Ron Guest

Inspired by @mmarfil I thought I should look and see what my top 5 Shortcuts are. I imagine there are a number of nearly identical Shortcuts floating around. Most I typically invoke using Siri.

• Loud Playlist
  I invoke this either from the widget or using Siri and it fires up Music to play my Loud playlist, shuffled, without repeat. This is possible using Siri, without a Shortcut, but I found that having a Shortcut with my recorded phrase makes it more reliable. I have this in the widget because there are times where I’d rather swipe to invoke it than speak. I actually have a couple of Shortcuts like this that play different lists.
  Get the Shortcut

• Save File as… I often want to save a web page or a PDF from Safari (such as a utility bill or bank statement). This Shortcut prompts me for a file name and then a places on my iCloud Drive to save it. Picking a file name should be a built-in iOS feature for now it isn’t. Typically for this to work it is necessary to first use the share sheet option to Create PDF and then run this workflow. It would be nice if the Shortcut could invoke Create PDF but as far as I can determine that is not supported.
  Get the Shortcut

• Add To Tomorrow Things3 is my task manager and it introduced Shortcuts support from the beginning. Things3 has a built in way to add something from the Share sheet but there is no option to pick a destination – it always goes to the Inbox. Using this Shortcut I add the current page in Safari as a task to my Tomorrow list (I also have Shortcuts to add an item to Today or my Read Later list. I typically invoke this using Siri.
  Get the Shortcut

• Open Shopping I also have a Shopping project in Things3 where I keep items I want to purchase. Some of these items are wishlist and others are near term. I keep a Groceries task and within that maintain a checklist of what I need to pick up. I have another for Drug Store reminding me what I want to get on my next visit to Walgreens, CVS or wherever and similarly for Hardware Store. When I start to run errands I can invoke this Shortcut for a reminder of places I might need to go or when I arrive at a store and and want to see the checklist. I have similar Shortcuts that will open Things3 to my Today list of tasks or my Upcoming list of tasks.
  Get the Shortcut

• Nap Alarm Time Who doesn’t like a good nap? But all good things must end and I typically need an alarm to nudge me to get up and get going again. This Shortcut prompts for the duration of the nap and then adjust the volume and sets DND mode.
  Get the Shortcut

Bank deposit - not the monetary kind, but rather what’s left over after heavy runs cause our creek to overflow. 📷

This USB-C Dock for the new iPad Pros on Kickstarter intrigues me. Is a dock better than dongles? Cost-wise I think only if you need all of the dongles. But it makes it easy to use more than one connection at a time and it would be a “one add-on to rule them all”.

I have more work to do on next year’s investing plan so went to the coffee shop to focus. I forgot my AirPods so I pulled a pair of earbuds out of my backpack. I forgot how klutzy having corded earbuds makes me feel. 🎶

Giving: It’s one simple behavior that’s been shown to increase happiness. Listen to interviews with the founder and CEO of Charity: Water, Harvard professor Michael Norton on the topic of happiness and spending, and a street experiment on self vs giving.

Choiceology podcast

For those who use Drafts, is there a way to get its character count to take markdown into consideration? I couldn’t find one which makes drafting a post within a 280 character limit rather tricky.

I’m feeling nostalgic for the early days of MP3s. The sites that championed MP3s introduced me to some great artists I never would’ve discovered otherwise. This thought was triggered by Apple including a song by Red Delicious in my auto-gen’d Favorites playlist. 🎶

Elf on the sh… err… shoulder 🎅🏻

Last month I set a goal to follow 100 people on Micro.blog by the end of the year (I was at 79 at the time). I easily surpassed that goal yesterday and it is very nice to see the quality of my timeline remains high. 💯

On social media like Facebook and Twitter virtually everyone I interact(ed) with is someone I knew before (family, friends, colleagues). In the early days of Flickr almost everyone I interacted with was new to me and I still have very fond memories of that period and retain some of those people as friends. Micro.blog is the only other instance where I’ve met a lot of smart, reasonable and kind people online and felt it was a net benefit to me. I recently tried Mastodon and at least my experience hasn’t been good and I doubt I’ll really participate there.

Like some others I have a long list of things (I think?) I’d like to see changed on Micro.blog. But at the same time I really appreciate that they’re taking their time to manage the experience. Flickr ruined the social aspects (as well as undermining it as a serious, or at least semi-serious) site for discussing photos. I wouldn’t want to see that happen again.

A cappuccino tastes especially good on a dreary day.

Hanging out at the local coffee shop to spend some time working on my economic/financial forecast. We’re facing the broadest range of outcomes I can remember so I want to have a solid game plan. Planning >> Reacting.

