I have come to realise that the biggest limitation of my local digital assistant is not its capability but my imagination. When situations arise where I know AI can help, it is usually obvious whether my local assistant is up to the task. There are certainly times when chatting with a frontier model through an existing subscription is going to be vastly more effective than anything I can run…
I create lots of automations to help me work more effectively on my Mac. One of the things I like to build into these automations is audible feedback to tell me when certain steps, phases, or overall completions occur. Rather than visual feedback, I tend to use audible cues. On macOS there are only a few standard audio files to choose from. And I like to have some variety so that I can actually…
While having a do anything and everything digital assistant is one approach, we all know that it’s team work that generally delivers the best results on projects. Well, when you have a good team to rely on that is. That was one of the points I took when starting to build out my digital assistant. Rather than just one do-everything assistant, I wanted to build up a team of AI specialists to support…
In my previous post about my private digital assistant , I explained the challenges I encountered and how I ended up at Hermes Agent as my choice of framework. The next step on my journey was to give my digital assistant a brain. This process was happening in parallel and was intrinsically linked into every stage of what I discussed previously. It was painful, but I did find what seems to be a…
Over the last three or four months I have been on a bit of a quest. I have been looking for a private digital assistant. Not another chatbot or the latest frontier model, but something I could run on my own machine. Something that would genuinely support me whilst keeping my data under my control. It has been a busy time with work and other commitments, but I managed to carve out an hour here and…
In the past I have employed numerous solutions to capture a link to a web page into another app. I think that in every case I was focused on working in that other app and pulling in a link to the current page, or perhaps a set of links for all open pages. This works fine for most of my use cases, but recently I encountered one where what I actually wanted was to stay in the browser and send the…
We have long been able to trigger processes on remote computers. It is what the World Wide Web is built on for example, and how we login to hugely powerful physical and now virtual devices, to carry out operations. We can also do the same with macOS. I’ve done it in so many ways in the past for my personal setup. Using Hazel and Dropbox to trigger commands via file sync, using browser bookmarks…
If you write online, the chances are, you have heard of Markdown , the syntax created by John Gruber as a simplified way of marking up plain text with simple formatting that can then be processed to other formats, such as HTML. The premise is based around maintaining simplicity and portability of content. Once the domain of bloggers “in-the-know”, Markdown has become much more commonplace and is…
It is spring and so the time to do some spring cleaning. Inspired by some recent amendments to Conductor , my Alfred workflow for Keyboard Maestro , I decided to tidy up some of my macros and macro groups. As part of that, I realigned some of my macro groups to my current conventions, and in this post, I’m going to share a few details about my approach.
In September last year I passed my UK foundation exam for amateur radio exam and became a licensed amateur radio operator. After attending the RSGB conference, I also walked away with my first high frequency transceiver and a couple of of antennas. A 40m end fed half wave (EFHW), and a portable multi-band vertical. Due to external factors I didn’t get much time to experiment with these before the…
For the last few years I have had a partially written Alfred workflow that I was finally able to finish and am now in a position to share thanks to a change that came in with macOS 26, Tahoe. It has something that has been technically possible for much longer, but not in a way that allowed enough flexibility for me to be happy with the path it would have had to have taken. But things have changed…
Just a quick post today about a useful little command line script I created. The script takes an image file and converts it into a format designed for seamless embedding within a web page.
Since moving away from Evernote, DEVONthink has been my go to solution for storing my reference materials. Everything from manuals and papers to bills and diagrams. Effectively anything I am not actively maintaining but need a copy of ends up in one of my DEVONthink databases. Recently I have been capturing lots of PDF materials for my amateur radio database, but I have found it is not always as…
I am a big proponent of the Elgato Stream Deck, and I love the dynamic nature of the keys and having them switch based on the in focus app or to match the needs of a particular piece of work. However I am not a fan of the mobile app, or more specifically the mobile app model. In this post I will explain why I am not a fan, about some alternatives I have been using for some time, including Alfred’s…
I have not written about XYplorer for a long time, but it remains one of my favourite Windows apps, and I do still wish I had as powerful visual file manager on macOS. In this post I’m going to share a little about some simple techniques that I use to allow me to effectively create workspaces within XYplorer that I can quickly switch between and give me access to the files, folders, and tools I…
In my last post I wrote about using Piper to convert test to speech on the Mac and my helper utility, for Piper, Pan . In this post I am going to explain the main reason I had to want to do this, and it is all based around creating a personal audio feed.
