The Robservatory – Page 27 – Robservations on everything…

Fix Messages’ broken bundled AppleScripts

Mar 7 '17Mar 7 '17
Apple, Mac OS X Hints, macOS Apps, macOS Rants

While playing around with Messages this morning, I noticed that it ships with a feature that, if used, throws an error. Steps to reproduce:

Open Messages' preferences.
Set the Applescript handler pop-up to any of the listed scripts:
Close preferences, and try to send a message to anyone.
Revel in the brokenness.

I especially like the execution error: No error message…it's that rare non-error that tosses up an error dialog!

In any event, I think it's shameful that Apple ships the app with a feature—plainly obvious in prefs—that breaks when used. Yes, I know AppleScript is probably dying, but that doesn't excuse shipping the app with a clearly-broken feature; if it doesn't work, just remove it. Apparently this has been an issue since Yosemite's release in October of 2014!

With all that said, fixing this is incredibly easy—it took me about 30 seconds of "work" to find and fix the problem. If you'd like to use the bundled AppleScripts in Messages—either as is, or in some modified form—here's what you need to do

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Control animated GIF playback on WordPress sites

Mar 6 '17Apr 18 '20
Blogging, Technology

I wanted to embed an animated GIF in my post about changing the iOS Settings screen. However, because the GIF was about 4MB in size, I didn't want it to auto-load—and in general, I find auto-playing GIFs annoying. I wanted something that would stop and start on click, like this (wonderfully subtle) example GIF…

So I did what any WordPress user would do in such a situation: I went looking for a WordPress plug-in that offered control over GIFs.

I initially found WP GIF Player and GIF Animation Preview. Both did what I wanted, mostly, but they added a bunch of their own HTML and CSS, and/or relied on the WordPress media library (which I don't use). After testing both, I just couldn't get them to work with the GIF and the size/position that I wanted to use. Perhaps there are others that would work, but I got frustrated and gave up searching.

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The Art of the Brick at OMSI

Mar 5 '17Mar 6 '17
Kids, Photography

We recently toured Nathan Sawaya's The Art of the Brick at OMSI, our local science museum. I had heard about this show, and seen pictures, but they don't do it justice…so here, look at some of my pictures which also won't do it justice. [View on Flickr]

[flickr_set id="72157677535255164"]

Part of the reason photos don't do the ehxibit justice is the lack of sense of scale—further accentuated in my photos due to the lack of reference points. Most of these things are quite large; the human figures are all life size (or bigger). The Easter Island head is maybe 8' tall, the Whistler's Mother figure is six or so feet long, etc. Each piece has a descriptive card that includes the total number of Lego pieces used. As you'd expect, it's a lot of Lego!

If you're in the Portland area—or The Art of the Brick is coming to your town—I highly recommend a visit. You don't even have to like Legos; the art is just amazing…even without considering it's made of Lego bricks.

Count characters in Keyboard Maestro inputs via filters

Mar 4 '17Apr 18 '20
Keyboard Maestro, Mac OS X Hints, macOS Apps

Yesterday, I added an SSL certificate to my site, and posted a brief note about the change. In that post, I included an image…which turned out to be, well, the comments say it all:

Yes, I posted a non-https image in the 'site is secure' post. Sigh.

So I took Jonathan's comment to heart, and created a Keyboard Maestro macro that ensures I post only relative URLs from now on.

Generally, I don't think such a thing would be worth sharing, as it's just a basic text replacement macro, right?. Mostly right, but in this case, I learned about a Keyboard Maestro feature that may be useful to others. So share I will…

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Heading into the secure zone…somewhat slowly

Mar 3 '17Mar 4 '17
Blogging

My blog is, and has been, hosted with 1and1 for many years. While I've had some minor issues during that time, I've been generally happy with their hosting. Recently I noticed that they now offer a free SSL certificate. The free certificate only covers one domain and no sub-domains, but that's all I needed for robservatory. I must say that 1and1 has made this incredibly easy: Enabling the certificate only took a couple mouse clicks, and it was active a minute or two later.

Getting the site actually secured, though, was and is a different story. You should see the secure site indicator on the front page, at least, indicating that you've made a secure connection to the site…

The "secure site" indicator as seen in Chrome…Safari uses an ugly gray lock.

Once you navigate back into the older posts, however, you'll probably lose the lock indicator. The connection is still secure, but the older posts have hardcoded image paths that start with http://, so they load non-securely.

I'm using that as an excuse to go through my old posts and update broken links, etc. This takes a while, but it's a good thing to do every so often. And note to self, never hardcode the full URL—I have no idea why I did that!

And yes, I could just do a mass replace in the database, but the audit has already helped me fix a couple handfuls of posts with errors.

Like a kid in a candy store…

Mar 3 '17Sep 11 '23
Auto, Photography

Back in January, I spent a morning at the Portland International Auto Show, walking around looking at a huge assortment of new cars and trucks, and even a couple of campers.

As the title says, for me, short of actually buying a new car, that was peak fun. I love everything about cars, and walking around a car show is about as good as it gets: All the new cars, none of the sales pressure of a dealer visit! Here are some of the better shots from the morning's virtual shopping trip. [View on Flickr]

Of the vehicles we saw, the Acura NSX and the BMW i8 were both very striking looking—much more so in person than in photographs. And I think the Audi RS7, especially in all-black, is one of the meanest-looking cars to come along in a long time. Now I just need to come up with the $7.5 million or so it'd take to buy all the cars on my wish list!

