Jim Willis

  • Reminder to Charge Apple Watch

    Wrote up a handy little Keyboard Maestro macro that will remind me to charge my Apple Watch.

    The special sauce here is that it runs any and every time I wake up my Mac between 5AM and 10:30AM.

    You can download the Keyboard Maestro macro here.

    [update: So, Keyboard Maestro doesn’t have a trigger for “password unlocks screensaver” And that is really when this thing needs to run. Enter the amazing EventScripts. Had no idea this tool existed but it kicks off AppleScripts for various system events (unlock screensaver, song change in iTunes, etc.). So worth the $6. Hope it continues to work once I upgrade to Big Sur!)

    UntitledImage

  • Apple Health HRV Data & Lyme Disease

    I think Heart Rate Variability data (good overview from Harvard Medical Health Blog) can be a strong indicator of health relative to an individual’s baseline. The problem for me has always been “baseline.”

    In the early days of HRV, I measured my beat-to-beat measurements using my iPhone (occasionally paired to a Polar heart rate monitor) to gauge my training load. But it was an inconsistent predictor because I needed to make sure to take the reading every morning under the same conditions, etc. Given the challenges that surround our household’s morning routine, that kind of manual, tedious process for gathering HRV data never really let me get confident baseline data.

    Now, the Apple Watch collects HRV data and — given how difficult it was to do it manually and get good baseline data — I was skeptical that the Apple Watch would be able to use sampling my HRV throughout the day to generate anything useful. I’m still skeptical, but my recent/current bout with Lyme disease over this past week has given me more confidence in the Apple Watch’s sampling technique to set a good baseline and show variance from that baseline.

    I think this picture is pretty self-explanatory but will add that when my HRV fell to its lowest around 11/12, I could barely get out of bed, was sweating uncontrollably and could not stop shivering. By the 15th, after 36hours of doxycycline, I felt about 80% better. I am still not 100% despite a rebound in HRV. 

    So, HRV on the Apple Watch is good at showing when you’re REALLY sick. That seems to be all I can take away from it at this point, but at least it shows that the Watch’s sampling approach does reflect reality, even if it doesn’t yet predict or give early warning.

    HRV

  • 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 feeds in it but it seems to have stopped doing that maybe? And I’m curious to see how the audio version of news works. So, verdict is out on News.

    Apple Music

    Maybe the worst music service, ever. But I sync my Spotify lists over to Apple Music and can play them on my HomePods so, there’s that. We had Spotify Family. I think I’m the only one who won’t fully make the jump to Apple Music so I kept the individual Spotify plan for myself and we’ll see how the rest of the family makes the transition. I don’t think they’ll miss Spotify like I would.

    Arcade?

    I don’t know what it is and am not likely going to find out.

    Fitness+

    Kinda excited to see how this pans out. I use Zwift right now but everything about Zwift’s bluetooth/hardware integration feels janky. Hoping Apple can do this better.

  • Alan Jacobs – Breaking Bread with the Dead

    I’ve just finished Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread with the Dead. Reading this book lead me down some wonderful technology-related rabbit holes that, in turn lead me back to people I haven’t thought about or read in a long time, especially Ivan Illich, Mark Hurst (man, The Good Easy takes me back).

    Hurst interviews Jacobs on the Techtonic podcast and I got a lot out of their conversation.

    One of several interesting ideas that Jacobs’ floats in Bread is that of Personal Density. The term comes from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow where an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen posits this law of human existence

    Personal density … is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.

    Pynchon’s narrator continues: “‘Temporal bandwidth’ is the width of your present, your now. … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”

    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 the last Tweet has scrolled off the screen.

    Jacobs’ prescription is to expand our now by reading older books. We need to reach back in time to extend our temporal bandwidth. We need to read, widely and include a lot of classics and older material.

    You need the personal density that will hold you firmly until, in your considered and settled judgment, it is time to move. And to acquire the requisite density you have to get out of your transitory moment and into bigger time. Personal density is proportionate to temporal bandwidth.

    What I particularly love about this book is Jacobs’ mandate that we be generous and hospitable to the voices of the past even when they are offensive to our current beliefs and ideals.

    If it is foolish to think that we can carry with us all the good things from the past—from our personal past or that of our culture—while leaving behind all the unwanted baggage, it is a counsel of despair and, I think, another kind of foolishness to think that if we leave behind the errors and miseries of the past, we must also leave behind everything that gave that world its savor. Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.

