I got hung up for a while trying to figure out why I couldn’t upload media to my Bluehost WordPress install from the Photos app when using iA Writer (or even the WordPress app)… it’s because the file size is currently limited to 512k. The complete lack of helpful details in the failure messages is annoying. But the other side of that is that I don’t need to upload 4 MB egg sandwich pictures, so I’m glad that at least I understand the issue.
To this end, this shortcut is tremendously useful.
Child No. 2 asked for one, and I was happy to oblige:
The New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association send this email to members today:
Earlier today, the US Department of Education sent a letter stating that New Jersey’s proposal to replace this spring’s NJ-SLA exams with a series of alternative assessment tools is in compliance with federal requirements under ESSA
Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, has held the line on the testing requirement required under the Every Student Succeeds Act. The US Department of Education, however, did accept waiver applications from the state departments of education, of which New Jersey was one. The NJDOE asked districts to provide data on assessments that were administered during a late winter-early spring timeframe, which turned out to be related to the waiver application.
Questions remain about the ACCESS and WIDA assessments for special education and English language learners, but we should have answers soon.
Full memo here.
Rewatched the Hughes’ Brothers “Book of Eli” last night. Ebert reviewed it back when:
The Hughes brothers have a vivid way with imagery here, as in their earlier films such as “Menace II Society” and the underrated “From Hell.” The film looks and feels good, and Washington’s performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is “flawed,” as we critics like to say, but it’s so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.
Denzel Washington is one of those actors you can’t not watch… which put me in mind of the interview Terry Gross did with him on Fresh Air. As is her tendency, she asked a question based on a detail that caught her eye:
GROSS: There is a scene in this where you’re holding two guns on someone, and you kind of scrape the guns against each other as if there two knives that you’re sharpening.
WASHINGTON: Mm-hmm.
GROSS: Was that a bit of business that you came up with when you were holding the guns?
WASHINGTON: Of course. I mean, you know, it’s just rhythm. You know, acting is like music, you know, and you improvise and you, it’s like jazz, you know, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s not a plan. I just did it. You know, it’s just rhythm. To me it’s just a rhythm. It’s like you do – Stanislavski said, you know, you cut 90 percent. You do all your research and you prepare and then you let it rip, you know, and that’s how it is. You know, you practice to music and you just play it.
Denzel Washington Remembers ‘Malcom X’ And ‘The Wizard Of Oz’
A fine public-private partnership if ever there was one.
Via Boing Boing, here’s how to fold Gaff’s origami unicorn.
In the theatrical cut of Blade Runner, the unicorn is a clue that Gaff had been at Deckard’s apartment. But the symbolism gained greater import in the director’s cut, suggesting that Deckard was a replicant:
For instance, in Ridley Scott’s 1992 Director’s Cut of the film, the filmmaker added in the famous “unicorn scene” dream sequence that appeared to confirm the Deckard-as-replicant speculation. Early in the film, Deckard dreams of a unicorn during a drunken reverie. Later, one of Deckard’s fellow blade runners, a wigged-out dandy named Gaff (Edward James Olmos), leaves an origami unicorn for Deckard to find. This suggests that Gaff knows Deckard’s memories, which means they’re implanted, which means he’s a ‘bot.
I don’t personally think he was a replicant, but I love the debate.
Launchbar-App-Swticher.mp4Speaking of Keyboard Maestro‘s app switcher, another option I tried out was to remap Finder’s Command-Tab to:
It’s not really an application switcher, but Command-R in LaunchBar shows you a list of running applications. It is sticky, so that the list of applications remains on the screen until you either mouse or use the keyboard to select a running application; macOS’s app switch disappears when you release the Command key. In LaunchBar’s list, you can use the arrow keys to navigate the menu, but the power-user move is to type the name of the application you want to switch to.
As with Keyboard Maestro’s application switcher, friction comes in that you may be so used to Command-Tab and Shift-Command-Tab to switch applications that, for however much you like the feature in LaunchBar, you won’t use it. Replacing Command-Tab with your LaunchBar invocation command and adding Command-R to the chain solves that problem nicely.1
1I’m still sticking with the Finder. Old habits die hard.
I bought Keyboard Maestro back in 2018 after reading good things about it, but have yet been able to make much use of it. This is partly because a lot of software that I’ve already added to my life does what KM does: Launchbar, TextExpander, PasteBot, and others. I have the feeling that I’m only considering a fraction of what it can do.
One of the features that I played with a bit is the application switcher. Keyboard Maestro hijacks one of my most-used keyboard commands, Command-Tab, and shows a grid of running applications over a turquoise background. You can continue to tab over the application icons, or mouse to your selection.
