Macdrifter

Replacing Logitech Control Center with BetterTouchTool

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 11:41:53 +0000

Long time, no post! Hi diehard readers. I hope this is a little reward for not cleaning up your RSS feeds.

I really enjoy using Logitech mice, which is good because almost no one else makes multi-function mice for macOS anymore. The MX Master 3 for macOS is a well designed, comfortable mouse with a lot of buttons and scroll wheels. Unfortunately the Logitech control center software is extremely bad. Over the past year I’ve been noticing mouse lag so extreme that I decided to give up on Logitech. But then I remembered I owned (and previously used) the amazing BetterTouchTool (BTT). This little darling of an app provides a huge number of options for managing input devices like keyboards, touchpads, and mice. With a little experimentation I’ve discovered that BetterTouchTool far surpasses the Logitech software with Bluetooth mice. Luckily the MX Master 3 is also a Bluetooth mouse.

Normal Mouse

BTT supports a huge variety of hardware triggers but for this post we need only concern ourselves with the “Normal” Mouse triggers. The “Magic” Mouse is it’s own special kind of device that I don’t use.¹

Side Note

The BTT documentation is available online but it’s a bit sparse. I almost gave up on using BTT because I didn’t think it has the features I needed. After an hour of experimenting with the app, it was obvious I was missing a lot by just reading the documentation. I’m not sure what this says about the RTFM methodology.

The second side note is about interface toggle for creating triggers and actions. I think the column view is much more intuitive to use. Change the setting in the main window bar as needed.

Back to the setup

From the BTT configuration, choose the Normal Mouse and create a new trigger. For this example I’m setting up a new “middle mouse button” trigger using the basic configuration option.

To setup most mouse button triggers you just hover the cursor over the recording panel and then click the button you want to use. Next we add an action to perform. You can chain actions together if you want to make your Mac seem like it’s haunted by neurotic ghosts. I usually just have a single action I can predict. In this case I’m going to make it display Mission Control.

There are a huge number of actions BTT can perform. They are organized into categories that mostly make sense, but I end up using the search a lot.

We’re done. Congratulations! If you plated along, you now have one new mouse feature. But this mouse goes to eleven…

Window Control

I’ve already written about my love of window management so of course I had to take BetterTouchTool too far. Let’s go one louder and make our mouse do something really wonderful and show a menu to choose new window positions when we press both the left and right mouse buttons together.

Named Triggers

This could be a pretty useful action that I will want to trigger with my keyboard and touchpad in addition to the Logitech mouse. If I set this up just for my mouse then I will need to rebuild the action for every input device. But, BTT has “Named Triggers” that you can setup and reuse. Create it once and then bind the named trigger to a lot of other triggers.

Go to the Automations and Named Triggers section of BTT and create a new Trigger.

Next, setup a “Reusable Named Trigger” and give it a name you can remember.

Now we’re going to create the “action” that will be run when this named trigger is, well, triggered. And, we’re going to be extra special about it. I want a single trigger to give me a bunch of options for moving my windows. The BTT action named “Show Custom Context Menu” is what we’ll use. Here’s what the complete context menu looks like:

Each context menu item is bound to a different window resize and move action. For the first three menu items I’m using the built-in convenience actions of “Resize window to Left Third”. The advantage of these built in actions is that the work with any monitor size equally well. In the configuration pane we setup the name, icon dimensions and any custom icon to display in the menu.

For the names, I find it convenient to give them numbers and letter prefixes and I’ll explain why in a couple of paragraphs.

Another Diversion - Makin' Icons

BetterTouchTool includes several collections of icons to use throughout the app. These can be used to annotate the triggers within the app but they can also be used in your custom menus. I wanted something that would be a bit more informative than the black and white sets included in BTT. I’m a big fan of OmniGraffle for making detailed icons but for simple stuff I prefer to use Lucidchart, which is one of my most used tools each week. Lucidchart has a good set of shapes, nice default colors, and excellent export features. For this little project I created a set of grids with different colors and exported as PNG with transparent background.

Finishing the Named Trigger

BTT didn’t have pre-set window locations for all of my use cases so I took advantage of the BTT “snap areas." These are user defined areas of the screen to place a window. I’ve setup a variety of these that match the hex-grid shown in the icons. I just needed to configure the snap areas through the BTT menu bar service first.

With the new snap areas set up we can head back to our Named Trigger and configure the rest of the menu items by using the Trigger Snap Areas..

Using the Trigger for Window Positioning

Now that we have our Named Trigger all setup with the window positions, we need a way to call it. Let’s make two new triggers and see our handy work in action.

Trigger on Left & Right Press

This will bind our Named Trigger to clicking both the right and left mouse buttons together. We head back to the Normal Mouse configuration and add a new trigger. We have to use the “Advanced” configuration to make this work. We do this but selecting our new trigger and then switching to the Advance configuration and adding some Advanced Conditions.

Advanced Conditions are a new BTT feature and allow us to do some interesting things with button presses. What we want is to trigger this menu when both the left and right buttons are pressed down.

