When I was trying to move my phone number to a new iPhone Air, I could not get a six-digit activation code from Softbank. I was stuck in a loop which my AI, and two staff members couldn't sort out.

Finally, someone at the Softbank store in Ginza figured out what was happening. I had Private Relay turned on, which was blocking the code from arriving via text.

We turned it off, the code came, got my phone number transferred, and I turned Private Relay back on.

Search for "Relay" in Settings and you'll see the spot right away.

Drafts application is where I spend a large part of my time on my laptop. In the application there are Actions that you set up to process the text you add to a draft. There are tons of them so you can customize your actions to be your perfect text command center.

One action I use so much, and take for granted, is the "New draft from each selected line" action. It takes a list and separates the list item into their own draft.

For example, in the morning I open up Drafts or a text editor and pour my mind into it to get all the things I need to do or are buzzing in my head out of my head. I do it in a giant blob of text because formatting interrupts the process of getting things out of the brain. The problem with that is I have a giant blob of tasks and ideas that should be a list.

Then I process the blob of text with Apple writing tools using the List feature. I processes the blob and makes a list. Using the "new draft from each selected line" action I make each list item a separate Draft.

After that I can go through the list and process each item one by one. Usually what I have to do is:

1. Store thoughts into their spot (reference file or list)
2. Make an event on the calendar
3. Make a task in reminders

For the third one, there is usually three or more things to get into Reminders. Drafts has a way to process them all at once. If you select multiple drafts, you can run an action on all of them. I have a "Add to Reminders" action I run that processes them all.

This looks like a long process but beyond typing out the things in my mind, this takes seconds to do.

There is a new action in Shortcuts that uses an on-device AI model that I am curious about this morning. There are many tasks in my reminders app. Some are interesting that I love to think on and daydream about. Come up with next actions and move towards a goal.

But then there are those other tasks that make you sigh and want to skip. Those ones need a little robot love for coming up with some quick, obvious next steps.

I set up a shortcut to run for those using the new "Use Model" action set to on-device, a couple of Ask for Input actions, and a New Reminder action.

The first Ask for Input prompt asks me what the task is. The second prompt asks me what success looks like. Then the Use Modal action has its request set to take the task and give me the next actions to get to success in four steps or less. I also added to the request to only include the steps. If you don’t, it includes messages like "Certainly! Here are the steps..." which I don't need for the task.

The new reminder uses the task as the title and puts the outcome and next actions in the notes. I ran it on a simple task like "Take out the trash" with success looking like "The trash bin will be empty". I got this reminder...

Take out the trash
## Outcome: The trash bin will be empty.
## Next Actions
- Empty the trash bin into a waste bag.
- Seal the waste bag securely.
- Place the waste bag in the recycling or waste collection bin.
- Ensure the trash bin is closed and locked.

A simple example for sure, but this rules. It is nice to have some next actions for the monotonous daily life tasks and ideas.

Are they always going to be the right next steps? Nope.
Will an incorrect list of next actions ping my brain to come up with the correct ones? Yep.

Would I run this on a long list of tasks and fill up the Reminders app with tasks? No way. One by one. Review them and tidy them. Don't give yourself a future task of tidying an overgrown inbox full of tasks with incorrect next actions.

I use an application I love called Hazel on my Mac. It watches files and folders for almost anything you want and then applies rules to them that you set up.

One thing I use the most is rules that react to tags. When I tag files in Downloads, they magically move themselves where they need to be. You can burn through a long list of files, tag them up, and then move on while they sort themselves.

This rules except suddenly the keyboard shortcut I had set up for tagging files and folders stopped working. I seriously couldn't figure out why it wasn't working for a couple of weeks. I switched to right-clicking on files and tagging that way.

This morning I did a little more digging and finally figured out what was wrong with the shortcut. It is kind of maddening.

For my shortcut's menu title, I had "Tags...". I was using three periods. This is incorrect. It needs to be an actual ellipsis, which is made by pressing Option-semicolon.

After that, you might need to relaunch Finder, then tagging with a keyboard shortcut should be back.

Did a three day 1000s of Cats tour of Kyushu last weekend. I had two ways to get a blog post up and four ways to get thoughts out of my mind. I didn't use any of them barely at all. I was so in the moment doing the shows and looking around that documenting didn't cross my mind. Besides the work tasks I had to do, I didn't do most of my daily routine things. Stuff like morning writing and the like.

I got back at it once I got home but kind of interesting everything went out the window for a couple days. I thought I would get a lot of writing done on the Shinkansen but I was traveling with someone. Too much looking out the window and talking about the upcoming adventures.

We have another tour like this one coming up in November so I am trying to come up with a strategy. My mind keeps arriving at dictating micro thoughts with the watch and then combining them at the end of the day if I don't have morning writing time. At least it is something rather than a three day streak gap.

It also makes me curious if I should make the medium I use for morning writing randomized. The choices would be paper (then scanned), watch (voice dictation), phone (typing on small keyboard), iPad (writing with apple pencil), and laptop (typical keyboard). Probably a good idea to keep my skills up with all of them at a steady pace.

Gonna go set that up and see how it goes.

