Today's Desktop Tour

Homescreens & Office Setups
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AWS is having issues, so here’s a tour of my current M1 iMac situation.

To get started, from left to right in my Dock, I’ve got:

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  • Finder, obviously
  • Safari, works great for me, secure, no bloat. A good first choice for anyone.
  • NetNewsWire, still the best RSS reader. Love that it’s come back as open source.
  • Messages, friends and family
  • Slack, because I have to
  • Mail, because it handles everything I throw at it no sweat
  • Calendar, same as mail, always there for me, super reliable
  • Notes, I’ve noticed that I tend to trust Notes more than 3rd-party tools
  • Reminders, an experiment, maybe I don’t actually need OmniFocus anymore
  • Day One, my personal journal for several years now
  • Transmit, the best FTP/SFTP/S3 file transfer app
  • BBEdit, an absolute unit
  • Terminal, all day every day

Moving up to my menubar, I’m running:

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  • A shell script that spits out the current weather, posted by Keyboard Maestro
  • Keyboard Maestro
  • Arq backup
  • Hazel
  • Pastebot, the best clipboard manager in my not-so-humble opinion
  • Duo, like Slack, because I have to
  • Spotlight, I don’t do the Quicksilver/Alfred/LaunchBar/Raycast thing anymore
  • And, well, the rest are basic.

I could probably remove Siri from the menubar, but every now and then I like to ask her to do something for me. I’m not sure where I got the weather script, but I’ve had it for years now. It uses the forcast.io API, that if you wanted to use it you’d have to get your own key I think, but here it is if you’d like to give it a shot.

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I turn on the Accessibility setting to Reduce transparency, and my desktop wallpaper is, I think, from @ismh86’s collection.

1 Like
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Can you please share this and how to set it up? :slight_smile:

Not VS Code? What’s better in BBEdit?

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It’s a Mac app. Maybe a quirky Mac app, but that’s because it has a lot of history. It is not an Electron app, like VSCode. It has been through all of the changes that MACs have had to endure. It is hella opinionated, reliable, and capable. And, always evolving.

1 Like
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Sure, first thing you’ll need is to setup your own API key with DarkSky: How Dark Sky users can use the Apple Weather app - Apple Support

Once you have that, you can use that key, plus your coordinates with this Python script: gist:5bbd51b10bf7dab26fa379d09b02b18d · GitHub

Once this is working on the command line, setup a new Macro Group in Keyboard Maestro with a single Macro in it to run this script:

Macro Group:

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Macro:

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Clear as mud, right!?

2 Likes
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I’ve never used VS Code and never intend to. BBEdit does everything I need and then some.

4 Likes
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Can you still do this? I thought the Dark Sky API had closed its doors to new signups, and full closure sometime in 2023.

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OH, my bad. I forgot all about that.Guess I’ll have to find a new weather provider API.

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Open Weather might be a possibility.

1 Like
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So… I finally got around to updating this. Here’s an updated Gist for the weather.py script that polls Open Weather: weather.py · GitHub

Everything else in the Keyboard Maestro macro should be the same.