Jim Willis

Month: January 2020

  • Stereo HomePods for Difficult Rooms and Social Listening

    I’ve seen couple of blogs (Kirkville, BirchTree) recently opining on stereo HomePod configurations and comparing them to a pair of Sonos speakers. I don’t have a pair of Sonos to compare my stereo HomePod configuration to but my experience with the HomePods stereo pair may be useful for some so I am sharing here. A few months…

  • Friday Link List

    note: forgot to hit publish on this on Friday 🙁 will try to do better this week! How To Expand Launchpad Hard for me to imagine Launchpad ever being as useful as Alfred for launching apps. That said, this tip for expanding the rows/columns of Launchpad might make a more compelling use case. Via Chris…

  • New Fuji X100 soon?

    Love my Fuji X-E2s. It is the best camera I have ever owned, hands down. Whether I’m using an old Pentax lens on it or the pricey but awesome Fuji lenses, the thing is a joy to use. That said, I don’t bring it with me nearly as often as I should. I feel awkward…

  • AppleScript for Day One braindump to Things

    Highlighting the truly first-world problem of Mac automation being totally different from iOS automation, I wrote up a simple AppleScript that mirrors the functionality of my iOS shortcut that takes my brain dump list out of Day One and “intelligently” transfers it to Things. When I write my morning entry in my Day One journal…

  • Amazon Order History to Markdown table in Day One

    Back in the spring I wrote an automator action that incorporated some Python code to take a downloaded Amazon Order History file and massage it into a nice Markdown table and creates a Day One entry. A few months back though the Day One command line tool stopped working and that broke this action. But…

  • Adding todos to Today list in Things using AppleScript

    Really pulled my hair out for a while on this issue so hoping to help someone out here. set newToDo to make new to do ¬ with properties {name:CurrentTodo} at beginning of list “Today” This, despite the Cultured Code documentation using Today as an example list in the AppleScript guide. So, if you use that…

  • Shortcut: Day One braindump to Things

    I use Day One as a journal almost every day. Most mornings start with me doing a bit of a brain dump into Day One, listing anything that’s on my radar that I need to deal with. So I wrote a shortcut to help me deal with those brain dumps a bit better. This shortcut:…

  • Friday Links – Jan 3, 2020

    Ambitiously titling this post Friday Links thinking that I may be able to do it again next Friday and the one after that. We’ll see! Anyway, some links I’ve enjoyed from around the web over the past few days: The rise, fall and resurrection of Flickr – Ferdy Christant When you support free, you support billionaires. When…

  • Could Competition from Private Equity Make Kindle Suck Less?

    I received a Kindle for Christmas. I love it despite the fact that it feels like Amazon has done little if anything to advance the technology of the ebook reader in the 10 years that have passed since I bought my wife her first Kindle 2. Highlighting passages in an ebook on a Kindle still…

  • Troubleshooting PDF OCR using Python on Mac

    I wrote a script to extract some text from a PDF (image-based text, so pdftotext wouldn’t work). Using pdf2image convert_from_path I simply could not get any data out of the pdf. I tried multiple PDFs while testing and convert_from_path just kept returning an empty variable. Turned out that my homebrew install of xpdf was interfering…