With large language models (LLM) dominating the technology space in recent years, multi-modal input, and speech to text transformations have come on leaps and bounds to the point where large swathes of text can be converted relatively accurately and very quickly from content with an audio component. But, did you realise that speech synthesis has also come a long way. There are again AI models that…
With the introduction of the Integrated Learning Experience (ILX) user interface for SuccessFactors Learning, SAP introduced a new option called custom cards. These custom cards allow administrators to create bespoke elements on the home page that users can select to link out or display information in a pop-over window. Curiously, one of the link options is for a JavaScript URL and the…
Ever since I purchased my Elgato Stream Deck I have wanted to have a go at creating a plugin for it. It provides a convenient one button press access to some of my most used automations, and it reconfigures itself to the application I am using. It is an absolute delight, and now it is making ample use of a plugin I created.
Recently in my day job I have been leading on an effort to resolve some performance issues in an online system. After completing various tests, we have traced the issues to being specifically around the overheads for processing files after upload. The performance issues only occurring when a large batch of files are loaded at once - at which point the amount of time to process each file becomes…
I have been using the “new” version of Outlook since it was released. It certainly isn’t “new” any longer. Given the technology base Microsoft has adopted for it, it is unsurprising that it looks the same everywhere, and it has come a long way from the first release. There are still plenty of things about it that feel rough to me (copy and paste calendar entries anyone?) but something that has…
Last year I did a little exercise in my day job to address something that has bugged me for years. In the SuccessFactors Learning system, there is an administrator only part of the system which provides a centralised location to all the configuration and details one might need for configuring and running a Learning Management System (LMS). When the administrator logs onto the system however they…
Back when I was at university reading for my MSc. I was working with some data files on Windows and I reached the point where Windows’ notepad application simply reached the point where it couldn’t cope with the size of the data files I was throwing at it. By today’s standards, they would be trivially small, but back then, not so much. To address this, I grabbed a CD from a computing magazine that…
I recently updated from an Intel MacBook Pro to a Mac Studio as my main Mac, and I switched around a lot of my desktop set up as I would no longer need to keep switching in and out my work laptop running Windows, with my MacBook Pro. Part of this involved bypassing my USB 3.0 dock into which I is what I have my Jabra speakerphone plugged into. I hadn’t given it much thought and as a result my Mac…
I have been a long time user of iTerm , but when the AI powered Warp terminal app came onto the scene I tried it out and ended up mostly switching over to it. My terminal skills are okay, but I don’t spend my working day in the terminal, so a bit of help with syntax comes in handy, and that’s where it adds value. I had still continued using iTerm for some pre-sets I could launch and run (like a…
Over the course of last year I saw several mentions on social media and other online posts about Obsidian , the personal knowledge management application, not being able to lock posts. I had an idea about this at the time and finally got around to picking it off my to do list. In this post I’m going to outline something that I believe is at least a workable partial solution for this.
Last year we finished the conversion of our garage into a small office, and I guess it must be the time of year, but recently there were a number of occasions I was being washed out in video calls. I looked more like the mask from the Scream movies than a human being. Closing the blinds helped, but then unless I put the full room lights on, it just wasn’t light enough. While I do have a (cheap)…
In my previous role I used to deliver a fair number of workshops, extended planning sessions, etc. These would often run for a day or more, and so having regular breaks was a key consideration in keeping everyone fresh, alert, and engaged. However, I did find that many customers treated the breaks as more of a rough guide than a set period. Even when stating we would start on time, inevitably key…
In my day job, I work on a near daily basis with SAP SuccessFactors Learning, a learning management system (LMS) which while utilising a web-based administrative user interface also boasts some flat-file like configuration. This configuration appears in the localised labelling functionality. Is suspect the data is held in a database when in use, but like many admins and consultants, I do tend to…
My previous post on some useful file renaming in Finder, Forklift , and Path Finder gave me a mental nudge to write up and share with you all some automations for getting some content into files from Safari. More specifically ways to generate links and snapshots of web pages and store them away in the current folder. This time however, rather than using Shortcuts, the tool of choice is Keyboard…
On Windows, I use the amazingly functional file manager XYplorer , and I have various scripts that allow me to work with files in a variety of ways that just make it one of my most productive tools on the PC. I would love to have something as functional on macOS, but instead I end up using tools outside of my file management apps (I actually use Finder, Path Finder , and Forklift in different…
Earlier this year we finished converting our garage into a home office. As part of this effort we replaced all of the electrics. For the lighting I asked the electrician to install Zigbee compatible spot lighting (I don’t have a lot of head space, so small recessed lighting was essential). The bulbs he installed were dimmable, but the switch he installed was a simple Zigbee on/off switch. After…
In May 2024 I was a returning guest on the Automators podcast , a show on the Relay network that looked at the use of consumer technologies to automate tasks. On the show I announced the release of a project I had been working on for over a year that related to the podcast - an Obsidian vault of content for the podcast. In October 2024, an announcement was made that the podcast was ending, and a…
Having recently converted our garage into a home office, I have been able to indulge in a few additional, but small, home automation projects. One of these is something to let my family know when I or my wife are not to be disturbed. This is only when we are on important calls, recording podcasts, videos, etc. To facilitate this I found it was useful to create a little “On Air” set up based on a…
I was posting a reply to a forum post about Moom (the macOS Window Manager by Many Tricks) this morning and was about to make a reference about using it with Bunch (the automation tool by Brett Terpstra). As I was composing the reply I realised I was using a small modification to the standard set up that I don’t think I’d shared before; and so I figured I’d share it out in a quick post.
