sc
Scott avatar
ttwillsey

Initial SuperDuper Copy

Mac

Part of the Mac series

Last night I mentioned setting up SuperDuper! to clone my Mac’s internal SSD to an external SSD daily. One thing about the initial copy you should know that doesn’t pertain to subsequent incremental copies is don’t let your Mac sleep during the initial copy.

I even thought about this when I started the initial backup, but then thought it shouldn’t matter. I came back to a failed copy with the following errors in the SuperDuper! log:

Terminal window
| Info |       Volume replication failed - Resource busy
| Error | ***ERROR OCCURRED: ****FAILED****: result=256 errno=60 (Operation not permitted)

I sent the log to Shirt Pocket support, and Dave Nanian quickly replied with the following (I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it here):

Your Mac has fallen asleep during the copy, even though we asked it not to, or something similar (such as a TRIM operation that takes too long) — as you can see, Apple’s error is vague and unhelpful.

But, in our experience, this usually works. Please reformat the backup drive (which, done this way, should reset all the TRIM operations):

  • Open Disk Utility
  • Choose “Show All Devices” from the View menu
  • Select the destination drive hardware (above the existing volume)
  • Click Erase
  • Choose the “GUID” partition scheme (2nd pop-up), THEN “APFS” formatting (1st pop-up) and name appropriately
  • Click Erase

Then restart your Mac. Install Coca (free) from the App Store and enable it to keep your Mac awake — including the screen. Ensure it’s plugged in if it’s a laptop. Turn Time Machine off temporarily. Then try the erase-then-copy backup again.

Note that none of this should be necessary for future Smart Updates, which are done with our copy engine, and not Apple’s.

Hope that helps!
—
Dave Nanian
Shirt Pocket

In my case, I use the Raycast Coffee extension now when I want to keep my Mac awake, so I used that to make sure the first copy finished.

Anyway, don’t sleep on that first copy, and do back your drive up to more than one destination. Make at least one local and at least one remote (cloud backup is fine). I highly recommend SuperDuper! for its features, price, and always outstanding support from Dave Nanian.

SuperDuper Invisible

Mac

Part of the Mac series

I’ve certainly used drive cloning software in the past, including SuperDuper!.1 For awhile now, though, I’ve just had Backblaze as my backup method, which does violate my principle of always having local and remote backups. So when I saw Jason Snell’s article on SixColors about using a cloned drive to recover from Mac failures, it gave me the impetus to make a clone again.

I love and like and love SuperDuper! and always have, but I do wonder about this UI choice… SuperDuper Invisible UI Element

If you can’t see the blue progress bar inside the outlined section of that Copy Files section header, you are not the only one. It took me a couple minutes to realize it was there.

Look, I may be the pot calling the kettle black, or not picking the mote out of my own eye, or whatever metaphor from 50,000 years ago for hypocrisy you want to use because of the color of the hyperlinks on my site’s dark theme, but that is some kind of invisible ink level trickery on that progress bar.

Anyway… according to the invisible progress bar, as I write this SuperDuper! is about 75% of the way done cloning my internal drive.

Footnotes

  1. It looks like I’m ending that sentence with two punctuation marks, but SuperDuper! is the name of the product, and the period is the end of the sentence. Really. ↩

Nownownow Oregon Edition

You all know, I hope, that I have a /now page on this site for quick dumps of things I’m into at the moment. It’s ephemeral, as /now pages should be.

The idea of the /now page comes from Derek Sivers, and he has a whole site, nownownow.com, dedicated to spreading the message and the sheer fun of /now pages.

And look! You can see people by region!

nownownow

I’m very pleased to announce that, as of this writing, 37 of us in Oregon are extremely proud of whatever it is we’re doing /now. You should definitely check it out. I’m even listed right beside Justin Miller.

nownownow Oregon

I was a little surprised to see that everyone in Japan touting their /now pages are gaijin1 and not Japanese. Some of those people in Japan need to talk to the people they live amongst and spread the news! Richard Möhn is my hero though – he lives in Kagoshima City, my old stomping grounds!

