When I work, I have my Mac docked and connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I use my Sony headset in meetings for its built-in microphone and built-out ambulance sirens and other NYC distractions.
My iPhone’s phone app is connected to my Mac for better texting in Messages and if I click on a phone number on a website to call.
If I’m in a meeting using Teams or Zoom, the phone call takes priority and immediately hijacks my audio from the meeting. I would be mid-sentence, and suddenly, the food delivery guy (who has to use our annoying call-in intercom door that uses a phone number to get in the building) would be listening to me explaining the pricing of our remote management software instead of the 5 folks I was talking to. I then have to mime to everyone in the meeting to hang one while I take the phone or decline it, and then switch back manually to my headphones as a microphone and speaker choice.
This is very annoying, to say the least.
Is there any way I could give Teams and Zoom priority over phone calls so that phone calls would still go through but perhaps be muted, at least until I pick up? Maybe I can remove the iPhone from the Mac completely, at least while I’m in work focus?
Kagi: Bangs and Snaps
Kagi search is very good, but some of its usefulness is not easily discoverable. The following are my notes on Kagi’s Bangs (and Snaps) after I dug in this morning for research.
While Kagi has a YouTube channel, it’s mostly reserved for flashy marketing clips. They have a few old how to videos which can still be helpful. The way to learn is their docs.
The main page is at https://help.kagi.com. From there, scroll down to User Guide on the left pane to read the documentation.
Bangs
First make sure Bangs are enabled within the Search options in Kagi:
- Go to https://kagi.com/settings?p=search
- Scroll down to Search Bangs
Use Bangs like this: !w search engine. This will open Wikipedia on the “search engine” page result directly (same as if you went to wikipedia.com and searched for “search engine”)
But Bangs are more useful than just for opening Wikipedia articles directly.
The Kagi community built a search for bangs: https://kbe.smaertness.net/. Searching this engine for “maps” taught me that !gmaps (as in !gmaps empire state building) will open Google Maps directly, !maps opens up Kagi Maps (I just learned this is actually a thing), etc.
Another interesting example is !news, which also has a Kagi flavor (https://kagi.com/news) when you search for a topic. With news, upvoting and downvoting a site (personalizing search results) is very useful.
Custom Bangs
Creating custom Bangs is possible from the Advanced Settings menu under Search in the Setting page.
- Select the Add Bang and go to that page
- fill in the following:
- Search engine name: the name of your Bang
- URL: this is the URL with the search query. Usually ends with
q=%s. - Bang Shortcut: the trigger to activate the bang, for example, !w
- Domain for Snaps: in short, the website the search should be limited to.
How to get the URL for a custom bang:
To get the correct URL for a custom bang follow these steps. In this example, I am using Google as the search I want to create a Bang for.
- Go to the search you want to use for the Bang (https://www.google.com)
- Search for a term (pizza)
- Copy the URL into a text editor (https://www.google.com/search?q=pizza)
- Remove the search term, and add %s after the query (https://www.google.com/search?q=%s)
Some sites' searches are not as straightforward, and the URL might be harder to find, but most follow this simple pattern.
About Snaps:
Snaps are related to Bangs. They are activated by @ and its trigger, similar to Bangs.
For example, a search for @w pizza will run a search for pizza in Wikipedia. The difference between a Snap and a Bang will be apparent in this example: while a Bang will forward you into Wikipedia to view results for pizza, a Snap will use Kagi to run the search, pulling results only from Wikipedia into the search index.
This allows you to use Kagi’s search features on a website, for example, summarizing a specific page on the site with Kagi’s AI, or navigating using Kagi’s keyboard shortcuts.
Just got All Systems Red by Martha Wells 📚 and I’m already 25% in. A good combination of goofy Sci Fi with neurodivergent elements I know all to well.
Had a busy but good day. There was positive feedback for the work I’ve been doing, which I needed because many of these things are new to me. Good stuff. 👍
Anti-insomnia skill I’m getting better at: not letting my analytical brain start processing. Instead, letting random thoughts float without any connection or order, the stuff that make dreams. This way I can fall asleep again.
