I posted a short video showcasing my All In One Shortcut menu that I place in my dock and use constantly.

It’s almost become my main interface with the iPhone. It starts with a Favorite shortcut menu when I put my most used actions (call wife, take a quick note, etc). That menu has a More… button that runs a more comprehensive menu that takes me to other choices.

I have menus for Home or Work related shortcuts, to choose from different countdown timers, to run Omnifocus actions, etc. Each of them, with the More… button, can take me to the main menu. Or I can cancel the loop. When I find the desired shortcut I just run it.

If I ever get en iPhone 15, this workflow will be placed in the hard action button. Meanwhile, it lives in the dock and gives me plenty of joy several times a day.

youtube.com/shorts/9-…

Is this going to show up in estebantxo.com? #geekery

So I installed RayCast to try a DEVONthink plug-in that looked promising, and I uninstalled it after two minutes. It was quite meh. The plug-in, I mean, and how it searched and managed groups and files within DT. And overall, RayCast is not a match for the File/Folder handling of LaunchBar. Instant Sending, moving, copying, renaming, batch processing… are handled much more conveniently in LaunchBar. I did not bother to look into any other features of RayCast: I guess I’m still a die hard LaunchBar user. #geekery

Three random thoughts this Monday evening.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my searches for the last couple of weeks. Both on the Mac and on iOS/iPadOS, I set it as my default search engine, and it’s been working really well, giving me very accurate results and helping me find relevant things when I was looking for something specific, and interesting stuff when my searches were more general.

Two weeks ago I also logged off my Google account, so I’d like to think that Google is not harvesting as much data from me as it did before, for years. The thing is that I’m still logged in YouTube, so I guess I’m giving Google more information that I’d what to think.

One of the thing that YouTube fed me today is that, apparently, Walkmans might be back. I’m a sucker for useless and/or sentimental gadgets, so I’ll probably end up buying more than one. I do have a cassette collection stored away somewhere…

Another thing that I corroborated today is that I don’t stand this guy. I mean the African one. Everything he says comes off to me as bullshit. I could not watch more than five minutes, and I made myself stay longer than I wanted because I think that we need to expose ourselves to uncomfortable views. Still, nothing but bullshit. Why on Earth are we so prone to give so much voice to guys that have proven to be liars.

UPDATE: These to comments by @pratik and @clorgie are much more accurate in their depiction of the guy:

I watched the entire Don Lemon’s interview of Elon Musk. Such an inarticulate and incomprehensible, the supposedly smart, man! Is this what we are considering a genius these days? Either he’s afraid to (he claimss he is not) admit or doesn’t understand the basic concept of implications.

@pratik I watched some this morning. Musk is a dull man masquerading as a much smarter one caught in his own web of lies. Sad.

I missed it because of DST, because in Europe we enter into DST a couple of weeks later than the US, so we’re still in winter time. But im not going to miss the next one, for sure.

Another interesting, thoughtful, and fun Micro.blog Analog Tools meetup this morning! 🖋️📓🗂️ We talked about hybrid analog/digital tools and processes, how friction can help slow thoughts down, and much more.

I think that the blogroll implementation for micro.blog’s Recommendations is lacking one thing. Since the recommended blogs accept an optional description, I would expect the description to show in the blogroll. I wanted to use that to explain why I think that each blog in the list is worth a visit.

I was told it’s Pie Day, so there you go.

So I learned that I need to have an ActivityPub user if I want to follow Fediverse accounts from micro.blog. Duh.

2024-03-17 UPDATE: I changed my home page to a more conventional one. The one I designed was quite gimmicky. If I ever learn a bit more about web design, I may come back to visually depicting my garden metaphor. For now, the patches in my garden, meaning the different sections of my website, will be featured in the conventional navigation bar.

I want my site to resemble a garden, so a few days ago I made a home page with buttons that represent the patches you can find as you walk around one.

Tonight, fiddling a little more with the site, I asked MacGPT to give me some simple code to change the color and the shape of these buttons. I managed to choose my own colors and even give an animation to each of them.

The patches that have content are different shades of green and are animated when you hover over them. The ones that are waiting for future content are yellow-orange-ish and static. I think they do convey that they are not alive yet.

And I added a link in the navigation bar that brings you to that home page. It’s called Panorama, because it gives you an overview of the garden.

Do you like it? Maybe the animation is a bit too much, maybe the colors are not right, maybe the whole concept is ridiculous. I’d love your feedback.

