The Art Of Not Asking Why

I probably grumped about this a hundred times:

Living in the NYC means (usually) that you rent an apartment. Renting an apartment is good as long as things work. When things break, your hands are tied. You can’t fix, you can’t call a repair man, you can’t order a new one. It sucks.

That is all.

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 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:

1. Go to https://kagi.com/settings?p=search
2. 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.

By the way, as mike notes: “the bang library is an open source repo that you can contribute to.” So if you know how and want to contribute, you can add your own Bangs. The community already shares a large number of user-created additions.

Custom Bangs

Creating custom Bangs is possible from the Advanced Settings menu under Search in the Setting page.

1. Select the Add Bang and go to that page
2. fill in the following:
   1. Search engine name: the name of your Bang
   2. URL: this is the URL with the search query. Usually ends with q=%s.
   3. Bang Shortcut: the trigger to activate the bang, for example, !w
   4. 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.

1. Go to the search you want to use for the Bang (https://www.google.com)
2. Search for a term (pizza)
3. Copy the URL into a text editor (https://www.google.com/search?q=pizza)
4. 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:

bsky.app/profile/b…

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 😜