Testing XMLRPC Hacks
Since the Gutenberg editor is such a slob, we can try Ulysses out. As expected, Ulysses doesn’t have any of the issues that the online editor has, no matter how quickly I type into the keyboard.
The real trick will be to see if the xmlrpc hack that I had to perpetrate to get Ulysses WordPress part to function still works. I bet it doesn’t, and so the new workflow to WordPress will likely just be copypasta, as usual.
Lets get ready for disappointment! Huzzah!
A while back I vainly tried to heed the warnings in Site Health, some vague mumbling on about PHP 7.3 and below being whatever. Yeah, okay, so off to the hosting provider.
Punch the PHP to 7.4, which turns out to be 7.4.10. While this satisfied Site Health, it broke JetPack. So I chatted up the hosting providers technical support, some vague mumbles about something called ctype, and it looked like it worked. But it didn’t. Still broken. But this is a dead blog that nobody reads, so who cares?
So, on Mastodon I found a developer who mentioned something about WordPress 6.2. So I wondered if there were other updates to be had. Gutenberg got updated, and editing in WordPress is as unpleasant as usual. So that’s at least comforting. It also turns out that JetPack also updated. There was a brief flash of the old bug, where JetPack refuses to authenticate to WordPress.com, but a click on the Authenticate button seemed to work this time.
The editor, Gutenberg, has a curious anti-writer quality about it. It’s sluggish, I can type way faster than the computer can register the keypresses. So I can write out text, quickly typing away, and then go to the bathroom while Gutenberg struggles with putting characters on a screen.
It’s not really a huge surprise that this blog is dead. Writing is unpleasant. Ah well, PHP 7.4.10 appears to be working at this point, so this sad experience can end. Gah, WordPress. It was free, and you get what you pay for.
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.
Oh Winlogon, Where Are Thou?
I logged into my “before to this point” trustworthy Windows 2012 R2 Server that I have nicknamed Sierra, it told me that I didn’t have rights to the D: drive as the domain administrator. Okay, so I can fix that by getting to the console, brought it up on TeamViewer, and it was a featureless black box. Nothing to connect to, nothing to command, “Send Control-Alt-Delete” did absolutely nothing.
So next stop, plug into the actual VGA console on the server and plug in a USB keyboard and mouse. I verified that the keyboard was alive, it toggled Caps Lock and Num Lock properly, tried Control-Alt-Delete, Control-Alt-Backspace, and Control-Alt-Esc. Nothing. Featureless. Except the local console was a dark blue screen and the monitor was not in sleep mode. It was registering a video signal, nothing but a blue screen. Heh, not a BSOD, that would have been something ROTFL.
I tried to connect to the file shares on the server, that wasn’t a problem, so I knew the server was at least alive. The front panel didn’t show any alerts, so the CPU, RAM, and Array were also just fine. The only problem was, no ability to logon to Windows!
I was able to remotely connect to Event Viewer from the Primary Domain Controller, which helped. There was an error, Winlogon recorded an error event type 6000, with the error: “The winlogon notification subscriber <SessionEnv> was unavailable to handle a notification event.” and then that started a Google search for ways to correct it. Every response was the same, reboot. I really can’t do that, the server has thousands of files open, there has to be another way.
I then connected remotely to services.msc to the troubled server. Nothing there looked promising, no references to Winlogon or any of that. Then it occurred to me that Sysinternals tools might be useful. I ran pslist \\ip-of-server and scanned the output. I spotted winlogon running, noted its PID, and then tried pskill \\ip-of-server winlogon to no positive effect, but I had the PID, so I tried that too. The moment I issued the command, Windows restarted winlogon, I peeked around the corner at the server console and there it was, the time and the entreaty to press Control-Alt-Delete. I don’t know what caused winlogon to crap out on me, but at least the fix was easy. I got logged into the shell on the server, and it is running idle, nice and normal.
So if you have a server like I do, and end up with a mystery blue screen and no way to login, look into downloading the pstools kit from Sysinternals. It saved my day!
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.
This post was written on Mastodon so it has an informal writing style with jargon and a manner for a specific audience. All the spelling and grammatical errors are intended.
