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A few more photos of the #EdwardFire in Orland, CA today. Fortunately our house was never in danger. Sad that this fire was likely preventable with mere common sense about mowing. A few homes were lost. #EFire
I do not love it when Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 inexplicably drops my entire approach flight plan and drives me direct to the arrival airport. Keeps me on alert, that’s for sure. I’m pretty close to buying X-Plane. Can’t wait for X-Plane 12 early access.
Baby “Bacon” variety avocados! Latest date I’ve seen berries on this tree. Let’s see if they’ll survive summer and winter. 🌱🌳
Here’s a magenta flower from one of our cultivated California Wild Roses.
Now in bloom in our backyard: cultivated California Wild Roses (pic 1) and Elderberry (2). Still gorging themselves: ladybugs. Everywhere in our front yard. They’re just decimating aphids. Ladybugs particularly love coyote bush (3) and sage.
Latest Shortcuts for macOS Has Vast Improvements
What's new in Shortcuts in iOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3:
“End If” and “End Repeat” can now be dragged in the Shortcuts editor
That’s a big deal. I’ve abandoned attempts at refactoring shortcuts solely because I couldn’t move entire blocks of If statements.
“Combine Images” no longer produces empty images on macOS
I ran into this bug right away and couldn’t believe it.
The "Shortcuts Events" app, which provides scripting functionality for Shortcuts on macOS, no longer needs to be opened manually before it can be used from scripts
This is potentially a big deal? I don’t know enough about how Shortcuts works but I’ve run into many problems running Shortcuts via apps like Hazel, and I bet some of them were because of the above issue they resolved.
This is a great update.
Here goes my second brew - a simple Bavarian Hefeweizen. With way warmer than normal temperatures I figure our house will be close to or within the ideal fermentation temperature range. 🤞
macOS Shortcuts, Logger for Shortcuts, Shortcuts Temporary Files, and Hazel
Logger for Shortcuts provided me exactly the information to figure out how to get Hazel to properly use a Shortcut against a file. Now I can have Hazel run a specific Shortcut against a file whenever a new file shows up.
Background: for some reason when Hazel starts a Shortcut, the Shortcut operates on a copy of the file in a temporary folder. My programmer brain assumed that the Shortcut Input would be immutable. Nope. Turns out Shortcut Input is a temporary file that all Shortcut operations (like exiftool) must then run against. So while you think you’ve been working on a specific file in a specific folder, Shortcuts has been working on a copy of it all along in a temporary folder. Thus you must output the Shortcut Input to provide the file you’ve been modifying (in this case with exiftool). It’s very frustrating for Shortcuts to override paths with its own temporary paths but thanks to Logger for Shortcuts I quickly figured out this vexing issue. Already the app is worth $9.99 because now I’ve got the time saving Hazel ruleset I always wanted.
Here’s the Hazel embedded Apple Script I have to run to make a Shortcut with a file output (Shortcut Input (gah)) to work. I suppose now that I’ve fixed the Shortcuts issue this could now be more simply done… but it works (I’ve never had any success with running Hazel’s built in Shortcuts capability and right now it can’t even list the available Shortcuts):
do shell script “shortcuts run ’Shortcut Name Modified for use with Hazel’ -i ” & quoted form of POSIX path of theFile & “ -o ” & quoted form of POSIX path of theFile
Logger for Shortcuts output clearly showing me the ridiculous temporary folder Shortcuts is using to work on Shortcut Input:
I’ve been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on the Xbox Series S. I’m surprised at how it keeps my mind off everything and on a passion of mine and so it really helps my anxiety. Last time I played was w/ FS 98. This is amazing but not without some bizarre issues.
More Point Reyes National Seashore photos from last Monday: bumble hovering near a flower, elk, and another coyote.
Yesterday, at Point Reyes National Seashore on the Tomales Point Trail, this hunting coyote could have been showing off. The coyote didn’t catch anything.
The freeze we got a few weeks ago, down to 28°F, did no clear harm to our plants. Mandarin, Valencia, Meyer lemon, & avocado flowers fine. Our nectarine is setting fruit as shown by this cute little green ovary. And ladybugs are all over our California wild roses 🌱🌳
We’re slowly preparing the backyard crop rows for planting. We just pulled all the weeds & bolting cilantro out to the compost pile. Saturday we enjoyed a fresh fennel salad. Next weekend we’ll test the drip tape, make any repairs, remove cat poop 🙄, and then add compost. 🌱
Our Nectarine is very close to blooming. This is its second year in the ground here. 🌱🌳
Almond bloom season is already upon us 😒. You can’t avoid it in most of California.
Thanks to a Honeywell leak detector, at 22:30 we woke to an extraordinarily loud beeping from under the sink & found there a fresh leak. Could have got worse fast. It’s leaking at the braided hose & coupling. That hose is integrated -not replaceable without a new faucet.
Dynamic Range Priority Added to "What was my Fujifilm Recipe?" macOS 12 Shortcut
I’ve updated my “What was my Fujifilm Recipe?” macOS 12 Shortcut. It now includes support for Dynamic Range Priority. The “Scanned Superia” recipe from fujixweekly.com is added. The Shortcut now uses SHA1 hashing, as on modern processors it is much faster than MD5 (Intel and M1 Macs). I removed Grain since I often override it and it doesn’t seem important to ID recipes. Finally, I prefixed “Saturation " to the saturation keyword so that it is clear as to what that keyword refers to.
You can get more information at the Shortcut’s page or grab the Shortcut here. Remember, this requires a Mac with exiftool to be available and in your path (or you can manually hardcode the path in the Shortcut).
Managing Anxiety
My doctor increased my dose of an anxiety med. Took three weeks to feel the effects of that but once again I don’t feel like I’m racing against time when doing a hobby. Or in full flight mode when making calls. My heart doesn’t pound as hard and as long when starting work. HeartWatch, with its history & charts, confirms I’m not imagining my improvement. I’m given more headroom to realize I’m anxious and can mentally manage it better to avoid panic. Hooray for medicine.
macOS Shortcut: What's my Fujifilm Focal Length?
Since I now have the TCL-X100II attachment and I make ample use of the Digital Teleconverter feature, I made a quick macOS Shortcut to add Fujifilm Effective Focal Length as a metadata Keyword. This Shortcut requires exiftool in your path. It’s a modified version of What’s My Fujifilm Recipe? Shortcut.
This is only tested on straight out of the camera JPEGs. I added it to my Batch Processor shortcut that also runs What’s My Fujifilm Recipe? Shortcut(example of that is linked to on that Shortcut page).
So photos imported into macOS Photos can now have the effective focal length as a Keyword. That’s very useful as I can search for it or make Smart Albums with it.
This Shortcut still has to output exiftool’s results to a temporary file as it errors on me if I try to read the results from only console (aka Shell Script Result).
Get the Shortcut: What’s my Fujifilm Focal Length? Shortcut
Today I had to remove a trespassing & bird harassing “Happy Birthday To You” balloon from our mandarin tree and then dispose of it. A birthday card can say as much. 🙄
