Browsing through some old files today I came across this note:

To Generate A Random String:tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ < /dev/urandom | head -c 8 | xargs

Curios if it still worked I pasted it into my terminal and, unsurprisingly, was met with an error:

tr: Illegal byte sequence

The tr utility is one of the many old-school Unix programs with history reaching way back to System V. It stands for “translate characters”, and with the -dc flags on, it should have ignored all input except for alphabet characters A-Z, both upper and lower case, and the integers 0 through 9, and the underscore character. The “Illegal byte sequence” error means it was really not happy with the input it was getting from /dev/urandom.

On macOS, the pseudo-device /dev/urandom is, according to the man page, “a compatibility nod to Linux”. The device generates random bytes, so if we read it we’ll get back raw binary data that looks like:

00010101 01011001 10111101

The reason the command is not working like it used to is because most modern computing system expect text character encoding to be UTF-8. When tr gets the string of random bytes from /dev/urandom, it expects the bytes to be in a specific sequence that it can translate into printable characters on the screen. Since we are intentionally generating random bytes though, we might get a few characters that translate properly, but eventually we’ll encounter the “illegal byte sequence” error above.

To fix the problem, all we need to do is set LC_ALL=C before running tr:

LC_ALL=C tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ < /dev/urandom | head -c 14 | xargs

Setting LC_ALL=C sets the language setting back to POSIX, or the original C ASCII encoding for text. That means when tr is fed a random string of bytes, it interprets each byte as a character, according to the ASCII table, which looks something like this:

Now each byte is interpreted as a character that matches the list passed as an argument to tr.

➜ LC_ALL=C tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_ < /dev/urandom | head -c 14 | xargsRhac_WGis7tHzS

So, to break down each command in the pipeline:

• tr: filters out all characters except those in the sets A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _
• head -c 14: displays the first 14 characters of the input from tr
• xargs: adds a nice newline character at the end of the string, so it’s easy to copy.

This command could be easily adopted to use base64 instead of tr without setting LC_ALL=C if you wanted more random characters in the string:

base64 < /dev/random | head -c 14 | xargs

Expanding head -c to 34 or so makes for a nice password generator.

In fact, I’ve aliased this to pgen in my .zshrc:

pgen(){    base64 < /dev/random | head -c 32 | xargs}

There’s almost certainly easier ways to generate a random string in the shell, but I like this, and it works for me.

Update: The good Dr. Drang suggested ending the pipeline and running echo instead of xargs for clairity, which makes a lot of sense to me. I updated the alias to base64 < /dev/random | head -c 32; echo.

The Tao of Cal - Cal Newport

With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it might be fun to try to summarize essentially every major idea I discuss in one short primer.

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work. I’d like to quote the entire post, but I’ll just post this one sentence. Read the rest of this article, then buy his books and read those too. Follow his advice and live a better life.

Godot Isn’t Making it

Outside of a miracle, we are about to enter an era of desperation in the generative AI space. We’re two years in, and we have no killer apps — no industry-defining products — other than ChatGPT, a product that burns billions of dollars and nobody can really describe. Neither Microsoft, nor Meta, nor Google or Amazon seem to be able to come up with a profitable use case, let alone one their users actually like, nor have any of the people that have raised billions of dollars in venture capital for anything with “AI” taped to the side — and investor interest in AI is cooling.

Edward Zitron seems to be a rare voice of frustrated reason in the tech industry. He’s very critical of AI, and, more and more, I’m thinking rightfully so. OpenAI is spending over $2 to make $1, burning through billions with no path to profitability.

Couple that with the environmental cost of AI (and its just plain awful cousin, crypto currency) and the unreliability of the generated answers, and I’m wondering just where all of this goes in the next year or so.

I’m not sure what’s going on over in Cupertino for them to think that any of the recent Apple Intelligence ads they’ve been running are a good idea. They’re cringy at best, and honestly just flat out insulting.

In one a schlub writes an email to his boss and uses AI to make it sound ‘more professional’, in another a young woman uses it to lie about remembering an acquaintance’s name. In another the same young woman again uses it to lie about reading an email from a college, to her face, while she’s sitting with her. In yet another, linked to recently by Scott McNulty, a woman uses AI to lie to her husband about getting him something for his birthday.

If this is what Apple thinks their AI is for, I honestly don’t know that I want any part of it.

Compare and contrast with the video I posted yesterday, and with this beautiful animation from Canonical.

I’ve watched that little animation several times, and they tell a better story in a minute twenty-five than all of Apple’s AI commercials combined.

I’m rooting for these guys. If they can pull off this truck at the $50-$60k mark, I think they are going to have a winner. I’ve been looking at electric trucks for a while, and I’m excited to see another entry in the market. And what a fantastic video:

A proper body-on-frame truck, 10,000 lb towing capacity, all electric, made in the USA. Count me in.

Love this guy. Patrick Rhone calls him folksy, I agree.

What a difference a couple of lines of code can make.

I recognize that databases have always been a weak point for me, so I’ve been trying to correct that lately. I have a lot of experience with management of the database engines, failover, filesystems, and networking, but too little working with the internals of the databases themselves. Early this morning I decided I didn’t know enough about how database indexes worked. So I did some reading, got to the point where I had a good mental model for them, and decided I’d like to do some testing myself. I figured 40 million records was a nice round number, so I used fakedata to generate 40 million SQL inserts that looked something like this:

INSERT INTO contacts (name,email,country) VALUES ("Milo Morris","pmeissner@test.tienda","Italy");INSERT INTO contacts (name,email,country) VALUES ("Hosea Burgess","kolage@example.walmart","Dominica");INSERT INTO contacts (name,email,country) VALUES ("Adaline Frank","shaneIxD@example.talk","Slovenia");

I saved this as fakedata.sql and piped it into sqlite3 and figured I’d just let it run in the background. After about six hours I realized this was taking a ridiculously long time, and I estimated I’d only loaded about a quarter of the data. I believe that’s because SQLite was treating each INSERT as a separate transaction.

A transaction in SQLite is a unit of work. SQLite ensures that the write to the database is Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable, which means that for each of the 40 million lines I was piping into sqlite3, the engine was ensuring that every line was fully committed to the database before moving on to the next line. That’s a lot of work for a very, very small amount of data. So, I did some more reading and found one recommendation of explicitly wrapping the entire load into a single transaction, so my file now looked like:

BEGIN TRANSACTION;INSERT INTO contacts (name,email,country) VALUES ("Milo Morris","pmeissner@test.tienda","Italy");INSERT INTO contacts (name,email,country) VALUES ("Hosea Burgess","kolage@example.walmart","Dominica");INSERT INTO contacts (name,email,country) VALUES ("Adaline Frank","shaneIxD@example.talk","Slovenia");COMMIT;

I set a timer and ran the import again:

➜  var time cat fakedata.sql| sqlite3 test.dbcat fakedata.sql  0.07s user 0.90s system 1% cpu 1:13.66 totalsqlite3 test.db  70.81s user 2.19s system 98% cpu 1:13.79 total

So, that went from 6+ hours to about 71 seconds. And I imagine if I did some more optimization (possibly using the Write Ahead Log?) I might be able to get that import faster still. But a little over a minute is good enough for some local curiosity testing.

