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Tennessee’s new “chemtrail bill” is inherently ludicrous. It’s also as poorly written as cold be expected. From the bill itself:

The intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight is prohibited.

Strictly speaking, the big government types in Tennessee are banning residents from setting up lawn sprinklers for their kids to play in on a hot day.

On the plus side, it will be explicitly illegal to “roll coal” with the intent of covering another person in a cloud of smoke.

I can’t help playing with Things sometimes. Even though there are plenty of reasons not to use Things, it’s pretty. It’s my attractive nuisance. However, I can’t stand its inability to complete repeating items before they’re scheduled, so I fixed it.

You know I like Keyboard Maestro and Shortcuts. I combined them to work around Things’s glaring shortcoming. So can you!

First, install my Shortcut, Things: Get ID of current selection. Look inside it. It only copies the internal ID of the currently selected item to the clipboard.

Then, install my Things: Repeat action early Keyboard Maestro macro and set it to trigger with a hotkey you like. Since cmd-K is the using Things shortcut for completing an item, I set mine to trigger when I press shift-cmd-K. Then it takes these steps:

1. Calls the Shortcut to get the ID of the current Things item.
2. Goes to the latest completed copy of that item.
3. Duplicates the completed copy and navigates to the new copy.
4. Calls the Shortcut to get the ID of the new copy.
5. Marks that copy as “open”, that is, not completed.
6. That causes Things to move the copy from the “logged items” section back up to the list of open items, so the macro calls a Things URL to jump back to the re-opened, copied item via its ID that we saved a couple steps ago.
7. Marks the new copy as deleted. That causes Things to update the repeating task so that its When and/or Deadline dates are relative to today.
8. Calls the Things URL to jump all the way back to the repeating item, via its ID that we saved in the first step.

Whew. That’s a handful, huh? But it mostly works!

Caveats:

1. There’s no error handling. Keyboard Maestro just blindly sends keyboard presses and menu selections to Things and assumes that everything’s going well.
2. I’m not really sure what would happen if you run the shortcut with no items selected, or more than 1 item.
3. If it’s been ages since the last time the item was completed and there’s no longer a “latest” item to go to, I don’t know what happens next.

In short, use this at your own risk. There are a dozen things it could be doing better or more safely and I haven’t (yet) done any of them. Still, it works! If I squint hard enough and get lucky, the new macro makes Things repeating actions work like every other to-do app in existence. I’m calling that a win.

I wondered how water-resistant the inks from the various pens on my desk would be. For my unscientific test, I wrote a small sample of text with each of these inks on a sheet of plain white copier paper:

• Jacques Herbin Émeraude de Chivor
• LAMY Turquoise
• Herbin Perle Noire
• Noodler’s Baystate Blue
• Fisher Space Pen Turquoise
• Zebra F-Refill Black
• Pentel EnerGel Blue

Don’t judge my penmanship. I know. I know.

I let them dry overnight. Then I used a wet toothpick to put one drop of water on each sample, being careful not to move the paper or water at all. The results were mixed:

• Jacques Herbin melted away.
• LAMY was as ruined.
• Herbin feathered badly but was readable.
• Noodler didn’t notice.
• Fisher blurred slightly.
• Zebra: what water?
• Pentel was also lost.

While I don’t make a habit of getting my notes wet, if were carrying a notebook out of the house, I’d pick one of the survivors. Baystate Blue and the Zebra F-701 weren’t affected. The space pen was fine, and Perle Noire was readable. I wouldn’t risk Émeraude de Chivor, LAMY, or EnerGel to rain, drops of water off an ice tea glass, or even damp hands.

My notebooks often spend their entire lives on my desk and I don’t exactly take them scuba diving. Yet, this is a good thing to know.

For my next experiment, I’m going to let the same inks dry for a week before testing.

Followup 2024-03-17: I tried again after letting the inks sit for 2 weeks. The results were similar to the original test:

The extra time didn’t let them “cure” or “harden” or “set in” or such.

I talked myself into buying a Stream Deck to control my Mac. I didn’t want one for the media features. I wanted a cool, programmable external keyboard-like thing to trigger actions. For example, I have buttons to turn my office lights on and off, toggle between playing sounds through my external speakers and headphones, and open my notes app to the Today’s Journal page. I like it.

