I love Drafts for writing blog posts, podcast episode show notes, and more. I used to also use it for saving self-written tech-related documentation in, but now that is primarily in Obsidian. But Drafts is great for “writing writing”. Workspaces, actions, themes, templates, and huge amounts of built-in functionality make it a flexible, capable writing tool. It’s also super keyboard shortcut friendly, which is a huge must-have for me.

And now it’s even better, because it has everyone’s favorite buzzword, ChatGPT!

This is actually a pretty cool feature, assuming you’re experienced with ChatGPT and know its strengths and weaknesses and how to dig the truth out from its inevitable lies. I’ve talked about MacGPT and its inline mode before, and using ChatGPT in Drafts is very much like using MacGPT’s inline mode. It’s very easy to create actions to define things, check spelling, summarize a selection, or to write code to match requirements specified in a prompt. In fact, Greg Pierce, creator of Drafts, has written some actions to do those very things.¹

I made some quick short videos showing these actions in… well… action. Have a look. By the way, I modified the OpenAI: Translate Selection action to include Japanese as an option. As written, it included Spanish, French, German, English.

Part of the Astro series

If you’re reading this thinking “this site looks a little bit different”, you’re correct. What started off as an exercise in improving my pagination pager for my blog posts became a bit of a site redesign including moving menu links out of the header into a standalone menu, a new (work-in-progress) pager, and having the home page act as a links/summary page instead of being the full page 1 of my paginated blog posts.

The home page change is probably the most obvious to most people, even though the menu change is the one I personally think improves things the most. Whereas previously I did a couple minor hacks with my pagination logic to have the home page show the first page of blog posts, this isn’t really how Astro likes to handle pagination.

Astro expects a [bracket] syntax page that acts as the page that will page through a given collection of items. Because of this, implementing anything more than a simple “more posts” link on the home page became difficult for me. I wrestled with figuring out how to get the home page the information passed via the page prop like Astro does on a proper paginated page.¹

In the end, I gave up and decided to do what Astro seems to think is the right way to set up a blog site, which is to have a landing home page and keep the paginated blog posts off of it. That doesn’t mean completely avoiding linking to posts, as you can see from the fact that I have a list of the 5 most recent posts on the home page. But these aren’t the complete posts like on the paginated blog post page, and they (obviously) aren’t paginated. Links to the 5 most recent posts are there, and that’s it.

Personally I don’t really know why Astro doesn’t have the ability to handle routing pagination with the index page or home page as the first page of items, but they don’t. None of the popular sites I enjoy that have daily articles have a landing page with posts hidden behind a link. They all just get down to business and show the visitor the first page of posts, with a pager to move on to older content. Regardless, it’s not a hill I want to die on for this site. I do have a project in the works where it may become more of an issue, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Bridges and hills. Who knew there would be so much geography involved in running a web site?

Ordering a Menu

Previously on this incarnation of my website (since converting it to Astro), the site header combined the site title (featuring my weird head) and the menu. The menu was just laid out horizontally and didn’t change for smaller screens other than to scale down enough to fit.

Besides not being very elegant, this menu structure also has the downside of featuring inherent non-expandability. This is a convoluted way of saying there was no way to cram more onto that menu. I knew that at some point I wanted a side menu that would disappear for small screens, but I wasn’t sure how it should look and if I really wanted a hamburger menu that would reveal a hidden mobile menu.

Enter Ben Smith, whose website I stumbled across somehow, probably in the Astro Discord Showcase channel. I genuinely feel bad about how much I stole his menu ideas, but it looks good and functions even better. Instead of a hamburger menu, Ben chose an approach of having a hamburger menu looking icon next to the site title for small screens, but having it just jump the visitor down to the same menu as on the full-size site, except now located down at the bottom of the page. I loved it. I stole it. I’m sorry and thank you?

Lest the reader think I also stole the icon idea, you can see from the image of the old menu above that I was already using a menu with icons. In fact, way back when my site was written with Hugo, I had a menu that was nothing BUT icons. I think it’s fair to say this isn’t a unique idea.

Also lest the reader wonders whether or not I realize the limitations of my design skills and whether or not I think my site looks stunningly professional, the answers are yes, I do realize my limitations, and no, I don’t overestimate my site’s appearance. My best is not very good when it comes to UI design or even design of any kind, and I do understand that.

