ThoughtAsylum

If you speak to anyone who more than dabbles in automation on macOS, Keyboard Maestro is almost certainly going to be a utility that gets mentioned. I’m certainly no stranger to the application and have been using it for over a decade to manage a large proportion of my Mac automations. But when you invest like that, you do tend to build up a large set of macros and having memorable ways to access them with short codes, hot keys, gestures, palettes, etc. can become a little overwhelming. I’m personally much better at remembering parts of the names and so searching an index of the available macros helps me with the ones I don’t have in regular circulation, and that’s what today’s Alfred workflow enables.

Building on my recent spate of Alfred workflow posts, it’s time to share my most complex workflow to date, and it is for one of my favourite applications, Drafts. As you might know I do quite a lot with Drafts, and I’m really excited to share what I’ve come up with as a 1.0 workflow. It might be a bit more than you expect, and it is certainly far more than I had expected!

For anyone using a Mac for an extended period of time and looking for ways to do things better, the chances are that you will have come across the name Brett Terpstra. Brett is a creative guy who shares a lot of the things he makes that help make life on the Mac that bit easier. Something I am totally on board with, taking a similar approach myself across the platforms I deal with. A few days ago Brett updated one of his tools, and one that I use regularly. A tool called Search Link. I figured this might be a good time to publish a small Alfred workflow I have for working with Search Link.

For me, 2021 has been a busy year to date. Shifting priorities meant that while I took stock of the Q1 updates in Cloud for Customer for Employee Central Service Centre, I never quite managed to get a full article ready for publishing. To that end, I will incorporate details of both the Q1 and Q2 Cloud for Customer updates into this article. What can you look forward to then? Well, SAP has described its approach to service in 2021 as one of modernisation and innovation. One in which they are seeking to improve not only the end-to-end processes, but also the usability of the systems. Let us look at how SAP has fared to date against these aspirations.

Last week, Zalaris published the bi-annual set of articles reviewing the details of the upcoming SuccessFactors release. These updates are already in preview systems, and most customers I expect are busy examining the options that they might like to take advantage of and looking for ways in which they can optimise their use of SuccessFactors.

Last year I published a post about how I was using Keyboard Maestro along with a Python script that accesses titlecaseconverter.com to convert titles into a specified style. Unfortunately, I think there was a change at the site level that started causing issues for me either last year, or earlier this year. As a result I ended up taking the existing Python code, simplifying it for my own specific needs and tweaking it for the issue I was experiencing. In today’s post I’m going to quickly share the update.

Zettelkasten has quite a buzz about it these days. It is a process popularised, and arguably pioneered by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. It is a powerful system, that in Luhmann’s view acted as a companion for him for in terms of being able to structure and manage the knowledge and insights he accumulated. With the rise of personal knowledge management systems (PKM) in the 2000’s, the methodology has taken on an almost mythical status. A panacea for all your knowledge needs. Why am I not making use of it then? This is the question I’ve found myself pondering quite a lot over the last year or two. It is a proven approach for yielding some amazing results. It’s structured way of working is right up my street. Its makes sense that I would be all in on Zettelkasten. But I am not.

Obsidian is my current personal knowledge management tool of choice. The primary reason for this is undoubtedly because it utilises plain text Markdown files, which gives me flexibility for the future, and access to easily process notes using any other text processing tool of choice. A second factor is the range of plugins available for the application. One of my absolute favourites is Templater, a plugin for templating within Obsidian, and I’m going to explain in this post one of the ways I use it to automate my use of Obsidian.

During 2020/2021, the world has seen significant changes in how we have lived our lives. Most of us have spent a lot more time indoors. Many of us have also spent a lot more time away from friends, family, and colleagues. On the whole, we have been leading a more isolated existence. Organisations have been supporting employees in these situations through remote working practices and collaborative technologies. There has been a pronounced increase in video calls, replacing face-to-face meetings and even many telephone calls. Chats over messenger solutions have replaced water cooler and cross-desk conversations. Thrust into a new world of remote work, somehow, everyone just about managed to keep up.

The personal knowledge management application Obsidian has a built in templating system that allows you to insert boiler plate text into an Obsidian note. While it is entirely functional, the Obsidian community is full of talented developers, and through its plugin architecture, a templating plugin surfaced that provided considerably more functionality than the core plugin. I recently posted about one of the more advanced uses for this plugin, and was contacted by one of my readers to note that I had not actually explained how to use templating. In this post, I’m going to attempt to address that omission.

Obsidian is a popular tool for managing notes in Markdown format. It is cross-platform, uses files direct from a file system location, and has some rather useful features, including a range of plugins created by the developers and the wider community. In this post I am going to walk you through how I have used some of the community plugins to give me better control over a feature known as workspaces.

Mermaid is a popular web-based diagramming tool that allows you to generate a variety of visualisations based on sets of text instructions that tell Mermaid how to generate the diagram. I’ve been using it for a little while to generate relatively simple flow diagrams that I need to build out iteratively or require regular updates. This is because once I have the structure in place it is often much quicker for me to add an instruction to change such a diagram than it is for me to rework a diagram in a visual editor. I recently used some Mermaid generated diagrams in a post on this site, and I’m going to share a tip for a challenge I encountered.

I recently updated my Macbook Pro to macOS Monterey, and with it I got access to running Shortcuts on the Mac. Being a long time power user of Shortcuts, all the way back to the first release of Workflow, it was quite exciting to get my hands on the app. I’ve been enjoying experimenting with it, but I decided I needed to improve the accessibility. Enter one of my favourite Mac apps, Alfred.