Now we head over and add the Action to our trigger. We use the Named Trigger action and provide the Named Trigger name we created earlier. Once this is saved we can click the right and left buttons simultaneously anywhere on the screen to get a popup menu to choose a window location. Selecting one of the items in the menu will move the front most window to the desired location and size.

Trigger on Right Click Minimize

We can also reuse this named trigger to add some new features to the macOS window minimize button. We setup another “Automation” trigger that is activated when we right click on the little yellow control button on almost every macOS window.

Since we reused the named trigger, anytime a new window position is added it will be available for all of the other triggers without any extra work. It’s so nice to be able to right click and simply pop a window to a new position or Space.

Fin

So that’s some of what I’ve been up to over the past 10 months. I guess it was a hiatus, or early retirement from the internet, or just a general malaise. Either way, Macs are still fun and I still really love what I can make them do with the right software and some patience.

Unfortunately my wrists lead me to the conclusion that the “Magic” is not good for my health. My Logitech mouse is more ergonomic even if it has less magic. I wish the Magic Mouse was more comfortable because a touch surface on the mouse is kind of neat. Instead I have a touchpad to the left of my keyboard. ↩︎

The CalDigit TS4 and OWC Thunderbolt Docks

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 07:51:01 +0000

Portable Desktops

This is a short comparison of two excellent Thunderbolt docks for the Macbook Pro.

The OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock is currently $360 on Amazon. ^spacegrey

The CalDigit TS4 Thunderbolt 4 dock is currently backordered for $380 at B&H Photo.

^spacegrey: Strangely the Space Grey version of the dock is almost $100 more. Thanks, Apple.

My top requirement for any dock is that a single cable connects it to the Macbook. That’s the dream of Thunderbolt and it has been delivering for me with the new docks. I plug my ethernet, display, scanner, and a large number of random peripherals into the dock and plug one Thunderbolt cable into the Macbook. I get the portability of a laptop with the connectivity of a desktop.

Side Line About Cables

There’s a lot of chatter these days about what a mess the Thunderbolt cable market is. Most Thunderbolt cables aren’t even labeled if they are TB3 or TB4 or just UCB-C charging. Worse yet, many that come with devices aren’t very good for data at all. I’ve settled on these Maxonar Thunderbolt 4 cables from Amazon .

A four foot cable is under $30 at Amazon. The cables are hefty, and have fabric braiding the entire length. There are plenty of other good Thunderbolt 4 cables out there but I like these and they haven’t failed yet.

Back to Docks

Other than the CalDigit TS4, I don’t think I have any other Thunderbolt 4 peripherals. Yet. I suspect that the next generation of external drives will lure me in soon. Until then, the major difference between the two docks in this article is in their other connections, not their performance. So, let’s jump to the payoff and look at the ports on both docks.

The OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock:

The CalDigit TS4 Dock:

The OWC dock comes with a Mini DisplayPort 1.2 and the CalDigit sports a DisplayPort 1.4 connection. The OWC dock has 3 USB-C type connections, including the host connection while the CalDigit dock provides 6 USB-C type connections, including the host connection. The CalDigit has a 2.5 Gigabit ethernet but my router doesn’t support this speed anyway.

The quality of the OWC dock is superior to the CalDigit TS4. The OWC dock feels solid and heavy. It has a glass top panel with tight tolerances. On the other hand, the TS4 dock feels almost too light. The case has some slight flex to it. It’s not cheap but it also doesn’t feel high quality. I’d call it “fine”, as in “good enough.”

There was one other strange design decision with the CalDigit TS4: orientation. As you can see in the image above, all of the port labels are oriented for a horizontal dock while the logo is for a vertical orientation. This is minor except that CalDigit included optional rubber feet to use the dock in horizontal orientation. They slide in between the slotted case of the TS4 and look out of place. While my “DIY spirit” appreciates the option of making the dock work in two orientations, my “$400 lighter spirit” feels like it was an after thought that looks cheap.

The CalDigit TS4 has pretty much every port I think I need. It’s missing an HDMI connection, but the DisplayPort is pretty universal with the right adapter. I use a Thunderbolt connection to my display which allows me to use the USB-A connections on the display too.

I could write volumes about the new MacBook Pro. It’s fast, has ridiculously long battery life, and a gorgeous screen. While it has a good number of ports (finally), it’s still not enough as my primary computer. Once I hooked it up to an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock I was completely satisfied with my new portable desktop. The CalDigit TS4 is a worthy, if not necessary, upgrade from the OWC dock.

Reciprocals of Primes

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 19:40:58 +0000

My guilty pleasure is watching YouTube videos about obscure math. Holy cow

ChronoSync 10 Released

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 07:23:58 +0000

I’m still a big fan of ChronoSync for Mac and the new version 10 looks really great. The application is now M1 native and provides more convenient connections to iCloud and support for bootable backups on Big Sur and Monterey. I like Time Machine for convenience of file recovery but I’m always a little wary of it’s longevity. ChronoSync just makes a copy of files on my NAS and external disks. It’s simple and has a log I can understand. Good stuff.