I love creating my own problems and then finding a rabbit hole and chasing it until I have a geek solution that is likely foolish. If I load too many tabs on my Macbook, it gets sluggish. So, can I start xQuartz? Sure! Update however…
Okay, that done, can I SSH with the -X flag to my little Raspberry Pi? Yes! Sluggish. Wah.
How about to my “Security” laptop, running Linux? Yes. Sluggish still.
Google Search, find x2go, install it. MUCH BETTER.
So I’m using x2go, running Firefox-esr and connected to my not-work-tabs, including this one. Not seamless, but it works acceptably well enough.
Sitting here, marveling at all this exceptionally complicated computing technology before me, everything has “multiple cores” yet you really couldn’t tell. So instead of running everything from one single computer, we’ve got serious work stuff on one, then a remote desktop window to another running “fluffy stuff”, and then playing Spotify from my !@#$ iPhone. HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Shitty apps, each written by devs that believe that their app is the “King Of The Realm” and you can malloc() forever without having to fret over anything at all. Leaks? Who cares! Look how pretty it is! So, multiple computers, multiple OSes, failures aren’t less, but they are spread out so they don’t block real work quite as badly.
Of course, there is also I/O Blocking to contend with. When the filesystem is doing anything, everything stops. Because I/O is super smexy.
So we contend with shitty development choices by simply throwing entire chunks of technology at the problem. Two laptops, a Raspberry Pi, an iPhone, and an iPad. Each device is good at individual things, but no, we can’t do everything on one single device. Watch that device just chug right to the fucking ground. Ah well. The modern response is “throw a hypervisor on it” and that, wow, what a great way to make an even bigger mess of things.
Bullshit hypervisors make for hilarious blown-out-afternoons. So, Windows 10 on an HP Elitebook laptop, install Hyper-V from the OS, and the Radeon display driver commits hairy suicide. Not only does the driver break, but it cannot be “upgraded” or “fixed”, the only thing you can do, is remove HyperV and… poof, uh, there was a problem? No! No problem! So, you shrug and chuckle and look at the icon for VirtualBox. Yeah, hey buddy…
There are some situations where I start thinking that I should buy a cheap $200 Chromebook just for some things. More technology. SMH. Of course.
Two days ago I remembered the glory-promise of X-Windows and SSH tunnels, with the Display being sent elsewhere. Oh my god, the promise of that… so glittering. So… disappointing.
Oh it works. But it’s like watching slugs have a romantic dinner. Maybe I should just read a book while you request that website, hmmm?
Obviously you turn to Google, the eminent sage and eternal junkie for answers. Ah yes, X-Windows over SSH is a ping/pong nightmare, half the traffic is consumed by just making sure that all the lower layers are functioning properly, constantly. Fine. But then you spot things like x2go, give that a shot, eh… it’s somewhat better.
In the end, the promise bends to tools you already have. Like TeamViewer connected to Windows 10 on a different laptop.
Heh, assuming TeamViewer stays functional that is.
Technology is bittersweet. We have such command of so many wonders. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all an immense house-of-cards. I suppose I’ve seen too much, I know too much, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” kind of running through my head. Like looking at Layer 1 connections secured by… chewed bubble gum.
And all the various cheats and hacks, because you naturally want something, but you can’t get it because the people who provide the thing, won’t provide the tools for the extra things you want. They aren’t going to write the code, their codebase is secret, you can’t submit code yourself, and so you just sit there, google searching and finding kludgy-as-fuck solutions to your headaches.
Yeah, that’s fine, be a prat. I’ve got a python script that scrapes your shit and does what I wanted to do.
Case in point, Signal. I love Signal. I will always love Signal. But I want to search on metadata within the Signal app. No. Like the soup nazi, no metadata for you! Only search on stuff in primary stream. Fuuuuuuuu.
So I have a group chat, it’s all my friends, in Signal, and we use it as a blazing-bright thread, it connects us all, geographically spread throughout the United States. It made the COVID-19 Pandemic less lonely. It was a community of dear friends and we could be together without risk.
