Jim Willis

Author: sjwillis

  • Apple One

    Signed up. It’s a no-brainer for my family as we were already on the 2TB cloud storage plan. AppleTV+ It’s got Ted Lasso. Enough said.  kidding. Still AppleTV+ has some terrific stuff on it. And Ted Lasso. Apple News+ I’ve hated Apple News ever since it started asking me if I wanted to open RSS…

  • Alan Jacobs – Breaking Bread with the Dead

    Jacobs writes about Personal Density in the context of how our current media consumption via The Feed of social media comes at such volume and pressure that our now is becoming more and more compressed and narrow. What seemed so important to us just last week has already faded from our attention as quickly as…

  • iOS Shortcuts and Email interfaces to OneNote

    One of the tools in the MS Office suite we use at work that I find myself using more and more is OneNote. It is my “everything bucket.”  Unfortunately, Microsoft’s OneNote can not be easily targeted by the powerful automation affordances that Apple provides (Apple Script, Keyboard Maestro, iOS shortcuts). Meaning, while OneNote runs on…

  • Prepping for WFH during winter months

    As we head out of summer, the shorter days combined with all of this working from home are going to present some real challenges when it comes to keeping my circadian rhythm chugging along. Over the years, I’ve had a variety of light boxes that I’ve used to try to keep my mood up and…

  • Doing the math on Apple Watch 6 vs. SE

    I think my next Apple Watch will almost certainly have cellular data on it. I love running in the woods without my phone (using just my watch and AirPods) but could definitely see the benefit of being able to call someone from my phone in an emergency. The biggest difference (besides price) between the 6…

  • Diet success with Due App, shortcuts and app launching

    Here’s one truth about how I lose weight: nothing is as effective as simply writing down what I eat. If I track everything I eat in a calorie tracking app (I use one called Track, but there are a bunch of similar apps), I eat less. Maybe seeing what I’m eating makes me more conservative…

  • Amazon quietly removes ability to download order history

    At the end of each month, I run an Automator process on my Mac that loads that month’s Amazon Order History file into a markdown table in Day One. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and it’s useful for a whole bunch of reasons. When did I buy something? Just search…

  • Library Management of Live Grateful Dead Matrix Recordings

    For the past several months I’ve been using Roon audio server to handle my home hi-fi listening. It’s a slightly pricey subscription model for what I use it for and I’m actively looking for an alternative. Basically, I just want a box that holds a bunch of lossless audio files and serves them up to…

  • Zoom volume and Music Volume control with Keyboard Maestro

    My new favorite Keyboard Maestro shortcut allows me to toggle between audio outputs (Built In Output device and my USB output). The Built in volume controls my iMac speakers, the USB output controls my Amp. So, combined with the superb Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource, I can easily bounce back and forth between controlling my music volume…

  • Log/Append a photo to a Day One entry

    Someone posted a question about how to do this on the Day One Community site so I thought I’d build up a little iOS shortcut that: – checks to see if you have an entry for today, if not it creates a blank one and then prompts you to choose a photo, resizes that photo…