Indexes

So… back to indexes.

Indexing is a way of sorting a number of records on multiple fields. Creating an index on a field in a table creates another data structure that holds the field values and a pointer to the record it relates to. Once the index is created it is sorted. This allows binary searches to be performed on the new data structure.

One good analogy is the index of a physical book. Imagine that a book has ten chapters and each chapter has 100 pages. Now imagine you’d like to find all instances of the word “continuum” in the book. If the book doesn’t have an index, you’d have to read through every page in every chapter to find the word.

However, if the book is already indexed, you can find the word in the alphabetical list, which will then have a pointer to the page numbers where the word can be found.

The downside to the index is that it does take additional space. In the book analogy, while the book itself is 1000 pages, we’d need another ten or so for the index, bringing up the total size to 1010 pages. Same with a database, the additional index data structure requires more space to hold both the original data field being indexed, and a small (4-byte, for example) pointer to the record.

Oh, and the results of creating the index are below.

SELECT * from contacts WHERE name is 'Hank Perry';Run Time: real 2.124 user 1.771679 sys 0.322396CREATE INDEX IF NOT EXISTS name_index on contacts (name);Run Time: real 22.129 user 16.048308 sys 2.274184SELECT * from contacts WHERE name is 'Hank Perry';Run Time: real 0.003 user 0.001287 sys 0.001598

That’s a massive improvement. And now I know a little more than I did.

If you spend all day in the terminal like I do, you come to appreciate it’s speed and efficiency. I often find myself in Terminal for mundane tasks like navigating to a folder and opening a file; it’s just faster to type where I want to go than it is to click in the Finder, scan the folders for the one I want, double-click that one, scan again… small improvements to the speed of my work build up over time. The speed is increased exponentially with the correct configuration for your shell, in my case, zsh.

zsh is powerful and flexible, which means that it can also be intimidating to try to configure yourself. Doubly-so when there are multiple ‘frameworks’ available that will do the bulk of the configuration for you. I used Oh My Zsh for years, but I recently abandoned it in favor of maintaining my own configuration using only the settings that I need for the perfect configuration for my use.

I’ve split my configuration into five files:

• apple.zsh-theme
• zshenv
• zshrc
• zsh_alias
• zsh_functions

I have all five files in a dotfiles git repository, pushed to a private Github repository.

The zshenv file is read first by zsh when starting a new shell. It contains a collection of environmental variables I’ve set, mainly for development. For example:

export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=trueexport PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE=$HOME/.pip/cacheexport VIRTUALENV_DISTRIBUTE=true

The next file is zshrc, which contains the main bulk of the configurations. My file is 113 lines, so let’s take it a section at a time.

source /Users/jonathanbuys/Unix/etc/dotfiles/apple.zsh-themesource /Users/jonathanbuys/Unix/etc/dotfiles/zsh_aliassource /Users/jonathanbuys/Unix/etc/dotfiles/zsh_functions

The first thing I do is source the other three files. The first is my prompt, which is cribbed entirely from Oh My Zsh. It’s nothing fancy, but I consider it to be elegant and functional. I don’t like the massive multi-line prompts. I find them to be far too distracting for what they are supposed to do.

My prompt looks like this:

 ~/Unix/etc/dotfiles/ [master*] 

It gives me my current path, what git branch I’ve checked out, and if that branch has been modified since the last commit.

The next two files, as their names suggest, contain aliases and functions. I have three functions and 16 aliases. I won’t go into each of them here, as they are fairly mundane and only specific for my setup. The three functions are to print the current path of the open Finder window, to use Quicklook to preview a file, and to generate a uuid string.

The next few lines establish some basic settings.

autoload -U colors && colorsautoload -U zmvsetopt AUTO_CDsetopt NOCLOBBERsetopt SHARE_HISTORYsetopt HIST_IGNORE_DUPSsetopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE

The autoload lines setup zsh to use pretty colors, and to enable the extremely useful zmv command for batch file renaming. The interesting parts of the setopt settings are the ones dealing with command history. These three commands allow the sharing of command line history between open windows or tabs. So if I have multiple Terminal windows open, I can browse the history of both from either window. I find myself thinking that the environment is broken if this is not present.

Next, I setup some bindings:

  # start typing + [Up-Arrow] - fuzzy find history forward  bindkey '^[[A' up-line-or-search  bindkey '^[[B' down-line-or-search    # Use option as meta  bindkey "^[f" forward-word  bindkey "^[b" backward-word    # Use option+backspace to delete words  x-bash-backward-kill-word(){      WORDCHARS='' zle backward-kill-word    }  zle -N x-bash-backward-kill-word  bindkey '^W' x-bash-backward-kill-word    x-backward-kill-word(){      WORDCHARS='*?_-[]~\!#$%^(){}<>|`@#$%^*()+:?' zle backward-kill-word  }  zle -N x-backward-kill-word  bindkey '\e^?' x-backward-kill-word

These settings let me use the arrow keys to browse history, and to use option + arrow keys to move one word at a time through the current command, or to use option + delete to delete one word at a time. Incredibly useful, use it all the time. Importantly, this also lets me do incremental searching through my command history with the arrow keys. So, if I type aws, then arrow up, I can browse all of my previous commands that start with aws. And when you have to remember commands that have 15 arguments, this is absolutely invaluable.

The next section has to do with autocompletion.

