I frequently get asked why I use Macminicolo and if it's worth it. It's a relatively expensive hobby, but it gives me so much benefit that at this point I couldn't live without it. Having an always-on Mac opens up a lot of opportunity and I'm always finding new things to use it for.
Once a month I have to submit my Verizon bill as an expense. The process of getting the PDF of the bill and then modifying it turned out to be a big pain by first reminding my mom to send the bill1, saving the first page and then submitting it for reimbursement. Turns out that Hazel can take care of everything beyond the actual submission.
I really enjoy writing in MultiMarkdown Composer and having Marked display a rendered version. When writing blog posts like this, images would never appear since Pelican's syntax for displaying images is {static}/path/to/image. I looked into Marked's preprocessor abilities and figured out a nice, clean way to display images when writing blog posts.
For the last few years, I've been using Brett Terpstra's Pinboard to Openmeta to save my Pinboard bookmarks locally. In the last few months, I've been spending more and more time trying to fix issues to get it to run reliably. Since this is something that I use often, I figured it was worth just re-writing it myself.
I recently read MacStories' article and was curious how easy this was to learn. Applescript never made sense to me and I spent more time trying to piece together examples than actually writing anything meaningful. I don't trust iCloud to keep my contacts safe, and I'm still using my previous workflow with Launch Center Pro and Pythonista to back up my contacts.
To continue on yesterday's post, revealing files in the Finder can be very useful. One thing that I find myself doing daily is moving into a particular folder in my Dropbox account once I've used the Alfred "move" action or when a new file has been added to my account.
I've always used Alfred as a way to reveal my Downloads folder with the keyboard shortcut ⌘ ⌥ L, but that only gets me part of the way.
I've spent a lot of time organizing and [digitizing][digitizing] old photos. Exiftool has been a great tool, but the learning curve is fairly steep and you can end up making a lot of bad mistakes1. Here is my ongoing cheat sheet of exiftool commands.
While it hasn't happened in a while, I have lost or had issues with contacts in iCloud. I haven't found a reliable way to automatically back up my contacts on my Mac, but Pythonista offers a simple way to back them up.
I commute about 30 minutes each way to and from work. Since I can listen to music while I work and spoken word is distracting, I listen to podcasts. Here's a list of the podcasts I'm currently listening to.