So, I journal, have an app for that, but obviously Signal doesn’t work with the journal app, so I can’t just hoover all the Signal content into the journaling software. Sometimes I forget to review everything we said in Signal, so the date-of-chat just slides off primary display. You could scroll, but wouldn’t it be nice to search on metadata? Like take me to the first thing shared on Sep 01, 2021? That would be nifty! NO. NO SOUP FOR YOU.
So, no metadata searching. Fine. So, enter the raw kludgy “fuck it, this is also a solution, damn you all” solution. Can’t search on metadata, but just on raw data, so, lets add the data markers we want to the stream! At 6am, write the date into the stream, every day. Then you can use the tools in the app to search on what was shared, and since the metadata you want is “shared”, now you can search on it! Well, okay! “Sep 01, 2021” look! YAY! That’s what I wanted!
Obviously this creates a “Forking House Of Mirrors”… one bullshit kludgy solution leads to a new problem. I don’t want to wake up at 6am to put the date into Signal stream. OK. Lets automate that. Enter Signal-CLI. shakes head fine. So, lets try to connect to the service, that was a hard climb. Okay, now it’s as group, what groups are there? No groups. What? No. Send something to someone, then ask again. Okay. <<send>> how about now? OH YES, THIS GROUP!? You need a special hex code for this.
If you have this hex code, you’d think you could use that without having to ask going forward. No. New install? You can’t just simply use what you know to peek around the corner, no. You need to run around Robin Hoods Barn all over again, and now you can use it! HUZZAH. FUUUUUUUUUUU.
So, finally, we can send signal data from the CLI. Next, lets figure out the date commands picky-picky formatting rules. How to get Sep 01, 2021?
We’ve got that! YAY! Okay, so lets write a Bash script! Get the date, and at 6am write it out to the Signal group. Write script, change mode on script so it can execute, plumb the foggy memories you have of crontab, and boom. Failure.
FUUUUUUUUUUU
Ah yes, cardinal sin, I didn’t explicitly declare the specific paths to signal-cli, echo, mv, fuck, any command at all. Call the script yourself, works, cron calls? Lost. Fixup. Dive into vim. Find your cheatsheet. Gah.
Finally, good god watch it work. 6am every day, a machine you “rescued from the landfill” with some half-forgotten linux distro you can’t remember is actually working and that’s fine. Now, when it’s Sep 03, 2021, you can search on Sep 01, 2021, to get back and manually journal what you remember telling people, because there it is. Click-drag.
All because metadata isn’t searchable. I got what I wanted. Everyone can benefit from it too. But it is complete mess.
This is why entire afternoons are incinerated on the pyre of “Fuck, I wanted XYZ, but the devs don’t speak English, their angel investors aren’t interested, and nobody but me would ever want this feature… so… fuuuuuuuuuuu”
I suppose I could attempt to ask for whatever it is I think would be good, but devs live on the moon, or as much as would be useful, they do. So no. We don’t tell devs anything. We just muck about, finding fragments on GitHub, trying not to get sick that Microsoft owns them now.
So you find gists, you find forked projects, you find python code fragments. The dependencies aren’t circular-misadventures-into-the-fog, you try to remember basic linux stuff because you haven’t had to screw around with any of it for decades and crontab went off to the same Elysium Fields that Trigonometry went off to…
Google Fu. Another worrisome “house of cards” right there too, but lets not look too closely at it, lest it collapse. Or sell our identity to Belorussians.
It doesn’t take much at all. Fragile houses of cards built on other fragile houses of cards. People mobbing on top, like hapless Eloi sitting down at the picnic tables and never having a single bright shiny thought in their pretty little heads because food is always right there, on the table, same time every day. Meanwhile, underneath, the Morlocks are banging on pipes, and every once in a while grabbing an Eloi for a snack.
That’s the Internet. Humanity on top of the Internet. The rot in Layer 8.
And all you really do is shrug. You hope for a better world. Every once in a really long while you stumble blindly over something truly elegant. It’s like tripping over Rivendell and spotting an Elf walking along a curated beautiful path of perfectly carved scrollwork.
And it’s only momentary. The pile of constantly shifting wreckage we call the modern world continues to shudder and throb. It all works, and you marvel that these people manage to continue to live in all of this… wreckage.