Here’s your assignment for today:

Footnotes

  1. Foreigners ↩

Mail Weekly Reads Script Command

Raycast

Part of the Raycast series

As I mentioned previously, I have a Weekly Reads page that I set up to make it easier for me to share articles with my dad and brother (and anyone else who cares), complete with RSS feed. But let’s be real, neither of them wants to be bothered with my feed because they have stuff to do and we already have a tradition of emailing links to each other.1

Last night I created a Raycast Script Command that looks at the markdown file for my latest Reads update, parses and reformats it for email, and mails it out to them. It looks like this:

#!/bin/bash


# Required parameters:
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title Mail Weekly Reads
# @raycast.mode fullOutput


# Optional parameters:
# @raycast.icon
# @raycast.argument1 { "type": "text", "placeholder": "Subject" }
# @raycast.packageName Website


# Documentation:
# @raycast.author scott_willsey
# @raycast.authorURL https://raycast.com/scott_willsey


subject=$1


# Find the latest file in the specified directory
latest_file=$(ls -t ~/Sites/scottwillsey/src/content/reads | head -n1)
echo "Processing file: $latest_file"


# Read the contents of the file, remove YAML front matter, and modify markdown links
content=$(awk '
    BEGIN { in_frontmatter=0; }
    /^---$/ { in_frontmatter = !in_frontmatter; next; }
    !in_frontmatter { print; }
' "/Users/scott/Sites/scottwillsey/src/content/reads/$latest_file")


content=$(echo "$content" | perl -0pe 's/\*\*\[(.+)\]\((.+)\)\*\*\n\n(.+)/$3 → $1 – $2\n/gm')


echo "Content after regex replacement:"
echo "$content"


# Escape the content for AppleScript
escaped_content=$(echo "$content" | sed -e 's/\\/\\\\/g' -e 's/"/\\"/g' -e 's/`/\\`/g' -e "s/'/\\'/g" -e 's/$/\\n/' | tr -d '\n')


# Pass the escaped content to the AppleScript
osascript <<EOD
on run
    set theContent to "$escaped_content"
    tell application "Mail"
        set theFrom to "[email protected]"
        set theTos to {"[email protected]", "[email protected]"}
        set theCcs to {}
        set theBccs to {}


        set theSubject to "$subject"
        set theSignature to ""
        set theAttachments to {}
        set theDelay to 1


        set theMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {sender:theFrom, subject:theSubject, content:theContent, visible:false}
        tell theMessage
            repeat with theTo in theTos
                make new recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:theTo}
            end repeat
        end tell


        send theMessage
    end tell
end run
EOD

It takes one parameter when I run the script so that I can give the email a cutesy custom subject (another idea I stole from my brother).

RaycastMailWeeklyReadsScriptCommand

Then it parses the latest file in my web project’s /src/content/reads directory, replaces markdown links with “commentary → link title – link” for each link and following commentary paragraph in the page, and gives that to an AppleScript to send the mail.

From this markdown page that generates the individual HTML reads page:

ReadsMarkdown

To this email that gets sent to my long-suffering family members:

ReadsEmail

It’s simple and effective. You can do this and make your family hate you too.

Footnotes

  1. Fine, it’s my brother’s tradition and I’m stealing it, much to his annoyance I’m sure. ↩

Raycast Extensions I Use

Raycast

Part of the Raycast series

Introductionum

Recently Niléane of MacStories wrote about the Raycast extensions she uses in Adding to My Mac’s Swiss Army Knife: A Raycast Extension Roundup - MacStories. I learned about a couple good ones that I wasn’t aware of, but I also thought I would list Raycast extensions I use here, along with a little bit about why for each of them.

The Listium

So here they are in alphabetical order-ish:

1Password

I actually underutilize this one. It allows for opening items in various ways (in 1P or in a browser), generating passwords, and more, but I’m so familiar with 1Password’s own keyboard shortcuts that I forget about the Raycast extension.

Append Clipboard

This is a really outstanding extension that lets you prepend or append text to whatever’s on your clipboard with a pre-specified separator. It sounds like something I should use all the time. I’d actually forgotten I had this one installed. 🤦‍♂️

Apple Mail

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – here’s an extension that sounds really useful and I just don’t use it. But I should! Checking for new mail, composing an email, sharing finder items to mail, seeing recent or important mail, these are all possible with this extension. I think with most of these it’s a matter of building muscle memory.

Apple Reminders

I actually have used this extension! The Apple Reminders extension lets you use natural language to set reminds, in addition to allowing you to view and complete them.

Brew

Hi, Homebrew users! Want a quick way to see what you’ve installed with Homebrew, or search for and install new formulae and casks? You can do so from wherever you’re at in macOS with this extension.

Change Case

I use this extension all the time. Capital Case, camelCase, lower case, PascalCase, snake_case, UPPER CASE, and more… select your text and have at it. I love this one.