    We need to be generous. We need to realize that writers were products of their time. That there is still gold to be mined in them hills even if parts of the author’s world view seems out of step with our own.

    …the moment of double realization. To confront the reality that the very same people who give us rich wisdom can also talk what seems to us absolute nonsense (and vice versa) is an education in the human condition. Including our own condition, which is likewise compounded of wisdom and nonsense.

    This, of course, reminds me of the line from one of Jim Harrison’s characters: “Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.” I like that idea of hedging our bets, knowing that–in all likelihood and at any point in time–we are wrong about something that is probably very important.

    Jacob’s book arrived at an opportune time for me as I try to disengage with Facebook while still trying to participate meaningfully online. I’ve found his approach of broadening my now helpful. So helpful that I’ve picked up two of his previous books that, combined with this one, seem to make up a trilogy of sorts: How to Think and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Looking forward to learning what kind of perspective these titles may add to my relationship with being online.

  • 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 my Mac, iPhone and iPad, adding notes requires opening the application, finding the note I want to edit and adding the relevant information.

    That little bit of friction—switching contexts/application from whatever I’m currently doing so I can open OneNote, find the right pages, etc.—stinks. It means breaking my concentration. Losing my flow.

    A typical use case for me is that I’ll be working on a project and realize that I want to bring something up at my next developers meeting with my team or raise an issue during my manager meeting. I have different notebook sections for each of my recurring meetings as well as a “To Discuss” page in each one of those notebook sections. Being able to just quickly send these ideas/notes into the relevant page would be great. 

    To its credit, OneNote does support emailing content into the application which is marginally useful but you have zero control over where that content goes within your OneNote notebook. So that’s not super helpful here.

    Enter Microsoft’s Power Automate. Using Power Automate you can append/prepend content to a given page within Microsoft OneNote via email using a subject line filter:

    UntitledImage

     

    Power Automate seems very janky. It is a 1.0 release but it seems more beta. That said, this Flow —as it’s referred to in the Power Automate jargon —gets the job done. It can sometimes take a few minutes for the contents of the email to appear on the page. Note, also, that this only seems to work when using OneNote for business. Apparently there is also a non-business version. Leave it to Microsoft to create silly distinctions like that in their product line.

    So but anyway, being able to email agenda topics to my relevant pages is very helpful. Still, it feels very un-Apple like. Enter iOS shortcuts and Siri.

    UntitledImage

    With this handy little shortcut on my iPhone, watch and iPad and I can just say “hey Siri, discuss with devs” and she’ll ask me what I want to discuss and then sh will send that text via email  to the right OneNote page.

    I’ve got a few of these different Flows setup. “Discuss with devs” and a few “Discuss with” so and so’s where so and so is one of a handful of names of people with whom I meet regularly. 

    I’ve been using these for about a week now (since upgrading to iOS 14 on my iPhone) and it’s been amazingly reliable. 

  • 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 my sleep solid. For the past couple of years, I’ve used the smaller desktop ones that purport to put out the recommended 10k lumens.

    This year though, I decided to step it up a bit and picked up one with a much larger surface area. These LED lamps are similar to the models that are typically used in light-therapy studies. 

    UntitledImage

    This lamp is bright and features a much larger surface area than the the previous (though much cheaper) model that I have used for the past several winters.

    As a bonus, I had a couple cheap Gosund wi-fi outlets sitting around so I configured one and created an iOS shortcut to turn the lamp on full blast. I think where I’m headed with this is some kind of trigger to make sure that I have it turned on for at least 30 minutes in the AM and 15 minutes in the afternoon. It’s only September and I can already feel my sleep cycle being interrupted by the shorter days, so here’s hoping.

  • 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.

    Screen Shot 2020 09 16 at 10 55 10 AM

    The biggest difference (besides price) between the 6 and SE for me is the always-on screen (and a less powerful chip — S5 vs S6 — though apparently 2x as fast as my current series 3 chip). It makes me nuts that I’m wearing a watch that comes straight out of science fiction but I need to touch it to my nose when my hands are holding something and the screen doesn’t come on when I raise my arm.

    But that price difference, man.

    The 6, with cellular is $529.

    The SE with cellular is $359.

