Post by Stephen Millard (ThoughtAsylum/@sylumer)

I recently moved into a new house and have finally been able to begin looking more seriously at my home automation options. I have invested some time and resources into using Home Assistant as my underlying automation control platform. I had run it several years ago and had given up on it due to a lack of stability, but these days it is a much more reliable and capable product. In my experimentation to date, I found I had a bit of friction in testing my automations, and so I set to work on finding something to help make things easier. The result was something I have subsequently found to be massively convenient.

An online forum is a great place to ask questions and generally seek advice on what you want to do with technology. I spend a bit of time each day catching up on the latest discussions across maybe a half dozen or so technical fora. On some of them I am a heavy contributor, and on others I generally lurk, just gleaning insights and keeping up with the latest conversations. Having been involved with technical forums for the past thirty years or so I’ve seen plenty of good and bad practices, and in this post I am going to share five tips on what I think are valuable and practical considerations for posting queries to technical forums.

With a relatively recent update around views in the beta of Readwise’s Reader service beta, I am now getting deeper into its use and building it into my various workflows in an aim to help me better manage and process the various feeds of information I have coming in. The Reader service includes an option to accept input via e-mail for newsletters, etc. While I plan to set up a number of e-mail redirect rules in my personal Gmail account to push some newsletters into the service, I also have a backlog of newsletters I want to pick from and pass them to Reader. I didn’t want to blanket forward sets at this point and drown my Reader feeds, so I decided I wanted to redirect on a per e-mail basis. Fortunately, I use Mailmate as my Mac e-mail client of choice, and I ended up scripting something I think provides an easy way of adding this sort of functionality for yourself.

Since I began using Jekyll as the static site generator for my web sites, I have been hosting locally while I modify structural changes and write the content prior to publishing. Serving the sites locally involves me running terminal sessions that run the web server. Unless I am actively working on something where I need to check what the web server is doing, I always wanted it to be out of the way, ideally tucked under some icon on the Mac’s menu bar. A menu bar terminal app kind of felt like what I was after. Recently I was reading a post that made reference to “bitbar” an application that allowed you to put text and menu items into your menu bar based on a script. I’d come across this and similar apps many times before, but never had a reason to use them. Until now that is, as I realised I might just be able to create my own solution for my out of sight, but still accessible local web server management.