Clean Keyboard

I just started using this one today. It effectively locks your keyboard until you type ^ U (Ctrl+U) to unlock it, in order to allow you to clean the keyboard without deleting your home folder or sending an obscene message to your boss.

CleanShot X

I’m currently a heavy CleanShot X user and this extension has a ton of useful CleanShot X commands, but once again… the old muscle memory. If you picked up on the fact that I’m primarily writing this article to benefit myself, you win the prize of knowing how insightful you are.

Clipboard Formatter

I use this all the time to clear formatting from items in the clipboard. It comes in handy for certain things I have to enter into excel, for example. Yes, you can tell excel to paste in content only, but this is faster for me, and it’s also useful anywhere you need formatting removed.

ColorSlurp

I use ColorSlurp for color picking and therefore I use this extension to quickly launch it and grab colors, but truthfully I may very well switch to Color Picker instead. In fact, I’m doing it right now.

Copy Path

Oh, I love this one. For example, I just had a finder window with some pdfs in it open and I ran this extension and it gave me /Users/scott/Documents/BlueDragonfly/Sophos/ET15 - Sophos Central Endpoint Protection v5.0 - Engineer/ET15-Sophos-Central-5.0v5-Engineer-EN/01 Sophos Central Overview/ on my clipboard. You can’t beat that!

Cron Description

You ever look in crontab and see something illegible like */15 * * * * python3 /usr/local/sbin/scripts/wanipy/main.py --env prod > /dev/null and you can’t remember what */15 * * * * means? Well, it means run this thing every 15 minutes, and I know that because (well, I already knew that particular one) Cron Description told me!

cURL

I know I installed this for a reason, I just don’t remember what it was. Anyway, it lets you use curl to make an HTTP request, complete with custom headers.

Custom Folder

I haven’t actually used this yet, but this one helps you create custom folder icons and apply them to folders you want to customize. It’s not something you’ll use every day, but it’s pretty cool.

Date Format Converter

Input a date string and then format it into any standard date format you like. It’s that simple.

Dynamic Font Size

If you’ve ever struggled with the CSS clamp function, you’ll like this one. You just enter your parameters, like min and max font sizes and min and max viewport sizes, and it’ll generate your clamp for you.

Easings

Another CSS helper. You can quickly copy an ease-in like cubic-bezier(0.55, 0.085, 0.68, 0.53); or you can create your own custom CSS transitions.

Format JSON

Lets you take JSON that’s not formatted nicely and indent everything properly.

GIF Search

Search for GIFs, favorite them, paste them in various ways to various targets.

Git Commands

Search and learn what different git commands do.

GitHub CLI Manual

Helpful if you need to interact with GitHub using a CLI, this utility lets you search for commands and then opens the GitHub manual page for them.

GitHub

Too many commands to list here, but it lets you work with GitHub in various ways. I guess that’s pretty self-evident.

GitHub Repository Search

This is for searching for repos on GitHub and quickly opening them (and really quickly opening repos you’ve visited before).

Google Chrome

I primarily use this for searching Chrome history, but you can search bookmarks, open windows, search tabs, and more.

Google Translate

I have never used this. Maybe I should uninstall it.

HTTP.cat Status Codes

This reminds you what all those pesky HTTP status codes mean AND gives you a cute cat to go with it. The internet was invented for cats. Don’t ever forget it.

Iconify — Search Icons

Here’s a good one that I should really use more. Search for icons and get the svg source code.

Ingredients Lister

I can see why I installed this, but I can’t see why I haven’t used it yet. This grabs web pages or YouTube videos and gets recipe ingredients from them for you.

Installed Extensions

If you’re thinking “I bet Scott used this extension to list what extensions he has installed”, you win a Ferrari!! I mean, someone else is going to have to provide the Ferrari. But I’ll let you win it if they’re willing to give it. 🤷

Link Cleaner

Clean those dirty links of yours, dammit!! Auto-scrubs tracking and referral crap off URLs for you.

Lorem Ipsum

Occasionally while mocking up some web idea I’ll toss in some Lorem Ipsum text, and this is a super quick way to do it.

Markdown Reference

I kind of installed this one because I could. I don’t think I’ve ever needed to use it. I use Markdown all the time but it’s pretty simple.

Menubar Calendar

I like this one for letting me pop open a tiny calendar quickly and for also showing me upcoming calendar items.

Notion

I use Notion. I use Raycast. You’d think I’d use this extension. Truth is, I keep forgetting about it (again). I should at least use the search feature, that would save me some time getting to it in the Notion app itself.

