Jim Willis

  • Turn Amazon Order History into a Markdown Table for Day One

    The other day I posted about using Keyboard Maestro to automate the process of getting my monthly Amazon Order history into a Day One Journal entry. That was the first step of the automation of this task.

    This has been a bit more challenging to automate than I was first thinking. I’m working towards this 3 step process:

    • Step 1: open up Day One and in Safari open up the URL for Amazon Order History report screen. [Done]
    • Step 2: automatically download this month’s Amazon Order History report [Need to figure this out]
    • Step 3: create a journal entry from a downloaded Amazon Order History .csv file [Now Done]

    I am still messing around with Keyboard Maestro for step 2 but was able to hack together a pretty handy Automator workflow for step 3. It’s a python + BASH script that

    • takes a .csv file, strips out the unnecessary columns,
    • totals up the amount spent for the month
    • create a Markdown table of the important columns from the .csv
    • creates a Day One Journal entry and tags it “Money”

    (more…)

  • 2019-04-08 10.59.26

    Spring!

    riding on Cooper

  • Stopping the Esc key from un-Maximizing Safari

    This little Keyboard Maestro recipe I whipped up to stop the super-annoying behavior of Esc un-Maximizing a full-screen Safari window alone is worth the price of the app.

    (more…)

  • Getting Amazon Purchase History into Day One

    Keyboard Maestro

    Inspired by listening to @ttscoff, @macsparky and @rosemaryorchard on yesterday’s Automators podcast, I made some slow progress but progress nonetheless! Trying to automate as much as possible my monthly entry in Day One of all of my purchases from that month from Amazon. Currently I’ve just got a repeating todo in Things that reminds me to launch this nifty Keyboard Maestro shortcut.

    Still requires that I download the .csv file, gussy it up in Numbers and paste it into Day One. Those steps are still a big reach for my automation skills but gives me something to work on.

  • Bear Mountain, 2019

    bear mountain

    My buddy the Nav Man and I went up to Bear Mountain this weekend to do some hiking and work on some song writing. Here are some pics:

    bear mountain
    bear mountain
    bear mountain
    bear mountain

  • Streaming Revenue (or, beware Charts w/o Context)

    On the heels of some recent coverage about how Streaming Revenue is up I thought it might be useful to put some context around the hockey stick charts that some of these news outlets insist on displaying.

    For sure, the music industry sure looks to be on the up and up!

    *Overall Revenue Chart from 2016-18*

    And streaming is really contributing a lot to the $9.8bil!

    *Streaming Revenue Chart*

    But in context of an industry that was bringing in $15bil 20 years ago this graph provides some good context:

    *Historic Revenue Chart*

  • 2019-03-31 14.24.37

    So glad this reference exists for configuring WordPress to work with micro.blog status entries.

  • How not to overthink iOS shortcuts for Day One Journals

    I like to keep notes about the gigs I play with my various bands. Sometimes I log very detailed entries about changes we need to make to our gear or sound settings for the next gig, other times it’s just a few quick words so I can remember who came out to see us or what riff I need to work on in a given song for the next gig.

    Naturally I use Day One to record this information. Last year I started using an iOS Shortcut that I wrote that prompts me for the type of information I want to record about each gig. The shortcut presented me with a list of questions and then combined all of my responses to those questions into a nicely-formatted Day One journal entry.

    day one prompts for gig journal entry

    The problem is that I am not a great Shortcuts writer. I’m lazy so I didn’t add any flow control statements to try to save my responses to the prompt questions as I went along. Meaning, after answering 3 or 4 questions and typing them on my iPhone (which is needless to say tedious) I would occasionally forget about my lame programming skills and try to pause the Shortcut while I go over to facebook or somewhere and download a photo from the gig to add to the entry. Nine times out of 10 I would hit “Done” in the Shortcuts app to do this and in the process I would lose all of the responses I had already typed. Frustrating.

    This morning I did just that. Again. I hit Done in Shortcuts while answering the gig prompts in order to go get a photo from facebook and lost all of the details I’d already written last night’s gig. Let me be clear this isn’t Shortcuts fault or Day One’s.

    day one journal template

    Then I realized I’m totally overthinking this whole need to be prompted bit by Shortcuts and instead trashed my old shortcut and just wrote up this little gem which works just fine and doesn’t have the risk of me screwing it up and losing text. Moral of the story: don’t overthink it! Maybe instead of using Shortcuts to prompt you for a long list of questions, just create a template entry in Shortcuts instead.

  • 2019-03-31 12.51.17

    Thumbs up to @kevin2kelly for giving Adventure Cycling Association a mention in the latest issue of Recomendo. @advcyclingassoc is an amazing resource and I am proud to be a supporting member!

  • 2019-03-27 22.28.14

    Hey, @brentsimmons release it on the App Store! NetNewsWire will be THE gateway drug for millions of users who have yet to discover that there is an internet outside of facebook and twitter! #controlyourfeed http://inessential.com/2019/03/26/netnewswire_on_mac_app_store_or_not_

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