Throughout the day I think of things that I need to do after work or this coming weekend. The best way for me to not forget these is to quickly get them into Omnifocus. I've been using Drafts on my iPhone and Alfred on my Mac to quickly create tasks …

I've always treated Alfred as a Finder replacement. The speed at which I can find and take action on files is faster than Finder.app or Spotlight will ever be able to do. Because of this, I want to have a quick and easy way to share Dropbox files from within Alfred.

I've chosen to not use iCloud Photo Library for a few reasons. I have a decent system set up for storing my photos in Dropbox, but I've always wanted to have my photos local on my iPhone. Now that iOS 10 has some cool features like memories and image search, I've been looking for a way to have my photos on my iPhone and also in Dropbox.

It's been a few months since my last post. I've spent a lot of time working on my blog, but all things behind the scenes that most people wouldn't even notice.

Setting keyboard shortcuts on Mac is actually fairly easy, but it requires a lot of clicking around. Fortunately there's a way to do this from the terminal that's faster and easier.

I'll be soon embarking on a long bike tour and was searching for a way to keep a journal of my trip but also post updates to a website. Day One was an obvious journaling choice, but with version 2, publishing isn't yet available. With a little poking around, it turned out to be fairly easy to export Day One entries and publish to Pelican (my static blog generator of choice).

If I haven't used my computer for a while, I'll end up with multiple calendar notifications that I have to painfully close one by one. I went searching for something that would let me close them faster, but nothing I could find did quite what I wanted.

Nearly every day …

I've been a long time TextExpander user. I use it every day for simple things like pasting my contact info or shortening urls using bit.ly. There are plenty of articles out there arguing for and against TextExpander's new subscription model. I support their decision but I can't justify $50 a year's worth of value and so I'm moving all of my snippets to Keyboard Maestro.

Last week at work I was working on a fairly large refactor of our front-end. Large pieces of code were being moved around and others re-written to be cleaner and more understandable. Throughout this process, I was leaving myself todo's so that I'd remember to fix something later. Problem is, I would rarely ever go back to them. That was until someone on my team shared some bash functions they had written to make following up on those todo's much easier

I'm using Alfred a lot less these days. Many of my workflows have been easier to build in Keyboard Maestro. The remaining few that are left in Alfred are ones that I heavily depend on, one of which is accessing my Server Favorites in OS X.

Up until OS X …

I was generally happy with how I was using Contacts.app with TextExpander to create snippets for my emails, phone numbers and addresses. However, as I eventually realized, I have to have Contacts.app running for it to work. When AppleScript and JavaScript talk to applications in OS X, they have to be running. That isn't the case for C and Objective-C libraries, so I decided to see how hard it was to use the Objective-C bindings for Javascript.

As it turns out, adding critical css wasn't trivial, but didn't take as much effort as I had originally thought. My site's layout doesn't contain that much styling, and so I simply added all of my CSS as an inline style tag. The tricky part, was getting Jinja to play …

It's always a good idea to keep backups of data you can't replace, including email. For the last few years, I've had a script that automatically backs up my Gmail account. Since switching to Fastmail, I figured I should continue doing the same thing. It turned out, it was pretty easy to set up another account.

Changing your email or phone number isn't fun. You have to tell everyone, update all of your online accounts, and make sure your TextExpanders are up-to-date with the right information. One of the places I will always update is my contact information in Contacts.app, so why not just use that as the source of truth for TextExpander snippets?

My adventure with Mac Javascript Automation continues. Things still aren't easy and the documentation is poor, but I'm finding that it's still easier to write automation scripts in Javascript than it ever was with Applescript.

I frequently work in ssh sessions and have found terminal multiplexers like tmux to be invaluable. The problem I was constantly facing was having to re-attach or create a new session each time I would ssh into a machine. Sometimes I would accidentally create a new session when one already existed and would then have to find where I had been working previously.

If your employer uses ADP, you'll know how terrible their website is. I always dread having to go to the website, but I like to download my paychecks every two weeks.