Keyboard Maestro’s Default App Switcher
As with all things Keyboard Maestro, you can customize the background color of the palette, the size of the icons, and more: vertical alignment? Sure. Familiar horizontal row? Of course. Transparent black background? By all means, yes please.
Keyboard Maestro’s Horizontal App Switcher
Keyboard Maestro’s Vertical App Switcher
I very much like this version of the app switcher, and I was ready to have it replace the system default. There is, however, at catch: Shift-Command-Tab does not move your selection in reverse. Tapping the shift key cycles backwards (to the left), but I have too many years of muscle memory for that to work for me.
Caitlin Flanagan, writing for The Atlantic:
Meghan had, in fact, realized the highest aspiration of many married people: She had convinced her spouse that his entire family was a bunch of losers.
Meghan Markle Didn’t Do the Work
Back when I was working as a school psychologist, one of my favorite automations for OmniFocus included AppleScript. I created a script that would generate a project in OmniFocus with all of the steps necessary to complete a special education eligibility evaluation, and create a folder for the student’s evaluation materials in Finder.
I don’t evaluate students anymore, but I do observe teachers, school psychologists, social workers, LDT/Cs, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists. We use the Danielson Framework, with additional requirements and structure provided by Achieve NJ.
Without getting into all of the steps, an observation fits the definition of a project under GTD: you have to schedule the observation, schedule a post-conference, score the observation, and more. I detailed how I use OmniOutliner to track this part of my work; as a useful digression, it isn’t that I don’t find OmniFocus useful for tracking observations, but OmniOutliner is a valuable planning tool that lets me review my progress from a higher level than OmniFocus does. OmniFocus, however, provides the granularity I need to manage each observation once I get started.
OmniFocus doesn’t currently support project templates, but it does support TaskPaper import. You can create a TaskPaper file and import it into OmniFocus; for this, I like to use Drafts and the TaskPaper to OmniFocus action.
In order to easily repeat the staff member’s name into through project title and corresponding tasks, I dropped TextExpander into the mix.1
Textexpander Template Snippet
TextExpander is famous for firing snippets by monitoring your keyboard input for abbreviations. This is a core feature of the application, but on the Mac, you can also expand snippets by invoking TextExpander’s Inline Search. Inline Search manifests a Spotlight-like search bar, where you can type to narrow down available snippets to find the one you need.
It’s a roundabout process, but stepwise, I:
Drafts, Taskpaper, and OmniFocus
I could shave a step off what happens in OmniFocus, but I let the project go into the inbox, where I add anything else I forgot and convert it into a project.
And minus the inline search feature in TextExpander, this all works exactly the same on iPad.
1Via Never Miss A Task, With Project Templates (Omnifocus Mini-Series), I found the inimitable Rosemary Orchard’s TaskPaper to OmniFocus Actions collection. Her collection is a bit much for my needs, but you can automate the hell out of TaskPaper templates in Drafts and send them just about anywhere, and as fully featured as you like, in OmniFocus. One of the most interesting features is the ability to create variables that the Draft action will prompt you to fill, neatly solving the same problem that TextExpander does for me. If you aren’t a TextExpander user, or prefer to keep things intimate between Drafts and OmniFcous, check out Rose’s actions.
Mobile devices make for great time wasters, with simple, casual games you can dip into without a major time commitment. Some of my favorite games are word games, most often spelling-focused games. Some greats:
Letterpress is a spelling game, where you pull tiles from a grid in order to score points for yourself, take points from your opponent, and attempt to lock up portions of the grid. It is the kind of game that you play at your pace; there’s no timing for a turn. You can invite friends to play, or allow the app to match you up with an opponent.
This august title is a take on the classic game of Scrabble. I paid for it once a long, long time ago. There are features you can pay for through microtransactions, but a good player is a good player.
## NYT Spelling Bee
Subscribers of the NYT Crossword puzzle can enjoy more casual fare in both the Daily Mini and the newer Spelling Bee. In Spelling Bee, you spell words from a wheel of seven letters; the words you create must contain the center letter of the wheel. You can rotate the wheel to get a fresh look at the array. Longer words yield higher scores. The board refreshes daily, and you can go back to yesterday’s puzzle and see what you missed. Spelling Bee appears simple but is delightfully beguiling.
If you like Spelling Bee, then WordSmyth is up your lexical alley. In WordSmyth, you spell words of varied length from a grid of nine letters. Unlike Spelling Bee, however, you can’t use a letter more than once. The game is feast for the senses; the music is tranquil, the visuals fluid and smooth, and the tap and swipe gestures make smart use of your device’s touchscreen. Like Spelling Bee, you can play one new grid per day; unlike the NYT’s offering, however, you can always go back and work on an older puzzle.