    That $170 difference would cover almost a year and half of AT&T cellular data for the SE, so maybe I’d have to touch it to my nose a few times but that seems like a pretty good deal to me. The SE with cellular seems like too good of a deal to pass up.

  • 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 in my snacking or maybe I don’t want to take the time to log that handful of M&Ms so I skip them. Either way, I’ve lost about 15 pounds during this quarantine, all by simply tracking my calories. 

    The thing is that I usually stop logging what I eat after a few weeks. Logging what I eat is a nuisance. I regularly forget to open my calorie tracking application right after I eat and by the time I finally get around to it as I’m sitting down to watch a show before bed, I’ve largely forgotten what I’ve eaten throughout the day.

    So what makes this time different?

    Well, for starters, I’ve been using the Due application on my iPhone to remind me to enter my calories after breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. Due is a persistent reminder application. Meaning, it just keeps annoying you with reminders until you actually do the damn thing it’s reminding you to do. 

    Still, after a couple of weeks of using Due, I started just clicking “done” on the reminder because clicking through the reminder and opening my calorie tracker application just seemed like a pain in the ass and was too much friction. So, I solved that friction point by adding a link in the reminder that opens my calorie tracker in one click. 

    In other words, tracking what I’m eating has been working for me because I chained together three different, loosely-coupled technologies here:

    • a decent calorie tracking app that makes a tedious task as easy as possible – Track
    • a persistent, annoying reminder application to remind me to log my calories – Due
    • a link in the reminder to make it super-easy, low-friction to open my calorie tracking application right from the reminder. – iOS shortcut

    Some apps support a URL Scheme to open the application (for example, music:// opens the Music application). The Track application doesn’t, AFAIK, have URL Scheme support so instead I just created an iOS shortcut to open the application and I call that shortcut in the reminder like this

    IMG 9A9E4424A017 1

    So, when the alert pops up on my phone, I just click the red link and Track opens up. Nifty.

    But, this Reminder + Link to Application has also been helpful for the Day One #photoaday challenge for the month of September. Every day at mid-morning I get an alert to post a photo from today to Day One with a link to the application that opens Day One and creates a new post:

    IMG 1D868C3ACF03 1

    Here you’ll see that Day One support the URL Scheme directly so there’s no need for me to create an iOS shortcut, I can just call the new post URL and it works (though, why it doesn’t show up in red in Due is beyond me).  You can do a whole bunch of cool things with the Day One URL Scheme, like go right to the activity feed: dayone://activity  or create an entry with a clipboard image dayone://post?entry=Hello Self&imageClipboard=1. See this list if you want more ideas.

  • 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 day one. How much did I spend last month on Amazon? Just look in Day One. 

    This month though, I went to download the file from Amazon and the interface for selecting a month’s worth of orders and downloading them is gone.

    I reached out to Amazon support on Twitter and through the website and was told that the page had been removed and it was replaced by a “Request My Data” page.

    UntitledImage

    This isn’t a self-service download portal like the previous version but instead allows you to request ALL of your order history and it takes up to 5 days to receive the data. I submitted my request 3 days ago and haven’t seen anything yet. In any case, this seems like a step backwards to me and makes it more difficult to track on a monthly basis what I’m buying. 

  • 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 my raspberry hi-fi/pi with a DAC on it.

    Being able to control the playback through an iOS app is a must. So I’m on Roon and re-ripping a bunch of my CDs to lossless (opportunity provided by quarantine/working from home, an upside).

    Besides listening to losslessly-ripped CDs, I am also really, really enjoying matrix recordings of Grateful Dead shows. Occasionally, (well, frequently) when I download matrix recordings, the .flac files are missing good metadata. Applying metadata to the Flac tracks can be a bit tricky so I thought I’d detail my process below.

    Start by downloading some torrents of good matrix recordings. I use Transmission app to download torrents.

    Once you’ve downloaded a show, you’ll have a folder with a bunch of .flac files and usually a .txt file that contains the show information.

    You’re going to want to “tag” your Flac files using the information contained in that .txt file. There are a handful of Mac apps that do meta-tagging on audio files but I use one called xACT.

    X Audio Compression Toolkit does a zillion things but the one thing it does that nothing else seems to do is take a text file of song information and apply it sequentially to a bunch of audio files.

    So, if you’re great-sounding flac matrix recording files are missing metadata, here’s how you fix that problem, easily, in xACT.