I’m not going to go into the old Pocket Sized Podcast days, but just know that I was publicly criticized by a few listeners for my artwork design skills, or lack thereof. 🤷‍♂️ You can’t win them all. Hopefully this site is at least tolerable enough that people won’t take time out of their day to chase me down and tell me how bad it is.

GPT - What is it good for?

Human communication is weird. It’s so nebulous and imprecise and dependent on visual cues like eye-to-eye contact and physical observation of the party we’re communicating with. I often used to imagine how much life would be easier if we could do direct data dumps into each other’s brains, like computers sending information to each other.

How funny it is to me then that machine learning is making advances by using large language models to let computers parse incoming information through the context of human language in order to let systems with different APIs and data formats communicate with each other. It turns out that the future of computer communication may well be based on the less precise and more misunderstanding-prone human forms of verbal communication.

All philosophical musing aside, the point is that I’ve been using ChatGPT to do computer related tasks for me like write AppleScripts, bash scripts, and detail nuances of Swift code. These are the types of things I believe the GPT LLMs are best at. I don’t like arguing with it to make it do things it’s not good at or isn’t supposed to do, and I understand and share the social and ethical concerns voiced by people like Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender. In addition, there’s the question of resource usage, and LLM training requires tons of it.

That’s a lot of off-topic information to prepend onto what is basically a post about what ChatGPT tools and applications I use, but I think it’s important to think about these things and not just blindly fall into the AI craze and believe everything people like Sam Altman want us to believe.

GPT apps

”Blah, blah, blah,” you say, “what about the apps?” Fine. Let’s talk about some ChatGPT apps I like.

MacGPT

By far the GPT app I use the most is MacGPT by Jordi Bruin. MacGPT primarily runs as a menubar app, but it also features global mode (a pop up query field that looks like Spotlight) and inline mode (letting you get responses from ChatGPT right inside your text documents and text fields).

As an example of inline mode, I’m going to trigger MacGPT to have ChatGPT tell me if Python 3 supports async/await right here inside this post.

Does Python 3 have async/await functionality?+gpt

Yes, starting from Python 3.5, async/await functionality is available in Python. It allows for asynchronous programming, which can greatly improve the performance of certain types of applications. The async/await keywords are used to define asynchronous functions and to wait for the results of asynchronous operations.

Here’s what that looks like in action:

MacGPT allows you to use either a native Mac UI for interacting with ChatGPT or the OpenAI web view for ChatGPT. Both have pros and cons - the OpenAI web view allows you to keep your history available there for access across all platforms, while the native UI looks nicer and (hopefully) in the future will have greater customization. I’d like to see an even wider menubar view, and complete font customization including font, font size, and bubble colors.

Both views allow for copying of conversations, but the native UI copy function copies the entire conversation in the window including both your prompts and ChatGPT’s replies, while the web view only allows you to copy a ChatGPT response and doesn’t include the preceding prompt that you entered.

MacGPT isn’t perfect, but given the low cost of entry (it’s basically donation-ware) and the pace at which Jordi has added updates, I have high hopes for its future.

Machato

I recently stumbled across another Mac ChatGPT app called Machato. Machato takes a different approach than MacGPT in that it just runs as a normal Mac app and doesn’t have menubar, inline, or global (floating textbox) functionality. I miss MacGPT’s menubar aspect when using Machato, but it has some compelling features of its own.

Machato lets you create multiple conversations so you can categorize by topic, and it also allows you to create folders to further organize them. It also has a very handy ability to branch a conversation so that you can pick a point to split off into a new conversation. All you have to do is hover over a prompt or response and click the “Branch from here” icon. It’s super handy.

Machato also lets you pick the output type for copied conversations – Markdown, LaTeX, or plain text.

And finally, Machato keeps track of your usage costs per day, week, month, or all time. I would love to see MacGPT steal this feature.

I’m kind of torn between MacGPT and Machato, because Machato has the superior UI and functionality for serious “help me with my programming” use, for example, but MacGPT has the nice always-there presence with its menubar component and the ability to pop that open and closed with a keyboard shortcut.

Petey

Another interesting entry into the ChatGPT space is Petey. Petey is for iOS and (get this) Apple Watch. Yep, you can ask ChatGPT things from your watch. You can share the results to messages or mail on the watch, or copy and paste them by sending the answer to your iPhone with one tap, and copying the answer from there.

