Automated Weekly Sermon Podcast
Each Sunday at Church of the Epiphany we record our sermon using someone’s mobile phone. We started doing this back in September and, for the last three months, editing and uploading these sermons to our website has been a fairly manual process. Starting this month, however, with a combination of JustCast, Dropbox, Hazel, Squarespace, and Auphonic I’ve been able to mosty automate the process. 1. Download & Rename Each week shortly after worship, Fr. Read more...
Word to Markdown Conversion with Footnotes
Many of the essays on this site start their life in Microsoft Word or Scrivener. Early on, I would have to convert essays to Markdown for posting manually. This generally worked okay, but I lost my footnotes. I tried Word to Markdown for a brief while, but it didn’t work entirely as I’d like it to. Enter Pandoc. I’ve been using Pandoc to convert all of my Word documents — including footnotes — for the last two years. Read more...
Automate Slack Status with IFTTT
Recently I came across the need to automatically update my status in Slack. I have class Monday and Tuesday afternoons/evenings which requires me to leave work a little early. As I’m often rushed, I don’t always remember to set my status. This has, at times, left my team waiting on a response to a message I won’t see for a few hours. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Luckily, using Slack’s legacy tokens and following the guidance of Made by Munsters I was able to use IFTTT to quickly automate the updating of my Slack status. Read more...
Automated *Pretty* Tweets to DayOne
I’ve been using DayOne as my journal since 2014. Very early on, I realized that a good part of my daily journaling was actually done on Twitter. Over the years I’ve used IFTTT to import my tweets, but the fact that that system didn’t include images or quoted tweets removed a lot of important context. I wanted something nicer that showed the full Twitter card with graphics, etc. DayOne’s recent release of activity feeds seemed to be a good solution, but it, too, lost a lot of context and was very manual. Read more...
Daddy Status Page
A common problem for my wife and daughter since I started working from home more and more was knowing when I was on a conference call. My office has a glass door and the hallway behind it leads upstairs and to the master bedroom, so my family — understandably — likes to know if they’ll be on camera or not when they walk past. It’s also handy for them to know when they can ask me a question verbally rather than having to send me a text message from the room next door. Read more...
Archiving my Website with Workflow & Hazel
I really enjoy automating things using Workflow, Hazel, shell scripts, or just about anything else. Last night I got the idea that it would be cool to have a graphical archive of each post to my website as it appeared the day it was posted. Over time I’ll have a visual history of how my website has changed and, who knows, might make a little coffee table book or something. Read more...
Mermaid CLI via Whalebrew
As I noted in my quick review, I love Whalebrew. Whalebrew has allowed me to use several tools I was too afraid of before in my day-to-day workflow. The biggest of these tools is Mermaid. I’ve been using Mermaid for years to make quick and simple Gantt charts and other diagrams. Up to now, however, my workflow has involved saving my Mermaid file in a text document and copying and pasting the text into the online Mermaid generator when I need a new image. Read more...
Review: Whalebrew
It seems that each and every day there is a cool command line tool to try out to help automate or generally improve some part of my day-to-day. The problem with many of these tools, however, is that they require all sorts of dependencies (Ruby, Python, Node.js) each of which have their own package managers and sub-dependencies. Homebrew solves this for many things, but they are pretty picky about what they allow in, so more often than not, I’m left trying to decide if I risk messing up my machine by installing a web of dependencies or skip giving the tool a try. Read more...
Sublime Notes on iOS via Editorial
Switching to plain-text notes using the Sublime Note package was a huge boon to my daily productivity. Not only was Sublime Text more stable than the previous alternatives, it used less memory, was easier to search thanks to Alfred/Spotlight, and — when paired with Dropbox — synched quickly across all of my devices. My only problem was my inability to easily edit notes on my iPad. Yes, I could take my MacBook Air with me from meeting to meeting, but thanks to my Microsoft Universal Keyboard I was now too spoiled by my small and light iPad mini + keyboard setup. Read more...
Sublime Notes Template Snippet
Several months ago I followed the lead of my friend Jon Boulineau and switched from Evernote/Simplenote/OneNote for my note taking needs, to Sublime Text using the Sublime Note package. Sublime Text uses significantly less system resources than the alternatives and is incredibly stable at all times. Further, when synched via Dropbox, all of my super-small, plain-text note files are instantly available on all of my devices — mobile and otherwise. Read more...
Alfred 3 Firefox URL Copy
I’ve been an Alfred user for many years, but until I moved to LifeWay, I’d never had the opportunity to use a Macintosh — and thus Alfred — as part of my daily work. For me, Alfred was always about quick launching applications, doing quick calculations, and checking the spelling and definition of words. Thanks to my daily use at LifeWay and the guidance of the Mac Power Users, I’ve upped my Alfred game significantly over the last several months. Read more...