# Better autocomplete for file namesWORDCHARS=''unsetopt menu_complete   # do not autoselect the first completion entryunsetopt flowcontrolsetopt auto_menu         # show completion menu on successive tab presssetopt complete_in_wordsetopt always_to_endzstyle ':completion:*:*:*:*:*' menu select# case insensitive (all), partial-word and substring completionif [[ "$CASE_SENSITIVE" = true ]]; then  zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'r:|=*' 'l:|=* r:|=*'else  if [[ "$HYPHEN_INSENSITIVE" = true ]]; then    zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{[:lower:][:upper:]-_}={[:upper:][:lower:]_-}' 'r:|=*' 'l:|=* r:|=*'  else    zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{[:lower:][:upper:]}={[:upper:][:lower:]}' 'r:|=*' 'l:|=* r:|=*'  fifiunset CASE_SENSITIVE HYPHEN_INSENSITIVE# Complete . and .. special directorieszstyle ':completion:*' special-dirs truezstyle ':completion:*' list-colors ''zstyle ':completion:*:*:kill:*:processes' list-colors '=(#b) #([0-9]#) ([0-9a-z-]#)*=01;34=0=01'zstyle ':completion:*:*:*:*:processes' command "ps -u $USERNAME -o pid,user,comm -w -w"# disable named-directories autocompletionzstyle ':completion:*:cd:*' tag-order local-directories directory-stack path-directories# Use caching so that commands like apt and dpkg complete are useablezstyle ':completion:*' use-cache yeszstyle ':completion:*' cache-path $ZSH_CACHE_DIRzstyle ':completion:*:*:*:users' ignored-patterns \        adm amanda apache at avahi avahi-autoipd beaglidx bin cacti canna \        clamav daemon dbus distcache dnsmasq dovecot fax ftp games gdm \        gkrellmd gopher hacluster haldaemon halt hsqldb ident junkbust kdm \        ldap lp mail mailman mailnull man messagebus  mldonkey mysql nagios \        named netdump news nfsnobody nobody nscd ntp nut nx obsrun openvpn \        operator pcap polkitd postfix postgres privoxy pulse pvm quagga radvd \        rpc rpcuser rpm rtkit scard shutdown squid sshd statd svn sync tftp \        usbmux uucp vcsa wwwrun xfs '_*'if [[ ${COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS:-false} != false ]]; then  expand-or-complete-with-dots() {    # use $COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS either as toggle or as the sequence to show    [[ $COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS = true ]] && COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS="%F{red}…%f"    # turn off line wrapping and print prompt-expanded "dot" sequence    printf '\e[?7l%s\e[?7h' "${(%)COMPLETION_WAITING_DOTS}"    zle expand-or-complete    zle redisplay  }  zle -N expand-or-complete-with-dots  # Set the function as the default tab completion widget  bindkey -M emacs "^I" expand-or-complete-with-dots  bindkey -M viins "^I" expand-or-complete-with-dots  bindkey -M vicmd "^I" expand-or-complete-with-dotsfi# automatically load bash completion functionsautoload -U +X bashcompinit && bashcompinit

That’s a long section, but in a nutshell this lets me type one character, then hit tab, and be offered a menu of all the possible completions of that character. It is case-insensitive, so b would match both boring.txt and Baseball.txt. I can continue to hit tab to cycle through the options, and hit enter when I’ve found the one I want.

The last section sources a few other files:

[ -f ~/.fzf.zsh ] && source ~/.fzf.zsh[ -f "/Users/jonathanbuys/.ghcup/env" ] && source "/Users/jonathanbuys/.ghcup/env" # ghcup-env[ -s "/Users/jonathanbuys/.bun/_bun" ] && source "/Users/jonathanbuys/.bun/_bun"source /Users/jonathanbuys/Unix/src/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zshsource /Users/jonathanbuys/Unix/src/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

If I’m experimenting with Haskell, I’d like to load the ghcup-env variables. If I have bun installed (a way, way faster npm), than use that. The final two sources are for even more enhanced autosuggestions and command line syntax highlighting. So, typos or commands that don’t exist will be red, good commands where zsh can find the executable will be green. The autosuggestions take commands from my history and suggest them, I can type right-arrow to accept the suggestion, or keep typing to ignore it.

Taken together, I’ve been able to remove Oh My Zsh, but keep all of the functionality. My shell configuration is constantly evolving as I find ways to make things faster and more efficient. I don’t consider myself a command line zealot, but I do appreciate how this setup gets out of my way and helps me work as fast as I can think.

p.s. A lot of this configuration was taken from other sources shared around the internet, as well as the zsh documentation. I regret that I haven’t kept references to the origins of some of these configs. If I can find the links I’ll post them here.

I’ve been trying to wrap my small monkey brain around what ChatGPT will mean in the long run. I’m going to try to think this through here. In many ways the advances we’ve seen in AI this past year perpetuate the automation trend that’s existed since… well, since humans started creating technology. I’ve seen arguments that seem to be on two ends of a spectrum, that the AI is often wrong and unreliable, and we shouldn’t use it for anything important, to AI is so good that it’s going to put us all out of jobs. As with most truths, I think the reality is somewhere in between.

It’s my opinion that jobs that AI can replace, it probably will replace a lot of. But not all. Referring back to our discussion about the current state of Apple news sites, if the site is a content farm pumping out low-value articles for hit counts and views, I can see AI handling that. If your site is well thought out opinions and reviews about things around the Apple ecosystem, that I think will be safe. Because it’s the person’s opinion that gives the site value.

For more enterprise-y jobs, I could see fewer low and mid-level developers. Fewer managers, fewer secretaries, fewer creatives. Not all gone, but certainly less than before. If your job is to create stock photos and put together slide shows, you might want to expand your skill set a bit.

I think… the kind of jobs that will survive are the type that bring real value. The kind of value that can’t be replicated by a computer. Not just the generation of some text or code, but coming up with the why. What needs to be made, and why does it need to be made?

Maybe AI will help free us up to concentrate on solving really hard problems. Poverty, clean water, famine, climate change. Then again, maybe it’ll make things worse. I suppose in the end that’s up to us.

On my way towards completing another project I needed to setup gpg public key infrastructure. There are many tutorials and explanations about gpg on the web, so I won’t try to explain what it is here. My goal is to simply record how I went about setting it up for myself to securely sign my Git commits.

Most everything here I gathered from this tutorial on dev.to, but since I’m sure I’ll never be able to find it again after today, I’m going to document it here.

First, install gpg with Homebrew:

brew install gpg

Next, generate a new Ed25519 key:

gpg --full-generate-key --expert

We pick option (9) for the first prompt, Elliptic Curve Cryptography, and option (1) for the second, Curve 25519. Pick the defaults for the rest of the prompts, giving the key a descriptive name.

Once finished you should be able to see your key by running:

gpg --list-keys --keyid-format short

The tutorial recommends using a second subkey generated from the first key to actually do the signing. So, we edit the master key by running:

gpg --expert --edit-key XXXXXXX

Replacing XXXXX with the ID of your newly generated key. Once in the gpg command line, enter addkey, and again select ECC and Curve 25519 for the options. Finally, enter save to save the key and exit the command line.

Now when we run gpg --list-keys --keyid-format short we should be able to see a second key listed with the designation [S] after it. The ID will look similar to this:

sub   ed25519/599D272D 2021-01-02 [S]

We will need the part after ed25519/, in this case 599D272D. Add that to your global Git configuration file by running:

git config --global user.signingkey 599D272D

If you’d like git to sign every commit, you can add this to your config file:

git config --global commit.gpgsign true

Otherwise, pass the -S flag to your git command to sign individual commits. I’d never remember to do that, so I just sign all of them.

Make sure that gpg is unlocked and ready to use by running:

echo "test"  | gpg --clearsign

If that fails, run export GPG_TTY=$(tty) and try again. You should be prompted to unlock GPG with the passphrase set during creation of the key. Enter the export command in your ~/.zshrc to fix this issue.