Lately I've been obsessed with seeing how small of a device I can get a thing done on and then doing it on the smallest device. The thing that prompted me to do this is all of the old radio shows I listen to. They dreamed of being able to do the things on a watch in the 1930s. There are comics and radio shows from then that can back this up.

So for them I've been trying to get as many tasks to watch level as possible. It's fun. It's a great way to dig into the device and see what it can do. Searching for answers leads to rabbit holes where I find the things I didn't think of. If a thing can't be done on the watch, it gets bumped to phone then iPad/laptop.

There is a point to this besides having fun and learning the devices. Sometimes you are stuck somewhere. I always have paper/writing device. I always have the watch. I always have the phone. With the larger screens, it is between sometimes and never. Being able to chop through little tasks when I have energy to burn because there is a typhoon outside rules. So if I can shift the little things I can do to "watch and up" level or "phone and up" then I have some things to do.

I have noticed some things are easy to get myself to do on the watch and some take a lot of willpower. Listening to podcasts and music from it for example. At the beginning it was a lot quicker to pick up the phone or turn on sound from the laptop. That's just because I am not pro at the watch yet. Also the idea of listening to something on a tiny speaker when there is a little bigger speaker close was a thing. Do I really need to listen to someone talking about tech in full lush stereo all the time though?

Getting thoughts out of the head and into a list rules on the watch. With the new os update, the Notes app is so nice to have. For as much as I like Shortcuts, I need to revisit them on the watch. They were clunky at best for me earlier but I bet that is sorted out.

New moon is the beginning of the cycle, so that means planning for the next four weeks. There are a few areas that I need to get started on, so this is the perfect time to ruminate on them.

First is a need to get back to making things for 1000s of cats as opposed to the last couple of months. I was in admin mode since July. It feels like a lot of the business side of the band has a system now. There was a lot of figuring out how to do things due to rogue waves. I need to make things, whether it is free digital downloads, podcasts, ringtones, or whatever.

The second thing that is going to start is the website. It is currently using static HTML files with some JSON files for the shows. We need to switch the site to Drupal for a few reasons. One being that I would like to communicate with our mailing list. I've looked into all the services, and our list is approaching the size where we'd have to pay a monthly fee to send out emails.

Another reason for going with a CMS is that we can edit and add to the site at rehearsals, commuting, and shows. Do band stuff while in band mode. Use all that waiting-around time purposely. Also, I can set things up so that everyone can update content. Currently, only I can, and it isn't fair. No one wants to ask someone else if things can get updated.

Yet another reason to do this is getting everything into one spot. We have so much info spread out over tons of apps, folders, and files. We need a spot that is where everything is and is accessible and editable by everyone. Fun to plan but feel the need to convince myself this is a good move.

I have a morning shortcut I run that runs a bunch of other micro shortcuts. An example would be one that selects a random verb for me to focus on today in Japanese.

Since I just moved over from Things 3 to Reminders, I needed to update a lot of shortcuts to add Reminders for today in from the the shortcuts. It took me a second to figure it out. Hopefully this will help someone else in the future with this too.

Reminder for Today (right now)

1. Add the "Add New Reminder" action to your Shortcut.
2. Add your text to the "Reminder" box.
3. Select where the reminder will go or leave it as Inbox.
4. Click on "No Alert" and set it to Alert.
5. Leave it set to "At Time".
6. Right click on the last box (2:00) and choose Current Date.

Other Idea

Play with the Adjust Date action to have the Reminder set to some time later.

There were some missing description fields on a site I was working on. I filled them in because that is what one does when you find an empty description field or alt tag. This, of course, made me worried about all the other sites we maintain. So I started in on checking them.

Since the sites I am working on are with Drupal, I needed to figure out the quickest yet easiest way to get a spreadsheet of nodes with missing descriptions. Views popped into my mind right away because Views can make a table. You can quickly set up a view with the fields you need to check on.

Here is my hacky way of getting the info out of Drupal and into a spreadsheet. I was able to get all the information I needed from five sites in under ten minutes with this though.

1. Make a view and name it something you can remember (ex: junk).
2. Make a block in your view and set it to table under format.
3. Add the fields you need to check on. Mine are Title, Description, and Link to Content.
4. Set Link to Content to output the URL as text and to use absolute link.
5. In the preview, you will now have a table of all your content. Copy that table and paste it into your spreadsheet app.
6. Delete the view if you are done with it.

There are probably other ways but this gets the job done for me.

This site uses the Drupal CMS (content management system) which has a vast amount of modules you can use to have your site do so many things. My thing lately is choosing one module and test/ruminate on it while working on other things.

So instead of just testing content migration using CSV files, I am daydreaming about as many ways to integrate that into this site (and others). Having a source of truth csv file is good way to work on content. It has made my band's website less of a nightmare to update and maintain.

The next module I did a little deep dive into was the Rate module. It lets you have things like five stars or a thumbs up feature. The Rate module is going to be fun for the albums i listen to. I want some sort of marker for albums I should revisit in the future.

The thing to ruminate on with the Rate module is when to use each feature. Do you go with stars or thumbs? If I add a star rating system to albums, am I really going to listen to a two star album in the future?

It's fun to ponder but it is also a little easier to ponder and test the modules one by one.