I’ve written quite a bit about Raycast in the past. However, I don’t know if I’ve written very much about how I use it, or why I find it so useful. One of my favorite features is basic fallbacks and quicklinks. Fallbacks are what display after you’ve typed a few words and Raycast doesn’t find what you’re looking for (after searching for apps, etc.). This is how I use the app to search everywhere else. Here’s my current setup:

The first fallback is just a basic Google search. This is the default way I search Google. And since I use xSearch in Safari this becomes a super powerful way to search a bunch of different websites with ease. I can type “ch blink-182” and it’ll search Chorus automatically for me. Or “az Mark Hoppus book” to search Amazon. Or any of the websites I have setup in xSearch:

I also have a fallback to directly run the search in Google Chrome instead of my default browser, Safari. There’s also a file fallback so if I am looking for a specific file and I didn’t launch the file searcher with a keyboard shortcut I have quick access to it. There’s some other handy fallbacks as well, like the dictionary, translator, and bookmark search. But the other fallback I’ve found myself using quite a bit, and one of the other awesome features of Raycast, is the quicklink feature. Quickinks let you open files, URLs, or paths instantly. I have one set to “drop” to open my Dropbox folder. I have “app” to quickly open the Applications folder. And quite a few others:

The Ask ChatGPT one is a recent addition. Raycast has basic AI features built into the app and their pro features let you expand to other models. For basic questions using the built in features is nice. Hit Command-Space and type a quick question, hit Tab, and get a basic AI reply. Simple. I have their AI chat “window” mapped to Option-Command-Space for longer chats or when I want to type a longer prompt. I don’t pay for the pro version of Raycast’s AI feature set for a few reasons. First, because during my testing I was getting worse, and slower, responses using the same models on their default apps or websites. Second, I like having my chat history with me on mobile and Raycast doesn’t have a mobile app. So, instead, I use ChatGPT’s service. They have a nice and capable Mac App. It even has a built-in keyboard shortcut feature where you can pop open a little window to ask it questions. However, I don’t really want to run the ChatGPT app all the time. It’s, currently, not an app I have in my Dock or running throughout the day. Raycast’s basic AI handles those queries for me. But there are often times when I do want to send a question directly to ChatGPT. If I want to quickly launch the app I can use my hyperkey for it (which Raycast now also supports), but the quicklink fallback lets me just start typing when I have a question and then decide where I want to send it (Google, quick AI, or directly to ChatGPT). And you can map quicklinks to keyboard shortcuts themselves. So, if I use Option-Space I get my custom ChatGPT quicklink query:

Type the question, hit enter, and it gets automatically populated in the ChatGPT desktop app. The mechanics of this are simple:

This just fits how my brain works. I like to have one app as the central “control” for doing a whole bunch of things on my computer. This then just becomes muscle memory for me to do things quickly with the keyboard. From quick file searches, to adding events to my calendar, to adding a quick note in Drafts, to adding a reminder to pre-heat the oven for dinner, to running more complicated searches, all the way to using various AI tools. At this point Raycast has also become my emoji picker, clipboard manager, TextExpander, quick gif search, and color picker.

I’ve liked other launchers in the past. Alfred was my favorite for a long time. But I haven’t loved one to the degree that Raycast has cemented itself into my every day workflow like this. I think it is now to the point where sitting down at a computer without it would feel broken. Rarified air.

There’s no solace in I told you so. There’s no glee in being right.

This is just the work of an unhinged moron with apparently nothing better to do than ruin everything.

Today was a computer spring cleaning day. This is where I go through the computers and clean out cruft, update apps, do all the additional software updates needed, and check for basic maintenance stuff. I finally updated the OS on the headless Mac Mini server from Sierra to Monterey (which is the last version that little dude from 2014 can support). It’s still running strong, no issues at all. To go with the updates I wanted to change the wallpaper, I recently saw these Ultramarine Haze wallpapers from Basic Apple Guy and am a big fan. No banding in the gradient; great colors.

I also saw this app, Supercharge, pop up on my radar this week. Some cool things here. The shortcut for “close visible notifications” being the one thing I see that I really wish Apple build into the operating system. I already use Keyboard Maestro to do this. I assign keyboard shortcuts to click the right spots on the screen to close notifications and click the “reply” option on messages. It’s super helpful when one comes in and I’m in the middle of typing to just hit Control-ESC to close it, or Command-ESC to quick reply to a message. Why these don’t have system wide shortcuts is beyond me. Of course that would mean needing to traverse the jungle of pain that is the Settings app. But, I digress.

