Writing about my work shift scheduling shortcut reminded me that I used to use another shortcut on a weekly basis in the workplace.

Since I get paper paychecks with no digital paper trail, I wanted to be able to easily scan a copy the paystub into my Finances folder. Doing so was surprisingly tricky seeing as Apple’s own ‘Scan Document’ action in Shortcuts doesn’t allow you to do much with that scanned item as a variable. Instead, I used an action provided by the (aptly named) Actions app that fills the gap by sending the scan to the clipboard to be used elsewhere in the shortcut. Instead the end, I got the shortcut to open to the system file scanner to scan my paystub, automatically rename the file to my preferred naming scheme with current date, and save it to my Finances → Paystubs folder in iCloud Drive.

It worked well enough, save for the fact that you had to download that Actions app and sometimes the scanning action would flake out and demand another go. In fact, the shortcut was helpful enough that I was getting ready to add it to the HeyDingus Libary.

Then came along Simple Scan. This app by Greg Pierce (maker of Drafts, in which I’m writing this very blog post) was designed to fill this exactly use case: quickly scan something with the system scanner and send it elsewhere. Sure, you could do all of this within the Files app, but it’s cumbersome there and not nearly as versatile.

Long story short, I tried out Simple Scan during its TestFlight beta period, and its pretty much immediately replaced my custom shortcut. The scanner is fast and reliable, and Greg built in a bunch of power automation options including defining a naming scheme and specific destination. You can even set up a whole host of those custom automations — along with the built in ones for Messages, Files, Email, Photos and Share Sheet — to use at will. I’ve got one for my paystubs of course, and another to send random scans to my generic Scans folder.

One of my favorite features is that those automations show up as quick actions when you search the app’s name in Spotlight or when doing a long-press on the app’s icon. With one tap I can start the scan and know it’s going to end up in the right place. You can also choose to get either a JPEG image, or just recognized text out of a scan, rather than a PDF. It’s so handy.

Simple Scan fills a specific need and does it so well that I don’t even mind paying for it, despite the fact that I had already built my own free solution. I’m pretty sure you can use it for free under some limitations, but an annual subscription of $5 gets you full access. You can also do a lifetime purchase of $20 and get everything without a subscription (that’s what I did). If you want to try out my old shortcut, here’s a link to its unmaintained version.

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This is post #29/31 for Blaugust 2024.

Apps Shortcuts Blaugust

You know me, I’m always up for spending an hour to make a shortcut that’ll save a few minutes each week. In this case, I grew tired of duplicating and dragging around my work calendar events each time the schedule came out. Now, with just a couple of taps, my whole week’s work of shifts get added to my calendar.

My workplace is a little behind the times. We write out our time cards by hands. We receive paper paychecks in lieu of any direct deposit. And our work schedule is simply a paper grid with our names and which days we’re supposed to come in written on it, and then a picture of it is emailed to us the weekend before. What can I say? My boss has been doing it this way for 40 years and I don’t expect him to give up his paper and pencil anytime soon. But it means for me to get my shifts onto my calendar, I used to have to flip-flop between my email app with the picture of the schedule open and Fantastical where I’d duplicate an older event (with the right title, location, and time frame set) and change its date for each of the new ones. Not totally onerous, but also not super easy.

Shortcuts makes this process super easy.

Get the shortcut →

My goal was to be able to just select which days of the week I was scheduled to work and have the events appear on the correct calendar with all the right details. And by using a bit of date math, I got it working perfectly.

It starts by asking which day the work schedule starts on. Our calendar runs Monday to Sunday (as all good calendars should), so I select the upcoming Monday. Or, if by some miracle we get our schedule more than a week out, I’ll select whatever Monday starts the week of shifts.

Next, I select from a list of each day of the week which days I’m scheduled to work. The list comes from a ‘Dictionary’ action in which I’ve defined how many days after Monday each it. For example, Tuesday is one day past Monday, and Friday is four days after.

Finally, using a ‘Repeat With Each’ block, I add the number of days past Monday to the start date I initially chose and add each shift with a ‘Add New Event’ action that’s pre-defined with the location, start and end times, and title. All those events get added to my Work calendar that’s shared with my wife.

Here’s what it looks like:

If you need to schedule events that are mostly constant, but just their days of the week change, I encourage you to download and customize the shortcut to fit your needs. It certainly saves me hassle and time, makes me less error prone, and keeps our family on the same page.

Get the shortcut →

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This is post #28/31 for Blaugust 2024.

Shortcuts Blaugust

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

I’m off to Ohio for a wedding this weekend, so (perhaps for the first time ever) you’re getting an issue of 7 Things early!