Had fun this morning looking into my old journal notes. Found something to add to the blog. Blogging from the past is a thing 🤓
(Check out the On this day section)
I like my Wired subscription so far. Overall, they have good stories, and I missed some reading material on my Android now that I stopped reading the news.
On the phone:
And the paper magazine looks good as well:
Matt shared this from Hank Green:
I like Hank’s content, he always has an interesting fact to share. Very happy to see him on Bluesky, along with Swift on Security and other geeky celebs.
Now we need to get them on micro.blog 😜
Over at Micro.blog, where my blog is hosted, there’s another new awesome feature.
Comments from Mastodon and Bluesky are now integrated into one feed inside Micro.blog’s Mentions section. Now I can see comments to posts I wrote from Mastodon, Bluesky or Microblog itself all in one place and reply back. Awesome!
If you’re all shaken up by WordPress downfall and looking for a new home, consider Micro.blog (not a sponsor! 😅), it’s awesome.
I looked at my menu items on my Mac and thought I’d write a post explaining what tools I use daily. Here they are, from right to left:
Focus:
“Focus” was introduced in macOS Monterey back in 2021. It basically restricts certain apps from sending notifications during certain times. These work across devices: if I have my work Focus on my Mac, it will also work on my iPhone. For me, apps like WhatsApp are silenced when I work, while Microsoft Outlook and Teams are silenced on my iPhone when I’m with friends. Focuses has more features, especially now that Apple Intelligence has been introduced.
Time Machine:
Time Machine is a built-in backup solution for MacOS, and if you have a Mac, you should use it. I have mine set up on my Synology for encrypted backups, but you can also store those on an external drive, which you can buy on Amazon or Best Buy, etc. On a practical level, it helped me many times when I deleted an important document or a photo and realized my mistake even months later: I just go back in time, find it, and restore it back to the present. Simple and effective.
Mullvad VPN:
A paid VPN service is a good start for some online privacy. I like Mullvad because it works on Linux and Windows, comes in with many options to tweak if you’re more into that (like split tunneling, for example, or command prompt options), and also allows you to pay in several semi-anonymous ways. Lately, I noticed more sites block me when I use it, which usually means the service’s VPN servers are becoming too popular, and I might need to look for someone else soon, which is unfortunate.
Shifty
As the app’s website says, “A macOS menu bar app that gives you more control over Night Shift.” Night Shift is MacOS’s built-in solution to filter blue light and turn on the black theme during nighttime. I use Shifty to keep my warm colors past sunrise if I need to during the winter or turn it off automatically if I edit Photos in Lightroom or watch a movie.
PopClip
I had a loving relationship with PopClip in the past, and I was happy when Lou reintroduced me to it. It’s a multi-tool menu of your most needed functions that pops up (hence the name) whenever you double-click or highlight a line of text. You know how when you copy-paste something into an email, your font changes along with the colors of your letters and their size, and it drives you bananas? Not with this guy. Double-click (or double-tap), and a menu will appear, and you have the option to paste without formatting. I also use it to quickly look up words in the dictionary or past something into Grammarly (coming up) if needed.
Snaggit
Snaggit is probably Techsmith’s most popular app. It’s a professional screen-capturing tool I needed for my job, but I see myself still paying for personal use. While macOS’s built-in screen capture tool is good, Snaggit allows me more complex edits that you often see on my blog, including the option to capture quick videos.
Velja
Velja allows you to automatically open certain URLs on different browsers installed on your Mac. It comes with the ability to use complex options, but I mostly use it for one thing: open links from Microsoft Teams and Outlook in Microsoft Edge since that’s the browser I use for work-related functions. Otherwise, if I click on a link a co-worker sends me in Teams, it will open in Safari, where I’m not signed into my various work-related platforms.
OneDrive
I get 1TB of storage on OneDrive from work, and I use it to sync and share my Microsoft Office documents so they are available for me and my co-workers on whatever other workstation I use at work. For personal stuff, I use Syncthing, which doesn’t have a menu icon to show here and covered enough in the past.
Outlook
The Outlook icon doesn’t offer anything I need, so I just removed it as I was writing this post.
