I want to toggle my Dock position between the left side and the bottom of the screen, depending on the context I’m in.

To do this…

• Save this Apple Script.

  • tell application “System Events” to tell dock preferences

    • if screen edge is bottom then

      • set screen edge to left

    • else if screen edge is left then

      • set screen edge to bottom

    • end if

  • end tell

• Make a new Keyboard Maestro global macro that runs it.

  • I assigned ⇧⌥⌘D to toggle the Dock.

Here’s a demo in action.

Inspired by a recent post about keeping the menubar a bit more compact, I switched the menubar clock to the analog version.

• How to Change the macOS Menu Bar Clock from Digital to Analog

Since clicking on the clock also toggles Notification Center, adding the Clock widget (with a monthly calendar) made sense, which is way more readable than the small one in the menubar.

• I can even toggle Notification Center with the Globe-N keyboard shortcut for quick clock access.

On the other hand, I remembered a Mac app, called FuzzyClock. It’s an old app that shows you the time, kinda… Instead of displaying 8:23, it just says twenty past eight. Sadly, FuzzyClock doesn’t work on newer systems anymore, but I found FuzzyTime which is a modern, reimagined version of FuzzyClock.

• What’s the point of these apps? Sometimes, maybe we’re too attached to being precise with our time, and not knowing exactly what the current time is can ease that, making us more focused.

Since I hid the digital clock because I wanted more space in my menubar, it’s not ideal if I see FuzzyTime running all the time. It takes up more space than the digital clock, but it would be nice to toggle it using a keyboard shortcut.

• I used Keyboard Maestro to automate the display of FuzzyTime.

• Pressing ⌃⌥⌘H will open FuzzyTime, and pressing the same shortcut again will just quit it, resulting an on/off toggle effect for FuzzyTime in the menubar, which is exactly what I want.

In essence, here’s how I check the time on my Mac now.

• Oh, I and still have plenty of space for my app icons in the menubar.

One annoying thing that happened today’s “beautiful” web is that we forgot that we have this CSS selector.

• a:visited

I was also sinful in this, since I just pushed a change which adds proper a:visited support to my site.

• This is mostly annoying for me, since I see almost all links as visited, but can be helpful for readers.

Now you can see visited links in a different color than the default links.

I found Type yesterday in the Club MacStories newsletter.

It is a simple app which let’s me append any text (with a timestamp) to plain-text files.

• Basically a quick capture tool for running lists.

  • Append to selected file (from list of running files – a la Merlin Mann’s “runx” file scheme) – Actions – Help & Questions – Drafts Community

  • Mac Power Users #23: Workflows with Merlin Mann – Relay FM

• LaunchBar can be also used to append text to plain-text files.

I haven’t kept any running list before in plain text; I just captured these ideas into Things directly.

I created a couple of new files using Type in my ~/Documents/Running Lists folder. Here are some examples.

• Brainstorm.txt

  • Following the Natural Planning Model in GTD, sometimes the best way to figure out something is to start writing about it.

    • Free-form thinking environment for writing – Decoding Zettelkasten

    • Journaling can help us to clarify next actions – Decoding Zettelkasten

• Debug.txt

  • Stole this idea from the Type app website.

  • It should be a log of steps I used to figure something out while programming.

  • Since this is just a capture file, steps must be migrated into proper how-tos later.

• Meeting.txt

  • A quick log of any meeting I’m attending to capture what we are talking about at the moment quickly.

Type is focused on just one task: append text to these files. It doesn’t disrupt my workflow.

But I still treat these files as an inbox in a sense, so after I capture anything here, it should be processed.

Instead of introducing yet another inbox, I integrated these files into an existing one.

• I’m big on having multiple capture tools, but just a couple of inboxes.

I made a shortcut that is triggered via Keyboard Maestro when I’m reviewing my TaskPaper journal.

• The shortcut grabs all running files and then lets me pick one.

• It grabs the content from the picked one, then appends it to my TaskPaper journal as a new entry.