Release Notes

Roll Your Own

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 06:04:37 +0000

Modern web tools provide some amazing solutions. Stories like this remind me why the first step in solving most problems is to try to build it myself.

Nelson Minar:

For anyone wondering how Goodreads could have simply lost all my data, I’m wondering too! It bespeaks contempt for users. And terrible system design, services should not be able to lose data irrecoverably. The specific bug is related to my removing Twitter API access to Goodreads last week (they stopped supporting Twitter login months before). Somehow that triggered their system to delete everything. Goodreads promises me it was a true delete, the data is wiped from their database. I don’t believe this: sites generally flag data as deleted, they don’t actually remove it. Goodreads also ignored my request to restore my data from backup. Either they don’t have backups or they can’t be bothered.

Ouch.

One of the things I find fascinating (and refreshing) about the community of Obsidian users is how driven they are to build bespoke self-hosted tools. Even if Obisidian disappears or the plugins stop working, the data still exists on your own disk in files you control. Maybe I’m just old, but I’m tired of having to start from scratch because web services go away or pivot to something unrecognizable.

Friends of Dave Interview

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 12:24:59 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I sat down with my friend David Sparks to talk about nerdy stuff. I always love talking with Dave because he’s exactly as nice as he sounds. We talked about Keyboard Maestro, Shortcuts, and plenty of Star Wars.

If you haven’t tried MacSparky Labs, I can tell you it’s pretty great. It comes with member-only posts as well as insightful webinars.

MacSparky Labs

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 18:32:26 +0000

What a great start to a new year. David Sparks is going all-in on MacSparky. He makes such great stuff and his new MacSparky Labs is an awesome idea. I’m constantly impressed by the quality of David’s work. Not to mention, he’s actually an incredibly nice person that just loves all of this nerdy stuff. Go subscribe to MacSparky Labs. It’ll be a joyful part of 2022.

Safari Tab Switching

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 07:11:26 +0000

My latest obsession is with improving my personal UX. Now that I spend most of my time on a Mac instead of bouncing between Windows and Linux, I’ve noticed a huge improvement in the pace of my work. When I do run into something inefficient, I jot it down and try to fix it.

Lately I’m frustrated with Safari.

I typically have several Safari windows open, each with a different group of related tabs. When I want to switch to a specific tab it’s a tiny awkward dance of flipping through windows and then CMD-Shift-Backslash to open the Safari tab overview search. It’s not a great experience, especially if I have a Safari window in another space.¹

There’s a really nice solution to this problem with using an Alfred workflow. It’s some clever work that uses javascript to list all of the browser tabs. It also has separate triggers to search Chrome, Brave, Edge, and something called Vivaldi. I think I need to rig up an iCab extension but it’s a great addition that solves a problem Apple doesn’t.

I’ll throw in a bonus Alfred workflow for managing windows. It’s also clever and fits the command palette model I have for interacting with my Mac.

A quick search of this site tells me that I’ve been writing about this problem since 2012. ↩︎

Hotkey Memory

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 09:04:20 +0000

I have a confession: I can’t remember all of my hotkey combinations and I waste a lot of time repeating mundane tasks. Between macOS, Keyboard Maestro, Moom, Alfred, and every little app shortcut, I simply can’t keep them top of mind. Here’s what I can remember at this moment:

CMD-Opt-T opens the Todoist quick entry panel.
Ctrl-Opt-M opens Moom in grid layout mode to move a window.
CMD-Opt-Arrow moves a window around a 2x3 grid on my screen (via Keyboard Maestro).
CMD-Opt-X uses SnagIt to grab a screen shot
CMD-Opt-M triggers a Keyboard Maestro palette for Markdown and text manipulation
CMD-Space starts a search in Alfred
Opt-Space starts a search for a Keyboard Maestro macro by name
Ctrl-Space starts a Spotlight search which I almost never use

Those are really handy shortcuts. The handiest. But it’s only 10% of the tricks under the hood. Which might be why I’ve grown to really like the command palette mode in the new generation of apps. It’s probably why I like Alfred so much, even if I wish it had better alias and fuzzy matching. Obsidian fits this model too. I hit CMD-P and start typing the action I want to take and get a short list of similar commands. It’s slower than a dedicated hotkey, but it takes up much less of my meat-RAM, which at this point is the most expensive part of my setup.

Obsidian goes the extra mile and supports alternative command palette plugins and options like pinned commands that remain at the top of the list.

Todoist also now has a command palette triggered by CMD-K. It’s nice and now it’s the way I use most Todoist commands.

I’m trying a new Alfred and Spotlight alternative called Raycast. It leans on the command palette model pretty heavily and I like that.