Finally, Github has a simple way to add gpg keys, but first we’ll need to export the public key:

gpg --armor --export 599D272D

Copy the entire output of that command and enter it into the Github console under Settings, “SSH and GPG keys”, and click on “New GPG key”. Once that’s finished, you should start seeing nice green “Verified” icons next to your commits.

I spend a lot of time in the terminal, but I spend an equal amount of time in my text editor. My main requirements for a text editor is that it be equally fast and powerful, but not try to do much more than just be a text editor. I have my terminal a quick command-tab away, so its very easy to jump back and forth, I don’t need a terminal built into my text editor. I also need my text editor to be completely accurate. What I see has to be what is written to the file, no “hidden syntax”. That’s why I prefer BBEdit. BBEdit has powerful text editing features, but it’s not overwhelming. It’s not trying to be your entire operating system.

In fact, BBEdit fits perfectly in the macOS environment. I used to be a dedicated vim user, but over time the context switching between the different macOS applications and vim became distracting. One of the great things about macOS is that once you learn the basic keyboard combos they apply almost everywhere, unless the application you are using is not a good Mac citizen. Vim has it’s own set of keyboard combos, endlessly configurable and expandable. I started forgetting my own shortcuts. BBEdit uses the macOS standard keyboard combos, many inherited from emacs, so if you learn how to navigate text in TextEdit you can apply those same shortcuts to BBEdit.

But, BBEdit is also powerful. You can include custom text snippets for autocompletion, run scripts to manipulate text, and use regular expressions for detailed search and replace operations. With the latest release you can also setup a language server for more powerful syntax checking and completion. BBEdit has been in active development for 30 years, and in that time the developer, Rich Siegel has continuously improved it and kept it up to date with the ever-changing architectures of macOS. BBEdit feels just as much at home on my M1 MacBook Pro as it did on the Macintosh of the 90’s.

BBEdit hits the right balance of power and simplicity for my workflow. It’s fast, reliable, and fits perfectly in the Mac environment. For as long as Rich is developing it, BBEdit will be in my Dock. I don’t know what will happen when he decides to retire, but I’m hoping that decision is many, many years away.

Starting its fifth year on my desk, my 2017 iMac 5k is still going strong, but starting to show it’s age. There’s still nothing that I can’t do with it, but after looking at my wife’s M1 MacBook Air I can’t help but be just a little jealous of how fast that little machine is. I’ve yet to come across any computer that offers the same value as the iMac, especially when you factor in how good this 27” retina screen is. I’m tempted by both the current 24” M1 iMac, and the new 16” M1 Max MacBook Pro, but the rumor mill is talking about bigger, master iMacs and colorful M2 MacBook Airs, either of which might actually make the most sense for my desk. I want to see the entire lineup before committing. The good thing is that no matter which machine I choose, it’s going to be a major speed improvement from where I am now.

On the software side I’m in a bit of a state of flux. Old standards are now no longer given, but because I’ve been using them for so long I’m reluctant to step away. Apple’s Reminders has gotten good enough for most things, but after a brief experiment over the holidays I found that I was letting things slip through the cracks, and headed back to OmniFocus. OmniFocus, for all its complexity, feels like home.

1Password’s upcoming switch to Electron has me concerned, but after some consideration I wonder how much of my concern is practical and how much of it is philosophical. Ideally, I would have preferred if 1P 8 was an evolution of 1P 7, instead of an entirely different application, but at the end of the day I’m still going to use it for work, and I still have a family subscription that I get through my Eero subscription, so I’ll keep it around. And if I’m going to have it anyway… why not keep using it? The flip side of that coin is that when using Safari the built-in password manager is seamless, far simpler than 1Password, even for one-time codes. But, do I really want all my passwords only available in Safari? Sometimes I might want to use Firefox. This is all still up in the air.

For file management, I’ve still got DEVONthink, but it’s another one where I’m not sure I’ll keep it. Again, ideally, iCloud Drive would be encrypted end-to-end so I could safely trust that I could put sensitive work data on it and not be putting my career at risk, but that’s not the world we live in. Without DEVONthink I need to keep all my files on my local machine, which is normally fine, but every now and then I want to get to something while I’m out running around, and DEVONthink to Go is the only secure solution. I’ve heard rumors that encryption might be coming, but until it’s here I think I’m going to stick with DT.

Keyboard Maestro and Hazel are both on the chopping block. I still have both installed, but neither are running. For Keyboard Maestro, I honestly can’t keep extra keyboard shortcuts in my head, and I’ve never found that many uses for the application. For a long time the only thing I’d use it for is text expansion, and even then only for the date stamp, i.e. 2022-01-05_. If there comes a time when iCloud Drive is encrypted, I’ll probably turn Hazel back on for automatic file management. But given that everything now gets dumped into DEVONthink, all my files are organized by the apps AI and I have less to set up and maintain. And if I’m honest, I’ve always had problems with Hazel’s pattern matching, sometimes it would inexplicably not match a pattern in a file I could easily find while searching with Spotlight. Most of Keyboard Maestro’s automation features that I did use I’ve moved into Shortcuts. I’m looking forward to Hazel-like functionality being built into macOS.

Other than that, I’m happy with Day One, I’ve increased my use of the Apple Notes app quite a bit, I love NetNewsWire (although I’ve decreased the number of sites I’m subscribed to for less, but better, content), MindNode is a fantastic mind-mapping app, and I keep all my mail in Mail. The biggest new addition to my setup is Parallels for running Windows 10. I’ve found I need this for teaching the Microsoft Office course at the local community college. Of course, this is another area where I’m unsure what I’ll do when I finally do update to an M-series Mac, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Over the past month I’ve been experimenting with cutting down on the number of applications I use on my Mac. One in particular I though was going to stick was moving my task management system over from OmniFocus to Reminders. I enjoyed the everywhere integration of Reminders, like how Siri would include any tasks I had scheduled for the day when I asked my HomePod “What’s my update?”. Unfortunately, when I sat down at the end of the holiday break to think about the projects I had going at work, and how to schedule them out for the upcoming week, I realized I needed to open OmniFocus, and once it was open, I knew the experiment was over.

I’ve been using the GTD system for so long now it’s a part of how I think. OmniFocus was built around that system. It’s the only to-do app that I’m aware of that does things like defer dates and built-in weekly reviews. It might be a deep and complex app, but I’ve got it customized to my liking. I know which parts of it I use (perspectives) and which parts I never touch (flagged tasks).

The long and the short of it is that I’ve got a complicated job as a senior devops engineer, I teach two courses at the local community college at night, I’ve got a family, and I’ve got a home and vehicles to take care of. To be able to focus, to be there for my family, for my work, I need a system that I can trust. For me, OmniFocus is the foundation of that system. I’m not excited about the new direction of their mobile app, but I can live with it. I imagine that OmniFocus and I are going to be together for a long time.

