Ever since I started working for an SMB my relationship with my desk phone has devolved into nebulous loathing. The device by itself is fine, and functions as it should, for as functional as any telephone can be. It’s the way that other people treat it that leads to my blazingly strong hatred for the entire technology.

My work line is an oubliette. Anyone who has watched the movie, Labyrinth, knows full well what an Oubliette is, and that’s my voicemail account at work. There is no limit to the number of callers, most of them salespeople. The problem with telephones is that for many organizations, especially big ones, their phone companies have elected to trunk calls to random Direct Inward Dials, DID numbers so that you get random calls from somewhere oddly close to you. So, for example, a salesperson trying to reach me from Cisco, for example, calls in and the DID is from Dowagiac, Michigan. Sure it is. So, because DIDs aren’t reliable, dependable, or even honest really, the fact that there is a Caller ID is meaningless since the data throughout the system is GIGO. A little aside, GIGO is like sludge and wine, if you have a barrel of wine and you add one tablespoon of sludge, then you have a barrel of sludge. If you add a tablespoon of wine to a barrel of sludge, you have a barrel of sludge. Much like everything else, a tablespoon of GIGO makes the entire experience crap. Because you can’t tell when GIGO hits, or when it doesn’t, or even what is GIGO and what isn’t GIGO. So it’s all crap. So, I have a DID for work, and I can’t use it. because it’s been “Lost to Salespeople”. So then I had a clean DID for my cell phone, until one of the fine-and-respectable companies I do business with sold the number to a directory and now I get endless calls from my cell. So, I turn on the “Silence Unknown Callers” option, and if you aren’t in my address book, then my cell phone DID is a dead duck.

I faced an issue at work, I needed to get support for a thing, and so I thought to myself, what number could I give them? And I didn’t have anything. I couldn’t give them my work DID, because I don’t answer it. There’d be no point to offer a number that you won’t pick up on. I can’t use my Cell DID, because they come in on random DID inbounds and none of that is saved in my address book. Their calls would be silenced and tossed.

So, because people are generally just vaguely wretched and dull creatures, we have to turn to an app, I picked Hushed. For $47 a year I can rent random DIDs to use, DIDs safe enough so that when they do get a call, I can just pick up, because I know that the inbound caller isn’t a salesperson looking to run their high-pressure sales techniques on me.

So we invented this lovely technology, then we ruined it with our greedy perversions, forcing us to spend even more money to cope. We can’t have nice things, because, people. Obviously.

So if you are in IT, and you’ve lost your DIDs to the ravening horde of salespeople, maybe look into burner phones or apps like Hushed. Things will be fine until we exhaust the pool of DIDs that the provider has. LOL. At some point in the future, I can see salespeople just calling random numbers, because you don’t know what DID your prospective customer is using because they were trying to cope with the burden of escaping from you. And the cycle of wretchedness continues.

I wrote this comment to a Facebook post in the group Heartstopper Netflix. I was on a roll and couldn’t stop.

Here it is for my blog readers to enjoy. And yes, I really have left this blog go to seed. It would be good for me to write in it more.

Here’s the comment…

I’m a 46 year old gay man, 25 years partnered and I welcome you to our wonderful world.

This group is an oasis of the coolest most understanding and kind human beings on Facebook. Maybe the show drew us together. Maybe it was fate.

Heartstopper touches us all. For me, I see myself as Nick and Charlie, a mix of both, and I also feel parental too. I feel supportive and protective over them, and every episode I fall apart watching them, all of them.

I only wish that people feel the openness and magic of this wonderful work, so they can explore themselves, reinvent themselves, and feel brave enough to stick out your chin and declare your truth.

The narrative of Heartstopper is the gift, for me, a story that shows that there can be love. It can start with ardor, agape ardor, affection, infatuation, crushing, all of it.

But more, there is no instance at all of overwhelming sexuality. It redefines being gay for me, yes, at 46, that I can feel love and it doesn’t have to start with fumbling libido racing to win everything. I can be gay and like someone, and feel that grow into romantic affection.

The lack of tedious tropes and the blazing honesty of this work is a lighthouse for all LGBTQIA+ human beings to steer towards a safe harbor we never noticed before.

In a world where awful seems broadcast, there is this island of hopeful wonderfulness, in all of you. Heartstopper gave us a lot, so so much. It gave us a narrative, it provided us new permissions we never dared afford ourselves, and it created a fandom that quite literally carved a platform of awesomeness out of the tempest that surrounds all of us, that seems endless. This is a safe place. To feel our truth, to feel like all of this isn’t a waste heap.

I love Heartstopper. I love it’s message, and I love what it is doing to all of us. Every one of us. Changing us. Helping us. And the more I think upon it, maturing us. Maturing me. At 46 and giving myself permission to feel something I never dared feel before.

I feel brand new again. And I feel like my old Daddy self as well.