Grammarly
I’ve used Grammarly for free for years, and now I get the paid version through my employer. To be honest, I don’t like the heavy AI marketing, and some of their functions can get in the way of writing. With Apple Intelligence, I might no longer need it as much. For now, I use it for everything. For example, the post you read now will be proofread by this tool when I paste it into Micro.blog’s text box. They used to have an API that kind-of-sorta worked with Emacs, which I use for everything I write, but they killed that.
Filtering org-agenda to *exclude* a category
Back in July, I explained how I use Beorg to sync my calendars. To recap, Beorg continuously exports the iOS calendar into a read-only org file, which I then sync to my Mac’s desktop through iCloud.
The calendar.org file shows on my Emacs agenda, where I can see both my Outlook (work-related) meetings and my Gmail (personal) events. This is very nice, but because the calendar.org file is read-only (as it should be—it keeps being overwritten by the Beorg every time the iOS calendar syncs), I can’t use it for anything besides this visual information.
If I want to create a project from a meeting and add notes and sub-tasks, I have to copy the event from my calendar.org file to Now.org, where I keep my current projects and tasks. There, I can add notes and headers.
But then there’s another problem: when I copy my headers over to Now.org, my agenda shows duplicates - one event header comes from calendar.org, and the other comes from Now.org after I copied it there. Here’s what it looks like:
When I start my day, it’s important that I see calendar.org so I can copy over details to now.org. Once I’m done, however (clearing the Calendar tag, adding a keyword like MEETING, and cleaning the text under the header from details I don’t need), I no longer need to see calendar.org, and I want it to disappear.
I was looking around for a solution to this problem, and of course, it was right under my nose. Org-agenda comes with the option of narrowing down (filtering) the agenda to a category at the point with <. What I didn’t know is that C-u < does exactly what I want: the opposite of the above. It hides the category selected. Problem solved.
Pan's Labyrinth, 2006 - ★★★★½
This is the third or the fourth time I watched this movie. It's the first movie by Guillermo del Toro I've seen, and it's masterpiece.
A fairy tale fit for grownups, you won' find a happy ending here (well, kind of, depending on your angle) - it's full of magic and symbolism. There's not much to say about this movie that won't spoil the magic of watching it for the first time, so I won't attempt to do so. Go watch it.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 🦃😁
Not a lot going on at work today, so I decided to borrow one of our old Windows machines and set it up as a remote workstation. Installed all the Office updates, synced Edge, RSAT, PowersShell 7.1, other good stuff. Now to document everything… But first, a nap. 😴
Now I really want to play this game. Want to wait for them to patch it first, I’m hearing it has too many bugs.
Christmas brain washing needs to stop.
I can’t block stores from blasting Christmas music into my ears or prevent game studios from updating a game with a patch that forces me to watch a Christmas-related intro clip.
I don’t even celebrate it. It’s not December yet. What happened to TG. Go away 😡
The flow of followers on Bluesky doesn’t stop. It’s about to double from the start of the week. Just wish I knew how to turn off now follower notifications on my Android.
greatly reduce video file sizes
For my personal journal videos (which I call jvids for short), the quality is not important since it’s just me talking. I could just get rid of the video, but it doesn’t feel as “real.”
A 10-minute HD video recording on an iPhone can take close to a gig. This method compresses the videos to around 50MB MP4 files, even more if I want to. I use the iPhone directly or as a Continuity Camera with my Mac and Photobooth, but you can use a webcam or whatever other means you’d like.
Run ffmpeg like so1:
ffmpeg -i input.mov -filter:v scale=640:-1 -crf 30 -c:a copy .\output.mp4
Where:
-filter:v: we’re telling FFMPEG the next option is going to be a video filter
scale=640:1: the video filter - this tells FFMPEG to give me the width of 640 pixels, and it will figure out the right ratio for height. This greatly helps reducing the size, but noticeably lowering the quality. For my own talking head, this is fine.
-CRF 30: this is the compression ffmpeg uses, from 0 to 51. The default (if you don’t specify CRF) is 20 for the default codec. I want to shrink it a bit further, so I go for 30.
-c:a copy as for the audio codec, no compression and no conversion, use as is, make a copy
Gotcha:
1 Notice that 640, while being a nice resolution, doesn’t work well for videos recorded on phones. To quickly get something that works, divide the width by 2 and use that number; it will still reduce it greatly.
Big city lights 📷
This spot is calling my name 📷