Honestly, I can’t believe Shortcuts doesn’t work better with Spotlight. Or maybe I can believe it. It sure would be nice for my Shortcuts to show up in Spotlight instead of a bunch of random app suggestions from the Mac App Store. Raycast immediately became more useful than Spotlight by including my Shortcuts in the list. Compare that to what Spotlight suggests:

Keyboard Maestro has had a global command palette options for years. It’s a good way to trigger macros by name.

It’s easy to setup this kind of Keyboard Maestro feature. It’s one action.

Now, I just need a universal command palette that works with all of my other command palettes.

I’ve also rigged up an Elgato Stream Deck to trigger hotkeys I can’t memorize. It’s a handy little accessory even if it’s not mission critical.

Maybe it’s my age, but I’m thrilled with this new trend that relies less on memorization and more on semantics. I look forward to macOS modernizing Spotlight making it more than the fourth best search tool on my Mac. Apple could make Spotlight the command to control all the rest by giving mac developers better frameworks to hook up to. They can even use some of my idle CPUs to better understand the context of my request with some of their machine learning being wasted on my photo albums.

Wayward Title Misses the Point

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 05:50:39 +0000

Someone needs to check in on CBS Boston. Here are two recent titles from their office:

Horse And Its Owner Stopped Inside Doors Of Plymouth Walmart

92-Year-Old Injured In ‘Unprovoked’ Attack At Quincy Center MBTA Station

Each one of these titles make me wonder what world the CBS writers live in. Perhaps they live in a world of violent nonagenarians and unruly gangs of horses.

Keyboard Maestro Plugin For Shortcuts

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 05:41:38 +0000

Will you look at that! Stephen Millard generously created and shared a Keyboard Maestro plugin for Shortcuts on macOS. This looks like a great bridge to Shortcuts, which is still the best way to work with Apple Calendar data.

Some Obsidian Shortcuts and a Macro

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 07:27:03 +0000

One major shortcoming of Obsidian is that it does not integrate well with macOS or iOS so there are no conveniences for capturing text into an Obsidian note. I decided to learn a bit about the Obsidian URL scheme (which works on macOS and iOS) and create some Shortcuts to fill in the gap.

New Obsidian Note

This is a simple Shortcut that has one purpose: Give me a simple and convenient window to create a new Obsidian note on macOS and iOS. Let’s dive in.

Here’s the Shortcut code:

My basic note template in Obsidian looks like this:

Most of my Obsidian file names are a combination of the note “title” and a time stamp.¹ This helps me in a couple of ways. It reduces the chance that I will try to create two notes with the identical file name and it gives me some context of the note age when I am browsing or searching for notes.

I also capture the timestamp as meta data in the note YAML. If Obsidian has done anything to improve my notes it has been to push me to be more consistent with front matter.

The Shortcut starts by creating the all important time stamp using a custom time format. This will be used in the YAML meta data.

But Obsidian does not allow colons in file names so I remove those with the Replace action. Now I have timestamps in a format for the file name and for the YAML data.

Next I assemble the content for the note, including all of the front matter. There’s not much special here except using the “Ask Each Time” variable. This will cause Shortcuts to open a prompt asking for some text. This means the Text action is also an Ask action which is a bit more tidy.

After this action the Shortcut has to URL encode everything and build a URL using the Obsidian URL scheme.

The syntax of the URL scheme is pretty readable so I won’t belabor what’s going on. Here it is:

obsidian://new?vault=<name of the vault>&file=<Name of Note with full PATH>&content=<URL encoded note body>

When this Shortcut runs I get two prompts:

A prompt for the note title, which is optional
The body of the note

The note title is optional because if I don’t want to bother thinking of a title the note is named with just the time stamp. On macOS the first pop-up looks very simple. One annoyance with the Shortcuts “Ask for Input” action is that there is no way (that I’ve found) to choose the “Done” button without a mouse. It’s yet another rough edge that tells me Shortcuts was not ready for macOS.

After asking for the title the Shortcut shows another popup asking for the note and showing the front matter in case I want to edit it. This is all I really need for most of my short notes.

The last few actions create the note title and then URL encode everything so it can be used with the Open URL action.

Backlog

Strip bad characters from title before encoding
Figure out a way to click “Done” with a keyboard

Clip From Browser to Obsidian (macOS)

This macro makes me sad. Apple does not provide a share extension from Safari into Shortcuts on macOS so I had to make this automation in Keyboard Maestro and in Shortcuts for iOS. It just works.

These macros have one use case: When I am reading something in a browser I want to capture notes with a link to the article. I may want to capture multiple notes for the same article in a single note.

Keyboard Maestro

For this macro I’m using the new Keyboard Maestro “Display in menu bar” feature for macro groups. I created a “Browser” macro group and enabled it for my web browsers.

I like this new Keyboard Maestro feature. The menu disappears when I’m not working in a browser but is magically there when I need it again.

The macro looks like this:

The first action grabs any text that is selected in the front browser window using a bit of JavaScript and saves it to a variable:

1window.getSelection().toString()

The next couple of actions test to see if we got something with the JavaScript and if we did then it prepends the text with the Markdown quote block format.

