I can’t say I have any fantastically elaborate automation. I teach English & Social Sciences, so I make textexpander snippets for feedback. I am learning Asian languages, I don’t use automations for this because I want to make mistakes so I can better learn.
I use date related snippets for file renaming mostly for image and video files.
The weather is unpredictable. It is getting hotter and I remember a few years ago we had two additional seasons called Spring and Fall.
I started using Macs when they were beige, and no one dared to write an “i” in front of product names. Really happy to have bet on the right horse! I just wished I’d have bought Apple Stock instead of that Performa 6400 at the time …
Most elaborate automation: Time tracking and monthly reports with Apple Shortcuts. This whole thing broke with the first west wind of the season, of course. My most-used is a receipts manager, also done with Shortcuts.
Favorite snippet: I use the built-in snippets, and sometimes LaunchBar snippets. Most-often used is “&iban”, which turns into my 43-or-so-digit banking identifier.
Free time: Bicycle, gardening, woodworking, 3D-printing – I have so many side quests I started a podcast to keep track of them, resulting in another side quest.
Weather: sunny, 12° C. Lovely, isn’t it? I’m about to go out, I just wanted to make sure to get onto this new Twitter alternative in time.
I’m John, from the UK (in the countryside a little outside of London)
Sunny but chilly, but Autumn is starting - so the cold & drizzle everyone expects from England is the norm.
Automation bits of Hazel, Alfred, Popclip & Keyboard Maestro - a book 10+ years back about going Paperless - started it and picked up many ideas from BrettTerpstra .
Having learnt various programming languages professionally (and forgotten most) returning to python & teaching the grandchildren (programming & Robotics). Everyone’s heard of Cobol - but before that for me “Cleo”.
“free time” having retired there’s not enough!
lighting & sound at a local theatre
modernising a 400+ year old house
rewriting / updating (and hoping to publish) my father’s book on “Mistakes”
I’m Geoff, and I use a lot of the usual suspects in the Mac automation world (Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Bunch, FastScripts, Moom…).
My most elaborate automation is an AppleScript that parses bills received via email and creates calendar events so that I don’t forget to pay them.
My favorite snippet (or most used anyway) is ;xxc to paste the clipboard contents as plain text. (I think I heard about it on a Mac Power Users episode a long time ago, and it’s incredibly useful since I write a lot of documentation at work.)
In my free time I run, play guitar and write music. The weather where I live is uncomfortably humid for about half of the year.
Hey there, I’m Dani, living and working in the Swiss Alps. I am a therapist and host, having migrated my ventures into the gift economy. Techwise, I am using Obsidian to build and maintain my personal operating system. Besides some sophisticated templates, moderate automation is done on the macOS surface using bunch and moom. I’m also using the help of NVultra and Marked for some particular markdown file development.
But then I have installed each and every tool coming across my way promising the least potential in achieving however small a benefit in automation with however infeasible mastery of such tools. Just for giggles and because I can’t help being fascinated by whatever mind-boggling tricks such tools are offering. What made it into my OF project plan is one of the results of this beautiful chaos. It must be said that being aged, I caught this virus in the early 70s when I ballyhooed the advent of an IBM 360, marking the era of punched cards and the end of having to physically knit programs on wire boards.
Hiya gang - my name’s Christian. I remember starting with an SE/30 in high school and making figures for an undergraduate thesis in MacDraw. Been hooked on tools like these ever since. Like many of you I’ve got my fingers in many automation pies (KM, BTT, AppleScript, js). For the past year or so I’ve been using Tana as my main project organizer, and I’m also a fan of scriptkit.app.
I’m the executive director of a local arts non-profit; I’m delighted to be able to work from home. I’m also a lapsed cellist, long-distance bicycle rider, and big fan of cooking (and eating!)
My most complex automation was kicked off by Covid interruptions. Our chorus went to virtual rehearsals using new software to sing over the internet live in virtual rooms. The setup was pretty new, and we wanted the flexibility to bring in and mix sound from our conductor’s mic vs the chorus vs occasional recorded music. Scriptkit helped me write routines that switched up real and virtual audio channels and connect/disconnect to different servers - and pipe the full mix out to zoom or youtube for those who weren’t using the fancy virtual rooms sound software. The wiring diagram for the various options was pretty complex, so being able to script them as automated configurations made switching in the middle of a session doable. Now that we’re back to meeting in-person, it’s gathering dust, but it was essential for a time.
