Elle and I got back from Macstock 2019 (a.k.a. Macstock 5) on Monday. We stayed an extra day to spend some time in Woodstock, the wonderful little Illinois town that is host to Macstock (or close enough, it’s actually in nearby Crystal Lake).
macstock, personal
A while back I switched this site into high-privacy mode, switching to SSL and removing Google analytics and click-based advertising. I’ve been happy with the results, including using Fathom for analytics.
personal, privacy, security
The revamped Killotron Giveaway Robot functioned flawlessly all the way up until actually sending out the emails; it made me do the final stretch by hand, so we’ll call that “mostly” successful with a bit to fix for next time.
giveaway, keyboard
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! TextExpander from Smile continues to be my most-used app on my Mac, and it’s a huge timesaver on my iOS devices. It’s an honor to have Smile’s continued support!
snippet, sponsor, textexpander
I saw a great response to my post about MacSparky’s Keyboard Maestro Field Guide, and David was kind enough to provide some promo codes for a giveaway. If you haven’t checked it out, it contains everything you need to know to get started and dive deep with the Mac automation utility Keyboard Maestro.
automation, giveaway, keyboard, tutorial, video
After talking about it with the panel on a recent Mac Show appearance (pretty sure this part of the conversation happened during technical difficulties), I pulled out my Griffin PowerMate. The older USB one. While I did upgrade to the Bluetooth version, I still like the USB one better1. For various reasons, I’d replaced it with my Shuttle Xpress on my desk, but I found space to comfortably use both and set about re-configuring the actions on it.
automation, desktop, macos, office, ruby, scripting, shell
Happy Independence Day to my US readers. I’m not doing any parades, nor running any special discounts on my apps. Just a silly post.
keyboard, macos, quicktip, search
I started this post a while ago, before I realized that Timing would be sponsoring the blog later this month. So full disclosure, Timing is sponsoring the blog later this month. This is a handy trick either way, so I’ll go ahead and post it as… value added?
applescript, automator, bunch, developer, nvultra, scripting
Thanks to TableFlip for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week. This app is one of the coolest task-specific Markdown tools I’ve seen in years, making editing MultiMarkdown-style tables in your documents truly painless. I’m honored to have their support this week!
appstore, editor, macappstore, macos, markdown, sponsor, tools
As noted by Michael Tsai, in the Xcode 11 beta release notes, Apple notified us that scripting runtimes will be removed from “future versions” of macOS. I previously linked Dr. Drang’s thoughts on this as well:
automator, macos, python, ruby, scripting, shell, tools