Next we grab the URL and Window Title from the front browser and save those as variables. We will use these to create the note but we need to do some tweaks on the title before we can use it as our note name.

I want to be able to append multiple different text selections to the same note. The Obsidian append handler will do exactly that as long as I know the exact name of the note. So I decided to use the Window title for the note name. This is slightly risky for two reasons:

The browser window title may have characters that are illegal for an Obsidian note title
The browser window title may not be unique in my list of notes

I can solve the first problem by stripping out illegal characters using the KM Filter action and replacing the characters with nothing using the Filter action.²

After I have the title, the URL, and the selected text from the front browser window, the macro builds the note body, including the YAML front matter. The final bit of the macro is to URL encode the title and the note body before calling the Obsidian URL scheme to create the note. Notice that I also snuck in the path to where I want my notes saved, the creatively named “Notes” folder of my “Notes” vault.

With everything locked and loaded we can construct the URL using the all important mode=append attribute. To use this we need to install a new Obsidian plugin called “Obsidian Advanced URI” which is available in the community plugin collection. The append mode causes Obsidian to append the data value to a note with the filepath (including file name). If the note doesn’t exist then Obsidian will create it. If the note does exist then the new content is appended.

This is what a clipped note looks like:

I can clip as many times as I like. As long as the article title doesn’t change the new clips will append to the same note in Obsidian. This is what it looks like with multiple clippings:

I’m not thrilled with the duplicated YAML but it also doesn’t hurt anything. Dataview still works fine and the purpose of the note is still satisfied.

Conclusion

My main conclusion for this macro is that Shortcuts is still not for macOS. But that’s OK because Keyboard Maestro is 1000x more sophisticated and yet easier to program in many ways.

My non-cheeky conclusion is that file identity in Obsidian is a bit muddled still. The uniqueness of the file name and path is not a great way to identify notes for appending, especially if I’m not in control of the file name. Webpage names can be complex and include unexpected characters that aren’t supported in Obsidian file names and maybe those aren’t the best way to identify an article uniquely.

Finally, this macro could have also been done without the URL scheme. Since Obsidian on macOS is backed by a folder full of text files I could just as easily manipulate the text file directly. But I wanted to learn more about the Obsidian URL scheme. I also now have a method that I can use with Obsidian Sync on iOS which doesn’t have the folder of up to date files to use.

Backlog

Better handling for characters that break URL encoding of clipped text
Logic to not include YAML if file exists in Obsidian
Make it compatible with the Shortcuts version for iOS
Include images (encode) with clip

Clip from Safari to Obsidian (iOS)

Here we are, repeating our work so that we can use iOS and macOS together, seamlessly. We’re going to use what we learned about the URL scheme but otherwise the Shortcuts version is a new solution. Here’s the Shortcut, which is expecting to receive input through the Safari share sheet.

There’s not much unique going on with this Shortcut. It uses all the same patterns as the Shortcut at the top of this article plus the added RegEx replacement for the title of the document we used in Keyboard Maestro. The big problem is that Shortcuts does not use the same title element as Keyboard Maestro. I honestly have no idea how Shortcuts decides on the title for a Safari page. After some testing it’s clear that Keyboard Maestro is doing the logical thing and Safari is doing something else. For example the source for our example clearly shows the title which includes the byline and the subtitle:

Shortcuts extracts the title without the byline or subtitle. This means that the Shortcut and Keyboard Maestro macro are not interoperable. I can not reliably append to an Obsidian note on iOS that I created from clipping a webpage on macOS.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to use Shortcuts on macOS and it feels like mistake. While I love the idea of cross platform automation I’m like to use Keyboard Maestro on macOS and Shortcuts on iOS. Or I need to lower my expectations for what I automate so that it fits within Apple’s capabilities.

Backlog

Capture the same title as Keyboard Maestro (switch to JS)
Update RegEx for title cleaning to be less permissive
Standardize with Keyboard Maestro macro functionality

Summary

I’m really impressed by what the Shortcuts team at Apple has done but the migration to macOS is a disappointment for me. It’s the only automation platform that can truly be cross functional within the Apple device universe and yet it suffers from incomplete implementation on the macOS platform. Shortcuts on macOS lacks any developer sweetners and instead feels more like a proof of concept.

On the other hand, Keyboard Maestro goes deep on macOS. And it has documentation. For now I think I’ll keep using Keyboard Maestro for heavy lifting on macOS.

I treat web clipping notes slightly differently because I may want to append more content to an existing note. Stay with me for the next Shortcut ↩︎
KM doesn’t seem to require escaping the regex but I already updated the macro to escape RegEx control characters like back slash. ↩︎

Low Bar

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 10:01:08 +0000

This list over at Dynomight.net is maybe the lowest possible bar for being thankful but I still love it.

That hokey unfashionable techniques like practicing gratitude turn out to have strong scientific evidence behind them, and several countries happen to have a preexisting holiday that’s already, at least in theory, dedicated to this practice.