The above album is hosted on Flickr and displayed here via a plug-in; read on if you're interested in how I did that…

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Magically achieve ‘inbox zero’ in Mail…or don’t

Mar 2 '17Mar 3 '17
Apple, Mac OS X Hints, macOS Apps, Mail

While working yesterday, I noticed that my inbox was empty. Generally, I strive to keep it that way, but I knew it wasn't true just then—my phone showed six messages in my inbox. Even stranger, using a Smart Mailbox in Mail, set to "show messages in inbox for Many Tricks," revealed the six messages. It was only when clicking into the mailbox itself that I couldn't see anything. At first, I blamed Mail…

Mail has now decided my inbox is empty. That's not true—Smart Mailbox for inbox shows six messages. Quit, rebuild, no help. Sigh. pic.twitter.com/NVtQnGjjPV
— Rob Griffiths (@rgriff) March 1, 2017

Can you blame me, though, after my Mail search issues and the weird potential fix?

When I looked a bit closer, I spotted a clue that maybe it wasn't all Mail's fault. The "(0 filtered messages)" as seen in my tweet normally reads "(0 messages)." This was different, so I went looking in Mail's menus for "filter," where I discovered View > Disable Message Filter. Because the menu read "Disable," that meant the feature was enabled. I selected it, the menu switched to Enable Message Filter, and bingo, my inbox messages were back!

So what happened, and why wasn't it more obvious to me what had happened? The fault lies both with me and with Mail.

[Note: Glenn F wrote about this very issue for Macworld a few months back…sorry I missed it, as it would've saved some investigative work on my end!]

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Out with fluorescent garage lights, in with LEDs

Mar 1 '17Mar 3 '17
Cool Hardware, Home

I've converted most of our home to LED lighting—costs have plummeted in recent years, and when you combine LED lights' long lives with low energy costs, the payback period is incredibly short. Newer LEDs are also warmer in tone—we found some "soft light" 60W equivalent bulbs that are nicely warm (and warmer when dimmed). Through all of this, though, I had one area of the house I'd ignored: The garage.

Our garage has six (five overhead, one over a workbench) 48" long fluorescent hanging fixtures. I hate fluorescent bulbs, but the cost to replace them with LED-equivalent fixtures was high—about $300 to do all six. But the other day at Costco, I noticed they had two-pack FEIT 4' LED replacement bulbs—like these at Amazon—for only $18 (versus $28 at Amazon as I write this).

A "normal" 48" fluorescent tube light, as in this Sylania four-pack is around $6 or $7 per light. So while the LED bulbs are more expensive, a $3 difference isn't much at all given the lower engery usage and long life. (And the fluorescents in my garage go out quite often, even compared to indoor incandescents.) So I bought one box, as a test to use over the workbench.

Within a couple minutes of installing the LED tubes, I was headed back to Costco to buy five more boxes—the difference is that notable. Instant on, brighter and more-even light distribution, no flicker, and they should last nearly forever.

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A modest proposal to improve the iOS Settings app

Feb 28 '17Apr 18 '20
Apple, iOS

One of the things about the iPhone I don't like is that Apple requires (recommends?¹)Many apps now have settings within the app, which I love, so this "separate settings" thing doesn't seem to be a hard requirement. that apps keep their preferences (settings) in the Settings app.

While I understand the theory (don't clutter the app with prefs, all prefs in one spot), the reality is that this structure quickly turns the Settings screen into an endlessly scrolling nightmare. I hate opening the Settings screen, knowing how much flicking it'll take—simulation visible at right—to get to the app whose settings I want to modify.

With some apps having some of their prefs within the app, and some of their prefs on the Settings screen, I find I often have to look in both places to see if the pref I want is available.

What I'd love to see is Apple recommend (require?) that apps do not use the Settings screen, and instead keep their prefs within the app. After all, if you're using app XYZ and you want to change something about its settings, the most logical place to look would be within the app itself. This would greatly clean up the Settings screen, too, restricting it to just Apple's stock apps and system-wide settings.

But barring that change, I'd like to see a more-usable Settings screen. How can it be more usable? By splitting the apps into alpha buckets, so I could tap into a letter/number, and then see only those apps on the list. Something like this very-rough mockup…

A horizontal flick on the alpha row scrolls through the letters (and numbers), then vertical flicks scroll within the chosen letter. This index would appear with the first entry in the third-party apps section, then stick to the top as the user scrolled down.

I'm sure there are better ways to do this, but something needs to be done, especially as device storage sizes increase.

Open Unix man pages in their own Terminal window

Feb 27 '17Mar 3 '17
Mac OS X Hints, macOS System, Terminal

A while back, I wrote about opening Unix man pages in Preview, and this is still my preferred method of browsing man pages. However, there may be times where Preview is overkill, and you want to stay in Terminal, maybe for a short help file such as that for ln. But opening a new window by hand is a bit of a pain, and tabs won't work because you can't see both the window and the man page at the same time.

While browsing the old Mac OS X Hints site, I found this nice solution: Open man pages in a new Terminal window, one that's set up just for reading such pages. It looks something like this (though I've customized my setup; keep reading)…

Adding a few lines to your shell's startup file makes opening these 'in their own window' man pages as easy as opening 'regular' man pages.

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