For those of you who follow along with my posts and creations, you will no doubt have noted that I have created more than a few workflows for Alfred , the launcher app for the Mac. In fact the number continues to creep up. I don’t particularly consider myself a fanatical user of Alfred, but I find it an efficient trigger for so much of what I do and I simply centralise a lot of my automations to…
One of my favourite free tools on the command line is Pandoc . Whenever you need to convert a text-focused file from one format to another, Pandoc more often than not has you covered. Have command line tools to let you do conversions like this lets you build transformative workflows as well as conveniently just change from one format to another on the fly. I am also a big user of Obsidian , the…
As you may know, I am active in a little corner of the technology community through a few appearances on podcasts on the Relay network, my regular contributions to discussions on the Automators podcast forum , and my relatively recent release of the Automators Podcast Obsidian Vault . This past weekend, I travelled down to London to join in the celebrations of 10 years of Relay , and in this post…
I have had a busy few months finishing off a project, but I finally found some time to take a look at a relatively new utility by Brett Terpstra to use with his Marked 2 application. Marked 2 is a powerful Markdown preview application and the new utility introduced a new flexible framework for custom processors and pre-processors. I had already being using a simple custom pre-processor, but this…
As you may be aware, I’m a daily user of the note taking and management application, Obsidian . It is an incredibly useful tool that lets me build my own vaults of information that I can then easily cross reference and search. It has become my personal wiki tool of choice. My use of Obsidian runs a wide gamut across personal and professional aspects of my life, and I can often be found in deep…
Where I live we have three types of waste collection. One week we get our refuse collected and the next week we get our recycling collected. For about eight or nine months of the year we also get garden waste collected along with the recycling. I have linked up my Home Assistant instance so that every week, the night before collection I get a notification on my mobile phone as to what is being…
All of my jobs have involved me communicating information to people during presentations, and during the last decade I have regularly found myself building out non-linear slide decks in Microsoft PowerPoint. These are slide decks that bring together multiple sets of small ‘micro’ presentations on a very narrow and specific topic. I can then use the slide deck to cover any of these topics in any…
This past month I attended my first conference of the year. It was actually a forum of several hundred people, but I have a couple of other similar events coming up. A two day exhibition at the London Expo this coming month and an SAP HR event in May. At this first event all of the non-networking events were taking place in a single large room and I just captured everything on my phone and my work…
Recently, while working on a new Alfred workflow, I found myself once again wishing that Alfred workflows supported subroutines or functions. Something that would give me better reuse of chunks of my workflow so I could keep things as a single source. For the most part I rely on using a single script for this kind of work, but sometimes a script alone isn’t the best way to do it, rather multiple…
This post is, in a sense, a natural follow up to my Path-based Commands in Obsidian post from around this time last year. In that post I demonstrated how you could trigger command line tools from within Obsidian using the Templater plugin. In this post I’m flipping that around, and rather than going external, I am focusing on the internal. The text within an Obsidian note. However, rather than…
Do you ever find yourself needing to visit web pages that are no longer available? I seem to go through phases of this, and being able to reference back to an archived copy is very useful. There are a number of services and approaches where you can archive your own copies of web pages, but that does not help when it is a site you never visited before and so did not have a chance to archive a copy…
A few months ago I wrote a post about my tiny Home Assistant powered desk clock , and in that I mentioned that while it would be possible to have little notifications pop up on it, I actually had a separate set up for that. In this post I am going to cover the details of my set up for this additional display, including the details of how to configure both the device and Home Assistant aspects, and…
Recently I was exporting some web pages in PDF format. It was a simple enough task, and I was making use of the PDF option in the macOS standard print dialog window. The thing was I kept generating them, dragging them off into Dropzone (a shelf app with a plugin architecture for processing files) while I sorted and gathered, and then I dragged each off where it needed to go; a variety of folders…
There is a wonderfully powerful utility app on the app called TextSoap that has been around on the Mac long before I ever really started using Macs. Its premise is simple - it cleans up text; but its power is huge. The app is really approachable and allows non-programmers to build sophisticated processes for not just “cleaning” text up, but for transforming it in any number of ways. If you aren’t…
I’ve been using an Apple Watch for several years now, and currently own a series 4. I’m not big into tracking my fitness, or hiking the back woods, but I do benefit from being able to get key notifications on my wrist and from being able to capture thoughts and notes on the go. Earlier this year, or maybe late last year, my watch succumbed to what looks to be a surprisingly common issue whereby…