Immune In a Nutshell

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 09:58:59 +0000

Like millions of other people I’m a huge fan of Kurzgesagt. I’ve “supported” them over the years by buying their posters and other doodads, so of course I immediately pre-ordered the new book by their founder Philipp Dettmer. For $22 it seemed like a good purchase. After reading it for the past month I can whole heartedly recommend this book as a way to learn about how the immune system works.

I have one precaution for other fans of Kurzgesagt: It is not like their other info-graphic heavy products. This is a book with words. Lots of words. There are occasional graphics and they are very nice but it is a text book for people that actually want to learn about how immune systems function. You can tell by the references.

Here’s a typical passage from Immune:

But Helper T Cells do not just put the Macrophages into Killer mode. Once this battle frenzy is triggered, they are necessary to keep them alive. Helper T Cells monitor the battlefield, and as long as they sense danger, they are stimulated and know fighting is still necessary. Macrophages that fight in battle-frenzy mode are on a timer and will kill themselves after it runs out. This is another one of these safety mechanisms to make sure the immune system is limited to a degree. Helper T Cells can reset this Macrophage suicide timer over and over again. So as long as danger is present, they tell your exhausted warriors to carry on by restimulating them over and over again. Until they decide to stop doing that. Once Helper T Cells notice that the immune system is clearly winning the fight they stop and so, bit by bit, more and more spent soldiers end their lives. Helper T Cells do not just crank up the violence, they also determine when enough is enough and everybody should calm down.

Good stuff. I’m enjoying the entire book.

🤘🤘🤘

Missed Connections and Email

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 14:12:48 +0000

Ever have a situation where someone contacts you by email about a thing and when you respond there’s no answer? Twice. What’s the etiquette when you suspect the sender has too many layers of email filters to start a relationship? I should ask Merlin about this.

Anyway, good episode.

The Best Office I Never Knew I Wanted

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 08:03:44 +0000

Here’s a twofer. Not only does this article describe a bunch of cool office tools I like but it’s a good affiliate-linked holiday shopping list for you. Hey, I’m like the Wirecutter but without a paywall and I actually use the stuff.

The Desk

I got an Uplift desk. Well, I got two. I got a convertible standing desk with the “Commercial frame” for my Mac and various peripherals. I also purchased a fixed height desk to hold all of the Windows computers I have to use throughout the day.¹

The Uplift standing desk is very sturdy, which was a key requirement for me. I hate the feel of standing desks that wobble because it makes the monitor wobble which in-turn makes conference cameras go crazy. I went with the Uplift Commercial Frame and it’s well made. The Commercial Frame has an additional cross bar that stabilizes the desk, provides a spot to put my feet up, and shifts the center of gravity a little lower to create some additional stability. It’s nice.

The wooden top, on the other hand, was disappointing. The first one I received had a crack running the length of the desk and had obviously been damaged before it was packed.

The replacement top was mostly fine but for a premium wooden top it had a lot of minor defects like nicks and smeared wood stain. I don’t recommend buying their high end wooden tops but I do recommend their customer service. I had little issue getting replacements.

I threw in some extras like their power grommet, which gives me some convenient electrical outlets at the back of the desk. Honestly, it’s nice but not necessary since there are good alternatives for less. I also added the CPU holder to use as an extension for a lamp and my stationary supplies.

In addition to the desk, I picked up the $300 Uplift filling cabinet. It’s well made and extremely solid feeling. It too had small nicks on the paint but not enough for me to deal with the return process again. I like the cabinet and the finish matches the desk so I’m happy overall.

The Computer Setup

My main goal was to have a single cable from my MacBook Air to connect to everything on my desk. I started with the dock. The OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock has 85W charging through Thunderbolt 3 along with pretty much every port I need. The best part is that one Thunderbolt cable connects my MacBook Air to all of my peripherals, including a monster of a monitor. Take a look at the specs over at OWC. I highly recommend this dock for a Mac even though it’s $400.

I use my MacBook Air in clamshell mode so I grabbed this Aluminum vertical laptop stand for $24. It holds my laptop and my iPad and looks pretty good on the desk.

I paired the dock with some of these “USB4” Thunderbolt 4 cables. They are pricey at almost $40 each but they feel solid and I like the braided texture.

One of the major downsides of using a MacBook in “clamshell” is there’s no TouchID. I love TouchID on the Mac so I paired mine with Apple’s new Bluetooth Magic Keyboard. It has been mostly great although if my MacBook is temporarily out of range then I have to turn the keyboard off and on to re-enable TouchID. See, turning it on and off does fix some things.

That brings me to my precious. A 38 inch Ultra Wide monitor from LG. I purchased the LG 38WN95C-W which took some mental gymnastics to justify. I paid $1500 for the monitor back before supply chain issues caused the price to go through the roof. I drive the monitor with a Thunderbolt cable from the OWC dock, which is great. Because I use Thunderbolt I get the added benefit of extra USB ports on the display without a lot of additional cables.

