Tag Archive for: Workflow

rsync

A stylized illustration of a cheerful robot holding a stack of colorful folders in front of a large, open vault door. The robot has a blue and orange metallic body with glowing eyes. The scene is set in a futuristic archive with warm lighting and stacks of documents in the background, suggesting secure storage or organization.

When I first started learning photography, I used Aperture as my photo editor and management solution. But I was too dumb to use it right and accidentally deleted the only copy of many photos from the first years of my son’s life. Since then, I have been diligent, borderline fanatical, about having backup copies of family media and important files.

Determined to never repeat that mistake, I explored various tools for creating better backups. One of the most versatile tools I found is rsync, built right into macOS.

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AppleScript for Pulling Today’s Completed Tasks From Things

A screenshot of an AppleScript editor window titled "Pull Today's Completed Action Items from Things and Create a Day One Entry." The script is designed to retrieve completed tasks from the Things3 app and create a Day One journal entry. The script contains code to set the current date, format it in ISO 8601 format, initialize a list of completed tasks, and fetch tasks from the "Logbook" list. Syntax highlighting shows text in different colors: green for comments, blue for commands, and purple for logic conditions.

Balancing life’s necessary chores with meaningful progress toward our goals can be challenging, especially when greeted by an overflowing task list each morning.

To tackle this, I’ve been exploring ways to not just manage my tasks in Things but also to ensure I’m making real headway on projects that matter. In this post, I’ll show you how an AppleScript is helping me do just that.

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A Hazel Rule for Getting TV Shows Into Plex

I remember binge-watching Smallville via DVDs that Netflix sent to me in the mail. I would watch four episodes in a row, then mail back the DVD and wait days for the next one to arrive so I could get the next four episodes. When streaming arrived, it was a miracle!

Sadly, a miracle that was too good for this world. Streaming has been on a steady decline for the past several years, while prices seem to increase more frequently than new seasons of hit shows are released. Streaming has turned into cable TV, and the magic is gone.

That is until I found Plex. Check out my original Plex post for more details about setting up a Plex server.

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Keyboard Maestro Macros for Dates

A while ago I shared a post from David Sparks about automating greetings in emails to reduce typos and increase accuracy in written communication. That post got me thinking about the other things that I do in my day-to-day written communications that could benefit from the accuracy and precision that comes from automation. I realized that dates were what I should try to address.

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A Hazel File Rename Rule

I plan on writing a post all about Hazel in the future, but I wanted to share a specific use case for Hazel that others might benefit from.

In short, Hazel is a very cool macOS tool for automating the moving and naming of files. I know that does not sound very fun, but it is incredible. Again I will talk more about that in the future but let me show you what I wanted to do:

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