These are not new, but 512 Pixels collects 5k versions of the orginal default macOS wallpapers. I still love the abstract, swoopy blue and grey wallapapers through Tiger.
How do you organize data? If you’re working on a project, do you like to keep everything together in a folder in the Finder or Dropbox? If so, what about applications that aren’t document-based? To-do applications are self-contained, with entries in a silo. Notes apps, too. Digital junk drawers, like Yojimbo, Keep It, and DEVONThink, keep their files sorted in their own internal storage systems as well; you don’t save their files across the file system.
If you use specialized apps like these, you have likely struggled with this folder-based organization. In order to find a reasonable solution, you have either tried to make one app the clearinghouse for all of the information, or you use search.
Hook by CogSci looks to solve this problem with Hook. Hook links files together. Hook’s interface is sparse; it’s a utility in the true sense of the word, reminiscent of LaunchBar or Alfred in its presentation.
So here’s an example: each year, I have to prepare budgets for each special education program by school. The final product is a one-page printed spreadsheet, which I give to the accountant at a meeting.
Getting from last year’s categorical budget–the printed spreadsheet–requires a number of pieces of information: last year’s budget, for example, a sheet with projections for how many students I think will be in each program and each grade, notes (usually taken in Drafts of Agenda) from meetings, and emails. It’s a project, in the GTD sense of the word.
As an OmniFocus user, I always create a budget project with a deferred start date (We don’t work on them until about this time of the year, right after Christmas), but there are always notes and considerations that I add to the project, which begin once I’m completing the upcoming school year’s budget (while I was preparing the 20-21 budget, I started thinking of things that I would need to remember for the 21-22 budget).
Without relying on Hook, I could link to support materials in OmniFocus by creating an action item with a note that contains a URL to a Google Sheet, for example–and that might be the right way to manage one of the steps in the project, if it is, in fact, an action item. But having a to-do item exhorting me to review an email that I don’t need to act on isn’t productive.
With Hook, though, I can select the project in OmniFocus and invoke Hook; I am treated to a window with the name of the project, and below it, all of the “hooks” associated with the project: Drafts notes, emails, URLs to Google Drive files, etc. Action items go into OmniFocus, and support files are linked to the project via Hook. I can be promiscuous with my application use, because as long as Hook can get a link to the data, I can attach it to this central point of focus. In the picture below, you can see how Hook shows three support files: an email, Drafts document, and a link to a Google Sheet that I will need to update.
Having a central point of reference to which all of your Hooked links are connected is a key part of using the application. You can’t, for example, grab three files and link them to each other, and then have other files linked to this ersatz collection later on. That’s a strength or weakness depending upon your intended use case. To this end, Hook enables the user to connect to a central hub (for example, a text file or TaskPaper file, or even to select something such as a new OmniFocus project or a folder in Finder. The developer describes exactly this on Hook’s website.
Users with multiple Macs can take advantage of Hook’s sync feature. You point the app to a folder that both installations of Hook watch (iCloud or Dropbox, for example) and your links will work across devices.
CogSci Apps is following a model like Agenda, where buying Hook is a one-time transaction, but releases with new features after one year will cost you. Theses “Updates Licenses,” though, don’t cost as much as the first full license you purchase.
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors, about the most important Mac ever:
And then there’s the iMac’s final legacy—the lowercase letter ‘i’. It was such a hit that Apple began sticking it in front of every product it made. Some of them survive to this day. But does the i in the iPad, iPhone, and iPod really stand for ‘Internet?’
Of course not. It stands for iMac. The product that saved Apple.
MotorTrend profiles the Cozy Coupe’s creator, Jim Mariol:
The most clever part was the overall conception: a pedal-car-like experience without the pedals, called a foot-to-floor toy. Something kids too little for pedal cars could also enjoy without excluding older kids who could also fit inside. Mariol was inspired scooting around on a wheeled office chair, using his feet—something within the power of an average little tyke. The design was more than just cute: The roof made it, indeed, cozy and more like a real car than a typical roofless pedal car. And the larger rear wheels and bulkier rear end meant it would be harder to tip over backwards. Add in the long, swoopy door, which of course opens, and you have a primeval car experience, delivered to Little Tikes for consideration in 1979.
I always figured the design was inspired by the Flintstones.
Little Tikes Cozy Coupe: First “Car” for Many Has Roots In Real Car World