I picked up the Anker PowerConf S500 a few weeks ago to solve one semi-dumb problem. I need a microphone and speaker because my MacBook Air is closed when I use the external monitor. As it turns out the PowerConf is a great little conference call speaker too. Not only can I connect it through a USB-C cable but it can also be a wireless Bluetooth conference speaker when traveling. I wouldn’t want to use it as speaker for music, but that’s why I have a HomePod in my office. At $220 I can’t recommend this unless it solves a very specific problem for you.

Of course I needed a video camera if my MacBook Air is in clam shell mode. The Logitech C920x HD Pro webcam gets the job done for $60. After seeing some example 4K video conference streams I decided that I probably look better in lower resolution. I wish this model had a lens cover but I’m also fine using a Post-it tab that only cost a dime extra.

Organization and Supplies

I really like these new Anker USB C Charger, PowerPort III plugs. They provide a ton of power and they are pretty small. I plugged one into the outlet on the Uplift desk and now I have plenty of peripheral charging and it can even charge the MacBook Air with 65W when I travel.

Do yourself a favor and grab 50 adhesive cable ties for $10. They work well as reusable cable ties even if you don’t need the adhesive. These are so much better than zip ties.

I’ve mentioned the Anker magnetic cable holder but I recently discovered the Velcro version think it’s great too. The Velcro wraps are a lot more “universal” than the magnet versions which have a maximum size cable they can hold.

To keep all of my desk accessories organized and not rolling around a $300 filing cabinet, I bought a 6 pack of poly storage bins for $15. They’re not top-quality but they don’t need to be for this job.

I love the Sharpie S-Gel pens. They ink dries quickly and makes a smooth line. The medium is the best size for my work and they are inexpensive at about a $1 a piece. I deploy these everywhere.

I really like the Kensington Duo gel mouse pad but it’s a bit too bulky for my main desk where I usually write and draw. I don’t use one on my standing desk and prefer to go commando with a leather desk pad for $16. These desk pads are a nice way to save the surface of a desk from wear and tear but also provide some friction for a mouse and keyboard. I still use the mouse pad on my “Windows” desk where I prefer to spend as little time as possible.

The Jabra Evolve 75 headset has noise cancellation and the battery lasts an incredibly long time. I also love that I can mute myself just by swiveling the mic up. It’s a clever little device that I use every day. They also sound pretty good too. These have been recommended to me several times by people that work remotely so I had to try them. I’m glad I did because they are perfect for teleconferencing.² At nearly $300 these are premium additions but I wear them for multiple hours each day and they do a good job. They are also extremely portable and I’ve used them in hotel lobbies perfectly well. They are light and small and come with a nice carrying case.

I fully expected to return the Elgato XL Stream Deck because it seemed like a silly thing for YouTube streamers and it cost $250. But, it turns out that it’s perfect for an old man like me that has a hard time remembering the 300 keyboard shortcuts I configured on my Mac.

My default Stream Deck screen is mostly an app launcher and window manager. I keep it right in front of my mouse so it’s usually just a couple of inches away to quickly move a window or start a timer. I’ve found a lot of uses for this little keyboard and I’m impressed that Elgato hasn’t abandoned such an odd device.

Conclusion

I’m fortunate that I get to work remotely from home. I’ve done this off and on for years but always just tolerated inconveniences and discomforts because it would be short-lived. But it wasn’t short-lived and after many years I’m giddy with the environment I have now. It’s a lot easier to hit that flow state.

Everything linked here is just “stuff” and I could certainly work without it. Just like I could go for a hike without shoes. But I don’t want to hike without shoes and I don’t want to use a 13" display with spaces for 10 hours a day.

Every time something annoys me or interrupts me during my work hours I make a note and then I try to fix that thing. Each tiny improvement isn’t much on its own but taken together they make may computer feel powerful and vital. It seems like a lot of money to spend on an office, and it is. But I spend 10-12 hours each day in my office which is more than I spend anywhere else. It might as well not waste my time.

I’m a consultant and a lot of my customers require me to use their hardened Windows laptops to connect to their infrastructure. I’m totally fine with this but I also don’t want to replace my Mac on my desk every time I do. ↩︎
Are we still calling this “teleconferencing”? It sounds anachronistic. ↩︎

Warhammer 40K Disavows Nazis

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 07:44:41 +0000

Apparently Warhammer 40K had to explain why hate groups aren’t part of their real-life culture.

For clarity: satire is the use of humour, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system’s flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh-out-loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime, turned up to 11. The Imperium is not an aspirational state, outside of the in-universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems. It’s a monstrous civilisation, and its monstrousness is plain for all to see.

That said, certain real-world hate groups – and adherents of historical ideologies better left in the past – sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment, and to co-opt them for their own agendas.

I guess I’d like to see more of this but it sure is disappointing how often folks have to repudiate hate groups lately.