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.

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.

In early 2013, I discovered Slogger and loved the idea of journalling about more than just what I had to say. What I was listening to at a given time is just as important as what I was thinking. However, there wasn't an ideal way to log Instagram posts without other dependencies, and so I took a stab at writing my first plugin.

I have multiple computers running Dropbox, all of which have different folder paths to where the Dropbox folder is located. I wanted to have a universal way to find and navigate to the folders regardless of what computer I was on.

My Dropbox folder is full of images claiming to be "missing dates." ¹ Some of these photos were thumbnails or images from DayOne that didn't necessarily need dates, but others were real photos that for whatever reason didn't have dates that Dropbox recognized.

I've always used Foursquare as a way to remember the places I had visited while traveling. Foursquare isn't really meant to be used in this way, and as a result, they don't make it easy to answer the question, "what was that restaurant I went to last time I was here?" I'm now using IFTTT to log all my checkins to a text file in my Dropbox account.

I'm really bad at converting a time to other timezones. Now that the company I work for has offices in multiple countries, scheduling has become much more difficult. In an effort to eliminate the need for people to convert times themselves, I wrote a TextExpander snippet to take care of it for me.

I've been finding more and more reasons to use Launch Center Pro recently. With the fairly recent addition of Dropbox actions, I've been finding new ways to share links quickly.

Here's a quick Alfred workflow to get the airport code for a given city or the city based on an airport code.

I've been doing a lot more traveling in the last year. Each time I take off or land, I found myself sending nearly the same text message to multiple people. After a while, it began to feel more like a chore than the kind gesture of letting others know I made it safely. For the repetitive messages, I found way of automating nearly the entire process.

After listening to the Mac Power Users episode on photo management and reading the slew of follow up blog posts on other photo management workflows, I thought I would share mine as well. While my workflow will be fairly similar to Federico Viticci's with a few exceptions, I thought I would share the way that I take, organize, view and share my photos.

Nearly all of my photos are sorted based on year, month and day. Hazel easily takes care of of this for me, but occasionally I will have projects where photos need to be excluded or organized in a different way. With Hazel, I can still account for these special cases with extra bits of metadata.

Pelican is a great python-based static blog generator. After a few months using it, I’ve decided to automate the content generation as much as possible.

I created a quick Alfred workflow that takes the contents of my clipboard and opens a new file in Sublime Text (or Text Edit).

There are some great tools out there to convert things like currency, distances and measurements. Even Siri can do this fairly well, but the one thing I always find frustrating is that the process of doing this can be fairly slow and in a lot of cases requires a data connection. Growing up in the United States, I was unfortunately never exposed to the metric system or Celsius. Since I've moved to Dublin, I'm find myself doing a lot of conversions from one unit to another.

I notice a lot of people asking about why they can't get images to display on their website when using Dropbox shared links. Dropbox is a great way to post an image quickly on a forum or as free hosting for your low traffic website, but there are a few things to know.

Since moving to Dublin, my girlfriend and I have wanted to keep our friends and family up-to-date on everything we've been doing. I recently bought the new Olympus E-P5 and have been taking a lot of pictures. So that everyone knows what we're doing, we decided to share a Scriptogr.am blog and post pictures of our adventures.

Living in the U.S. we rarely call people outside of the country. Whenever we create new contacts in our address book, they'll typically start with the state's area code and omit the country code.

I started coding about two years ago and only recently discovered the wonders of Markdown. Every time I'd learn something new, I would keep it in a text file with TextEdit. This was good and fine until a coworker introduced me to Notational Velocity. This completely changed the way I managed my notes but I always felt like I was missing something. That's when I discovered NVAlt. It let me keep the simplicity of plain text but format the note with the wonders of Markdown.

I have two computers, one for work and one for personal. I keep mostly everything separate, but one thing I want to always have with me is my terminal environment and aliases. With Dropbox, I can not only access, but edit my .bash_profile from anywhere without using symlinks.