Another experiment I’m trying this week: Giving Apple Reminders a shot in place of Things. This one may not stick. The friction to get a reminder entered to my liking quickly is way more effort than Things' quick entry. We’ll see…

I’m experimenting this week… First: Coffee without sweetener. I’ve been a one Stevia packet guy for years. I’m going to ditch it for straight black coffee. Second: Analog notes in a Field Notes memo book instead of digital notes in Obsidian. Both should be interesting.

Somehow, I suddenly have far more usb-c to lightning cables than I know what to do with.

I’m taking another look at Drafts today. I had a pro subscription a year ago, but I never took the time to really dig into what it was capable of before it lapsed. I’m kind of seeing the potential here, but this is definitely an app I’ll have to RTFM on…

Apple Six Color Hello T-Shirt

Since I’m on the topic of t-shirts and swag, I just published a new design on Cotton Bureau of my take on the classic Mac “hello” graphic with the retro Apple six color palette.

Click the image to buy one of your own!

Woah! Broke 10,000 lifetime views as tracked by Tinylytics on my site today thanks to @manton’s boost of my Micro.blog swag post. Not earth shattering news by any means, but it is a nice number to see.

Unoffically Official Micro.blog Swag

If you’ve missed my previous posts about the Unofficially Official Micro.blog swag available on Cotton Bureau, here they are all in one place.

I just added the mug as an on-demand option.

Enjoy!

So… Given the Meta news today, I’m 100% done with Zuck’s platforms and will be deleting accounts as soon as I’m home tonight. I think I’m going to ditch Bluesky while I’m at it since I’ve gotten nothing worthwhile out of that one either. Mastodon and Micro.blog is where I’ll be from now on.

AppleScript to Generate Strong Passwords

I’d totally forgotten I wrote this AppleScript until I needed to create a strong password this morning. If you’re a Mac user and need to generate unique strong passwords, give this script a try.

It works really well when used along with FastScripts by Daniel Jaklut.

property allowedCharacters : {33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122}
property givenPasswordLength : 21 -- sets the preferred password length

repeat while true
	try
		set givenPasswordLength to text returned of (display dialog "Enter desired password length:" with title "Password Generator" default answer givenPasswordLength)
		set givenPasswordLength to givenPasswordLength as integer
		if givenPasswordLength is not greater than 0 then error "Please enter a valid positive integer."
		exit repeat
	on error errMsg
		display alert "Error" message errMsg as warning
		return
	end try
end repeat

repeat while true
	try
		set generatedPassword to generatePassword()
		set dialogResult to (display dialog "New generated password:" & return & return & generatedPassword with title "Password Generator" buttons {"Cancel", "Refresh", "Copy"} default button "Copy" cancel button "Cancel")
		if button returned of dialogResult is "Copy" then
			set the clipboard to generatedPassword as string
			exit repeat
		else if button returned of dialogResult is "Cancel" then
			exit repeat
		end if
	on error errMsg
		display alert "Error" message errMsg as warning
		return
	end try
end repeat

on generatePassword()
	set generatedPassword to ""
	repeat givenPasswordLength times
		set randomCharacterPosition to random number from 1 to count allowedCharacters
		set generatedPassword to generatedPassword & (ASCII character item randomCharacterPosition of allowedCharacters)
	end repeat
	return generatedPassword
end generatePassword

It’s such a trip when I browse to a referring site I see in my daily Tinylytics stats and find the site using my mnml theme. Just… Wow. 🤯

My wife, son and I went to a local restaurant to have an early New Year’s Eve dinner. I was happy to see that the 20 or so TVs they had in the establishment were all VIZIO 65" P-Series models. Thanks to Mama’s on 39 for contributing to my paycheck!

New Year’s Day means three things in the Mitchell house: The Rose Parade on TV, a big bacon and eggs breakfast, and Chili con Carne simmering on the stove. I’m adding a twist this year and smoking a round cut first. I think it’ll add a nice twist to an already family favorite.

Happy New Year all…

Another mnml update to v2.1.1 that gracefully handles a “more” summary break added to content without a post title.

My wife and I walked downtown for coffee and to check out the waves. Since our beach is south-facing, the wrap around west swell is producing unorganized closeout mush. We decided it wasn’t worth the extra walk to the pier for a closer look. The coffee from Philz was excellent, as it always is.

Hmm… Seems there’s some banding issues with the two desktop images I created yesterday after downloading them to my work laptop. They look fine on the personal laptop where I created them. Will investigate once I’m home. I wonder if Micro.blog adds extra compression to .heic files when uploaded?

Even More mnml Updates

I’ve been a busy guy today. More updates to mnml are available for those using the theme.

This update adds compatibility for these Micro.blog plugins:

Thanks to @cygnoir for asking me to support them.

I made it through the certification bootcamp and actually learned some new things. It’s reinvigorated my interest for Apex and LWC on the Salesforce platform, which kind of makes me wish I could go back to just being a developer and create cool stuff again rather than being a nerd wrangler.

Pushed a few minor tweaks to mnml that should show up in Micro.blog installed plugins shortly (v2.0.8). Keep an eye out…

I’m second guessing whether I should have used the melodicmayhem.net domain I own for my Mastodon instance. That would have been a really cool instance name… But then, I really like being “on brand” with my jimmitchell.org subdomain. Makes no difference, I’m committed.

I’ll be doing an intense online bootcamp training for my next Salesforce certification all week long – eight hours a day for five days. It’s all stuff I’ve been doing one way or another for the last 15 years, but being a people manager for the last three has made my mojo rusty. This should be fun…