If you are fortunate enough to live in a home with a driveway, and fortunate enough to live in a region that gets a lot of snow, you are already familiar with the seasonal chore of snowblowing¹. It is currently seven degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the weather forecast calls for five to six inches in snow today, which means that soon enough I’ll bundle up and head out to take part.

Snowblowing gives me a lot of time to think, and over the years I’ve developed a system for keeping the driveway in tip-top condition. There are a few rules, or, more likely “best practices”, to keep in mind when considering next steps while looking at a fresh blanket of snow. You must keep in mind the current and forecasted weather, your schedule and the schedule of anyone who lives with you, the state of your machinery and current preparation level, and finally the pattern you’ll walk when clearing the driveway and sidewalk. Importantly, grab your hot beverage of choice and enjoy the magical beauty of snowfall.

You’ll want to wait for the current storm to be over, don’t start snowblowing when it’s snowing unless you have no choice. Ideally there will be a nice break after the storm. The sky clears and the sun comes out. This is when the city will send out their plows to clear the roads, and it’s best if you can wait till after the plows go by to start your driveway. It’s maddening when the plow goes by your home and shoves a giant pile of slushy mess at the bottom of your freshly snowblown driveway. If you can wait till they are done, you can get it all done at once.

However, don’t wait long! Snow is normally easiest to blow when it is fresh powder. Depending on how much snow fell, and the arrangement of your driveway, you are in danger of the snow melting enough to turn to slush, which is much harder to move.

The number one most important thing to keep in mind is to clear the driveway before anyone drives on it. This is why you need to consider household scheduling. If anyone needs to leave or arrive before you get a chance to snowblow, the weight of the vehicle driving will pack the snow down tight. Once packed down like this, the snowblower will ride right over the tracks, barely scraping the top instead of pushing the snow out. Then, even if you’ve done a good job with the rest of the driveway, you’ll have two hard-packed treads of snow going across it that will (1) look bad, and (2) turn into a slipping hazard. When the sun comes out, and if your driveway gets a full day’s worth of direct sunlight, even if it’s below freezing, the sun will melt the snow just enough for it to re-freeze and turn to ice. Once this happens it is difficult to get off the driveway, and it’s likely those treads will be there for the remainder of the season.

When the time is right to head outside, you’ll learn quickly if you are properly prepared. Snowblowing is cold work, start with the right clothes. I’ve found that wearing a base layer of cold-weather gear helps tremendously, as does choosing the right pants. I try to avoid jeans unless they are flannel-lined, and normally go with a pair of hiking pants from Eddie Bower. These pants provide a layer of protection from the snow melting in, dry quickly, and when paired with the base-layer gear are warm enough. I wear a base layer shirt, a t-shirt, and a flannel, and then an Eddie Bower puffy jacket. I top it off with a North Face winter hat, and a pair of insulated leather work gloves. Of all my cold weather gear, I’m currently most unhappy with the gloves, my fingers tend to start freezing after a half-hour or so outside, so I’ll need to replace them with something better soon. Finally, wear thick wool socks if you have them, and good boots. Sneakers will work in a pinch, but I’d double-up on the socks, otherwise your toes will get very cold very quickly.

Next, hopefully you’ve read the weather and have started up your snowblower once this season, checked the oil, and made sure you’ve got a full tank along with a spare gallon of gas or two. If you start to snowblow the driveway and run out of gas, or, worse, if you have a bad snowblower that won’t start, all the other preparation and scheduling you’ve done won’t matter. Like a Scout, be prepared.

Speaking of snowblowers, my advice for equipment is the same as my advice for computers. Buy the best you can afford. This is not an area to skimp. True, it might be hard to look at it during the other ten months out of the year when it’s sitting in your shed or garage taking up space, but you’ll be thankful you have it those few times per year you need it. When looking at purchasing equipment, remember the old adage, “Buy nice, or buy twice.” You really want that snowblower to start up the first time you pull the cord.

In the same vein, purchase the best snow shovel you can afford. Even though you’ve got a nice snowblower, you’ll need a shovel for detail work, porches, and light snowfalls that don’t warrant getting out the powered equipment. Avoid the cheap plastic shovels, and avoid shovels with a weird bend in the handle. What you want is a wide metal shovel with a good blade on the edge and a sturdy, straight handle. That will give you the most control over the shovel and let you get the most work done with it. I’ve always found the bent handle shovels to be awkward to use.

Once you’ve found the right weather at the right time, you are properly dressed, and your equipment is prepared and ready, it’s time to start blowing snow. The way you go about this is part science and part art. You have to read the wind, the weight of the snow, and the power of your snowblower. You need to keep in mind how you want the driveway to look afterwards. Ideally, you move enough snow off the driveway that it’s bare concrete underneath, or close enough to bare that the sun will melt what’s left off and leave it clean. You want clean straight lines delineating the edges of your driveway where your lawn starts. If you can’t get to clear concrete, you’ll want your driveway to have just the barest layer of snow left on it, and have that snow reflect the plow tracks of your snowblower. Again, long straight lines are best. Avoid mixing vertical and horizontal patterns, you’ll want the entire driveway to look like it was all done at once.

The pattern you use to clear the driveway will be somewhat dependent on the weather, but I’ve found that normally starting in the center of the driveway and blowing snow to the left and right of it and working out towards the edges works best.

You could start at one edge and work your way all the way over to the other edge. If the wind is strong in one direction crossways this is probably the best bet.

You’ll need room to turn around, so I’ve found that one or two paths right at the top of the driveway parallel to the road gives me plenty of room. However, avoid trying to snowblow the entire driveway this way, you’ll wind up with a face full of snow, blowing snow all over your freshly blown driveway, and worse, blowing snow into the road. Don’t blow snow into the road, that’s poor form.

Finally, once the driveway is cleared you may be tempted to put salt on it to prevent icing. Don’t. Salt will damage your concrete, and stops working after it gets below ten degrees anyway. If icing is a safety issue, it’s better to put down a chemical deicing agent. I’ve seen sand recommended, but I’ve never seen anyone using it. Overall, it’s best to put the work in with the snowblower and shovel to clear all the snow off the driveway before it turns to ice, and let the sun take care of the rest of it. That way you don’t have to worry about slipping.

Some see snowblowing as a chore, I see it as a rare opportunity to continue perfecting the craft. In a world where most work happens in front of a screen, it’s good to be able to physically accomplish something you can be proud of. And a well cared for driveway, clean and cleared of snow and ice after a storm, is definitely something to be proud of.

1Password 7 was an incremental improvement on 6, and 6 was an incremental improvement on 5, and so on all the way back to the original 1Passwd. But 1Password 8, which is now in Beta is a horse of a different color.