    Open the app and hit the “tags” tab.

    Load the Flac files into the listing on the left side of screen.

    Next, open the .txt file that accompanied the flac files and you’ll find a listing of the songs like this:

    UntitledImage

    You’ll want to edit this list to get rid of any line breaks, extra info, etc. I use TextMate to do this and it take about 2 seconds to create this:

    UntitledImage

    The key here is you want exactly as many lines in the file as there are tracks in the xACT window. It will apply each line to the files sequentially. Brilliant. So, highlight the track listing (remember no blank lines!) now, in xACT click the small “Auto-name” box next to the “Title” tag field. This will pull up a window into which you can paste your sequential track names.

    Click OK and then “Write Tags” in xACT. Bammo!! There you go.

    I also like to add album art, the Venue, etc. and then click “Write Tags” again before uploading the tracks to my Roon Audio player so when I’m done it looks like:

    UntitledImage

    Note that as long as all of the tracks are highlighted on the left you won’t actually see the Track name displayed. You want them all selected when applying Artist, etc. You can click an individual track to confirm that the Track name was applied.

    Once I import that show into Roon it looks like this:

    UntitledImage

Current Spins

Top Albums

Check out my album Set It All Down on your favorite streaming service.

Posts Worth Reading:

Free Internet vs Internet of Free Stuff

Letterboxd

Reading Notes

  • Read: Why Not Bluesky
    The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make […]
  • Read: The Imperfectionist: How Not to Freak Out, Part Two
    The antidote to all of this, in the broadest terms, is *more reality*, more immersion in the finite here and now: more writing on paper; […]
  • Read: Recording: After the Election – Four Ways We Can Respond
    “Under the worst conditions, what’s the most important thing to have?” He replied: “Friends.” Source: Recording: After the Election – Four Ways We Can Respond […]
  • Read: Mud Boots of Empathy in Spain
    Spain’s unity at this moment is from the bottom up. Or, as Spanish professional soccer player Ferran Torres wrote on social media, “The people are […]
  • Read: Vision Con
    Unable, then, to see the world because I have forgotten the way of being in the world that enables vision in the deepest sense, I […]

Saved Links

  • Doppler Music Player for Mac and iOS — Brushed Type
    Built for people who buy music — Direct link
  • Sill
    Top news shared by the people you trust Sill streamlines your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds to give you a clear picture of what’s happening. — Direct link
  • Techmeme Ride Home
    The day's tech news, every day at 5pm. From Techmeme.com, Silicon Valley's most-read news source. 15 minutes and you're up to date. — Direct link
  • Queue
    Beautifully Simple Podcasts. — Direct link
  • Surveilled (2024) — The Movie Database (TMDB)
    Uncover the insidious ways in which our daily lives are being surveilled by the state. In a gripping chase, Ronan Farrow travels across the world following breadcrumbs and finally exposing a dark world of spywares, hacking, and peddling of private information, where activists and journalists are persecuted, and no one is protected from the watchful and vicious eyes of authoritarianism. #API #Actors #Actresses #Cast #Credits #Movies #Photos #Ratings #Reviews #Shows #Streaming #Synopsis #TV #Teasers #Trailers #User — Direct link
  • The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone | The New Yorker
    Western democracies have been roiled by the use of spyware to target politicians, journalists, and other vulnerable groups. Could it happen here? Ronan Farrow reports. — Direct link
  • The Markup
    The Gentle January series shares one practical privacy tip a day from a Markup staffer who actually uses the advice in their own life. — Direct link
  • ongoing by Tim Bray · Why Not Bluesky
    "to be clear, I’m a fan of the Bluesky leadership and engineering team. With the VC money as fuel, I expect their next 12 months or so to be golden, with lots of groovy features and mind-blowing growth. But that’s not what I’ll be watching. I’ll be looking for ecosystem growth in directions that enable survival independent of the company. In the way that email is independent of any technology provider or network operator." — Direct link
  • The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet
    "I have been impressed with the tools that the open source development community is building to bridge the gap between the AT protocol and ActivityPub, and I’m hopeful that some mixture of Bluesky and Mastodon will eventually serve most of my needs as a social media user and, hopefully, as someone who co-owns a website" — Direct link
  • Helium Mobile
    Ditch big telco. Rise above with The People's Carrier, a new carrier owned by the people, and earn crypto. — Direct link