This show makes me cry. It feels good. Somewhere between a blessing, a benediction, a baptism, and a cleansing.

It’s making me a better gay man. It’s making me a better human being.

While adding items to my shopping list this morning to Remember The Milk, my favorite To-Do App, it occurred to me that I could maybe make a Shortcut which leveraged Location Services and RTM together. Often times I’m moving from place to place, especially on Saturdays to do grocery shopping. RTM is very nice to use, but it is slightly annoying to have to navigate to specific lists when you get to a new place. RTM does have a Nearby option, but I haven’t really noticed it until right before I started with this Shortcut, so this could just be extra-on-top of what RTM could already do.

This Shortcut begins with the Location object from the Location group.

I looked at all the output from Location and for my needs, Street seemed to be the most useful.

I used the If object from the Scripting group. Chained together, one inside the next.

If Street contains your home street, then Open RTM from the Apps group with the “View Today” object.

If Street contains your work street, open RTM from the Apps group with the SmartList “Today At Work” (I created this SmartList, it’s all the tasks in the Work context, due Today.)

This theme keeps going, I go to Costco, the street there is Century Ave and my local Meijer is on Gull Road in Kalamazoo Township, near where I live.

Each time I call this Shortcut, it will poll Location Services, then figure out where I am and then open RTM right where I want to be.

Every morning I prepare my coffee using my grinder and AeroPress. Usually I resort to using Google Home to provide me two timers, a twenty second timer for the grind, and a thirty second timer for the brewing. Most mornings the Google Home is fine, but sometimes the Google Home gets profoundly hard of hearing, or won’t stop the alarm, a whole host of irritating behaviors. So I thought, maybe I could get a Shortcut to do this task for me, some tapping and a convenient run of the single-shot iOS timer per task. Here’s how I got it to work:

I created a new Shortcut, starts with “Show Alert” from the Scripting Group. The phone waits until I measure out my coffee beans to grind. Once this alert gets a tap, it calls Clock from the Apps Group, runs a timer for 20 seconds, then opens the Clock app, which shows the time count down there, and the script itself waits 20 seconds for the timer to expire before moving forward.

The next task is to “Ask for Input” from the Scripting group, “Ready to Brew?”, when the tap is Yes, which is the default, the Shortcut returns control back to Shortcuts app, then opens Clock again. This was oddly necessary because without Shortcuts getting a shot at the foreground, it just wandered off, functionless.

The next task is to start the Clock timer for 30 seconds. If the user taps anything but Yes to “Ready to Brew” the Shortcut ends.

I already used this particular Shortcut this morning and it worked delightfully well! I didn’t have to have a screaming match with Google Home, and the phone behaved pretty much as I wanted it to.

On the heels of the first foray into Shortcuts with iOS, I happened to stumble across a suggestion in Shortcuts Gallery, that seemed to suggest that the phone could perform functions if it discovered itself in a particular environmental situation. Specifically, When AndysiPhone connects to “Mazda” and pointing to Bluetooth connections themselves. I poked around in this suggestion to learn there was an entire “Automation” section that I had completely glanced over.

I lease my Mazda CX-5, best car I’ve ever owned, by the way, and so I have a strict limit on the miles for the vehicle. Every morning when I use the car, I record the mileage so I can track it. Originally this was on pen-and-paper, but then I moved it into a text file, and after that, to Google Sheets. Then I discovered the Notes widget in IFTTT, and for the longest time I would call on the Notes widget in IFTTT, type in the mileage, and then hand it to IFTTT to add the mileage I entered, along with the date and time, to my Google Sheets. This worked well, when I had the presence of mind to remember to fire off the IFTTT widget, that is. Then after I had my first foray into Shortcuts, I discovered that my phone could recognize when it connected to my Mazda’s Bluetooth system. That event is the perfect trigger to ask for mileage! I knew that IFTTT was still good to help me automate Google Sheets, but I had to reconfigure how IFTTT worked so it would work with Shortcuts and not IFTTT’s own Notes widget. Here’s how I did it:

In the Automation section of Shortcuts, I created this. If the “When” section is met, the “Do” section executes. In this case, it’s a Shortcut.

The Shortcut begins with a “Ask for Input” from the Scripting group. Ask for a Number, because all I care about is mileage, and I only want a handy number entry pad.

Next I went to IFTTT, created a WebHook which is linked to my Google Sheets Mileage Intake Log. The WebHook is called “mileage_log”, and the key is a private string that you get from the WebHooks documentation in IFTTT. The Text object lets me configure the URL with the mileage added after “?value1=” at the end of the URL.

Then I set a variable based on the text in the Text Object, so it can be used as a variable moving forward.

Next is to grab the “URL” object from the Web group. I feed it the variable from above, which is really just making my phone emit a WebHook call to IFTTT with my mileage in it.

Next I use “Get Contents of URL” from the Web group to fetch the response from the WebHook call. I’m looking for “Congratulations” in the response from IFTTT.

