576: No Judgement Here

Stephen and David both mentioned that they could not get shell scripts to work with TextExpander on M1 Macs.

I have no idea why that would be, but shell scripts work fine in Typinator and Keyboard Maestro.

Seems like a TextExpander bug.

The episode doesn’t seem to be available on Apple Podcasts yet. edit: fixed now

@MacSparky and @ismh were talking about the lack of logic behind the order of panes in System Preferences. Stephen said he just uses search.

Search is good, but there’s are two other suggestions I’d make, indicated by the two arrows in this screenshot:

1. Step One (white arrow): “Organize Alphabetically”.

This will organize all of the panes alphabetically, which makes much more sense than the “Categories” that Apple uses by default.

2. Step Two (red arrow): “Customize…”

This will put System Preferences into a mode where you uncheck panes that you do not use. See below:

You can see that I have turned off Mouse, Screen Time, Sidebar, and Siri.

3 Step Three (optional): Play Favorites!

Note that even if you uncheck panes, you can access them via the “View” menu so, I could uncheck all of them except my “favorites” (most often used) and have it look like this:

But if I do need one of the others, I can still use the View menu to see them all:

(99% of the time I access System Preference panes via Alfred, which means that I definitely don’t need to see them all in the main window.)

I definitely prefer having two nice, alphabetically rows of Frequently Used preference panes instead of 4+ rows of seemingly randomly-ordered preference panes.

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@MacSparky mentioned trying to put together an Apple Script to toggle dictation on the Mac. I have been using this one for a while now and it meets my needs

Found this somewhere on the internet. Can’t remember who should get credit for this–but not me. :slight_smile:

tell application "System Preferences"
	reveal anchor "Dictation" of pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
	-- activate
end tell

delay 0.5
tell application "System Events"
	tell process "System Preferences"
		click checkbox "Enable Voice Control" of group 1 of window "Accessibility"
	end tell
end tell

tell application "System Preferences" to quit
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It’s from the KM forum: Applescript or other Technique Enable/Disable Voice Control on Catalina - Questions & Suggestions - Keyboard Maestro Discourse

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How To Enable Voice Control In Catalina

Hello David – you mentioned Setting up voice control and you said you were 80% there with an apple script.

Well, I wanted the exact same thing and got help from the great keyboard maestro forum. The script totally did the trick for me.

In my use case, I only wanted Voice control a few times a day and turn it off the rest of the time, so this simple script easily opens up right to that dictation pain of system press and simply toggles the button on or off. Then I close system prefs.

The forum said this also should work in Big Sur also.

I hope this helps - DaveAlso

I also like using Voice Control, especially this last year working from home.

But I still find it to be a resource hog. Anyone else? I’m on a 2018 Mac Mini 3G processor with 16GB of RAM, and even when Voice Control is in sleep mode I feel and hear my machine grinding.

Want to point out that this Alfred workflow for making UUID, which uses this bash command, runs just fine on my MacBook Air M1.

Here’s also a link to a Keyboard Maestro text expansion should anyone else be interested into it.

P.S.: I’ve also forked the Git Repo to add the text snippet activation to the original Alfred Workflow just to try it. Working fine as well.

Regarding textexpander:

Couldn’t try it as well, but can add that Alfred is working fine.

Fun episode! Nice work, David, beating the king of collectors to that SE/30.

Uh, how am I just finding out about this now??? SO much better!!!

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There’s a not-so-obvious limitation of iCloud Drive that I discovered when I had a need to restore a folder from a Backblaze backup.

All of the iCloud Drive data is stored locally on my iMac (i.e. Optimize File Storage is turned off). Among other things, I wanted to make sure that the iCloud Drive data is backed up to Backblaze.

The issue is that, unlike other cloud services (e.g. Dropbox), the iCloud Drive data is stored in what appears to be proprietary way in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. Backblaze (and similar solutions) can be used to backup this folder, but it’s not possible to browse the iCloud Drive folder structure in Backblaze, making it very difficult to retrieve a folder full of files.

If you try to do a restore in Backblaze, you’ll see something like this.

Backblaze - Restore iCloud Drive

This is one of the reasons that I keep most of my data in Dropbox. Unlike iCloud Drive, it’s possible to browse Dropbox folders in Backblaze.

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According to Jason Snell, I don’t remember which podcast (Upgrade or 20 macs in 2020), Stephen’s collecting focuses on the OS X Mac era and is weak as far as the original Macintosh era goes.

Personally I regret giving away my Macintosh SE/30 and my Apple //GS Woz Edition.

Ive listened to both shows but missed it… What is @MacSparky running these days?? What is the XDR Pro Display hooked up to? Is it is M1? I’d like to hear how its going because I’d like to do the same thing and use my M1 MBP with a single display and ditch my intel iMac …

It’s an M1. I think a MacBook Air but I’m not sure.

Yeah … I went a little crazy and traded my iMac Pro for one of those crazy Apple Monitors. I’m still not sure if that wasn’t a really dumb idea … but there you have it.

@MacSparky Im thinking of the same crazy solution ! I want my M1 MBP to be my main rig… I just cant find a decent monitor that doesn’t have issues … I assume no issues with the XDR? Ive tried a few different monitors and its blurry text, wake from sleep issues, forgetting the settings upon rewake etc… Has anyone tried the Apple LG 5K?

@MacSparky You’re Keyboard Maestro window manipulation shortcuts were great; far better than what I had figured out on my own. I am having trouble with the 25% centered at the bottom “Drafts” window one you mentioned. Would you mind hooking us up with that recipe?

@MacSparky i thought you mentioned posting your Home Screen in the show notes. I didn’t see it there.

I was a bit confused, it sounded like you had a large widget and then the Siri app suggestions on your only screen (I.e., no apps other than the doc)?

I think uuidgen is in a different location than that shown in the original post on this forum. I deleted the path and it works fine for me on an M1 MacBook Pr:

#!/bin/bash
uuidgen

Voice Control seems really nifty, thanks for the tip! I’d been wanting a “Siri dictation, but without interruption” for a while now – if I’d know this was available, I wouldn’t have held off upgrading to Catalina. (Apparently it’s a Catalina-only feature.)

Like others, I wanted to toggle Voice Control on and off. Even on my 2020 iMac, other apps get more sluggish when I have Voice Control enabled.

I took the AppleScript from the Keyboard Maestro forum, and I tweaked it to preserve state. In particular,I was annoyed that it would always quit System Preferences, even if I already had it open. I don’t like it when scripts mess with state that’s unrelated to the task at hand.

My variant of the script keeps it open, and returns you to the System Preferences pane you originally had open.

tell application "System Preferences"
	if it is running then
		set systemPreferencesIsAlreadyRunning to true
		set theCurrentPaneId to the id of the current pane
	else
		set systemPreferencesIsAlreadyRunning to false
	end if
	
	reveal anchor "Dictation" of pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
	
	delay 0.5
	
	tell application "System Events"
		tell process "System Preferences"
			click checkbox "Enable Voice Control" of group 1 of window "Accessibility"
		end tell
	end tell
	
	if systemPreferencesIsAlreadyRunning then
		reveal pane id theCurrentPaneId
	else
		quit
	end if
end tell
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