On iOS, it’s not quite as interesting to me as the next app in my list, because it doesn’t let you do multiple conversations or look at the history as easily. You can ask questions, get answers (and have them read back to you), and copy and paste them, but that’s about it.

Petey is well-designed, playful, and fun. For more background and information about Petey, you can hear it directly from app developer Hidde van der Ploeg¹ on episode 60 of the Launched podcast.

Petey is $4.99 and has an in-app subscription, but if you have your own OpenAI API key, you don’t need to pay for the subscription.

GeePeeTee

GeePeeTee is Jordi Bruin’s iOS companion app to MacGPT, but it has some interesting features that MacGPT doesn’t. The most interesting feature to me is Conversations, similar to the same feature in Machato. My assumption is he plans to bring that to MacGPT at some point, but I haven’t bothered him to ask yet.

GeePeeTee doesn’t have a watchOS app, but it is better for iPhone use than Petey. Either way, you can’t go wrong. GeePeeTee is free on the App Store, but you need an API key.

Summarium

ChatGPT can be an effective tool to learn things and shorten writing or programming time if used wisely. It’s also wildly overhyped and has replaced crypto as the buzzword de jour, but the result is that lots of developers are writing apps against its API. You can probably guess by the fact I own and am talking about them that I like all the above apps (I do). I recommend you give them a try if you’re a Mac and iOS user who has room for ChatGPT in your workflow.

Part of the Automation series

I inadvertently lied to you. I bragged about using a bash script to get my current external IP address and putting it in my menu bar with One Thing, and about scheduling that to happen on a predetermined frequency by creating a LaunchDaemon plist and registering it with launchctl. But there’s just one problem.

It didn’t actually work.

After a bunch of digging around, I figured out the reason was I was making some extremely basic scripting errors, but I’m glad it happened because along the way I also learned about some changes to how launchctl works in current macOS versions, and also about a program called LaunchControl.

My primary error was that I forgot about how the Unix PATH and execution environment interaction works. Basically in Unix, your PATH variable dictates what directories the shell will look in to find the application or script you are telling it to execute, whether in a script or at the command prompt. I forgot that just because I could run my script at the command prompt and have it work, that didn’t meant that it would execute in the same environment with the same PATH as mine when executed as a LaunchAgent entry, even though the LaunchAgent is in my user directory’s Library/LaunchAgents directory. Therefore it could neither find one-thing (located in /usr/local/bin) in order to run that, nor could it find node.js which one-thing relies on (also in /usr/local/bin).

The solution was to add /usr/local/bin to the PATH variable for the environment that launchd runs my script in.

#!/bin/bash

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin"

# Show Update in Progress
one-thing "getting IP..."

# Execute the dig command and store the output in a variable
IP_ADDRESS=$(dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com)
IP_ADDRESS=${IP_ADDRESS//\"/}

# Pass the IP address to the one-thing command
one-thing $IP_ADDRESS

Very simple.

Along the way though, before I realized my remedial error, I was worried that Ventura was causing permission errors or blocking executing of the script by launchd. As I researched this possible angle, I discovered a program called LaunchControl. LaunchControl describes itself this way:

LaunchControl is a fully-featured launchd GUI allowing you to create, manage and debug system- and user services on your Mac.

As you may remember, launchd handles User Agents (~/Library/LaunchAgents), Global Agents (/Library/LaunchAgents), Global Daemons (/Library/LaunchDaemons). LaunchControl allows easy viewing, execution, and modification of all of these in one location.

It also allows for easy editing of the file being run by the Agent or Daemon, which makes trying things simple.

You don’t need LaunchControl to create and edit Agents and Daemons. You can create and edit plist files manually and many (most?) people do. But LaunchControl makes it easy in the same way that most people would much rather use VSCode or some other context-aware IDE to work on projects than to do it in TextEdit. It’s a powerful tool that makes something that is a chore easier and less error prone, and that seems like a good thing to me.

Part of the Automation series

Just about one year ago, Joe Rosensteel wrote on SixColors about putting local weather data in his menu bar. Aside from the entire system that gets the weather and gets it to his computer, the way he displays it in the menu bar is with a little utility app called One Thing. I thought it was a cool app, and I downloaded it, but never really made use of it. Until today.