Open Link in Specific Browser

This is actually kind of cool, but I never use this because I’ve created default browser script commands that I use all the time.

Open Path

Here’s another one I have but never used. It looks like a way to open things in various apps depending on what the source link is, but… I have no clue.

Pins

I like this one. It’s just another way to get to things – I use it to create pins to Finder folders, mostly.

Pipe Commands

This lets you take various input sources and pipe them into a script command. You’d think I would use this all the time.

Placeholder

Grabs placeholder images from Lorem Picsum. Pretty handy.

PromptLab

A super useful extension for creating AI prompts to be used with Raycast AI.

Quick Calendar

Yep, another calendar extension, but this one just pops open a bigger calendar window to look at.

Quick Event

Um, I’m going to let you guess whether or not I’ve ever actually used this, but it’s for quickly creating calendar events.

Random Data Generator

This is a really cool one for quickly generating random dates, CC numbers, text, email addresses, and more.

Raycast Icons

Have not used. There, are you happy? This is for looking at various Raycast-specific icons.

Reddit Search

I might use this more if 1.) I remembered I have it, 2.) I don’t hate Reddit so much. Does everyone there have to write like they’re 13?

Regex Tester

I should use this more and see if it’s any good. I’m spoiled by BBEdit’s RegEx playground feature so I never do.

Remove Paywall

I’m not going to overtly state why I use this one, but I use it quite a bit. I don’t constantly end-run around paywalls on the same sites over and over. It’s for one-offs.

Ruler

This is a cool one for measuring stuff on the screen. I used this the other day to make a screenshot of a certain form item on a web page vs. what the form item plugin thought the minimum width should be. Yes, I could have used the browser developer tools for that, but this was easier for the client to look at and instantly get the point.

Safari

Like its Chrome counterpart, I mostly use this for Safari history search, but it’s also good for searching tabs and the reading list (which I do use).

ScreenOCR

I don’t think I have ever used this because I’ve discovered the OCR reading shortcut in CleanShot X, but it is pretty cool.

Search npm Packages

I don’t really use npm for a lot these days because most stuff I script I now script in Python. I of course use npm with things like Astro, but I don’t need to search for anything for that.

Set Audio Device

This is a great one to use to make sure you’re using your podcast mic instead of the built-in laptop one or whatever else will pick up the cricket in your kitchen.

Shell

I don’t know. It looks cool, but I’ve never used it. I have Warp, what the hell, guys. Get off my back. 😄

Speedtest

A handy way to run the ever popular speedtest.net speed test.

Summarize YouTube Videos with AI

I keep meaning to show this one to Peter. An AI watches videos so you don’t have to. Problem is, AIs are shite at summarizing (imnsho).

System Monitor

I have no clue why I have this installed, because I use and love iStat Menus.

Text Shortcuts

I use this a LOT while writing and programming, and I LIKE IT. Quick and easy text transformations of all types.

Timezone Converter

I use this when I remember to. Mostly I use it before I’ve had coffee for trying to see what people on the east coast might be doing.

Type Snob

VERY specific text utility for curly quotes, real em and en dashes, etc.

Unicode Symbols Search

I don’t always search for unicode symbols, but when I do…

Unix Timestamp

Unix timestamps were created by the devil, so I guess this is really just a conduit to hell. But it’s a pretty cool one.

URL Tools

URL encoding and decoding made fun and easy!!!

UUID Generator

Who does not need a UUID from time to time? No one, that’s who. If you think you don’t, well now you know why your life is falling apart.

Visual Studio Code - Project Manager

I genuinely have no idea why I have this instead of the general purpose Visual Studio Code extension. Maybe I was drinking beer the night I installed this.

Warp

I LOVE WARP!!! I always forget I have this installed though. I know. I’m a loser.

Web Converter

I do webby things a lot. I should probably try to remember I have this installed. “Hey, Scott. You have this installed.”

Wordle

I used to play this, but then I paid for Lex.games and have never looked back.1

World Clock

Somewhere in the world, it’s X o’clock!! Find out where!! Also (and even cooler), put in an IP address and find out what time it is for whatever has that stupid IP.

YouTube

Search YouTube videos and channels like it’s 1999. I don’t know why I said that. I’m not even sure when YouTube was first created.

YouTube Downloader

Speaking of YouTube… download all of YouTube, one video at a time!!!!

Summarium

That’s pretty much it for now. I’m always open to revisiting things and uninstalling some things and installing other things. Most likely in a year from now, not much will have changed though.