I’ve been trying to understand the reasoning behind the change. In a nutshell, AgileBits decided that the Mac wasn’t worth having a dedicated codebase, so they’ve thrown everything out and started over from scratch with Rust and Electron.

Over the past several months I’ve been thinking about how much I care about this, and decided that, for me, there’s a fairly short list of things I care a lot about, and the software I use every day on my Mac is one of them.

Part of what makes a Mac great is the predictability of application behavior. Once a user gains an understanding of the Mac environment, they can reasonably expect to be able to quickly pick up any other application. Things like menu items, keyboard shortcuts, help docs, and how the UI of the application are presented are standardized across the system.

Cross-platform shovelware often doesn’t care about any of that. Instead, they focus on their own UI paradigms, and often miss out on the built-in benefits of native app integration. The 1Password developers Mitchell Cohen and Andrew Beyer said as much in a recent interview on the Changelog Podcast, episode #468, (emphasis mine):

You go to a Starbucks, a college campus, you just look at your friends, family and co-workers, and they love their Macs. But you look at the software they’re using, and it’s normal software. It’s cross-platform software, web-based, a lot of times just inside of a web browser… And they don’t really think about it that way. They don’t ask for apps that look like Apple made them in the ‘90s the way that I think a lot of people kind of want us to go back and do that. And regardless of what technology we use, we’re not gonna do that. We’re going to make an app that looks and feels like the experience that we want, just like every other developer effectively is doing in 2021.

I actually think that for the average college student, for instance, who uses a Mac, they’ll think of something like Discord or Slack or Notion and say “That’s what a Mac app looks like. That’s how it works.” They’re not going to point to these apps that came out decades ago, that sort of are the standard bearers for what a native Mac app is supposed to be.

Sad, but I don’t think I can argue against their point. The concept of a Mac app is fading, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it, or even agree that it’s right.

Electron tries to mimic the native AppKit environment, and in some apps it gets pretty close. But Electron is a resource hog, that’s the other downside. Slack takes up way more RAM than it should, and Microsoft’s Teams makes my MacBook Air’s fans kick in every time I use it.

Electron is what you use when your company goals are more important than building the best application for your users. Honestly, how many Mac users really care about Linux? Well, at least one of the 1Password devs does.

But one of the really important goals was we wanted a browser extension that could work without a natively-installed application on the machine. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. One, at the time we had no Linux app, so that was a part of the market where – like, I’ve been using Linux since YellowDog on my original iMac… Whether I’m using Linux now or not, I always wanted 1Password on Linux; and this was a really easy way to make something that would run on Linux immediately.

The other thing is you have this thing called ChromeOS, which is this system – it runs Android apps sometimes, but it’s another place where a lot of things are done on the web, they’re done within Chrome… It’s a great place where you want a web extension or a browser extension that doesn’t need a Mac app running, or something like that.

I would argue that even on Linux not having a native experience for Gnome or KDE or whatever they use now is worse than having a cross-platform Electron app that doesn’t respect the local desktop environment. But, on Linux, I suppose having anything at all is a glass of ice water in hell.

Inside 1Password even the concept of what constitutes a native Mac app has already become diluted to unrecognizable.

So I wanna push back on this idea of native app, because it comes up in every conversation these days… We’ve done a ton of research, a ton of interviews, and to the normal who doesn’t watch this show and isn’t part of our Twitter tech community, a native app is an app that has an icon on your dock, that has keyboard shortcuts, that you can download and install on your computer…

I’d say that’s a very low bar. Surprisingly, the conversation goes back to the Linux desktop experience.

We’re doing things on Linux that no one’s ever done before, for instance having biometrics and browser extension integration, and integration with the system keychain… The Linux community has been really grateful and appreciative of that, and me too, because I love Linux.

It goes on and on, and we’re always going to do that, because the app isn’t very useful if it doesn’t integrate well with your computer.

But the buttons are not NSbutton And that’s where I’m just – I don’t really care anymore. I wanna build a great product, with great features, and I think that’s true for all of us.

The developers go into detail about the amount of work they’ve had to do to make the next version of 1Password feel at least somewhat at home on the Mac, as far as their definition of that goes. What they don’t go into detail on is how 1Password will keep up to date on the Mac as those custom details change and start to look and behave not just out of place, but out of date. When the Mac UI changes, Mac apps that have integrated with the native AppKit framework inherit the new look and functionality mostly “for free”. The work that AgileBits is putting into reimplementing AppKit functionality is going to have to be maintained and updated constantly.

Seems to me that they could have saved themselves the work and updated their existing 1Password 7 codebase, but only AgileBits knows for sure.

To be fair, Apple isn’t helping themselves much here. Pushing out their own apps that don’t adhere to their own HIG only encourages third-party developers to continue to use UI paradigms and design languages created for themselves, not the user.

I think 1Password 8’s release will mark the start of a sad chapter in the state of the Mac. Paradoxically, it comes at a time when the Mac has never been stronger, when the hardware has never been better, and when Apple is at the top of their game. Even with all that being true, the actual user experience of using a Mac with popular third-party software is going to be worse in 2022 than it was in 2006.

Other Notable Quotes

Source

But even on the desktop apps and mobile apps, we had web views, we had web-based integrations. And in fact, the most important part of our desktop app, which people interact with every day, has always been web-based and very heavily so. And that of course is the browser extension.

[16:16] So it’s interesting to see people think of what we’re doing as sort of like a move, or a shift, when really it’s just taking something we’ve always cared about deeply and continuing to use it in our product for the things that appeal to us about it.

Source

So one thing we’re very excited about with 8 is actually making it so that you do interact with all of our service and our apps, not just the command backslash as useful as it is. So that’s really on our minds.

Source

We wanted to make sure that we were building a product that was modern and discoverable in this day and age. And we had a lot of problems there, whether you were on a Mac and switched to Windows; at the time we didn’t even have a Linux client… There were parts of 1Password that felt, looked and acted differently. And a lot of that is because of our origin story. We had two founders that started this company over 15 years ago, they built the first Mac app, and essentially built the company from the ground up that way… And when the time came to add Windows, they just hired someone to write a Windows app. They joined the company, started building up a small team; same for Android, started with one person…

Source

We’re actually very interested in driving this approach of like write a cross-platform app using web technologies, because it’s awesome. You get to dictate your own design language.

Source

I’m not 100% – I’m still waiting to see, is there another Electron app that does unlocking with Apple Watch? We might be the only one; I haven’t found another one. But we spent a heck of a lot of effort into the actually making our Mac app as good in 1Password 8 as 1Password 7.

One of the things you brought up was the permissions dialogue not being in a separate window; we actually at one point had the app do that. That is something you can absolutely do; that’s not an Electron feature, or a problem with Electron that prevents you from having multiple windows. We made a conscious design choice to bring the 1Password design language into these new apps.

