The Art Of Not Asking Why

After months (actually, I’ve been thinking of it for a couple of years), I finally spent a sum forbidden in the past and got myself a System76 Mira Custom with a couple of tweaks close to maxed out. It will be here in about a week.

Finished reading: All Systems Red by Martha Wells 📚 - Immediately got the second book in the series.

Easy read, fun, yet with a lot of humorous points that make you nods and consider what it means to be a social human.

Jeff Jarvis writes:

UK considers doing the right thing regarding AI and the right to read and learn and, of course, American mass media’s lobbyists object. US media groups warn UK over AI content-scraping rules

This article is a good example of why, while I understand the concerns and worries of creators when it comes to AI-scarping, I was always against the idea of using copyright laws as the main argument. Now we have the Copyright Aliance (which is made up from organizations such as Disney, Fox, Paramount, Universal Music and Getty etc.) championing anti-plagiarism for us:

The group urged the UK government to “continue its long-standing leadership role and stand with the United States as a champion of the creative community and the copyright laws on which it relies”.

This is not coming from the creators. This is coming from greedy CEOs who want to lock everything down, and AI scarping is just another “concern” they have.

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. 👍