Window Management with Keyboard Maestro on macOS

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 09:46:30 +0000

macOS Monterey comes with some new window management tricks but they feel incomplete and a little frustrating. I have one suggestion for the Apple team that works on Spaces and window management: Get a big ass monitor. I did. It’s a gorgeous 38" display that makes me feel like I’m working on a space ship. It was surprisingly hard to adapt to so many pixels but I’m loving almost everything about it. Almost. Here’s what a 38 inch monitor looks like. Each of these windows is about the size of a 13" monitor:

With so many pixels on screen dragging a window is very inefficient, which kills the utility of window snapping tools like Magnet or even BetterSnapTool and it’s big sister BetterTouchTool.¹ When a window is on the right side of a 38" monitor and I want it snapped to the upper left corner, a mouse is the wrong tool.

I keep Moom running for occasional assistance but I decided I wanted to dive into the new Keyboard Maestro and some KM programming. So here it is.

Use Case

I’d like a set of keyboard shortcuts for moving windows around a grid on a large monitor. For a 38 inch monitor I like a 2x3 grid. It looks like this²:

The keyboard shortcuts should let me move a window between the spaces on the grid. It should also let me instantly resize a window that is not yet positioned on the grid so that it is. None of this should require a mouse.

One keyboard shortcut should allow me to cycle a window between all of the grid frames.

Background

Keyboard Maestro has three powerful features that I planned to use:

Keyboard Maestro also comes with some examples for moving windows but none of them were what I wanted. Plus, I wanted to refresh some of my KM programming knowledge.

I familiarized myself with the Keyboard Maestro actions and got to work planning. This is what my planning looked like:

Snap to Closest Grid

I started by solving this problem first. When a window is just randomly thrown on screen I want a shortcut to make it fall in line with my grid. Here’s how I thought about the solution:

What are the visible coordinates of the main screen
Chop the coordinates up into a lower and upper half as well as vertically sliced thirds
Figure out which grid location our window’s top left corner is sitting in
Resize and move the window to the grid position that the left corner is in

I used Keyboard Maestro to help me figure out the grid coordinates. First up, I needed to know the coordinates of the visible screen. This is important because I don’t want to try to move a window under the menu bar. I used the %ScreenVisible%Main% token to get the coordinates of the visible screen. As you can see below the coordinates are 0,25,3840,1575.

There are a few additional KM screen calculations:

These are all saved to variables that represent specific X & Y regions of the screen. I think the neat thing about this is the KM %Calculate% function. It’s handy because it can calculate specific values of a screen or window. For example, %Calculate%VarMainScreenVisible.Width/3% calculates the Width of the screen divided by three. No need to add another action to do the math or to extract the width from the overall array of dimensions.

Now we start figuring out where our current front window is on the screen.

Great. Let’s start doing some logical tests of the window relative to the screen. This uses the Keyboard Maestro IF flow control. If the top corner of our front window is above the mid point of the screen then we probably want to snap to the top of the screen. If it’s below the midpoint then we want to snap to the bottom of the screen.

Now let’s figure out which third of the screen our current front most window is in.

We’ve done some math and some logical comparisons. Now it all pays off with one action to move and resize the front window using the variables in our IF statements. We know where I left corner should be horizontally and vertically and we know how wide and tall the window should be based on the visible region of the screen.

Here’s the entire workflow if you want to build your own:

Move to Next Left or Right Grid Position

This is the real money maker. It’s very similar to the previous macro. The main difference is that instead of moving the window to the closest grid location it moves the window to the grid position to the right. If we are at the right edge already it loops around to the left most grid position.

Conclusion

Hey, it works. These macros definitely reduce the amount of time I spend moving windows around. I can command-tab to an app and then hit CMD-Opt-RightArrow to move the window exactly where I want on my grid. I doubt the time these macros save will be more than the time I put into developing them. But that’s hardly the point. They make me slightly happier and I re-learned a bunch about Keyboard Maestro.

Backlog

The holidays are coming up so I should have more time to experiment with Keyboard Maestro. But, I still have more I want to do with these window manager macros.

Detect screen dimensions and use 2x2 grid for smaller screens automatically
Ask location to move window with keyboard nav
Add a macro for a 1x3 horizontal grid, because sometimes I like tall and skinny
Try out KM “Prompt for Screen Rectangle” action because that looks COOL.
Try to show a grid overlay on screen to select locations to place windows.

This is what a 1x3 grid looks like:

Smart people have mentioned Amethyst but I’m not there yet. ↩︎
I made that with OmniGraffle. Sometimes I forget how good OmniGraffle is. I created a bunch of grids that I exported to use as Stream Deck button icons. More on that in the future. ↩︎

An Adventure Time Cipher

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 06:16:43 +0000

Thank you Aaron Randall, for this fun solution to something I still think about. I’m not ashamed to admit that I have the Adventure Time comic he is referencing. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I was not clever enough to solve the cipher. At least Aaron proves that those two things aren’t related.

Merlin's Repository of Wisdom

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 05:52:26 +0000

Did you see this?. You probably should. It’s like a list of ingredients for a good life.