For those who have deleted or deactivated their Facebook account: did you post a note on Facebook in advance pointing people to an alternative site (like micro.blog)?

Welp, did my first ECG using my ⌚️ ♥️ Apparently I’m still not dead ✔️

It’s a “needy” time of year for social media companies. Three times in 2 hours yesterday Facebook sent me silly email notifications (over nothing important), then LinkedIn joined the party, and now Twitter is bugging me. I’ll eventually block them but curious how far they’ll go.

This kind of info might help us convince some of our friends to leave the platform.

Facebook’s internal documents show its ruthlessness

I’m really curious: what school of marketing teaches that if a customer buys something from you the best next step is to bombard their inbox with multiple emails a day? Does that really drive the most revenue? Instant opt out from me, and also I hate you from now on.

A few months back I dropped the Adobe Photo plan subscription. I’ve never gotten along with Lightroom (still pining for Aperture!) and didn’t feel the cost justified my infrequent and light usage of Photoshop. Their recent approach to Cloud storage and deprecation of the standalone app left a really bad taste in my mouth. Plus, for me, their Cloud approach made for an extremely awkward workflow. I’ve been doing simple work in Apple’s Photos app on iOS and macOS as well as randomly using apps like Darkroom on iOS for more advanced photo processing.

I recently needed to do some Photoshop-type photo editing and recalled getting Affinity Photo for macOS for free about a year ago. I fired it up and It was a great alternative and I quickly accomplished what I needed. After doing some research I decided to buy the iOS version. It is quite powerful and after watching a couple of their tutorial videos I’m getting along quite well with it. I appreciate they put in the work to do some very clever things to take advantage of a touch device. It feels good and is a productive approach - better than on my Mac.

Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, I get nothing out of posting this, and don’t know anyone working for the company. N.B. I wish people disclosed this kind of information in posts about products. I often see people post positive comments on product’s and later find they are compensated, have a relationship with, or get special privileges from the company. Not cool.

We’re blessed we live only a block away from this creek. It has never run dry, even during a drought. After heavy storms from here to points north it rises rather dramatically. Even more wonderful is the fact there is a trail running next to this creek that stretches for miles.

Grasses 📷

Neon and Invisible. Not two words I normally see together.

Our real-world usage * My wife uses her iPad Pro exclusively (she is the full time manager of our home life)
* Our 10 year old son uses his iPad 99% of the time (once every couple of months he plays a game on an iMac)
* Our 14 year old daughter games on an iMac most days and everything else is on her iPhone, even school work. She almost never uses her iPad.
* I use my MacBook Pro for hardware and software development, some macOS-only financial reports, and bulk photo processing. Everything else is on my iPad (even some script development).

Our son could easily live without a Mac. Our daughter lives without an iPad. I need both. So amongst us, given our life stages and interests, it’s 50-50. I don’t see anything happening the next couple of years that result in us eliminating Macs.

The main difference the iPad has driven for us is we no longer need two Macs and our Macs will last longer (our 5 year old iMac is still doing surprisingly well playing games). There is also an implication for my backup strategy as more and more data shifts to iPads — even my code is in iCloud (as well as on the Mac and Github). My 12.9” iPad Pro is awesome but it can’t compete with the development productivity having an ultra-wide monitor, true windowing, background tasks etc bring. I don’t see any way this is going to change in the next couple of years. I think if Apple made a strategic shift to enable this kind of thing on iOS it would be a huge mistake for the general iOS user base. I can see them making some moves to support development but not to the point of trying to replace Macs.

I am not sure what impact the advent of iPads has on Apple’s share-of-wallet. The iPads are personal devices so each person needs one (for our family even if the iPad had user profiles this would still be the case). The upfront cost of iPads is marginally cheaper than buying a couple of Macs however Apple is driving a faster refresh cycle on iPads. The rate of improvement of iPads vs Macs makes it hard to resist regular upgrades (at least for the parental units) and in practice I think these costs will exceed a Mac-focused approach.

The longer I go between opening the Facebook app (to check posts from the kids’ schools) the more needy Facebook becomes - sending a steady stream of notifications in email and push. Often nothing more than “oh look, someone you’ve never met posted a photo!”. Yes, they’re evil.

I was quite sad when Apple dropped support for ordering Calendars, Cards etc directly from the macOS Photos app because I had used it for many years. I decided to give Snapfish a try and was really pleased with their site - easy and responsive composition in Safari on my iPad.

The more work I do on the 12.9” iPad the more impressed I am. With the keyboard attached it’s a better “laptop” than my laptop & reading is expansive to say the least. I didn’t initially get the pencil but I think I’ll use the money from selling my old iPad to buy one.

Even a Mars rover gets all look, something shiny and new!

Another glorious day of severe clear 📷 🌞 👟