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1️⃣ MereCivilian turned a 13-year-old iPad 2 into $1000 toward a brand-new Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Wow! [🔗 merecivilian.com]

2️⃣ Nick Heer makes the case that iOS has gotten a bit harder to use with a handful of examples related to the Dynamic Island, Lock Screen, and gestures. [🔗 pxlnv.com]

3️⃣ I wholeheartedly agree with this short post from Manu Moreale. Having links to your social profiles on your website is great, but you really really should have an email address there. It’s the most universal way of sending a message to someone. [🔗 manuelmoreale.com]

4️⃣ Can you believe that it’s been 15 whole years since the greatest software update of all time was released? 😏 I kid, but it really has been that long since Mac OS X Snow Leopard came out, and BasicAppleGuy has a short retrospective and fantastic up-res’ed versions of its iconic desktop wallpapers. [🔗 basicappleguy.com]

5️⃣ Remember that One Million Checkboxes website that was up for a couple of weeks? Its author just wrote up this wild story about how teens worked out how to coordinate to send secret messages, draw, and even make animations with it. So cool! [🔗 eieio.games]

6️⃣ This OP3 thing that helps you track downloads on your podcast even if the host doesn’t have it built in (like Micro.blog) seems pretty neat! If I ever start a show, I’ll have to remember it. [🔗 chrisenns.com]

7️⃣ Jonathan Ruiz took an idea shared by Federico Viticci on Connected and ran with it to develop a fully-fledged app that he just released on the App Store. It’s, fittingly, called Ticci Tabs and is a way to easily browse your favorite 6 or 7 websites. I’m planning on using it for the publications I subscribe to, and a few other sites that I just really like their designs. 🔗 thermalcorner.net

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🔗 Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

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This is post #27/31 for Blaugust 2024.

7 Things

My barging in (and not so subtle attempt to someday be a guest) on “the tech podcast where our favorite muppet is The Count.”

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Dan Moren: Do you buy books from Apple Books and read on your iPhone or iPad, and if not, how do you do most of your reading?

While my Apple Books library has 100 or so titles in it, I’ve only purchased a small handful of them there. The others I’ve sideloaded as ePubs or PDFs. And even with that many things in the library, it’s quite rare that I actually read in Apple Books either. Not that it’s a bad app, I just always seem to find myself in other apps when reading on my phone or iPad. Namely in Reeder where I browse my RSS feeds and save articles and blog posts for later.

If I’m reading an actual (e)book, it’s probably happening on my Kobo, or in the Kobo or Kindle apps on my iPhone. I’ll also give a shoutout to Libby, the app where you can check out ebooks and audiobooks from your local library(s) for free. It’s got a great interface on its own if you don’t want to send those titles to a Kobo or Kindle device.

Oh how I wish Apple would make the eReader of our dreams. But then again, it’d probably only allow you read things purchased from the Apple Book Store and I have many titles purchased elsewhere…so maybe not. I’m coming around to the idea that what I actually desire is a Boox eReader, on which I can install all my reading apps. But we’ll see.

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Karissa Bell: Do you have any gadgets that are specifically for your pets?

As my wife and I have decided not to have human children, our fur babies (cat, dog, and turtle) get all our misplaced offspring love. Which also means more things than they really need.

As far as gadgets go, the dog has an AirTag sealed in a weatherproof case on his collar (which works great), a mobile and adjustable electronic fence/coller (also great and a real eliminator of stress), and a small light-up and self-moving ball that he stole from the cat (not as great, but still kind cool).

The turtle enjoys his lights, heat rock, and mister all being controlled on a schedule with an Apple Home-compatible power strip.

The cat has received many toys over the years, but none have ever retained his interest for very long. Especially not when compared to cardboard boxes and bread ties. For several years we did have a PetCube camera to check on him when we weren’t home. It allowed us to talk through its speaker with an app and even shine a laser around to play remotely. But when it died we decided it wasn’t worth replacing. Don’t tell the criminals, but we’re not keen on cameras inside our home.

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Mikah Sargent: Do you use any of the accessibility features on your smartphone regularly?

Oh, I’m so glad you asked this question! It gives me the opportunity to make a plug for my clever little text-to-speech setup.

For nearly a year I’ve been very happy with using the ‘Speak Screen’ feature in Accessibility. As you might expect, when you start ‘Speak Screen’, it reads aloud all the text on screen with your chosen system voice. I use the traditional Siri voice (Siri Voice 4), but sped up slightly to my liking. I’ve also customized the experience in a couple of ways to optimize it for listening to longer articles, emails, and more in Reeder, Safari, Spark, or any other app.