Oh Tana looks pretty cool, will have to try that out. Had never heard of it before. I’m also going to look into Scriptkit, as it sounds like you’ve done some very cool stuff with it!
I’d be curious how you did this. I’ve set up receipt management with Hazel and some Keyboard Maestro tools, but not sure how I’d approach the same thing with Shortcuts.
It’s worth poking around Tana’s Discord. It’s very competent software, but still alpha release. I believe the way you get an invite is to post in the #introduce-yourself channel…
Hi, I am Christian (@darkwookiee is my handle almost everywhere). I am from Montreal and I am a system administrator working in the SAP ecosystem. I am also an IT college teacher. In my free time, I am still studying at university, I read a lot, I am a podcast addict and I consume anything pop culture.
I am a Mac/Apple enthusiast, but I am also working daily with Windows and Linux.
By far, my most elaborate automation is in my professional life. I am fluent in Python, and used it to automate anything from file parsing to system cloning and monitoring.
On the personal side, I have far too much automation tools for the free time I have to play with them. Sometimes I think that I prefer discovering new tools, and I don’t dig the potential of all the tools.
I am using Keyboard Maestro, Bunch, Hazel, Alfred, Drafts, Shortcut, BetterTouchTool. I also tried some SaaS tools like Make.com and IFTTT.
Af far as the weather in Montreal, it is still surprisingly mild… but winter is coming :).
I live in Rosamond, CA, I work at Sonos on productivity and collaboration tools (mainly Atlassian) and I’m incredibly passionate about teams, teamwork, and how technology enables groups of people to connect with each other and create community.
The weather where I live is basically always sunny. Today it’s 71 and sunny. My nine dogs are running around the house and the backyard. My partner is writing software in his bedroom.
In my free time I play with my dogs, watch TV, listen to and create podcasts (and guest on Brett’s!), read, and worry about COVID while trying to get back out into the world and connect with my friends.
I’m fat, Black, queer, trans, agender, ADHD, autistic, and suffering from C-PTSD and anxiety. All of these help shape who I am, and are important to understand me.
Feel free to connect with me across the social mediaverse!
My name is David Banham, I am retired but enjoy Brett’s columns and view of (most) things! I started in the computer business in. 1967, worked in systems programming for real time systems, then computer performance, capacity planning, and hardware planning. In the late 1980’s my talents were generally directed at Operational Problems and longer term operational planning. Spent about 50 million dollars in the early 1990’s fixing a bank’s mainframe production environment (which was error prone, badly automated, lacked throughput and performance, and generally worked so slowly there was no time for recovery when thigs went wrong). I did activities such as IT due diligence regarding company acquisitions, and then was asked to set up an Operational Risk assessment team, that was followed with more general consulting and review of operational failures (incident and problem management) for service impacting incidents. After retirement acted as independent consultant to banks and FI’s. I still write some code associated with items of interest. Like to look at automation and efficiency issues associated with computers and applications. My current mac has more compute and i/O power than a mainframe from the last century… amazing what you can do. Program mainly in Go, R, Awk and under duress Python. Favourite automation toosl for the Mac is Task, Keyboard Maestro and Warp…
Welp, I never thought I’d live to see this day and I am stoked! Let’s get this party going
I am excited to be joining this forum and connecting with fellow tech enthusiasts. It’s amazing how far technology has come and how it continues to shape our lives in so many ways.
I’ve been a hackin the Mac for many years and have spent countless hours tinkering and customizing my device to make it more efficient. I know many of you have probably done the same, and I’m looking forward to learning from your experiences and insights.
Let’s make the most of this platform and share our knowledge to help each other grow and thrive in this ever-evolving tech landscape.
Cheers!
@ttscoff can you hook me up with nvUltra Beta, please?!
While I never had the pleasure of knitting programs, my freshman Computer Fundamentals course, in Fortran77, was on a IBM 3033 (aka Myron). And while there were a few terminals, we frosh worked with punch cards.
When passing through Troy some years ago, we stopped in a the computer center, housed in an old church, stained glass windows and all, and saw the wires dangling from where the last card reader had been recently removed.
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