Most docs I found suggest using the Shortcuts plugin to execute Apple Shortcuts. I recommend that you use Keyboard Maestro instead. The “Shortcuts” plugin is neat in principle. It’s free. It looks like exactly the right tool for the job. For me, it’s not. Using the most current macOS (version 14.3.1), Stream Deck app (v6.5.0), and plugin (v1.0.7.1), keypresses work about half the time. After using the setup for a few days straight, it always hangs and stops responding altogether until I quit and restart the Stream Deck app. It’s frustrating to have this nice device to boost productivity, then have to pause for a beat every time I’ve used it to see if it worked.

The Keyboard Maestro setup’s experience has been the opposite. Once configured, if I press a button, that button does what it’s supposed to do 100% of the time. It has some drawbacks: it’s slightly more complex to configure, and you have to pay for Keyboard Maestro (which if you’re a Mac power user, you’ll want to do anyway). Still, the result has been worth it.

Here’s how I used it to build the toggle I mentioned that switches between speakers and headphones.

First, I created Shortcuts called “SoundSource: Output to Headphones” and “SoundSource: Output to Speakers”, with each Shortcut doing the expected thing. The names don’t matter: I could have called them “Spam” and “Eggs” for all my Mac would care. I just like being verbose so I can quickly find things again next time I want to tweak them.

Next, I made Keyboard Maestro macros that execute those Shortcuts:

Then I opened the Stream Deck app to create the “Multi Action Switch” button. I put mine on row 1, column 3. That’ll be important in a moment.

When you create a Keyboard Maestro action inside a Multi Action Switch, the Stream Deck app doesn’t fill in the “Virtual Row” and “Virtual Column” values like it would if you put the Keyboard Maestro action directly into an empty key. That’s OK. We’re going to change the column value anyway! See how I used Virtual Columns “301” and “302”? That lets the Keyboard Maestro app treat these as separate buttons. The Stream Deck app will do the work of remembering which action we’re currently on.

With that done, I went back into the Keyboard Maestro editor and added “USB Device Key Triggers” to each macro. When it was waiting for me to press a button, I tapped the physical Stream Deck button I was setting up.

That’s a little bit more complicated than the “Shortcuts plugin” setup, but only a little bit:

• I’d have to create the Shortcuts either way.
• I’d have to create the Multi Action Switch either way.
• Instead of using the “Shortcuts” plugin to run Shortcuts directly, I send a trigger to Keyboard Maestro and have it run the Shortcuts.

In exchange for this smidgen of extra one-time work, now my Stream Deck buttons work perfectly and instantly every time I press them. I don’t hesitate to see if the effect I wanted to happen had indeed happened because I can trust that it did. That made an enormous difference in how productively I can use the little Stream Deck.

Hulu’s new subscriber agreement claims to require users to resolve significant disputes through arbitration. It specifically prevents us from participating in class action lawsuits:

ANY DISPUTE BETWEEN YOU AND US, EXCEPT FOR SMALL CLAIMS, IS SUBJECT TO A CLASS ACTION WAIVER AND MUST BE RESOLVED BY INDIVIDUAL BINDING ARBITRATION.

This is a terrible deal for users.¹ Hulu gets the right to hire someone to settle disputes. We lose the right to protect ourselves as a group if Hulu does something horrible that hurts us.

They provide a method for rejecting these clauses in section 7, subsection 7 “Opt-out.” If you wish to retain your legal rights, you have to send them a physical letter stating that you wish to opt out of both the arbitration agreement and the class action waiver. This is the letter I’m sending them:

Me
123 Main St.
Tampa, FL
me@example.com

February 1, 2024

Disney Opt-Out
P.O. Box 11565
Burbank, CA, 91510

Dear Opt-Out Team:

I am opting out of the Hulu Subscriber Agreement’s arbitration agreement and class action waiver.

Sincerely,
 
 
 
Me

I highly recommend you send your version of this typo: email physical mail to Hulu. Otherwise, you’ll lose important legal rights to protect yourself legally if Hulu acts in a way that harms you.

I use Apple’s Notes app to, well, take notes. It’s the only non-Markdown I regularly use for such things. While I can, should, and mostly do try to use its built-in keyboard shortcuts to format text, sometimes I find myself looking at the screen wondering why ``` didn’t put it into a pre-formatted text mode. Today I decided to use Keyboard Maestro to indulge my Markdown muscle memory. The results are on my Gitea server.