I had to step away from the VAR I was using at work because of a recent change they had instituted with my business account. For years, I had enjoyed a classic relationship of having a single VAR Account Executive assigned to my account, where the AE would learn from me and get to know me, and I would get to know them as well. It was a very successful working relationship, and had been the way of things for six years. Around two months ago, the company made a change. They moved my business account from the structure that I was familiar with over to a team-based structure, and billed the benefits to include “There will always be an AE to work on your account” as a value-added proposition. I was worried that the change would instead eliminate the engagement, the learning, and the developing relationship between customer and reseller.
This new structure included a single shared email address that many people had access to, the AE’s assigned to the “Pod” and the “Pod Manager” who also kept a view on the shared mailbox. I was supposed to send every correspondence to this shared address. At first, I enjoyed the value proposition that there would always be someone to get my messages and to execute my requests. Although, to be brutally honest, access to my Account Executive was never really a problem, so this value proposition was actually a “solution in search of a problem” that I didn’t have. It wasn’t until much later, in the retrospective analysis, that I came to realize this as more significant than I considered it at first.
It was after this, when the rest of the feature set for this new structure started to appear. I’m certain that the VAR thought that all of these things were only enhancing value for customers, but really every step just led me further away from where I was most comfortable. I wasn’t able to “get to know” my team of Account Executives, they remain faceless, voiceless text in email. This lack of humanity was at first not considered to be an issue, but later on became significantly problematic. The disconnection accelerated as we progressed. I was no longer handing work to an Account Executive, asking them for advice and tips, and there was a significant amount of value that I was suddenly unable to access. I had come into the arrangement with a habit of asking my Account Executive to send me quotes on various items, and they would seek the best fitting item that suited my preferences and hand me a quote for the recommended items that best fit my needs and, during pandemic, had a better chance of being in stock. This habit was broken by the new way of doing things. I was no longer able to reach out to an Account Executive to get advice, to have their vantage point much closer to the manufacturers and distributors that we all were using to acquire technology, now I was supposed to simply go on the VAR website, find what I wanted, do my own shopping, and then assemble my own quotes. This feeling of being cut loose became pervasive because it was just another touted feature, considered by the VAR to be part of the “Value Added”, and quickly included not only writing my own quotes, but submitting my own orders as well.
The loss of engagement, the anonymity of the Account Executives involved, and how I was supposed to move all of my previous activities to self-directed work, ostensibly leveraged on the VAR website, all touted as “value added” components were actually just the opposite for me. It wasn’t until I started actually living in this new environment, doing my tasks this new way, that I realized just how much I had missed the old way that I used to do things. The value proposition was always above board, nobody was intentionally being manipulative or malicious, but the result was cold, impersonal, and made me feel like there was an erosion of all the value that at one point was part of my “value added” experience with my VAR.
Whenever there is a change, items can be lost in translation, they can get missed, I do not fault anyone for missing say one or two small things as the customer and the Account Executive in the VAR start to grow together and establish a working relationship together. I didn’t want to, at the time, hold people’s feet to the fire, but that’s exactly what I ended up having to do. I maintain a strict three-strikes policy when it comes to faults, if it’s awful, and you did it three times, that means that it isn’t a mistake, it isn’t overlooking something, it’s part of the design.
The first fault was completely missing the deadline on renewal of security software that my company depends upon to protect us all online. Thankfully, the manufacturer has a very gracious fifteen day grace period, where deadlines are much softer than how they actually sound. The fault resolved, and we moved forward. The second fault came shortly after the first one, and again, the same manufacturer. Missing the renewal of contractual agreements that enable me as a customer to approach the manufacturer’s technical support center if I have any questions or problems. It was addressed and we landed on our feet, but again, we had to sag backwards into the fifteen-day grace period. The third strike was one of tragic poor communication, and one of the most egregious failures I’ve ever witnessed. This failure also coincided with a new Account Executive team member whom I had never communicated with before.
