Jim Willis

Author: sjwillis

  • 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…

  • Book Notes: The Alchemist

    The Alchemist by Paula Coelho was recommended to me by the Goodreads algorithm, which apparently stinks as the only thing that kept me turning the pages in this book was the suspense of trying to figure out why the heck this book was recommended to me. Not my bag I suppose. Have been slowly making…

  • Book Notes: To Kill A Mockingbird

    I feel like my own feet have worn a path in the ground from the Finch’s to the schoolyard over these past few days.

  • Mac radio nirvana

    Setting up my new iMac, I’ve found a nice combination of apps to make listening to radio at my desk a real pleasure. [update Jan 8, 2020: this setup still works great but I have also purchased the subscription to Triode and also use the Mac desktop version of the app when at my desk]…

  • Essential Mac Apps – 2019 edition

    This week I’ve been building up my new iMac from a base-install of Mojave. I have a text file that lists all of the apps that I had installed on my dead MacBook Pro (and, good backups, thankfully), but instead of just reinstalling all of the apps I had, in the spirit of Cal Newport’s…

  • Brydge Keyboard vs Studio Neat Canopy for 11-inch iPad Pro

    My first immediate inital impression of the Brydge keyboard for the 11-inch iPad Pro is that it feels like the keyboard is too small and it won’t work out, not that I have huge hands or anything but because I am a pretty damn fast touch typist and the size of the keys makes me…