• Finally, it cleans the picked running list file, so it’s ready for the next batch of ideas.

Here’s a demo video.

I remember when we had Adium and you could connect almost all of your chat services to one client.

• Some features were missing, but the basic texting part usually worked.

We had a way to set our status to online, away, or offline. There was no need for Do Not Disturb or notification management since you just went offline and nobody could reach you.

• Actually, you can still use Slack like this.

• Some services even queued up your messages, so the next time you went online, new messages awaited you.

• I could even set the currently played music as my status.

Almost all messaging app had some form of proper native Mac app.

• Remember that Skype for Mac was actually a pretty decent Mac app with AppleScript support.

  • These days, it’s just an Electron app, although nobody uses Skype anymore…

• My friends used MSN Messenger too, which was kind of a crappy client, but at least you could use it through Adium.

These days, I have to use Cardhop to have proper messaging integration in my contact list to have a central place to jump into the different clients.

Almost all clients are stupid Electron apps on the desktop.

• Mobile clients are better: at least some of the biggest players have proper native apps on iOS.

• Facebook Messenger for Mac is a React Native app, which is a bit better than Electron.

I can’t go offline anymore; instead, I have to manage my notifications and schedule them using Focus modes.

I kinda miss old IM apps.

Play 2.0 just got released with a new channels feature.

• It’s behind a subscription, but you can try it for seven days.

I started using Play as a replacement for YouTube’s Watch Later list (and for other sites too, like Vimeo).

• YouTube is an attention magnet, and I want to avoid it when possible.

• Using the Watch Later feature makes this more hard.

• Play keeps me out of the YouTube app, mostly…

I also follow YouTube channels using RSS from Reeder instead of the YouTube app.

• This way, I have an integrated workflow of browsing videos, blog posts, Mastodon posts, etc.

• I’m also trying to give minimal data to Google through YouTube other than my watch history.

  • I have watch history turned off, but I’m sure Google still tracks it.

• Because of this workflow, it seems redundant to use Play to subscribe to the same list of YouTube channels.

I added my list of channels to Play anyway to test the Channels feature.

• It was a bit annoying since Play has no Shortcuts integration for managing channels or OPML import.

I don’t have a conclusion on the usefulness of this feature for me yet, but I’ll test it in the following week, and we will see if I keep the subscription or not.

I’m giving up the IndieWeb markup with bookmarks, since they kinda hard to get right.

All I want is a title and a blockquote, but with the IndieWeb markup I have to have a post content just to markup the link properly.

So, instead, I just add the “Bookmarked”, “Read”, “Liked”, etc. verbs to the title of the post and be done with it.

If someone has a better idea, let me know.

I also want to check if webmentions are triggered via the WordPress API.

Update

• They do!

It is actually occured to me that I can get the current Safari selection in Shortcuts, convert it to Markdown from Rich Text, then Markdown to HTML, then I end up with a blockquote.

• You need Drafts for the Markdown to HTML action.

Since all my respond type posts are created using one shortcut which decorates them with microformats, this makes me able to select text, and append it to the post.

• I use these IndieWeb post types:

  • Reply

  • Like

  • Repost

    • I don’t really use this as much.

  • Bookmark

  • Read

On the long run, this will give me context on why I saved something to my bookmarks.

Here’s a demo video in action.

I created a more advanced outline post format for my Bike based posts.

• Blogging with Bike

New entries will use a new bike-outline Stimulius controller which I originally created for my Zettelkasten, so I can have basic outline capabilities for Markdown lists.

It gets the post content and adds toggles to each outline row, so I can open and close them.

It also uses block IDs as row links, so each outline row can be linked independently.

• I don’t use Bike outline IDs, but generate them on-the-fly using checksums instead.

• This will change as I update the content, but it’s fine.

I’m just testing my blog post saving shortcut for my TaskPaper interstitial journal.

• TaskPaper as an interstitial journal – Decoding

I’m creating more rows, just for testing.

• This one is a child row of the previous one.

  • This one is a child row as well.