Footnotes

  1. I love Lex.games. Don’t even get me started. ↩

Weekly Reads

My brother likes to send emails to dad and I containing links of interesting things he’s read recently, replete with commentary of his own. I used to send one link at a time to them, then I tried his approach, and now I generally send a link at a time again.

Instead of this nonsense, I thought I’d create a Weekly Reads page to add Weekly Reads posts to, complete with its own RSS feed.

I may call it Weekly Reads, but I may add reads more than weekly or much less than weekly. I don’t know. Don’t pressure me! I have a lot going on! 😄

I need to create some links to it so people can find it and know it exists, but it’s there! It works!

Updated Sessions Raycast Script Command

Raycast

Part of the Raycast series

As you may know, I created a Raycast script command to trigger what I call “sessions”, which are really just setting up the Mac to perform different tasks, such as podcasting or “normal” general use. At the time, I was using Raycast for window management, so my script command referenced Raycast window management layouts. Now I’m using Moom for window management, so I needed to update it to call my Moom layouts instead.

In the process, I decided to steal even more from Robb Knight’s App Mode Raycast script command and use his method of killing all apps before activating a session and having an array of default apps that I always want open. It’s almost the same exact script now.

The updated version looks like this:

#!/bin/bash


# Required parameters:
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title Session
# @raycast.mode fullOutput


# Optional parameters:
# @raycast.icon /Users/scott/Scripts/Raycast/icons/app-mode.png
# @raycast.argument1 { "type": "dropdown", "placeholder": "Session", "data": [ { "title": "Home", "value": "home" }, { "title": "IT", "value": "it" }, { "title": "Podcast", "value": "podcast" }, { "title": "Podcast Edit", "value": "podcastedit" } ] }
# @raycast.packageName Utils


# Documentation:
# @raycast.description Set up a workflow session
# @raycast.author scott_willsey
# @raycast.authorURL https://raycast.com/scott_willsey


open raycast://extensions/raycast/system/quit-all-applications


sleep 3


CORE=(1Password Messages Mail Safari)


TYPE=$1


for value in "${CORE[@]}"
do
    open -a "$value"
done


if [ "$TYPE" = 'home' ]; then
    open 'raycast://script-commands/set-default-browser-safari'
    sleep 2
    open -a Warp
    /opt/homebrew/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s "Studio Display Speakers"
    /opt/homebrew/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s "Studio Display Microphone" -t "input"
    osascript ~/Scripts/applescript/apply_moom_layout.scpt "Home"
        exit
fi


if [ "$TYPE" = 'it' ]; then
    open 'raycast://script-commands/set-default-browser-chrome'
    sleep 2
    open -a "Google Chrome"
    open -a Warp
    open -a Slack
    /opt/homebrew/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s "Studio Display Speakers"
    /opt/homebrew/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s "Studio Display Microphone" -t "input"
    osascript ~/Scripts/applescript/apply_moom_layout.scpt "IT"
        exit
fi


if [ "$TYPE" = 'podcast' ]; then
    open 'raycast://script-commands/set-default-browser-safari'
    sleep 2
    open -a "Audio Hijack"
    open -a Farrago
    open -a Bear
    open -a FaceTime
    /opt/homebrew/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s "Elgato Wave XLR"
    /opt/homebrew/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s "Elgato Wave XLR" -t "input"
    osascript ~/Scripts/applescript/apply_moom_layout.scpt "Podcast"
        exit
fi


if [ "$TYPE" = 'podcastedit' ]; then
    open 'raycast://script-commands/set-default-browser-safari'
    sleep 2
    open -a "Logic Pro X"
    open -a Finder ~/Documents/Podcasts/FwB
    /opt/homebrew/bin/SwitchAudioSource -s "Elgato Wave XLR"
    osascript ~/Scripts/applescript/apply_moom_layout.scpt "PodcastEdit"
        exit
fi

You can see that because my so-called “IT” session sets Chrome as the default browser, I’m compelled to set Safari as my default browser for every other session type. I supposed I could just move that out to the top and have it called no matter what, and then immediately reversed if the session type is “IT”. You can read about my default browser script commands here.

The reason for the sleep commands is that without them, running the Session script command would result in some timing issue in which only some of the apps would open, but not all of them. I was able to solve the problem by putting in a sleep after killing all applications and after setting the default browser.

Calling Moom layouts using AppleScript commands (osascript) is possible because the author of Moom supports AppleScript calls to the program. I wish more programmers would think of their apps as potential links in a workflow chain like this.

/now /reviews /uses /links
Built with Astro
© 2025 Scott Willsey