ThoughtAsylum

One of the first commands I learned to use on a PC was the tree command in DOS.

With the increasing availability of assistive AI, many people have turned to AI frameworks and harnesses (Hermes Agent, Claude Cowork, etc.) to help them achieve day-to-day goals.

Lately I have found myself dealing with more and more terminal sessions on my Mac.

I have come to realise that the biggest limitation of my local digital assistant is not its capability but my imagination.

I create lots of automations to help me work more effectively on my Mac.

While having a do anything and everything digital assistant is one approach, we all know that it’s team work that generally delivers the best results on projects.

In my previous post about my private digital assistant, I explained the challenges I encountered and how I ended up at Hermes Agent as my choice of framework.

Over the last three or four months I have been on a bit of a quest.

In the past I have employed numerous solutions to capture a link to a web page into another app.

We have long been able to trigger processes on remote computers.

If you write online, the chances are, you have heard of Markdown, the syntax created by John Gruber as a simplified way of marking up plain text with simple formatting that can then be processed to other formats, such as HTML.

It is spring and so the time to do some spring cleaning.

In September last year I passed my UK foundation exam for amateur radio exam and became a licensed amateur radio operator.

For the last few years I have had a partially written Alfred workflow that I was finally able to finish and am now in a position to share thanks to a change that came in with macOS 26, Tahoe.

Just a quick post today about a useful little command line script I created.

Since moving away from Evernote, DEVONthink has been my go to solution for storing my reference materials.

I am a big proponent of the Elgato Stream Deck, and I love the dynamic nature of the keys and having them switch based on the in focus app or to match the needs of a particular piece of work.

I have not written about XYplorer for a long time, but it remains one of my favourite Windows apps, and I do still wish I had as powerful visual file manager on macOS.

In my last post I wrote about using Piper to convert test to speech on the Mac and my helper utility, for Piper, Pan.

With large language models (LLM) dominating the technology space in recent years, multi-modal input, and speech to text transformations have come on leaps and bounds to the point where large swathes of text can be converted relatively accurately and very…

With the introduction of the Integrated Learning Experience (ILX) user interface for SuccessFactors Learning, SAP introduced a new option called custom cards.

Ever since I purchased my Elgato Stream Deck I have wanted to have a go at creating a plugin for it.

Recently in my day job I have been leading on an effort to resolve some performance issues in an online system.

I have been using the “new” version of Outlook since it was released.

Last year I did a little exercise in my day job to address something that has bugged me for years.

Back when I was at university reading for my MSc.

I recently updated from an Intel MacBook Pro to a Mac Studio as my main Mac, and I switched around a lot of my desktop set up as I would no longer need to keep switching in and out my work laptop running Windows, with my MacBook Pro.

I have been a long time user of iTerm, but when the AI powered Warp terminal app came onto the scene I tried it out and ended up mostly switching over to it.

Over the course of last year I saw several mentions on social media and other online posts about Obsidian, the personal knowledge management application, not being able to lock posts.

Last year we finished the conversion of our garage into a small office, and I guess it must be the time of year, but recently there were a number of occasions I was being washed out in video calls.

In my previous role I used to deliver a fair number of workshops, extended planning sessions, etc.

In my day job, I work on a near daily basis with SAP SuccessFactors Learning, a learning management system (LMS) which while utilising a web-based administrative user interface also boasts some flat-file like configuration.

My previous post on some useful file renaming in Finder, Forklift, and Path Finder gave me a mental nudge to write up and share with you all some automations for getting some content into files from Safari.

On Windows, I use the amazingly functional file manager XYplorer, and I have various scripts that allow me to work with files in a variety of ways that just make it one of my most productive tools on the PC.

Earlier this year we finished converting our garage into a home office.

In May 2024 I was a returning guest on the Automators podcast, a show on the Relay network that looked at the use of consumer technologies to automate tasks.

Having recently converted our garage into a home office, I have been able to indulge in a few additional, but small, home automation projects.

I was posting a reply to a forum post about Moom (the macOS Window Manager by Many Tricks) this morning and was about to make a reference about using it with Bunch (the automation tool by Brett Terpstra).

For those of you who follow along with my posts and creations, you will no doubt have noted that I have created more than a few workflows for Alfred, the launcher app for the Mac.

One of my favourite free tools on the command line is Pandoc.

As you may know, I am active in a little corner of the technology community through a few appearances on podcasts on the Relay network, my regular contributions to discussions on the Automators podcast forum, and my relatively recent release of the Automa…

I have had a busy few months finishing off a project, but I finally found some time to take a look at a relatively new utility by Brett Terpstra to use with his Marked 2 application.

As you may be aware, I’m a daily user of the note taking and management application, Obsidian.

Where I live we have three types of waste collection.

All of my jobs have involved me communicating information to people during presentations, and during the last decade I have regularly found myself building out non-linear slide decks in Microsoft PowerPoint.

This past month I attended my first conference of the year.

Recently, while working on a new Alfred workflow, I found myself once again wishing that Alfred workflows supported subroutines or functions.

This post is, in a sense, a natural follow up to my Path-based Commands in Obsidian post from around this time last year.

Do you ever find yourself needing to visit web pages that are no longer available?

A few months ago I wrote a post about my tiny Home Assistant powered desk clock, and in that I mentioned that while it would be possible to have little notifications pop up on it, I actually had a separate set up for that.