It’s a collection of short little macros that let me type something like this:

# My title

## A heading

```
def hello():
    print("Hey, world!")
```

---

And that's about it.

and have it render like this:

Hey! That looks and feels a lot like typing in a Markdown editor!

I don’t want to rely on this. It’s usually better to lean into an app and use it the way it’s built to be used than try to make it act like another. Still, if this reduces a tiny bit of friction on those days when I’m crossing my signals, I’ll be glad to have it.

Our 2016 Toyota Sienna is perfect, except for its janky entertainment system. Every time I plugged in my phone, the Entune radio started playing “A a a a a Very Good Song”. It doesn’t have maps, at least that you’d want to bother with using. “Hey Siri” replied with an old, robotic-sounding voice. If you were lucky, playing a song would show an old photo of the band. Music from bands newer than the van would display something generic like “Alternative”. While it worked alright, the whole interface felt like it would’ve been nifty and current on my old Palm PDA.

I envied the CarPlay setups I got to fiddle with in my friends’ cars and in rentals. However, nice replacement entertainment systems that supported CarPlay plus all the same features as the original head unit were way more expensive than I could justify. Then I found a much cheaper CarPlay retrofit unit (affiliate link) with decent ratings, and despite my misgivings, I had to try it.

This little thing is brilliant. The important bits:

• It works. When I get in the van, after a few seconds my phone connects to the unit and I have a full-featured CarPlay display.
• It was easy to install myself. While I’m comfortable working on cars, I’d never pulled the family transport apart before without having to fix something broken. Thank you, Toyota, for designing our van like a LEGO kit.
• Everything else still works. Tapping the head unit’s power button gets back to the original display. Shifting into reverse still shows the backup camera. It adds features without blocking anything that the original system could do. That was my biggest worry, and it was groundless. I can’t overemphasize this: everything still works.
• The product description and several reviews mention that the Sienna’s display is low-resolution. I had also worried that CarPlay would assume a high-res display and that it would be unreadable on the lousy screen. Nope. It’s fine. Although it’s noticeably blockier than my iPhone’s screen, small text is perfectly readable, street labels and markings are sharp and clear, and it’s not an issue at all. My wife didn’t even realize that it isn’t “Retina” quality.

If you’re on the fence, do it. This relatively cheap little unit fixed all the things I loathed about the original Entune system while keeping all the cool features we enjoyed. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the upgrade to a friend or family member.

US President Joe Biden pardoned all Federal convictions for the use and simple possession of cannabis. I don’t use cannabis. If it were to go away tomorrow, my life wouldn’t change one bit.

I am thrilled with this blanket pardon.

Modify the statement, like:

I am pardoning additional individuals who may continue to experience the unnecessary collateral consequences of a conviction for simple possession of beer, attempted simple possession of beer, or use of beer.

and it sounds utterly obvious, and ludicrous that it ever would have been an issue in the first place. I enjoy a good stout or porter, and I can walk into almost any grocery store, flash my ID, hand over my money, and walk out with a bottle of drugs that’s caused far more societal harm than cannabis ever did. That I can drink a beer in public and no one bats an eye, while my neighbors could smoke a joint in their own house and go to jail for it, is insanity.

Good on you, Mr. President, for making life better for a whole lot of Americans.

I’ve seen things that looked like ads for apps in the iOS App Store. Today, I saw an ad for something else altogether. It’s a public service announcement warning viewers about potentially lethal fake prescription pills:

That’s a good thing to warn people about. However, it couldn’t be more out of place between the regular listings for games and useful apps. This is the app store, not a random website. And a PSA is one thing. The first time I see a commercial ad for a non-app thing here, I’ll probably have to buy a new phone to replace the one I’m likely to throw out my window.

My kid is home from college. I’m watching them do their homework while struggling against the shortcomings of Microsoft Word. It’s the Bourne shell of word processing: powerful, ubiquitous, chock full of time-sucking footguns, and probably the wrong tool for any job that won’t fit on a single screen.

After working with more civilized tools like a good text editor paired with a Markdown processor, I’d been happy to forget that some people still voluntarily use Word.