With the seasons changing again, it is time to take another look at the developments in SAP SuccessFactors. In this post, I am taking my regular dive into what is new with one of SAP’s less well known SuccessFactors solutions, Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC). For those who are unfamiliar with ECSC, it is an HR service desk solution. It provides a back-office system to allow HR service agents to process and manage tickets raised by employees. Employees can submit tickets by telephone, e-mail, text chat or via a web portal. The solution is built on SuccessFactors Employee Central for the employee information and the service functionality of SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) for ticket processing. An SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) application known as Ask HR provides the employee web portal. In this release, we will look at the usual updates in C4C and Ask HR that affect ECSC users, but I am also going to take a slight diversion to discuss the direction of SAP’s development of C4C that will no doubt have an impact as to how ECSC will develop.

Over the past year or two, transclusion is a topic that has come up several times in the Drafts forum, particularly in the context of other apps for personal knowledge management (PKM), such as Obsidian, Roam Research and Logseq to name just a few. In this post I’m going to talk a little about what transclusion is and how you can include some of the functionality in Drafts.

Last year I decided to spruce up my home office for Christmas a little bit, by using an LED light strip around the cupboard door that sits behind my desk. Rather than just using an off the shelf solution, I used a couple of BBC Micro:Bits (aka BBC MicroBit), to control the lighting effects and to provide a remote control. In this post I’m going to cover how I did this.

A few weeks ago I released version 1 of an Alfred workflow called Bypass. I created it to help use Apple’s Shortcuts app on the Mac. I have been continuing to expand the functionality, and have now released v1.1 with many new features. One of the areas I spent a bit of time working on was a way to make Shortcuts easier to use with the Elgato Stream Deck, and in this post I’m going to walk through how Bypass now supports setting up Shortcuts on the Stream Deck.

Anyone who has been following my efforts over the last few months may have noted that I have occasionally made reference to migrating from Evernote to DEVONthink. As part of that move I have been taking the opportunity to sort out some of my lax filing. One of those aspects is the naming of files and specifically the inclusion of date stamps where relevant - e.g. on bills, documentation releases, etc. Fortunately I was able to bring a little bit of automation to bear on this activity, which has been helping speed things up significantly.

I write a lot of things in a plain text format known as Markdown. It provides a set of standardised ways to mark up text for processing into other formats (such as HTML), whereby formatting and other rich content elements are applied. I write all of my blog posts in this format, and also posts for other sites where I publish and contribute. One of these sites is Buy Me a Coffee (BMAC), a site where you can donate to my coffee fund if you like the stuff I do. It is also where I post each month to let everyone know what I have been up to. It regularly surprises me just how much content and support to other Internet denizens I’ve actually provided during the course of a month! Over the course of the month I jot down notes in Drafts, and then in the following month I write these up, in Markdown ready for posting. Unfortunately, BMAC does not support Markdown, but it does support rich text.

Last year I wrote a post about automation with Templater for Obsidian. I showed some examples of using Obsidian’s Templater plugin to do some automation a little bit beyond what you might typically consider as the basics. One of the things in one of the examples bugged me for quite a while, and in this post I’m going to go through how I improved things for creating a link to a new page, and the correctly filed new page at the same time.

Last year I released Conductor, my Alfred workflow for working with Keyboard Maestro. It allowed you to launch Keyboard Maestro macros, get information about them, open them for editing, and even the run them with a preset delay. In this new release I’ve taken things a little further and I’m going to provide a brief overview in this post.

As soon as I had attended my first external work event and been issued a cheap paper badge, I began wondering why conference organisers were not using digital badges using eInk technology. I figured it was probably because people would “accidentally” leave the conference with them and they would be more expensive than the cheap paper print out in a plastic wallet on a lanyard. But, within a few years, eInk badges began to appear, and I felt things were catching up. Roll on a few years and I began attending public and private business-related events where people were not issued badges. Again I wondered why people were not issued badges, beyond the occasional sticky label that leaves a not so delightful slightly sticky patch on your business attire? It was around this time, almost a decade ago, I began dipping in and occasionally looking around for an eInk badge option of my own. I often saw ones available from Chinese marketplaces, but they were typically vaguely specified, only available in bulk and thus expensive for an individual to experiment with. Then several weeks ago I spied something new that looked ideal. I purchased a Pimoroni Badger 2040.

I recently wrote about getting set up for working with a Pimoroni Badger 2040, a small piece of hardware that functions as a programmable eInk badge. The basic unit is the electronics, but in order to make it a functional badge for my own purposes, I found there were a few additions required. In this second post in my introductory series of posts for the Badger 2040 I am going to briefly set out what other physical elements have been added.

This is the third and final post in my introductory series for the Pimoroni Badger 2040. So far, I have talked a little about getting things set up so you can easily work with and find out about the Badger 2040, and about the physical additions I have made to turn my Badger 2040 into a functional eInk badge. In this post I am going to cover the programmable side of this eInk badge, and what (simple) revisions I have made in order to turn this into a badge suitable for my own purposes.

In my post yesterday, I described how I was using Obsidian and Hook to help me support my documentation of automations. Today, I am going to share something that helps me work with documenting Keyboard Maestro macros.

Earlier this week I wrote about how I was using Hook and Obsidian to support my documentation of automations. In this post I will aim to explain how I am using this set up to help me access documentation for my Apple Shortcuts automations.

Today’s post is a quick one about something I find quite useful when working in Drafts on my Mac. It relates to hyperlinks and the feature of Drafts known as link mode that allows you to make links clickable at the expense of making the content non-editable. I found it frustrating to keep switching back and forth to access a link, but with the help of a small Keyboard Maestro macro, I was able to speed this up.

I am the founder of the website ThoughtAsylum.com, and the Drafts app TADpoLe library (and related action groups) as well as the creator or many other things for...

A web site about using technology efficiently, and other things