The lack of experience and knowledge on both sides of the divide, again, became a problem that really got in the way. This new Account Executive asked me over several email exchanges questions that were too vague to answer because there wasn’t any included detail. IT is a detail-centric category. We thrive on details, we need exact details, like numbers, or topics, some way to clearly identify what it is that we are talking about. It doesn’t really work when people try to use vague communication styles packed with pronouns and references to unknown objects. Exchange after exchange in this manner became tedious and incredibly tiresome. After several iterations, where I had also started carbon-copying the Pod Manager, did the truth of the situation reveal itself. Once I learned what the object of the conversation was, I tracked it and realized that the subject work should have been completed months before when they had already invoiced my company for the work completed, invoiced and paid.
That was the last straw, the VAR relationship had a tragic and lethal attack right on that spot, right at that time. I began to pursue a kind of “re-entry to the VAR marketplace”, essentially shopping for a new VAR. I found one, chatted them up, had several fantastic meetings and the new VAR has more energy than I’ve seen from the previous one, more professionalism, and more effectiveness. Furthermore, I was also clear with the old VAR, telling them that it was unconscionable how things had unraveled between us, including the “Pod Manager” who never even once attempted to intervene. It was like complaining at a brick wall, for all that I got out of the subsequent correspondences.
The way I was treated was more educational than bothersome. It was a lesson for how important my companies account was to the old VAR, that during the COVID-19 Pandemic, our purchasing slowed because the supply channels also slowed. We wanted technology that was on extensive backorder, and so as our purchasing slowed and stopped, our value to the old VAR ebbed away. The group arrangement was a lesson in and of itself, we were too small, too insignificant to assign to a singular Account Executive, and so, we were effectively downsized as a customer.
We were expected to do all our own work, be our own VAR, as it were because we simply weren’t buying enough to be relevant to our previous VAR. This in itself carries a rather embarrassing knock-on side effect because we had ordered a particular kind of technology from a particular manufacturer and we had eleven items on extreme backorder with the VAR. The old VAR never valued our account, and this was proven out to us by the later revelation that the eleven items on extreme backorder actually slipped into “End Of Life” from the manufacturer. The VAR couldn’t be bothered to re-evaluate the old Open Orders unprompted, discover the EOL surprise themselves, and try saving face by explaining to us what had happened and offering alternatives. What had happened instead, was that the customer had started conversing with a new VAR, discovered the EOL condition, that highlighted just how little the prior VAR cared.
It didn’t matter what the old VAR even wanted to attempt in recovery efforts for the now fully dead business relationship because the single thing that they bring, their “Value Added Reseller” nature, was proven to be totally absentee. We didn’t buy technology for lack of funds, we didn’t buy technology because the people meant to handle the reselling never noticed that what they had already sold ceased to be for sale by the manufacturer!
So I walked away. I moved many orders from the old VAR, spec’ed them out with the new VAR, and actually ended up solving nearly all the seriously backordered gaps in our purchasing stream in one singular afternoon. I sometimes wonder, idly so, if the old VAR thinks about the suddenly cancelled orders, where we were waiting since April with extreme backorders, and then interest fades. Do they even care, do they even notice? They didn’t care enough to look at any old open orders, to even see that the item that we were waiting for shipping on was never ever going to ship because the manufacturer simply stopped selling it. Not having the attention to detail on historical items makes it not really any surprise that they kept on fumbling until the customer simply walked away.
I think that the critical lesson for me in all this drama with the two VARs has been the hidden value that engagement had throughout the entire experience. I never really had a visceral feeling for just how important the engagement was between myself and my VAR Account Executive until it was eroded almost completely. Once engagement disappeared, it was a game-changer for me because it illustrated just how important VAR Account Executives are in the process, how much I had come to rely on them. The VAR Account Executive sits in a very high place, able to see things that customers cannot. Their fingers on the pulse of international transport, distribution, and delivery. I only wish that my prior VAR had not allowed six years of solid, dependable positive experiences go down the drain like it did. I am far happier with my new VAR. With the right engagement between customer and Account Executive, I have already spent $25,000 with the new VAR! These dollar values are still small potatoes in comparison to other customers, but $25,000 is certainly more profit for the new VAR than for the old one who is just sitting on a pile of cancelled orders.
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.