I have not detached myself from the habit of seeking feedback every time I post something in my blog. I want to go minimal, so I logged off from every social media account, deleted every app and turned off every cross-posting link. I told myself that I want to focus on my blog and look for other personal blogs and interact with their authors via email. Yet I still find myself looking for attention in micro.blog, the only app that I keep in my devices. Should I cut that tie too? I really like the small community around micro.blog and the people I once in a while chat with, so I don’t think I want to switch that off, but I have to look for some other way to prevent myself from seeking that social media dopamine reward. #thoughts
#geekery

🚀 P&B: Brad Barrish – Manu:

This is the 28th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Brad Barrish and his blog, bradbarrish.com

Wow. Is this interview interesting and full of great recommendations. Do not miss it.

Vita brevis, ars longa.

#geekery #art

It’s the second time in a few days that, as soon as I enter the App Store app on my iPhone, it offers me to install Tik Tok. Not just the add, but a sheet asking me if I want to install it. I may have accidentally clicked on something, but I really don’t think so. Has anybody noticed the same thing? Can it be some ad abuse or scam? #geekery

I am quite impressed by the automatic transcription of podcasts on the Apple Podcasts app. That this is the highlight of the day does not speak very well of my achievements today. Anyway, that’s that. #thoughts
#geekery

🚀 It’s Time to Give Up on Everything but Email – Manu

In all seriousness, if in 2024 you’re using one single email address for everything that’s a you problem, not an email problem. Also, Ian, let me ask you a question: what’s the alternative here? Do we all move to Slack/Discord/Teams? Do we all move everything to DMs? Do you think that’s a better solution?

There’s a reason why emails are still here. They’re still here because they work. Is email perfect? No. Is there a better alternative? Also no.

I wholeheartedly agree with Manu. Separating work and personal email is easy enough. And filters are necessary to manage subscriptions and other types of messages, but with a minimum setup, email can be tamed. #thoughts
#geekery

🚀 Hiro Report - Hiro.Report - 03MAR2024

Happy Sunday, everyone! We have a short and (hopefully) sweet one this week:

A new report by [@hiro](https://micro.blog/hiro) and it is, as always, full of goodies. You don’t wanna miss it and you do want to spread the word. #geekery

After a long time, I just built two new macros in Noodlesoft’s Hazel.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been using Hazel non-stop since I can’t remember. I keep the receipts for the upgrades to Hazel 4 in 2016 and Hazel 5 in 2020, but I’m sure I started using this awesome app long before that. I’d say 2011-2012. The thing is that I set around 50 rules across 4 folders a long time ago, and it’s been reliably managing my files ever since.

Hazel is a wonderful automation tool. It monitors the folders you tell it to and it does something to any file that you put in that folder and matches certain criteria you set up. For example, this is the use case I just built a macro for:

I agreed with a client that they will pay a monthly fee for a particular project. I asked them to note a certain reference number in each payment. My bank sends me the receipt for each transfer in a PDF, so every time I download my bank’s PDFs to my Downloads Folder, which is monitored by Hazel, the app looks for a file with a PDF extension, looks inside the contents of the PDF to see if there is a number that matches the reference number that I gave to my client, looks also for the date of the transfer, and if everything is OK, renames the file with the month of the payment and moves it to the folder where I store my invoices.

This happens automatically so, whenever I want to know if my client is complying with their monthly payments, I go to the invoice folder and there they are, all the proofs of the transfers neatly organized.

Since I’ve activated my micro.blog ActivityPub user, replies sent from Mastodon to my posts show up both in the micro.blog timeline and like comments in my blogs' posts. I can reply to them from the timeline and they show back in Mastodon. This is exactly what I wanted. I can stay in my blog and in micro.blog and know that I can interact with people in Mastodon, and these interactions are not lost because they are recorded in my blogs, where they belong. #geekery #thoughts

🚀 Maurice Parker - Shortcuts for Micro.blog:

David Johnson Thank you, and a question. If I have two blogs under the same Micro.blog username, can I chose which blog to post to?

2021-11-01 8:42 pm

I’m discovering Humboldt by Maurice @vincode and really having fun with the Shortcuts I’m building for iOS and iPadOS. One for publishing text posts, one for pictures, one for quotes…

I just saw this old question from David @crossingthethreshold and I’m sure he’s already got the answer, but this is how I do it. I have two blogs and I want one single Shortcut that lets me select the one I want to publish to each time.

Humboldt has a Select ID action. You set it to Always Ask and it gives you the list of your micro.blog blogs. You can define a variable with the input coming from that list. Then you put the variable in Humboldt’s Post action. When you run the Shortcut, you first choose which blog you want to publish to and Humboldt does the rest.

I built one single shortcut for all my text-blogging options. I first choose the blog in which I wish to publish. Then I write a title for the post or leave it blank. Then I write the content. Depending on the blog I chose, the shortcut will present me a list of tags to choose from. If I’m on the Mac, the tags will be picked from a list. If it’s the iPhone or the iPad, the list will be drawn from Data Jar. The publishing is handled by Humboldt, a great tool by Maurice Parker. #geekery