Customizing my zsh prompt
I got fed up of the default macOS prompt: simon@Simons-MacBook-Pro % Mainly because I like copying and pasting terminal examples into GitHub issues.
productivity
15 posts tagged “productivity”.
- 2025
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1 min read
- 2024
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Copy rich text to the clipboard
I've been experimenting with a tool for generating the content for a weekly Substack newsletter by querying the Datasette API for my blog and assembling HTML for the last week of content.
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Learn Something New Every Day
admin only: false I've read an article recently that simply learning something new will help you to improve your life. I thought about it and I think it's true.
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Get Skitch working on Catalina
I really like Skitch for taking screeshots, mainly because I like to snap a quick shot and then drag the icon onto a Google Doc or similar without saving the file anywhere.
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GitHub Actions, Issues and Pages to build a daily planner
I'm trying a new thing: a private daily planner, where each day I note down my goals for the day and make notes on my progress towards them as the day progresses.
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Grabbing a transcript of a short snippet of a YouTube video with MacWhisper
I use the MacWhisper macOS desktop app to run Whisper. It's a very pleasant GUI wrapper around the Whisper transcription model.
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Guessing Amazon image URLs using GitHub Copilot
I was experimenting with the new Readwise export API and it gave me back the following JSON: The image URL produced a tiny little image - this one: I wanted to get back a bigger version of that image.
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Close terminal window on Ctrl+D for macOS
I always forget how to set this up. It's hidden in Preferences - Profiles - Basic - Shell:
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Generating a calendar week grid with the Python Calendar module
I needed to generate a grid calendar that looks like this (design by Natalie Downe): The Python standard library calendar module has a utility function that really helps here: Outputs:
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Editing an iPhone home screen using macOS
My iPhone has a weird bug: I can no longer re-arrange the app icons on the home screen (or in the dock) by dragging them around on my phone.
1 min read - 2023
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Display EC2 instance costs per month
The EC2 pricing page shows cost per hour, which is pretty much useless. I want cost per month. The following JavaScript, pasted into the browser developer console, modifies the page to show…
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Concatenating strings and newlines in Google Sheets
I was asked if there was a way to run shot-scraper against a list of URLs in a Google Sheet. I came up with this example sheet which uses a formula to code-generate the YAML configuration needed by…
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Finding the largest SQLite files on a Mac
This runs using Spotlight so it's really fast: mdfind "kMDItemDisplayName == .sqlite" -0 xargs -0 stat "-f%z %N" sort -nr head -n 20 I have a lot of files in my Dropbox so I excluded those like this…
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Generating URLs to a Gmail compose window
I wanted to send out a small batch of follow-up emails for workshop attendees today, and I realized that since I have their emails in a database table I might be able to semi-automate the process.
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Driving an external display from a Mac laptop
For a friend's wedding I needed to run a Google Photos slideshow on some large televisions. I had two MacBook Pro laptops. Here's how I got it to work.
1 min read