May has been an intense month for me. Along with the heat from an early heatwave, I was also almost entirely occupied with work. I have been heavily involved in a few small parts of a very large go-live involving the simultaneous implementation of hundreds of integrated enterprise systems. Now that I am into post-go-live support territory, I am hoping my evenings and weekends will once again be mine and I might just get a bit more time with family and personal projects. But I did squeeze in a few small bits around my work commitments.
ThoughtAsylum
On the blog this month I added a post about how I am securely triggering actions on my Mac from my iPhone. The basis is in utilising Tailscale to provide a secure route back to my Mac, SSH to manage the interaction securely, and Apple Shortcuts to manage the interaction. There is a lot more detail in the post, but if you are interested in triggering things on your Mac from your phone, then this lays out what I think is a strong and accessible approach.
Forums
This past month is probably the first time since the forums I frequent first launched that I have not posted anything notable. I did post, but the fact there’s been nothing I feel is worth highlighting gives you some idea of how wild May has been for me.
Other
I have poked around in a few areas this past month beyond the blog post.
Hermes Agent
The first one is that I am still trying out Hermes Agent. I’m running into all sorts of limitations working with it, and I had hoped to start doing some AI/Hermes Agent-related posts. With any luck they will begin to surface in June. There is certainly potential there, and I have some thoughts I want to share, so keep an eye out for that.
Dropzone
With the new Dropzone 5 out, I decided to have a go at tweaking the inbuilt Tinify action. The default one takes the image dropped onto it and creates a new compressed (file size) version. My preference is certainly riskier, but I prefer to have the file replaced. It carries a risk, but it is a much faster than then having to delete the original and rename the new one, which is what I generally would need to do.
You can download a copy of the action from my Dropzone actions GitHub repo.
Links
This month I’ve got a couple of app links and something unrelated to tech.
7-zip
First of all an old favourite of mine, 7-zip. 7-Zip is an open source archive and extraction utility that I have been using on Windows for more than two decades. It allows you to work with a number of archive file formats, including of course, the ubiquitous zip files.
This past month I have frequently needed to work with archives that are encrypted using passwords, and Windows' native support for zip files just isn’t up to the job. In addition I had to generate some zip files as part of a data migration operation, and 7-Zip outperformed all of the other options I had available.
If you use Windows and you work with zip files, 7-Zip is worth checking out.
SupaSidebar
In at number two is a new app that I came across via BundleHunt, an app called SupaSidebar. It is primarily designed to be an advanced bookmark manager for your browser inspired by the Arc browser’s sidebar, but as soon as I saw it, I recognised it as something that could potentially scratch an itch I have had for some time. While I have applied other apps to meet the need, this was almost a like-for-like solution and so deserved closer inspection.
On Windows I love the power of XYplorer, an immensely powerful file manager. While I still wish for something comparable on the Mac, one of its most powerful features is the catalog, which I use for a powerful workspace setup. SupaSidebar looked like it might just be a Mac equivalent, and I was not disappointed.
I have configured SupaSidebar to be more of a standalone app than strictly focused on working across my browsers, and it is flexible enough to be exactly that with very little configuration effort - though you do need to step through the settings rather than just applying a default set to get that sort of experience.
I have only just begun to set up my personal projects as workspaces within it, but it is going well, and I am looking forward to building out my setup i during June.
The app also gives me the palette searchability of Workspaces so Workspaces is still absolutely worth trying if you want a cheaper workspace management option. The palette is something XYplorer can’t offer me, and I expect that as the functionality is built out further that before too long I will find myself wishing for parity in the opposite direction.
One final point I would like to add is that the developer, Kshetez, has been super responsive to my ‘new user’ feedback. As a result of our little e-mail exchanges, SupaSidebar now has some colouration of folders and folder entries (which I have found useful for a visual consistency cue across workspaces in the past), and he has tweaked a setting to allow me to launch non-browser-based URLs (e.g. Keyboard Maestro trigger URLs).
If you have not read it already, take a look at the XYplorer workspaces post, and then see whether this app might be the answer you have been looking for when it comes to personal project management.
The Lovecraft Investigations
And now for something completely different. The Lovecraft Investigations is a podcast I discovered several years ago, and it is a modern take lovingly based on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. The original series were produced for release as BBC podcasts, and now actually form part of the wider Pleasant Green universe.
Last year I supported Julian Simpson’s Kickstarter for The Lovecraft Investigations' look at Aleister Crowley, which is now publicly available. The gang is now back with a full new series and it promises to be a big one.
This time the team is totally independent of the BBC (as they were for Crowley), and they are taking on an epic story with a Backerkit campaign for The Call of Cthulhu, for which there is also a trailer.
I was an early backer and short of an intervention by the Great Old Ones, everyone knows this is one they will deliver on as this is what they do and what they did for Crowley. To give you an indication of the level of support and enthusiasm that is backing this, they hit their £85K target in a couple of hours of launch, and they are halfway through with over £320K pledged.
If you haven’t listened, go back and binge the series from the BBC, and then please consider supporting the campaign.
Upcoming
As things begin to shift in the day job, including me taking on a new role in the organisation, I am hoping to take some time out to recuperate, learn some new things, and get back to grips with some of my personal projects. I’m thinking AI and Hermes Agent will be a focus for June, but another direction may yet present itself.
As always, thank you to everyone who has bought me a coffee, I really appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who has read this, and for anyone interested in following along month-to-month, you can follow a creator, and you will get my monthly update straight to your mailbox.