEVONthink with tags.
I filled in a few details for someone looking for a custom Drafts syntax for Python.
I resolved a created date in file name issue for a Drafts user.
Have you ever noticed how credits and quotas seem to be the underlying issue when someone has a problem using OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Drafts?
While adding lots of integrations to Drafts can be useful for many, it does increase the maintenance overhead and adding AI integrations for every AI product (such as this request for Claude integration) I think could become untenable in 2024 given the explosion of GPT-based services coming to market. What do you think?
And remember in 2024, friends don’t let friends use Evernote, so there’s more than one way to address an error creating titles for new Evernote notes.
Automators
As a bit of a side-request off the back of a strange issue someone was having deleting a bad Shortcut, I made a suggestion around text-based editing of Shortcuts.
If you are an Outlook and Shortcuts user have you noted a bug where you can’t send Outlook emails?
Another month, another resurrection, this time backup shortcuts? (iOS 14). Is my choice of backup solution the same, and did everyone really understand what was going on?
I came up with a couple of options for a request around auto appending Drafts via Shortcuts based on some different destination setups.
A query on arguments not being passed to Scriptable from the Share Sheet was addressed and proven to be otherwise; though the original posters’s reasoning for assuming otherwise remains sound.
I also resolved another Scriptable issue, this time for an issue rendering emoji in a Scriptable widget.
An issue with show compose e-mail hanging Shortcuts on iPad, but not iPhone always lends itself to a good reboot of the iPad, but as is typical with a first time poster we are left wondering if that did in fact resolve the issue.
While AppleScript is far from my favourite language, I do occasionally turn my hand to it as it is the best tool for the job. Such was the case with creating a working Dropzone 4 add to Apple Notes action. This one took me a while though as it seems Notes currently has an AppleScript bug around adding attachments (i.e. not just me experiencing it) that I ended up having to brute force my way past.
I gave one of my usual sprawling (in depth?) answers, including a Keyboard Maestro macro, to a rather shallowly defined query about using Keyboard Maestro to copy the content of all files in a folder and sub folders. While Keyboard Maestro may be the UI for this, I defaulted back to using the command line to work with the files - after all that’s what shells and their utilities do best.
There were a couple of posts following up on very old queries, extracting attachments from all emails in an Outlook folder, and automated saving attachments from Outlook 2016, that both came from one user. I can’t figure out if they work for the company whose products they are suggesting (they never link to them, which is odd behaviour for any spammer or marketer) or if they really don’t understand the original question and how their suggestions don’t actually pertain to them. Stop Forum Spam has a few listings that suggest the former. What do you think?
I pointed someone looking to send a screenshot to Todoist the relevant documentation as they seem to have a flaw in their original logic about adding an attachment to a Todoist task.
A bit of a strange one , but another necro-post on a query about inserting dates and times on iOS/iPadOS/macOS - was the answer in the original thread of nine posts all along?
How well do you know your keyboard shortcuts on the Mac. Do you know how to trigger the Done button on inputting a date in Apple Shortcuts using the keyboard?. Did you suggest the same key combo as me? Does my suggestion work for you?
There was a query about alternatives to Show Text and Quick Look in Apple Shortcuts to display multiple consecutive steps describing how the shortcut works. While Show Alert is the simplest and obvious solution I followed up with a suggestion whereby Quick Look could actually offer them a more flexible and easier option still.
I made some suggestions about retrieving spreadsheet data in Shortcuts.
One new forum poster is having issues since the iOS 17.4 release, picking folder bookmarks in Cryptomator. My suggestions didn’t yield any luck, and I don’t use Cryptomator (it is also a paid app, so I’m not installing to investigate), but if you’re a Cryptomator user maybe you could pitch in and help them out?
While I do try to help people as much as I can, I’m finding more people reaching out to me directly for help these days. I try as much as possible to help in public, but I also get to choose what to help with. Seems like with this IMessaging to a list from a CSV file the poster thought I was the got to person. Flattering, but really not the point on a public forum. As it was I gave them a full break down of their failing solution (including diagrams) and my own replacement solution. So if you want to know why I would use a dictionary to process a CSV file, then this deep dive is for you.
A follow up on how to check if a contact number is compatible with iMessage lead to someone requesting me to jump on Telegram with them to help sort out their issue (that I had already answered) and someone seemingly making some liberal assumptions when a bit of an eye on the details shows no assumptions to be necessary.
One user had lost all Scriptable scripts. I suggested that they had been offloaded, but it seems that they were on one device and not another but that they could copy them across. That sounds totally bizarre to me unless they have changed Scriptable to read local vs cloud storage, or they have iCloud sync issues. But bottom line was they seemed to manually sort out their own issue.
Other
Of course, that’s far from everything I have been up to this past month. After all, we had a long weekend at the end of it, so that’s plenty of opportunity to squeeze more stuff in.
Obsidian
Back in January I posted about Templater-based Converters for Obsidian, and a new Github repo I had set up to host the Templater templates. I’ve added some additional templates for converting to and from spaces/tabs, and some for inserting unique IDs (primarily for tagging blocks) so you can link to them.