First, I turned on the ‘Highlight Content’ option, which highlights both the paragraph and specific word being spoken in different colors. It helps me keep track of my pace in an article, and, I think, retain what I’m reading even better.

Second, I set ‘Speak Screen’ to start whenever I triple-click the side button of my phone (or three-finger swipe down from the top of the screen). I love using this physical interaction to start a narration of anything I’m reading, even if the app doesn’t have a good text-to-speech feature.

If you want to know more or see screenshots, I’ve detailed my setup in full in this blog post. Give it a shot!

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Casey Liss: Let’s say you have a magic wand and you can make magic happen (engineering be darned), what feature would you add or remove from any of your technology products?

This is an easy one. I would simply wish for all the wishes I’ve catalogued for my Apple stuff here to come true!

Oh, I can only choose one?

I guess I’ll have to go with the one at the top of the list, no matter how insignificant it seems. And that’s for Apple to update their compact Magic Keyboard with Touch ID to charge with USB-C and finally offer it in the slick silver frame with black keys that I’ve been lusting after for…1726 days.

That would make me smile.

(Dan’s alternative app installation, Karissa’s perfect robot drivers, Mikah’s elimination of DRM, and Casey’s next-gen battery life are all excellent options too.)

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Bonus Topic: Who is your favorite Muppet?

[Looks around sheepishly] I actually don’t have any special affinity for The Muppets. I don’t remember watching it regularly growing up, so my only exposure was occasionally watching it at school when we had a substitute teacher.

That said, I think most fondly of Bert and Ernie, so I’m picking them as a pair.

⏰⏰⏰

Overtime Topic: What is the first app you ever downloaded, and what is the oldest download that you still have on your phone?

It looks like the app I downloaded first on August 22, 2008 was a Newton’s Cradle app. I have only a vague recollection of this app, but I assume it used the accelerometer of the iPhone to simulate swinging a Newton’s Cradle. It’s no longer available to download.

My second app that same day was Wikipanion, a Wikipedia client, and you can still download it today — although I don’t have it on my phone any longer.

My earliest downloaded apps that I still have on my phone today are Shazam (April 10, 2009), Facebook (August 15, 2009) and Mactracker (September 9, 2009).

What a trip down memory lane!

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Until next time, watch what you say, and keep watching the clock. Bye everybody!

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This is post #26/31 for Blaugust 2024.

Crashing Clockwise Blaugust

It’s time to jump aboard another blogging fad from those trendy guys over on Hemispheric Views. Oh, what’s that? I’m late? Shoot, I guess it was waaay back in May that Martin, Andrew and Jason spoke about their perfect albums. And then Robb, of course, put together an amazing cover flow-inspired mini site to catalog all the albums that listeners sent in. Well, I want mine in that hall of glory!

But what constitutes a “perfect album”? Here’s the prompt that Jason posed to his co-hosts:

Pick in your mind a perfect album. And I think it’s mostly open to interpretation, but I’m kind of thinking an album that you would say you could just start from beginning, let it run all the way through, without skipping songs, without moving around, just front to back and just sit there and do nothing else and just listen to that whole album.

What would that album be?

There are a handful of albums in my library that fit this description, but only one immediately jumped to mind. And it was the very first entry in my 52 Albums project (that’s been on hiatus but will come back, I swear) this year: ~How I’m Feeling~ by Lauv (2020)

(And just look at that album cover! Iconic.)

Here’s how I described it for the 52 Albums project:

It’s only been out for three years, but ~How I’m Feeling~ has to be one of my most-played albums of all-time. Lauv’s crystal-clear vocals ring true and carry forth all the emotion you’d expect from an album with such a title. It’s catchy from start to finish. It’s well-produced, yet raw. It makes me feel things. I love it.

Based on its themes around loneliness, depression, and self-reflection, you could be excused for thinking this was a COVID album, released by someone struggling through the effects lockdown. In fact, it was released on March 6, 2020 — just a few days before things “got real” here in the United States.

As you might expect for a “perfect album”, there are so many fantastic track in this record. A few standouts for me: “f**k, i’m lonely (feat. Anne-Marie)“,”Billy”, “Tell My Mama”, “Feelings”, “For Now”, “I’m So Tired…”, “Tatoos Together”, “Sad Forever”, “Modern Loneliness”, god there’s so many that I’m finding it difficult to not list every single song.

Whereas some albums, even great ones, can feel like they’re a mashup of all the individual songs an artist has come up with lately, ~How I’m Feeling~ has a distinct style and through-line of sound that carries from the first note to the final one. It makes my heart swell and constrict. It’s achingly beautiful. It captures raw emotion. It’s perfect.