The Text object is set to get this response from IFTTT, and there is a trick here, you need to set the type of the data for the Text object as Text, not URL, or anything else, it takes a long tap to find this hidden setting. Tricky…

I next used the If object from Scripting group. Here is where the trick gets you. If you don’t change the type of data that If receives, you will only get “If there is something” vs. “If there is nothing” and that’s it. What you want is “If A contains B” and the only way to get “contains” is if the input data is text! So here is where we evaluate the IFTTT WebHook response, find the “Congratulations” in the output, and then using the “Show Notification” from the Scripting group, I pop up a little alert showing “Success!”, then the If ends, and the Shortcut ends.

So now I won’t have to remember to hit a IFTTT Widget button when I start my car in the morning. The Bluetooth itself will be enough for my phone to notice and ask me for my mileage, and then pass everything to IFTTT, so it can add a timestamp, and pass that onto Google Sheets.

Apple’s Hidden Pot Of Gold

Two days ago I found myself hip deep in IFTTT settings, in their Button Widgets trying to find a way to make individual posts to my work log in my journal software, Bear.app.

I keep two tracks of logs, and they both share similar structures. I have a Personal Log, and a Work Log. They look like this in Bear.app: “August 7, 2021 – Personal Log” and then have space below where I journal my day. Usually I find myself forgetting to actually write anything and so I have days that go by where there is nothing in there. Sometimes I’ll turn to my Signal app, try to scroll back and see what I was posting to all my friends in our group Signal chat, and use that to help me remember. I’ve been wanting, for the longest time, a way to press a button and enter quickly some commentary, and then have it associated with a timestamp for me and added to my Bear log.

This all started with IFTTT. I know that Bear.app doesn’t have any connectivity to IFTTT, but Remember The Milk does, so I thought I could use IFTTT to write journal entries into RTM, and then at least I’d have them captured so I could eventually copy and paste them into Bear.app. It wasn’t elegant, but it was a workaround that could work. As I was looking around Google seeing how other people did things like this, I started noticing some references to Shortcuts. I had always thought of Shortcuts as this kind of Siri-linked simple tinker toy thing, Apple’s way of getting Siri to be more than it is. How wrong I was!

Turns out that Shortcuts has it’s own programming language, access to a shocking amount of iOS functionality that I previously never thought Apple would willfully reveal to end users, in the iOS platform, and the answer to this particular need of mine. This is how I did it.

It all starts inside the Shortcuts app. Older versions of iOS didn’t include this by default, but since iOS 13, I think, Shortcuts has been a stock app preloaded on every iOS device. Tap on Shortcuts, then create a new Shotcut, and here’s the screen shots:

The first item was to “Get A Variable” from the Scripting group. This lets you pick “Current Date” and if you press there, you can pick the format of the timestamp. I wanted a simple short time-only stamp, so setting Date to None was the key.

The “Text” object was next, from the Documents group. I don’t know why I needed it, but I think it draws the variable into the scope of the rest of the project.

Then “Ask for Input” from the Scripting group presents a small dialog box so you can type in whatever entry you like.

Next I created a new Text object, with the text I entered from the Scripting object. This is how I introduced a hyphen between the time entry and the text entry, formatted the way I wanted in my Bear journal entry.

Some apps have Shortcut-enabled controls provided to the system, in this case, Bear definitely has a lot of controls available. I was gratified to see an append-to-note function, so I added it to my Shortcut. This particular control creates a Bear entry for the entire day, gives it a special name, “Work Log Inbound” so that when I am in Bear, I can just copy and paste items from the Inbound daily item into my real work log bear entry, then throw away the “Work Log Inbound” entry.

After a short while of using this shortcut, which works really well, I must admit, it struck me that sometimes, not all the time, but I would like to maybe share my journal entry in Signal, or maybe email it, so the “Copy to Clipboard” from the Sharing group works really well. I can just ignore it, but if I want to add my journal observation to Signal, it’s waiting for me in the clipboard.

The Shortcut in the first iteration left me in Bear app. I didn’t want that. I wanted a “quick journal entry and back to the home screen” turns out, this home screen is technically called “SpringBoard”. There used to be a “Exit to SpringBoard” control in the Beta version of Shortcuts, but Apple removed it. Someone figured out a hack. The trick is to create a Shortcut to open something innocuous, like Notes, then save it as a plist file, then change it textually to force it to work for SpringBoard. Right now in iOS 14.7.1 this works, but it might break if Apple decides to be grumpy about it.

I created a duplicate Shortcut to this, called it “Personal Log” and it pretty much follows along. But that was easy since my work log and my personal log are pretty much parallel with each other in Bear. One small thing to note, this is only for basic text, there are no frills or extra neat bits, it just bangs in text chunks by button, nothing more, nothing less.

I started a new Crochet blog on WordPress.com. Here’s my first post. Enjoy!