It’s been a busy couple weeks in the Mac community. From horrendously serious topics like Apple taking on child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by scanning photos uploaded to iCloud to drastically less serious topics like an upcoming OmniFocus redesign and 1Password switching to Electron. But first, a follow up to Switcher Season 2021.

After seriously considering my motivations I’ve come to the decision to stick with the Mac and my Apple gear for the foreseeable future. It would be a massive and expensive effort to replace everything, even piecemealing it one bit at a time, and it would disrupt my life and my families lives. Like I said before, when Apple’s devices work as advertised it’s like pulling a bit of the future down into the present. And that’s what I want, I want to live in that optimistic, solarpunk future. Apple has, so far, done well with their green initiatives, like building Macs out of recycled iPhones, and running all their data centers off of renewable energy. Apple is massive now, but at their core I think they still want to do the right thing. Not that they always get it right, or that they always wind up on the right side of a debate, but over all I think I can still support the company because they are still, in general, working towards being a force for good in the world. We need more of that.

Of course, being one of the biggest companies in the world comes with additional scrutiny and responsibility. One of those is doing their part to stop the spread of CSAM, while at the same time protecting the privacy of their customers. I won’t get into it too much here, other than to say I think they could do more and it’d be fine. Otherwise I’ll just point you to John Gruber’s excellent take on the matter. Also, if this is a necessary step to end-to-end encryption for iCloud Documents, I’m all for it.

On a much, much lighter note, I’ve been using the new OmniFocus for iOS beta, and while it’s not nearly as bad as what’s going on with 1Password I’m not sure I’ll be upgrading. After using the beta for a while now, I can’t imagine I’ll stick with OmniFocus if they don’t make some significant changes to the UI before they ship. Which is sad, because I’ve been an OmniFocus user for a long time. I suppose I could see how long I can stick with v3, but it probably won’t be long.

I really miss the main dashboard screen, and how large the touch targets are in v3. In v4 I find the outline to be a big step back in usability and just how pleasant the application is to use. The checkboxes are too small, they are on the wrong side, the Forecast view doesn’t have the week calendar at the top, and I can’t swipe to go back to the dashboard. Instead I’ve got to find that little outline button on the bottom left, or just know that you can tap on the name of the perspective.

Some folks might really love how this works, but it’s not for me. The Omni group is using SwiftUI to build a single cross-platform application, and I suppose we should just be grateful they aren’t switching to Electron.

Because that’s exactly what 1Password is doing. I registered for 1Password Early Access and downloaded the new version and it’s like it was built by an entirely different company. ⌘ \ is no longer the default keyboard shortcut, which is crazy because they had t-shirts made for it.

I’ve been a supporter and advocate for 1Password for years. I led my team to use it at work in 2016 because I’d been using it and loving it since it was 1Passwd. It’s a web app in a frame. v7 was a best in class, completely solid Mac experience. v8 I wouldn’t give a second thought to if I wasn’t already so invested in the app. I know the AgileBits team gave this a lot of thought, but my opinion is that this is a mistake.

Man, AgileBits used to be such a great little indie Mac company, till they tasted that sweet, sweet enterprise money, then they took millions in investment funding.

One of the founders made a good argument for why they eventually decided to go this route:

@shepstl There is a bit of a truth here. I think the business/enterprise side is important for us.

You can see over that over the past few years every major vendor — Google, Apple, Microsoft have built their own password manager. Once something becomes essential, there will be a free option. Remember when Netscape used to sell the web browser and now it is something that we all expect to be free?

If we want to survive, we have to provide something more. Support for businesses (and families!) is a big part of it.

Now, both Dave and I are still using 1Password everyday. We are Mac users and we want to have the best experience for ourselves.

We agonized over the Electron choice and how it will be received by the community. Yesterday wasn’t easy and some of the feedback did hit our team pretty hard. I still think/hope we could pull it off and people will come around 🤞 I know I did — while there is still work that needs to be done, I can’t imagine using the old app today.

I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand. I think they could have continued to ship a first-class native citizen on each platform without resorting to Electron, but that’s the choice they made.

So where does this leave me? The thing is, all of these changes are happening at a time when Apple is also making pointed improvements to their native apps. Reminders is getting pretty good in the next version, it’ll support tags and smart lists that I could configure to be similar to Perspectives in OmniFocus. There’s also enhancements to the built-in password manager in Safari, most notably support for MFA, that make it an attractive native option. It won’t be nearly as full-featured as 1Password, just like Reminders will never be OmniFocus, but for my personal use case, maybe 80% is good enough. That, and Reminders deep integration into the Apple ecosystem will probably be what it takes for me to move.

I’m always looking for ways to simplify, reduce. To use less and do more. OmniFocus and 1Password are just reminding me to take a close look and see if I really need them in my life or not. I’m suspecting in the next couple of months I’ll wind up with not.

Years ago Alex Payne wrote “Switching Season”, about how he thought about switching from Mac to Linux. I know how he feels. From time to time I get the idea in my head that I’d like to move away from all things Apple and diversify my investment in technology. This normally manifests itself when I’m in the market for a new computer (which I am), and often in the form of a Unix workstation on my desk. The past few days I’ve been eyeing the System 76 Thelio.

To be accurate, this is not a “Unix” workstation, since it ships running a weird version of Ubuntu Linux. I wouldn’t run Linux on it though, I’d run a minimal install of FreeBSD combined with the XMonad tiling window manager. Inside XMonad I’d have half the screen taken up by Firefox, and the other half be a terminal, most likely split with tmux. I could keep Vim handy for running Vimwiki and all my other text editing needs, play music in cmus, keep up to date with the news with newsboat, and handle email with mutt.

When I did need Linux or Windows for whatever reason, I’d keep a virtual machine image handy to spin up in bhyve.

It could be a quiet, extremely focused work environment. Zero alerts, no notifications, no extraneous applications to pull me away from what I’m doing.

But… I’d also be closing the door on some future possibilities. I’ve been working on a new Mac app for bookmarking lately, and it’s actually very close to being ready for the App Store. A few things left undone yet, and it’s a little buggy in places, but overall it’s getting close. With my focused Unix workstation I’d be saying to myself “this part of your life is over.” And, that’s hard to say because the Mac and I go way back.

Apple was on the rebound when I bought my first Mac in 2003 or so, but I’d been eyeing them for years from overseas. Very similar to how I’ve been eyeing the System76 box, come to think of it. They were on the rebound, but they still weren’t anything close to what they are now. They were still the scrappy underdog, not literally the world’s most valuable company. The community around the Mac was a lot of fun, we kept getting blown away by the amazing technology that came out of Cupertino.

Following Apple as a hobby has been a spark of joy for many years. The thing is though, as they’ve grown and focused more on services and integrating themselves deeper and deeper into my everyday life, I’ve stared to feel a little uncomfortable. Like maybe I’m not completely ok with the world’s biggest company being my desktop computer, my laptop computer, my phone, my watch, my tv box, my workout companion, my cloud storage, my email, my music, my photos, my headphones, my speakers. So much.

