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.

Slight adjustment to the blog today. A couple of things were starting to bug me, so I did a little course correction this morning.

The moon phase posting schedule is really fun, but I need to adjust it a bit. There have been a couple of times I was excited to post, and it was in between the quarters. So what do I do then? Should I wait to post on the quarter? That is too much thinking for me. I should post when there is something to post.

So I added a moon phase selector to blog posts. That way, I can note when in the moon cycle the post was posted at least. That also means there I can use the full range of moon phases. I'll be losing the "moon as post trigger," but I think later on it might be fun to see if there are any trends with the phases and my posts.

The second thing this will do is remove some visual clutter in the post titles. I was including the moon phases in the post title. It was cool for a while. As more and more posts had them, the titles were starting to get more difficult to look at, I think. So back to the normal titles and then add the moon phase emoji is fine.

I've folded in tidying up my reminders and events in to my morning writing. It's turning out to be a thing that I look forward to which rules while the brain is halfway awake. Basically I've been adding why and how to tasks as a writing exercise.

With each task I have, I am supposed to be including what the outcome will look like and the next action(s). I can through about five to seven of them done within the 200 word goal. It is extra work for task creation for sure.

As I slowly get through them all, each task is becoming like a mini-story. It reads like...

• Do this
• Because you need things to be like this
• So do this first

I don't know why but reading the first two lines build up momentum. Then when I get to the third one, I have some speed built up and seem to do the thing more then when I don't include the "why" and "how". It's like every time my brain wants to act like a misbehaving child, the retort is in the next line.

Reminders: "Do this task"

Brain: "Why the eff should I?"

Reminders: "Because this is what success will look like."

Brain: "I don't know how."

Reminders: "Do this first."

New moon time coming up and that means a fresh cycle for the blog posts. Originally, I was going to be strict using the moon as a writing prompt. I had themes for each one, but that waned a bit. I do use the moon as the trigger to write the post still, but it is more fun to write about things exciting or interesting instead of the rigid schedule.

Using the moon as the schedule has made me more interested in the less famous phases of it as well. So, this is still a good way to blog for me.

The new moon is the recent phase, and that was supposed to be writing about things I am starting in on. Probably the most recent thing is that I am practicing drawing from a book called The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. There is a drawing practice schedule in it that I am following loosely.

I bring some random paper in some form with me and do the exercise while killing time somewhere. Cafe time is good. Waiting for someone shopping or whatever is good. Waiting for some band to start is good.

Also, my favorite thing so far with the book is that the author is s.｡oO particular about pencils. I laughed out loud when the first exercise called for a 3B pencil on newsprint-level paper. I proudly have those on my desk.

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.

Sometimes you just need to put headphones in and drum along with music you like. I did it for two hours yesterday. It is very rare for me to do. Usually I do things like repeat something forever to see where it evolves to or use some sort of randomness generator to make patterns.

Out of the blue yesterday I decided to just play along with stuff. I wasn't trying to play all the things perfectly. I wasn't trying to learn someone's style. It was more like punk music loving me before I knew how to play drums checking to see what level I am at now. Out of all the stuff yesterday, I really enjoyed playing Buzzcocks.

I am not anti playing along to other people's music for fun, by the way. If I do learn someone else's drumming, it is usually a measure or two I find interesting.

My current obsession is learning the drum beat at the beginning of Dave Brubeck Take Five. It is fascinating to me that a song in 5/4 was a hit. I am guessing but 99.9% of all hits are in 4/4. So I am trying to get my head around why this beat is pleasing to people's even loving ears yet it is an odd number.

My colors for this blog are white, black, grey, and light blue. For quite a while I’ve been trying to find a couple shades of blue for the link colors and things like vignettes. Sitting at a desk trying to conjure colors was a bust.

On our trip to the mountains last weekend, I decided to add “find a couple shades of blue” to the stuff to do list.

We were up on a mountain right above the cloud line and the sky was so blue. I sampled the color with an app. It got a little darker a couple hours later and I sampled that sky as well.

Added the two blues to the CSS and crossed my fingers. They look so good. Very stoked about them.

We are going to Nagano and Hokkaido this month. There is chances of snow for both places. If there is, I am going to sample white and black.

We went to the mountains this weekend in Nagano to visit a friend's French restaurant/bar, soak in some hot springs, and go to the top of a mountain to do a cloud ocean watch. On the trip home, we had time to kill before our last train back to Tokyo. We decided to go check out Zenkoji Temple even though it was pouring rain. It is where the first image of the Buddha to arrive in Japan is stored back in 642 AD. It got me thinking that I am surrounded by Buddhist temples here all the time. There is one next to our apartment called Takezuka-jinja from 983 AD.

It made me think that I should really listen to an audiobook about Japanese Buddhism while I work this week. I like podcasts and music, of course, but my book listening is a little sparse. I did a quick search and found that *Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind* by Shunryu Suzuki seems to be recommended. I started in on it yesterday but I am only halfway through it.

At first listen, there is a lot of talk about the importance of practicing and how there is no finish line with practicing. That resonates with me because I like practicing a simple pattern over and over. I take for granted that playing a beat slightly harder than my ability slowly over and over makes it hard for other random thoughts to pop in my brain.

I also liked the parts about striving to remain a beginner. It reminded me that I need to start thinking of the next drum thing to learn in 2026. Past things I studied were linear drumming, swing drumming, brushes, etc. The top candidate right now is drum beats from the Benin/Togo region of Africa. It could change though so don't hold me to it.

The other random thing that popped out was this quote from Shunryu Suzuki...

When my teacher was seventy, he said, 'When I was young, I was like a tiger, but now I am like a cat!' He was very pleased to be like a cat.

I did a little bow to that one. m( ^ _ − )m

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.