Today I was digging through web server logs to solve a non-pressing but quite interesting problem, and I realized I was tired of using What’s My IP type web services to see who I am so I would know which log entries on my server are me. I put the IP in Tot so I could easily refer to it, and then I thought, “that’s great, but what about when it eventually changes?” Even though it almost never happens, it does happen very occasionally. Also, when I’m working with my terminal app in fullscreen mode, I don’t want to have to dig around for a note.

Enter One Thing.

I figured the easiest way to get a value into One Thing for this purpose would be from the command line, so I installed the One Thing command line tool. Then I googled for a nice command to get my external ip address from the command line and found

dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com

I decided to make Peter happy by making ChatGPT do my scripting for me and asked MacGPT to write a bash script that runs the dig command, removes the quotes the dig command places around the IP address, and then passes the output to the one-thing command line tool. That script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# Execute the dig command and store the output in a variable
IP_ADDRESS=$(dig -4 TXT +short o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @ns1.google.com)
IP_ADDRESS=${IP_ADDRESS//\"/}

# Pass the IP address to the one-thing command
one-thing $IP_ADDRESS

The comments in the script are MacGPT’s, by the way.

Although I’ve done tons of cron jobs on linux servers, I don’t think I’ve ever actually scheduled any tasks on a Mac in recent history. I knew I was going to want to use launchd but I was fuzzy on the details. I asked MacGPT what to do, and it told me to make a plist file that references my bash script, shove it in /Library/LaunchDaemons, and set some file permissions and file ownership settings, and register it with launchd using the launchctl command.

I replied, “that’s cool, but maybe you should write the plist file for me”, and it did.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.scottwillsey.my-ip-address</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/bin/bash</string>
      <string>/Users/scott/Scripts/bash-scripts/my-ip-address.sh</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Hour</key>
      <integer>12</integer>
      <key>Minute</key>
      <integer>0</integer>
    </dict>
  </dict>
</plist>

I moved this file to /Library/LaunchDaemons, set owner and permissions with sudo chown root:wheel com.scottwillsey.my-ip-address.plist and sudo chmod 644 com.scottwillsey.my-ip-address.plist.

Now /Library/LaunchDaemons looks like this:

scott@Songoku:bash-scripts ➜ ll /Library/LaunchDaemons
total 72
drwxr-xr-x  11 root  wheel   352 Apr  8 17:12 .
drwxr-xr-x  70 root  wheel  2240 Apr  7 13:30 ..
-rw-r--r--@  1 root  wheel   569 Mar 16 14:12 com.backblaze.bzserv.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel   428 Mar 14 19:02 com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist
-rw-r--r--@  1 root  wheel   594 Nov 16 23:23 com.objective-see.blockblock.plist
-rw-r--r--@  1 root  wheel   399 Jun 11  2018 com.objective-see.ransomwhere.plist
-rw-r--r--@  1 root  wheel   781 Nov 11 09:20 com.rogueamoeba.aceagent.plist
-rw-r--r--@  1 root  wheel   777 Nov 11 09:20 com.rogueamoeba.acetool.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel   598 Apr  8 17:10 com.scottwillsey.my-ip-address.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel   580 Nov 26 09:26 net.telestream.LicensingHelper.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel   532 Jan 13 12:26 us.zoom.ZoomDaemon.plist
scott@Songoku:bash-scripts ➜

As usual, the script itself needs execute permissions.

chmod +x my-ip-address.sh

And now I have my IP address in my menu bar!

By the way, the IP address shown isn’t really mine. It’s Microsoft’s. Don’t try to DDOS them, but if you do I can only assume they have better DDOS protection than I do.

I’ve been playing with using ChatGPT (via MacGPT) with the gpt-3.5-turbo model to help script things. Today I wanted an AppleScript to rename some files by sticking a UUID in between the base file name and the file extension (e.g., rename MyImage.png to MyImage-FFE9D8C8-8AEE-42E2-8A48-F0C328A9E5F2.png). I asked MacGPT to write the script and this is what it came up with:

-- Prompt user to select input directory
set inputFolder to (choose folder with prompt "Please select the input directory")

-- Prompt user to select output directory
set outputFolderAlias to (choose folder with prompt "Please select the output directory")
set outputFolder to (outputFolderAlias as string)

-- Generate a UUID
set uuid to (do shell script "uuidgen")

tell application "Finder"
 -- Get a list of all files in the input directory
 set fileList to every file of folder inputFolder

 -- Loop through each file and copy it to the output directory with a new name
 repeat with aFile in fileList
  set fileName to name of aFile
  set fileExtension to name extension of aFile
  set baseName to text 1 thru ((length of fileName) - (length of fileExtension) - 1) of fileName
  set newName to baseName & "-" & uuid & "." & fileExtension
  set newFile to outputFolder & newName
  duplicate aFile to folder outputFolder with replacing
  delay 3
  set name of (file newFile) to newName
 end repeat
end tell

It actually had delay 1 but I set it to 3.