If you give it a listen, I’d love to hear what you think.

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This is post #25/31 for Blaugust 2024.

Blaugust Podcasts Music

[Steps up onto soap box.]

I actively avoid using Snapchat because its notification system is so bad. It’s a messaging service that doesn’t show you your messages in the notification preview. Instead, you get bland and unhelpful notifications saying “John sent a message.” Great. I tap on the notification to go into the chat view and reply. Now that I have an active conversation going, my notifications get even worse because when my chat buddy starts to type, I get another notification saying that they’re typing. Not the little typing indicator within the chat view that every other messaging service does. No. A full-on notification sent to the lock screen that buzzes my phone or watch with the text “John is typing…”. I don’t want typing indicator notifications and I don’t need them, but hell if I can figure out how to turn them off without turning off all of Snapchat’s notifications altogether.

But Snapchat is primarily a photo messaging service, you might say. Surely those notifications are better. Nope. Instead of showing a photo preview in the notification, you just get a big red (or purple for videos) square image to let you know that you have a photo waiting for you. Super helpful, thanks.

I assume part of the problem is that Snapchat is erring on the side of privacy, seeing as part of their differentiation is that their messages are only temporary. Photos can often only be seen once and old chats fade from the conversation history (also super annoying, in my opinion). But that’s not how everyone uses Snapchat, and it sure would be great to have more user preferences that I could adjust for how I receive my messages.

(And while I’m on a rant about Snapchat, I’m also often put into a bad mood when I open their app because they’ve put the ‘My AI’ chat at the very top of my chat list. But it seems to load slower than all the other chats, so when I aim and tap on the top conversation in my list, at the last second the list refreshes and I find myself tapping into the AI chat instead. So I’m often extra annoyed.)

Snapchat, I’m sure you can do better. But since you don’t seem to want to, I’ll continue to prefer Instagram DMs, iMessages, Discord chats, and basically any other service that does their notifications in a sane way.

[Steps down from soap box.]

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This is post #24/31 for Blaugust 2024.

Blaugust Apps

I’ve gotta share with you one of the small changes that my wife and I made to our home that’s had a far outsized effect on our wellbeing. A life hack, if you will. It’s to turn off your microwave.

Well, not quite turn it off. But turn off two specific functions of it. First, turn off its clock display. Second, turn off its ability to beep.

Turn off the clock

Do you really need another appliance clock in your kitchen? The stove has one, your coffee maker has one. Even your fridge might have a clock on it these days. And that’s not even considering smart displays, the smartphone in your pocket, watch on your wrist, or actual clocks on the wall. If you can, I say choose only one to keep going. The rest, turn off if you can — and if you can’t, set it to a wildly different time and then never think about it again.

It’ll be at least one fewer clocks to set when the time springs forward and falls back each year. One fewer clock to dial in after a power outage. One fewer clock to try (and fail) to keep in sync with the countless other timekeepers in your house.

Personally, I like fewer things on my to-do list.

Turn off the sound

My wife gets all the credit for this one. For as long as we’ve been together, she’s loathed letting the microwave get to the end of its cooking cycle and sound the alarm that the food is done. The loud beeps that go on for way too long were personally offensive to her. So when she used the microwave, she stayed on alert waiting for the time to tick down toward zero, and then she’d manually stop it with one or two seconds remaining. All in the service of fewer shrill beeps.

When we eventually bought a new microwave in one of our moves, I happened to be riffling through the manual and saw a section about changing its options, including how to turn off the beeps. It made the microwave completely silent — no beeps when it’s done and no beeps on each press of its buttons. I earned some Good Husband Points that day as I banished those beeps from our life.

If you’re worried about forgetting about food in the microwave because there’s no alarm, well, that’s not been a problem for us. The only downside is that, although I eliminated having to reset its clock, now I need to go through those options to turn off the beeps after every power outage.

Give it a shot! A quick internet search for your microwave’s model name and the word “manual” should bring up a PDF of that instruction booklet you assuredly discarded long ago. But there could be some life-changing stuff in there.

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This is post #23/31 for Blaugust 2024.

