If you want to spend more time typing on your keyboard and less time fiddling with your mouse, I highly recommend Alfred as a file navigator and replacement for Spotlight.1 The latest Alfred update brings some minor improvements like placeholder variables for text expansion, new workflow actions, and some better file handling options. I’m not even really into building Alfred workflows and I still think it’s worth the money. I mostly use Keyboard Maestro for complex workflows on the Mac but if you want to build your own tricks in Alfred, it’s pretty easy.

It’s graduation season so I thought I’d share this simple Shortcut. It’s for those of us that accidentally switch to video mode on the iPhone camera when we are trying to just take a photo. I did this recently and ended up creating several one second videos when I thought I was just taking photos. The Shortcut shows a photo picker and then converts any selected video to a JPG. The first frame becomes the image, which may not be the best photo but at least it’s not a one second video.

If Memos isn’t your thing, I’d point out that TextGrabber 6 is a terrific OCR utility for iOS. A friend posted a recipe to Slack and it was a pain to grab the text on iOS. So I took a screenshot on my iPhone and opened the photo in TextGrabber. A second later I had the recipe as plain text ready to paste into my recipe manager.

As advertised on Daringfireball.net, Memos is kind of amazing. When it works. The iOS app scans your photo library (on the device, not on someone else’s computer) and recognizes text. You can then search for photos with text. Here’s an example I tried. I searched for “Fainting” I found a photo with a sign in the background. That’s Bladerunner level stuff. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work. The app reindexes at every launch and often does not find the same text later.

I keep staring at the header image on this site.

I stumbled on these two articles separately. On the surface they are unrelated. As a read them both it started to click that these have a lot of overlap. Zafu Labs, OKRs from a development team’s perspective: So it makes sense that when the OKRs come out for the quarter, we just take what we already have and figure out how to fit it into the OKRs. Steve Denning at Forbes, Understanding Fake Agile:

Maciej Cegłowski (of Pinboard fame) writes about the Sisyphean effort of trying to secure political campaigns against hacking. Very few people are aware that there is a big jump in safety between using a laptop and using a phone/iPad. Even I forget that little tidbit. iOS (and the App Store) dramatically reduce the risks of using a computer.

From Steve Dent at Engadget: “With … advances in our technology, the Classic adapter and app will no longer be supported after August 31, 2019,” the company wrote in a blog post. “After that date, the 1st and 2nd Gen adapters will no longer work.” The company is now steering owners toward the latest $100 LTE adapter that’s comes with an optional $5 per month Premium subscription. Seems like a pretty bold move for a pretty niche product category.

It was a relatively mild winter here in New England. We are now fully into the manic depressive spring of sun and cold rain. With my day job consuming my free time I’ve spent very little time on my hobbies, like Macdrifter. I also feel a creeping depression squeezing out room for small joys. I no longer enjoy most “tech” publications. Maybe it’s the predictable format, the trite repetitive opinions, or the meaningless financial analysis.

I missed the 50th anniversary of one of the pivotal books in my life. Slaughterhouse Five was published in 1969, just before I was born. I didn’t discover it until I was 16 years old. There was the time before I knew of Kurt Vonnegut and then there was the rest of my life. Today I can trace alot of my personal philosophy, cynism, and religion to Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five.