But this script is wrong. Running this script generates an error about not being able to rename the apparently already renamed file, complete with UUID, to the desired (same) name, complete with UUID.

Finder got an error: Can’t set file "Macintosh HD:Users:scott:Documents:Podcasts:FwB:BrewsImages:OUT:Cup_Shots_Kagoshima_800x-559DCE44-3B60-4CE9-8AEE-1A862C6498FA-CBC0F756-F7E3-4368-ACFB-98F4DC50E1BB.png" to "Cup_Shots_Kagoshima_800x-559DCE44-3B60-4CE9-8AEE-1A862C6498FA-CBC0F756-F7E3-4368-ACFB-98F4DC50E1BB.png".

The reason is simple: ChatGPT set the newFile variable to outputFolder & newName and then tries to set the name of file newFile to newName later.

The correct code for the repeat loop section is:

repeat with aFile in fileList
 set fileName to name of aFile
 set fileExtension to name extension of aFile
 set baseName to text 1 thru ((length of fileName) - (length of fileExtension) - 1) of fileName
 set newName to baseName & "-" & uuid & "." & fileExtension
 set newFile to outputFolder & fileName
 duplicate aFile to folder outputFolder with replacing
 delay 3
 set name of (file newFile) to newName
end repeat

The only difference here is that now when the newFile variable is created, it’s set to outputFolder & fileName (the original filename) so that when it looks for the file to rename, it correctly looks for the original file name.

I told MacGPT about its mistake and it claims to be glad that I did, but I wonder if it learns that way. I don’t think its model changes based on user feedback, but I don’t really know what all goes into improving its learning.

By the way, in case you’re wondering why I’m using AppleScript in 2023 for a new task, it’s because I can use AppleScript very simply to tell Retrobatch to run a saved workflow that crops images to a square ratio and save them as png. Since I’m already running the AppleScript, I’m also using it to stick the UUID into the file names, something I was using a shell script for. I would have just had my Retrobatch workflow run the script, but I couldn’t get it to work correctly and I’m not sure why. The documentation on how the shell script action in Retrobatch works isn’t super comprehensive, and I didn’t find anything in the Flying Meat forum that helped either.

And to answer what might now be another question of yours, in general I stick a UUID in image file names because I don’t ever want to have to worry about image file name collisions when I shove them in the site images folder. I just want to upload them and be done with it. If I have the UUID in the file name when I start writing my post, all I have to do is make sure none of the images in that particular post have the same name (I use one UUID for all images in a post).

Part of the Automation series

Last month I wrote about Bunch, a wonderful utility for scripting work sessions, complete with sets of apps and the ability to customize various Mac settings. Last night as I was creating transcripts for Friends with Brews,, I realized that part of my transcription workflow could be handy for podcasting as well – namely, starting an Amphetamine session.

Sounds a little extreme, you might be thinking, but it’s actually less controversial than that. Amphetamine is a Mac utility that can keep your Mac from sleeping for a predetermined period of time, with granularity. Want to let the monitor sleep, but nothing else? Can do. Want to set a trigger so that whenever a specific app is running, Amphetamine is active? Can do!

In my case, since I already set up for podcasting by running my podcast bunch, I decided to see if I could trigger an Amphetamine session on and off with it. The answer is simple – can do! The reason is William Gustafson, creator of Amphetamine, made it possible to trigger sessions with AppleScript, and Brett Simmons, author of Bunch, supports running AppleScript commands in a bunch. Problem solved.

Starting an Amphetamine session with AppleScript in a bunch script:

* tell application "Amphetamine" to start new session

The asterisk tells Bunch that the following is an AppleScript command. It’s not part of the AppleScript syntax.

Stopping an Amphetamine session with AppleScript in a bunch:

* tell application "Amphetamine" to end session

Just by adding these lines to my podcast bunch, I now have the ability to stand in front of my Mac for long podcast sessions without touching mouse or keyboard and not having to worry about the screensaver kicking on. Perfect.