Tips Blaugust

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Monday (this time). Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ If you read my site, I think there’s a good chance that you also listen to a Relay podcast. They just celebrated 10 years as a network, and this is a touching short film about the hosts and community during their 10th anniversary live show in London. [🔗 _IanOfEarth // youtube.com]

2️⃣ Everyone was right, the Twenty Thousand Hertz episodes exploring Apple’s iconic sound design are excellent. [🔗 The Sound of Apple // 20k.org]

3️⃣ Joshua Grady has a great tip for keeping web apps on your phone without needing to keep their icons on your Home Screen. [🔗 @joshuagrady // social.lol]

4️⃣ Yikes. Prepare yourself for the photorealistic AI generation revolution that’s coming. [🔗 @chriswelch // threads.net]

5️⃣ The thing that kept sticking out to me during this amazing video about the GameBoy’s engineering is that their pursuit of making it affordable led to it being more efficient, and vice versa. [🔗 Real Engineering // youtube.com]

6️⃣ I expect I’ll have more to say about it soon, but I’ve been binging through The Sharp End Podcast. One episode per month details with survivors of climbing accidents. They discuss what happened and what they’d do differently. I already consider it required listening for mountain go-ers. [🔗 Ashley // thesharpendpodcast.com]

7️⃣ I doubt I’ll ever tire of watching people pursue things at the ragged edge of their ability and come out on top. Tradprincess works an absolutely wicked looking roof crack, one that’s only been sent by a few very elite climbers. [🔗 Tradprincess // youtube.com]

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🔗 Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

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This is post #22/31 for Blaugust 2024.

7 Things Blaugust

Manu Moreale, writing on his blog about how the digital world often reflects the physical one:

There was a time when forums were the cities of the web but now are more like small towns. They’re the place where people congregate around shared interests. Spend enough time on one and you’ll get to know its citizens. New threads are infrequent, discussions are slow and can develop over months and years and it’s the refuge for those who are tired of the busyness of the big cities but still want some sense of belonging to a community.

And then there’re personal sites, the house in the forest. It’s the place people escape to when they’re tired of the noise. However personal sites are not isolated islands. They interact and stay connected, using links, mentions, emails, and RSS. It’s a part of the web that moves at a slower pace and that’s a feature, not a bug.

I really like this metaphor for your blog being your home in a connected neighborhood, and how the internet is a compelling digital manifestation of the community structures that humans have built in the physical world — but with improbable scales. Manu likens the large social networks like Facebook and X and TikTok to major cities, while I think of them as skyscrapers. Silos, if you will, reaching impossibly far into the sky. So many people crammed into one spot, sharing common utilities, and yet only a small percentage actually know each other or interact directly.

Mastodon might be more akin to mass transportation system. There are large instances and small ones — like planes, trains, or buses — but they all interact and intersect. It doesn’t really matter which one you use because the point isn’t which you’re on, the point is where you go and what you do with it. Sometimes you’ll chat with the people you’re sharing the bus with (the local timeline), but it’s kind of rare.

Blogs, as Manu noted, are the homes. We decorate them differently. We organize what’s inside them in different ways. You might like yours tidy, while mine is a bit of a mess. We stockpile posts and links, hobbies and projects, and then sometimes get a wild hair and clean house. Throw out the junk. Put a fresh coat of paint up and new photos on the wall. But despite how different each individual home is from one another, they all serve the same purpose. It’s where we live and can just be ourselves.

(Email is — of course — just like snail mail, spam and all.)

We can’t help but rebuild familiarity with our physical world into our digital ones.

This is post #21/31 for Blaugust 2024.

Blaugust Linked

After another (let’s be honest, expected) delay on my part, I’ve wrapped up my PenPal conversation with Steve Ledlow of Tangible Life. For our final exchange, Steve told me more about his kids’ dance competitions:

Dance comps for my older two girls are pretty competitive, but each one has some common measurement aspects.  Usually, they are doing both solos and duets, as well as some group numbers for their company dance group.  The ratings are usually done by a group of judges, and the styles range from lyrical, contemporary, tap, hip-hop, jazz, musical theatre, ballet and some that blend those.  It’s really an amazing world to have fallen into because of their passion for it.  I could never have imagined knowing so much about a world I’d never been exposed to in any form before them.  They have both done well, earning convention scholarships and some cash prizes when they place in the top few spots for their respective age groups and level of performance.  I’m so proud of them and watching them on stage these last few years is like nothing else.  Even when I’m unable to attend the events live, they usually have a stream and I’ll even pull over on the road on the way to something else to watch their performances via live stream.  There’s an overused and cliche phrase in the dance world of “my heart is on the stage”, but it is the truth when I’m watching them do their thing.

Now there’s a proud dad! 🙂 We also chatted about using Cotton Bureau to get t-shirt designs online for purchase, and how he’s having some trouble getting his first design approved. I hope that gets resolved soon so I can buy whatever he comes up with!

Read our entire conversation →

It was a pleasure to email with Steve, and I hope that thread stays open. And although I’m going to be taking a little break from the PenPals project for a month or two, if you’d like to be a part of it in the future, please do let me know!

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This is post #20/31 for Blaugust 2024.

PenPals Blaugust