We have cracked the code on growing herbs on our veranda. Basil was no problem, and we can't keep up with our plants. Dill, on the other hand, was a struggle. It took a bunch of A/B testing to find the spot it likes. Once we found it, the plants went into overdrive. There was a perfect spot where it gets a morning dose of sun, then spends the rest of the day in the shade.

Dill is pretty expensive at our local supermarkets, so this rules. A little fresh dill on simple food wakes everything up. The same goes for a couple of basil leaves. Simple accents on simple food rule.

I am trying to apply this "perfect light" light plant lesson to my Reminders app and task system. I had sections set up by context (personal, work, band, etc.), and things weren't quite getting done smoothly. Tasks weren't getting the right light.

I changed the sections to what device I am on, and things went turbo. My devices are watch, phone, laptop, drums, home, and outside. Home and outside are a little bit more loose than the other, but they work for me.

This setup works for me because @watch clears out the sand-sized tasks. Then @phone clears out the gravel-sized ones. When I get to @laptop, the rock-sized tasks are more visible.

Is the sorting of tasks into where they can be done tedious? Yes, but I use sorting and tagging to review the task. Tags are my old context (personal, work, band, etc.). The tags are emojis, which make them really easy to spot.

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.

My thinking has shifted a lot over the past month. That trip to the post office was really jarring for me. It was like all the news I was seeing from the US was suddenly in my face. Being across the ocean, I have the luxury of turning on or tuning out the barrage of news. Being told that I can't send our stuff to a place and being from the place made things very real. Then it got me ruminating on what this all actually means. As I zoomed out levels higher and higher, I could really start to see what is really happening.

Not being able to ship small things to the US isn't about economy. It is about cutting off people from their homelands. It is about messing with people’s interests and hobbies. It's about unworldly people bothering worldly people. Cutting people's ties to the globe. Ruining relationships. Choking scenes like music and art.

It is very discouraging and energy-draining. That is probably their aim. Make everyone so tired that they just give up. I was drained for about two weeks for sure. I am not drained anymore, though. We figured out how to flow around this problem. That will be true for any other problem set in front of us.

Don't let them drain your energy.

There is an app called Apple Music for Artists that I like to open up from time to time. There are a bunch of other ones, but I chose the one just to get a quick outside view of the band. Things like which songs are getting played more than others. I use that for setlist making. It is also fun seeing the list of places where we are getting played for me. It makes you feel like you are part of the globe.

Over the weekend, I opened it up while on a little trip to the ocean in Chiba Prefecture. I noticed a Top Radio Spins area this time. It shows which songs of ours are being played on different radio stations. I didn't know radio was even playing us, actually.

I've had my head so buried in the sending merch troubles with the US tariffs that I lost focus on all the other things. Seeing that radio is playing our release reset my brain and gave me new energy.

I love this blog and blogging. Realizing I need a system for this thing though. I need a stricter date I have to publish on but is still fun somehow. Daily is too much like a streak. Weekly is too much like a work calendar. It needs to be more frequent than monthly.

While I was looking at my calendar the moon phase jumped out again. I love the moon phases. The moon rules. Using the moon phases as a posting calendar is perfect for me. It is always up in the sky so it would be an amazing blog post prompt.

There is also a nice option of post amount options. You get once a month (full), bi-monthly (full, new), quarterly, or even eight times (gibbous, crescent).

I also like how, if I went with quarterly for example, the posts would be essentially weekly but out-of-sync with the usual calendar. Also get the added bonus of the emoji.

I am going to try a moon phase blog and come up with a theme or something for each phase. When I have thoughts, ideas, or find things to share I can sort them into the correct phase. Hopefully when it is time to post on each phase there will be a bucket filled with things to post.

I went to the post office in Tokyo yesterday with two packages to mail. Our new release came out lately. The orders are coming in, and they need to be shipped. This is the life of a drummer in a two-piece punk band.

JP Post has an app where you fill out the shipping and customs info. You receive a QR Code and use it to make a label in the lobby of the post office. Once I got a system set up, this process is fast and easy.

I got the labels ready for the package to the US and brought my two packages to the counter. The post office worker had an "oh no...here we go" look on their face.

They proceeded to tell me that the post office has suspended all commercial package shipping to the US for the time being due to current US policies. They handed me back the first package with apologies. I hadn't read the official news yet, which left me in a position of not knowing what to respond.

The second package was going to West Tokyo. They were relieved they could get that one sent out for me.

Now I am in a spot of trying to figure out how to get orders for our cassettes to my home country. There are other delivery services, but we would need to raise the cost of shipping a lot. Contrary to what the current US President thinks, we aren't going to pay the extra shipping costs. That extra cost gets added to the bill of the person in the US that ordered it.

In a fun "battle" with the service that distributes music to music stores like Apple Music or Spotify right now. The band I am in has songs that are about 75% Japanese and 25% English on our new release. When I submitted the release, I needed to choose a language for the release. 75 is more than 25, so I selected Japanese. Then, with each song, I set the language to what language it is in. I clicked send and waited to hear from them.

I got a form email saying due to some issue, one of the stores can't accept it. I wrote back asking what the issue is and got a response saying due to some language issue, they couldn't submit it.

As a test, I resubmitted the album and set the release language to English and set the tracks to their language. I am waiting to see if English is okay for whatever store is blocking submission.

I don’t really get why I need to set the language at all for our music though.

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.

I randomly generated this drum pattern to work on today.

LBBRLBRR

It was a little tricky at first so I broke it up into some chunks to let my hands get used to the pieces.

• LB--
• BR--
• LBB-
• BRL-
• RLB-
• BRR-

Did these for 5-10 minutes and then the full pattern was a lot smoother when I went back to it.

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.