Jim Willis

Month: January 2022

  • Memory, time and quarantine.

    “I may not be as strong as I think,” the old man said. “But I know many tricks and I have resolution.”  – The Old Man and the Sea, E. Hemingway.   At baseline, my memory is only so-so. For example, I can remember chord progressions to songs and lyrics only with a lot of…

  • SuperDuper! & OneDrive errors

    Appears that with Monterey 12.2 or some other recent upgrade, something changed with OneDrive’s local file storage. I had been excluding Users/$username/OneDrive from my backups but now need to include: Users/$username/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-SharedLibraries-$name of share OneDrive’s links seem to cause SuperDuper! to fail, so this path needs to be updated in any Exclude scripts on your backup. If…

  • Day One and iOS/Mac Shortcuts Parity

    One of the most popular Shortcuts I’ve written is my “Logging to Day One” shortcut that allows you to keep a timestamped list of items to a single day’s journal entry throughout the day. I wrote a post about it two years ago, you can read more about it here. I updated the post today…

  • Diet & Sleep

    A new study/meta analysis: Diet Composition and Objectively Assessed Sleep Quality: A Narrative Review …diets higher in complex carbohydrates (e.g., fiber) and healthier fats (e.g., unsaturated) being associated with better sleep quality. Diets higher in protein were associated with better sleep quality. In general, diets rich in fiber, fruits, vegetables, and anti-inflammatory nutrients and lower…

  • After Life Season 3

    Finished watching Season 3 of After Life with Ricky Gervais last night. Felt like he had to do season 3 to wrap up the series and some of it felt forced and there were more than a few scenes of dog-walking that just felt like filler material so that they could stretch season 3 out…

  • More on sleep

    I think about it most when I’m getting the least of it. Anyway, very good piece in the nytimes about relationship between diet and sleep. I know that on nights when I get 6hrs of spotty sleep, it is very difficult to say no to the Dunkin’ Donuts drive thru.  Per several of the studies…

  • Last.fm to Apple Music playlist shortcut

    This is a pretty handy Swiss Army knife-type shortcut for creating Apple Music Playlists from last.fm data. I originally wrote it so that I could create Apple Music playlists based upon the listening history of my last.fm musical neighbors. But as I started poking around on the web, I noticed that last.fm users were looking…

  • Sick all of the time.

    I’m always on the lookout for clues as to why I get sick more frequently than most folks and why, when I do get sick, my colds last so much longer. I came across this study which adds additional weight to my theory that one cause is that for reasons I cannot really do much…

  • Quickly Share Marvis settings across devices

    I was struggling to keep my Marvis player settings in sync across multiple iOS devices and landed on this really low friction solution: Go to Settings->Advanced->Export Settings and then use the share sheet the pops up to AirDrop the file to your secondary devices. The receiving device will automatically open the file in Marvis and…

  • Apple Music Library Organization & Marvis

    A few weeks ago I began using an iOS app called Marvis (which, I cannot recommend enough for helping to organize and find albums/playlists in your Apple Music). Using Marvis, I’ve created a few rule/filter sets that help me surface albums I haven’t listened to in a while. However, what I am finding is a…