Home Tech
Back in February I confirmed the disappointing SSD failure for my Home Assistant Raspberry Pi setup. Thanks to something else I have done this month, I now have it back up and running and have been catching up on this year’s updates - via various YouTube videos and Home Assistant Podcast episodes. Getting the backup restored was incredibly painful as it is an unreasonably large backup file. I think I have too much historical data after six to eight months of use which is what made the backup file so huge. As a result, the browser-fed process kept stalling, but with persistence and this other update I was finally able to get things sorted. I’ll need to carry out some remedial work to get the backup file size under control at some point, but that simply wasn’t on the cards for this month.
The big change however has been the ousting of my tp-link Deco mesh router with a new Mikrotik router. Switching away from the Deco as the router seems to have made all the difference in the world. All of its AI smarts and “don’t worry we’ll take care of all your networking for you” has been swapped out to the other extreme - a router where I have to configure every little last thing about it. Generally I’ve been used to some happy medium between these, but fortunately professional curiosity and some networking experience meant I wasn’t totally lost.
The base setup was relatively straight forward thanks to some really great YouTube videos by some Mikrotik professionals (including Mikrotik themselves. Setting up connectivity with my modem - well that was painful. Added some port forwarding and hairpin nat routing to get my Home Assistant instance working inside and outside home network was even more frustrating and took me about 10 hours to get working … even though the online guidance suggests setting this up is a 5-minute job. It wasn’t when you include all the testing and trying to pin down various issues. But let’s just say I now have some very important configuration exports squirrelled away into my backups!
The result though is a network working exactly as one would expect. Rock solid, better Internet speeds and most importantly a happy family and happy work colleagues (no more random drop offs mid-call as I’ve been experiencing since late December).
I have even configured Wireguard as a VPN and am using that in preference to some of the port forwarding I had put in place previously. I might say a good amount of this is because setting up the Home Assistant access was enough to put me off adding any more; but we’ll just go with its better security that way. I’m also going to be very tempted to put Mikrotik routers in place for others in future as I can then connect with Wireguard and remotely analyse and administer their network as I seem to be the go to “IT guy” for a lot of family and friends - assuming I can configure it for their Internet connection of course.
The Decos are now acting as access points only, and they seem to be working fine. I’ll keep using them as access points for now, and keep updating the firmware, but at some point, I strongly suspect I’ll switch out to a different WiFi set up too. My faith in them is very low and the Mikrotik gives me all sorts of options for managing Wifi access points (CAPsMAN - maybe something I’ll need to explore).
As a result, my core network (don’t ask how many devices are connected by the switches and via WiFi) seems to have been broken down into many separate components and now looks like this.
As an aside on this, we have also just had our loft boarded out, which means we have started to clear the garage from last year’s move in preparation for finally doing the conversion into an office - which will mean more networking and more home tech, though I doubt I’ll have much to spend on things after the cost of the building work to change it from being somewhere to keep a car into somewhere to put a desk.
Alfred
I’ve also spent a little time tinkering with the new Alfred 5.5 update, while it was in beta actually. There are some new action blocks that I plan to incorporate into some of my Alfred workflows. I doubt it will be any time particularly soon, but just know that they are on my radar.
Odd Jobs
Strangely this past month has also seen me lending a technical hand to a few people. One someone I used to work with, and a couple of other folks. While each of them asked about me consulting I’m more pitching in. The hassle of setting myself up with a side hustle consulting business is just too much to consider right now, and I have no idea how that would fit with my actual day job. There’s no way I’d let that suffer as a result.
The upshot is some people owe me some drinks and favours. Such is the way of the world, but am I doing myself out of an opportunity here?
Does anyone else out there have any insights to share on what it’s like to do a very much ad hoc consulting side hustle? It might be something I need to consider longer term if I keep receiving these sorts of requests. While I did work as a consulting manager I was a little removed from some of this stuff, and I’ve never been self employed, let alone also working a full time job at the same time.
Work
Speaking of the day job, as well as a full on day at the annual SAP Learning and Skills forum event in London, I also gave a presentation to the SAP SuccessFactors Learning Special Interest Group on enhancing notifications. Members of the group have exclusive access to the recording and materials - but anyone with an interest in this niche area should also be able to find the presentation deck and materials in one of my GitHub repos with a little searching if really they want to. Given the higher than usual attendance and the feedback, I think it was a pretty good topic.
Work-wise the month has left me rather drained, so I have definitely appreciated finishing the month with an extra long weekend.
My Special Project
I have also made good progress this month on the extra work my special background project threw up a while back. I’m almost there and close to being back on with the core efforts. But as with any project, making sure you have a solid foundation reaps dividends in the long run - but I really need to get things moving. I have a rough milestone in mind that I am aiming for, so I’ll be continuing to divert as much time as I can spare to this. I don’t know how many hours I’ll have put into it in the end by launch, but I suspect it will easily be several hundred hours; yet when I look at it I can’t help but think I’ll not get that time out of it, so I do hope others will find it useful too so I can justify the effort.
Upcoming
Coming up in April I have a good opportunity to test out my new workflow as I’ll be spending a couple of days at the Learning Technologies Exhibition at the London ExCeL. I expect it will be even more packed than last year as I’ll also be spending some time at the office, supporting other colleagues attending the event, catching up with a number of partners, and maybe even some folks from my consulting days.
Other than that my focus will be firmly on my special project.
As we March onwards (pun intended) into the second quarter of 2024 and UK spring time, I would just like to once again thank everyone who has bought me a coffee. I really do appreciate it and I hope you’ll find the caffeine continues to yield interesting and useful insights and “things” from my efforts. Have a safe April and I’ll catch you all in another month.