I like Louis CK unironically. I like him for the same reasons I like George Carlin, because he makes me think, then laugh, then think some more. I think both comedians are intellectual giants. Now Louis CK has created the anti-sitcom. It’s a tragic comedy minus the comedy. Horace and Pete is 10 episodes of raw humanity that is both disturbing and satisfying. Horace and Pete focuses on a single family-owned bar but manages to cover a lot of forbidden sitcom territory.

The new OmniFocus URL scheme looks to be a major improvement. It’s still in development but it’s starting to sound like OmniFocus is going to catch up to other apps in some significant ways. This means, for example, that you can now create a text file outlining an entire project, with placeholders for specific names, defer dates, due dates, and so on. You can then run a workflow that processes those placeholders and builds a new project (such as “Run a marathon on June 30”) from that project template, and these project templates and their processing workflows can be shared with others.

I’m not a huge fan of Slate but every once in awhile, I really enjoy one of their deep-dives. This article about the source of the spread of Cholera in Haiti is incredible. One of the several key facts this map fails to note is that three months earlier there had been zero diagnosed cases of cholera in Haiti. In fact, there had never been a diagnosed case of the disease in that country before.

What a terrific piece of reporting. Asked about the provenance of the unspecified “small farms” venison, Cuarta said he buys it from Jackman Ranch in Clewiston. Jackman’s Mark Hoegh said that, while he does sell the Don CeSar wagyu filet mignon, he does not sell them venison, because he does not produce venison. It’s not enough to know that there is no regulation or enforcement, we should assume purposeful deception with every new trend.

Pretty neat stuff on Nik’s Crappy Blog although probably way outside of what I’m willing to do for my macros. There’s more help with this built into Keyboard Maestro and on the forum.

As of today, Smile Software has softened their stance on the new subscription version of TextExpander. If you are an existing user, they cut the price in half of the new TextExpander. I’d have nothing to say if this was all about pricing.1 TextExpander was something I used a lot and was definitely worth the price. The previous versions of TextExpander are returning to the App Store according to Smile:

A few people have asked me about replacing TextExpander fill-in snippets using Keyboard Maestro. While I think Keyboard Maestro is pretty easy to work with, it’s very different than a single purpose snippet expansion tool. Here’s a quick breakdown of a macro for responding to email. It opens a prompt and asks a few questions about the message and then inserts a draft message into an application window. Variables Keyboard Maestro lives and breathes with variables.

Oh. My. Lord. Do you want to see a movie made by one of the stop motion animation masters behind Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Willow? Do you like visual story telling? Do you just like movies that make you wish you could unsee them? Mad God is all of these things and more. Seriously, this is not for kids (or even most adults), but it is gorgeous and incredibly detailed.

The Omnigroup is testing deeper and more complete automation for OmniFocus on iOS. From their forum: So we took this a step further, and added support for copying projects from OmniFocus as TaskPaper text and pasting them back into OmniFocus as TaskPaper text. And then another step further, creating an Editorial workflow. This Workflow accepts TaskPaper text with placeholder tokens and prompts for you to enter final values, then creates a project in OmniFocus 2.

I’ve dropped a few hints about using the iOS and Mac app Copied.app (that’s some brutal SEO) but I’ve never really explained what I mean. Simple shortcut expansion is great when you have two key restrictions: A memorable system of shortcuts A small collection of shortcuts I’ve discovered weaknesses in my systems for shortcut expansion as my collection grows. I just can’t remember all of them. Even worse, accidental triggers eliminate all of the efficiency gains for shortcuts.