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05:47 Tuesday, 24 May 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 73.4°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 344
Well, Doc went with the big lens. Unsurprising. I'd do the same thing. We covet things. Especially things that seem to grant us powers or abilities beyond those of mere mortal men. Not that we'll ever do anything with them. Worthwhile, I mean.
Anyway, life goes on and camera companies are grateful for our weakness, as is most of capitalism.
Finished Battery. Fun book.
Went through the archives here yesterday and I think I fixed all the broken permalinks. There may be one or two I missed, but I think I got nearly all of them. Now if anyone wants to assign a link to a bit of my deathless prose, it should actually work.
I haven't fixed all the missing pix. Checked again at the Wayback Machine, and they didn't archive those images urls. I may try to find the originals, if I can figure out what they are, and fix that as well. Just for the sake of completeness.
I had one of those little victories that makes life seem worthwhile sometimes. We have Moen faucets in our house, which is less than 3 years old. The aerators are becoming clogged with scale, and the result is water that often sprays horizontally as it exists the faucet. In our devotion to design, the aerators are seemingly embedded in the faucet. They require a special key to remove them.
Go to Moen, identify your faucet, look at the parts list and identify the correct aerator part number. Comes with a replacement aerator and the magic key to install it. Bought it at Amazon (because of course), bought three of them actually. Delivered the same day. Kind of tricky keeping that little plastic key engaged, but the old one backed right out and the new one went in with no trouble. Good as new. The old one will get the CLR treatment and get stashed against the day when I have to pull this one out. $17.00 for a little piece of plastic!
Well, on with the day. Thanks for dropping by. Stay well.
✍️ Reply by emailSpringtime
Current Wx: Temp: 71.53°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 0mphWords: 432
I saw a bobcat in the backyard in Florida several weeks ago. It was only the third time I'd ever seen one, and almost six years since the last time I saw one, shortly after we moved in.
I've seen a lot of wildlife here, deer, rabbits, and wild turkeys; but yesterday afternoon I spotted this mama relocating her kittens. I think she only has two, but it's possible I may have missed an earlier effort. I saw her move two from the neighbor to our right, across our yard, to the neighbors on the left. It's a feral cat, or what is sometimes referred to as a "barn cat." I sent the photo to my neighbor to the left as a heads-up. She said they had two barn cats, but don't have pets in the house.
I suspect they may have five now.
Feral cats are a problem for birds. I'll keep an eye out and see if a colony is developing, and if there are any organizations that'll come out and sterilize these guys. But I'll wait and see, many people love their barn cats and it's not something I want to get cross-threaded on with the neighbors.
As you can tell from the photo, it'd stopped raining. But it's started again. Yeesh.
While the sun was out, I spent some time trying to organize the garage. We'll need the shed for storage, but I have to get in there and rip out some insulation material because something is living in the ceiling. That shouldn't take long, but it'll be a messy job. I'll wear a mask and eye protection. Maybe a set of those paper coveralls.
Space will definitely be at a premium.
Killed some time watching that new Apple TV+ movie about the Fountain of Youth. Maybe that's the title? I should know, a full-screen ad pops up for it whenever I visit a story on BBC News, but I don't pay attention.
Bad movie. Don't waste your time. It's National Treasure and The DaVinci Code kind of mashed together, with a little bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark for the climax. Characters are fractal, 1.5-dimensional. Well, the two main characters anyway. The rest of them may be less than one-dimensional. Nice job with sets and VFX though.
So far, all of these Apple TV+ movies have been a big disappointment.
Murderbot has been entertaining, though.
Well, better get cleaned up and pack a few things. Plan to be back here late Sunday afternoon. Maybe the weather will have cleared by then.
✍️ Reply by emailKeys to the Kingdom
07:42 Sunday, 24 May 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 48.6°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 15.32mph
Words: 576
Serendipity is a thing in my life. I like to think of it as the universe kind of offering me clues, something that requires, or rewards, attention.
Yesterday I wrote a bit about my lack of facility with keyboard combinations, despite some amount of "trying." I even installed Karabiner Elements on my 27" iMac. I haven't installed it on either of the MacBook Pros that replaced it. I also hold an incredible amount of affection for LaunchBar, one of the first apps I installed for Mac OS X a long time ago in an apartment far, far away.
Said affection has not made me very proficient with it, I'm afraid.
Anyway, back to serendipity.
Some hours after writing about MacOS X Guru's BBEdit 16 review, I happened upon this post from Kottke. (I'm way behind on my feeds, but maybe I was right on time? Or, just in time?) That post pointed to this, which turns out to be a wealth of riches on keyboards and the joys of using them. (Click through to the archives and enjoy.)
I've been making significant use of Captain's Log every day. There's a little more friction than I'd like, and I've been "meaning to" address it. I have FastScripts, which allows you to add keyboard shortcuts to scripts in the FastScripts menubar app. My reluctance to finally do so is perhaps explained by my previous disappointment and lack of success with assigning keyboard shortcuts to other things.
But serendipity was in the air, along with the rain, yesterday. Because I recalled a post by macosxguru about Alfred, a LaunchBar clone, and its utility in freeing up keyboard shortcuts. And since I love LaunchBar, I decided I needed to figure out how to make LaunchBar launch scripts. In the process of figuring that out, I learned that LaunchBar wasn't indexing my Scripts folder, so I fixed that. Then I learned you can assign an abbreviation (keyboard shortcut) to particular items in LaunchBar's index.
So now when I want to send a bookmark to Captain's Log, I open LaunchBar and type BL (bookmark to log) and the script runs. I'll assign ML to the Mail to Log script, and FL to the "File to Log" script, and IL to the "Idea to Log" script.
Why not just use a hyper-key assignment of some kind? Because I want to use LaunchBar more often and become more proficient at taking advantage of its utility. It saved my bacon not long ago when I was using the clipboard manager in Unclutter and I accidentally deleted the clipping I was looking for. For a reason I no longer recall, finding the source of that clipping was going to be difficult, so I invoked LaunchBar and started typing clipboard. When Clipboard History appeared, I right-arrowed over and found the clipping I was looking for! I don't think I've ever used LaunchBar's keyboard history feature before, though I did recall it had one.
Now I want to try and retrain myself to use LaunchBar's clipboard manager. Unclutter is a cool app, and I've used it a lot over the years. The other feature I use quite a bit is to stash bits of text in the notepad feature. But the key to proficiency is repetition, so I should focus on LaunchBar.
Anyway, that was kind of fun yesterday afternoon. "Fun" not being something I often association with using the Mac anymore.
More of that, please.
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