There’s still enough rebel in me that wants to root for the underdog. The little guy trying to do the right thing. System76 ticks the right boxes for me. Aesthetically pleasing design, small company, manufacturing in the US. If I were to do this, I’d eventually want to wean myself off the rest of the Apple ecosystem. Replace my Apple Watch with a Garmin Forerunner. Replace my iPhone with a Light Phone II and a Kobo ereader. Replace the Apple TVs with Rokus. Replace my HomePods with a couple more Sonos speakers. It’d be a long process.

And honestly, it’s a process that I’m not sure I’m up for. Especially when living in the Apple ecosystem is so good. There are tangible benefits from living inside Apple’s walled garden, and when it all works together it really feels like living in the future. And that’s when I love it all again. Despite Apple’s many faults, there’s still just nothing better out there.

The System76 box would be super cool, but I’d be stuck on the Intel platform while Apple speeds ahead with the M1. I’d have to abandon any biometric authentication and go back to typing my password for everything. What I think I’d miss the most though is the trackpad. I’ve had a Magic Trackpad for a few years now and I can’t imagine going back to a mouse. Multitouch is a revelation on any platform its used on, and the Mac is no different. It’s good for RSI issues, it’s amazing for gestures, and I love being able to long-click on words to get their definition. Of course, with an XMonad setup I wouldn’t be using the mouse much, but I’d still need it for navigating the web and the odd task in the window environment.

I don’t want my choice of computer to be making some kind of weird political or lifestyle statement, but then again, when you vote with your wallet what else can it be? I wish Apple had never become the behemoth that it is today, but it still makes the best computers.

Maybe I’m talking myself into that workstation, maybe I’m talking myself out of it. I honestly haven’t decided yet.

Bare Bones released the new version of BBEdit recently and it’s packed with features that teach the old dog some modern IDE tricks. When programming I mainly work in Python these days, so I obviously wanted to take advantage of BBEdit’s new Langage Server Protocol support. This lets BBEdit start a daemon for you in the background that you install separately, and the daemon takes care of things like code completion, error highlighting, and documentation. However, how to set this up specifically for Python development was a bit unclear to me. Here’s how I got it working.

First, and you’ve probably already got this setup, install python3 with Homebrew and use it to install a virtual environment.

brew install python3python3 -m venv ~/Unix/env/lsp

Next, activate the new virtual environment and install the Jedi Language Server. Once installed, copy the full path to the executable:

source ~/Unix/env/lsp/bin/activate pip install -U jedi-language-serverwhich jedi-language-server | pbcopy

Finally, open the preferences for BBEdit, find the Languages section, and towards the botton add a Language-specific setting for Python. Under the Server tab, make sure you’ve checked the box to “Enable language server”, and paste the path copied from the previous command.

If BBEdit finds the executable at the path, there will be a green dot at the bottom labeled “Ready to start server”. Otherwise, you’ll see a red dot that says “absolute command path not found”. If you see that make sure the commands above completed successfully.

Now, whenever you open a Python file BBEdit will automatically start the LSP daemon in the background and start working it’s magic.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of chatting with David Sparks about an upcoming Field Guide he’s doing on DEVONthink. He had asked for power users of the app, and given that I’ve been going back and forth with it for years I sent him a screenshot and let him know I’d be happy to help. He responded and here we are. If you’ve ever listened to David on one of his podcasts, he’s just as personable and friendly speaking with him one on one.

I’m looking forward to the new Field Guide. My part in it will be as a kind of power user addendum where a few existing users give a glimpse into what their setup looks like. I hope David can get something useful out of my rambling, overall I felt like I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to say about DEVONthink. I didn’t get into the custom CSS for Markdown display, or the Sorter menu extra, or how you can import a webpage from Safari as Markdown and strip all the adds and other junk out of it. I didn’t get into backup and restores of the databases, or my Take Note hotkey (^space), or how I integrate RSS into my research database to stay on top of new developments in AWS. Ah well, there’s only so much you can do in 15-20 minutes. I’m sure David already covered all of this in his Field Guide anyway.

Also, since DEVONthink is so good at search and discovering additional data, I closed all but my research database during the recording so I didn’t accidentally surface any proprietary or personal information. One of the biggest reasons I use DEVONthink is because it can keep all my personal data private and secure between machines, but that wouldn’t do much good if I just showed the world my bank account numbers or details about our AWS environment in a search result.

Hopefully David can work some magic in editing. If I’m honest I’m a little nervous about how my section is going to turn out, or if it’ll be included at all. Overall though, I think I’ll be in good company, and that the Field Guide is going to be a great success. I’ve got a lot more to say, maybe I should revisit that podcast idea I’ve had for a while. No matter how my part tuns out, it was great to talk to someone who’s work I’ve been following online for years. David’s work with OmniFocus and Paperless have been foundational, and I hope he has the same success with DEVONthink in the upcoming months.

I’m writing a fairly large document for internal use at work, and instead of using something like Word I’ve generated a bunch of markdown files that I’m stringing together with the excellent Pandoc to generate a very nice PDF file with LaTeX. The resulting PDF is beautifully formatted, thanks to the Eisvogel template. A key part of the PDF is a functional table of contents outline in the sidebar of Preview, and the ability to link to different parts of the PDF from arbitrary text.

Pandoc generates header identifiers for each section of the document automatically, which you can use as normal markdown-formatted links. The documentation states:

A header without an explicitly specified identifier will be automatically assigned a unique identifier based on the header text. To derive the identifier from the header text,

• Remove all formatting, links, etc.
• Remove all footnotes.
• Remove all punctuation, except underscores, hyphens, and periods.
• Replace all spaces and newlines with hyphens.
• Convert all alphabetic characters to lowercase.
• Remove everything up to the first letter (identifiers may not begin with a number or punctuation mark).If nothing is left after this, use the identifier section.

So, the header Header identifiers in HTML becomes #header-identifiers-in-html. I did this manually exactly once before I was certain that it was going to be far too tedius and something that could be easily solved by awk, or so I thought.

It turns out that the BSD version of awk included with macOS doesn’t support the flag needed to convert to lowercase, so instead I grabbed a quick perl command and sandwiched it between two awk commands:

sed s/\ /-/g | perl -p -e 'tr/A-Z/a-z/' | sed s/^/\#/g

Then all I needed to do was drop that in a file with a shebang header and mark it executable, move the file into BBEdit’s “Text Filters” folder and it was made available to BBEdit from the Text menu. Now I just highlight some text I want to format as a link, and select the menu option.

I suppose I could get even fancier and muck with the clipboard, and work all the other Pandoc rules into the script, but I imagine this will take care of %95 of my use cases for what I’m doing. That’s more than enough.