Maxwell Zeff, writing for TechCrunch:

It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”

Parker Ortolani:

OpenAI dropped an all-new image generation system for ChatGPT today and man is it good. One of the biggest problems with artificially generated images has been the inability to generate accurate text within them. There have historically been problems with inaccurate characters, spelling, or even complete graphical errors. Today’s update to image generation with GPT-4o fixes these. You can now generate charts, signs, logos, word marks, text graphics, pretty much anything you can think of with ease. It nails spelling, seems to set type well, and generally abides by your instructions.

The latest update from OpenAI does a speed run through all the company’s greatest hits. It’s impressive. And it’s morally and legally, at best, in a gray area. The Ghibli stylized images all over social media lack art, lack soul, but are a technically impressive achievement. The kind of thing you’d use as a forum avatar but never hang on your wall. A novelty.

A few years back Hannah commissioned a hand drawn piece of art of her, me, and the cats for a present. It’s framed and in my office on a shelf I can see from my desk. It brings me joy every time I look over and see our old condo and the time, attention, and care that went into the creation of it. Not just from the artist, but from Hannah in working with the artist to craft something very much us.

I tossed some images to GPT and it generated a Ghibli version of us. It wasn’t bad. It butchered the Funkos that were in the background pretty badly. But it lacked character. And I didn’t like how it rendered my body. I then asked it to create something in the style of Bill Watterson. That it balked at. Told me it couldn’t do it. Why it would take instructions to copy/steal from Ghibli but not the famed Calvin and Hobbes artist, is … odd? But at the end of the day it’s an LLM, and if you can describe it without using the magic words it’ll still give you want you want:

Again, not bad. Kinda fun? A passing resemblance to the style. But it feels more like a paint by numbers template used by a caricaturist with less style. And it lacks any of the punch, the actual artistic flourish and genius of Bill Watterson’s art.

And the Funkos are still hilariously rendered.

I saw Simon Willison (one of my favorite blogs writing about AI) recently added a new “notes” feature to his website. He credits Molly White’s micro notes feed as inspiration. As someone who also recently added a similar feature to my blog, I gotta say, I really would love to see this trend continue to spread. It’s been fun and freeing to have a place to post little random one-offs again without the baggage of social media.

Here’s the Python script I wrote that calculates how many words and articles I’ve written on this website. I run this at the end of the year, change the dates, and use it for my yearly stats posts. No idea if it’s of any interest to anyone, but if you run a WordPress blog it should be pretty plug-in-play by changing the URL, author ID, and dates.

I think I started naming my computers sometime in high school. If memory serves it was probably something I picked up from my computer networking friends.1 I think it started with Linux servers but has carried over to my desktops and laptops.

Even today my servers have names (Chorus is Melody, the Forum is Overture, the headless Mac Mini in the closet is Harmony).

And my personal computers are named as well. However, it was only in the last, I dunno, ten years or so, that I also started giving them custom icons to go with their names. I heard John Siracusa talk about this on a podcast at some point and I realized I had not actually changed my hard drive icon in years. I remember doing it on Classic Mac OS and one of my earliest computer memories was making my 3.5 floppy disc have a custom Bart Simpson icon. And I change quite a few of my dock icons2 to be, to me, more aesthetically pleasing and similar.

Now I not only change the name of the computer, I also change the hard drive icon.

My desktop, the big beefy boy that he is, is named Optimus:

And the sleek black laptop is named The Batmobile:

The IconFactory has a lot of awesome icons.3 And so does Louie Mantia.

It’s fun. I recommend it.

This morning, I tried listening to the re-record of one of Anberlin’s classic albums, Never Take Friendship Personal, and I do not have positive thoughts:

This sounds like the YouTube covers of songs that I find pretty obnoxious. Like the cover of this album should just be a dude with a beard making a weird face with a yellow font saying “what if Matty Mullins sang for Anberlin?!!”

All the life has been stripped out of these and replaced with vocals that have had every inch of personality mechanically pulled from them. Anberlin’s a top 20 most played band for me and I’m glad they can continue making money I guess, but I really kinda just hate everything about this one? Like … stand on your new music? Between this and the deleting or replying to fans with rude comments on Instagram has really soured me on this era of the band.

However, this whole re-record thing did lead to something positive. I’ve been complaining for years about the online master of the original album on all streaming services. It’s extremely low volume and washed out. Today I saw a comment that the weird three-album-compilation thing Tooth and Nail put on streaming services actually has the better, proper, master. I went to Apple Music to check it out, and holy hell, they’re right! And because Apple Music still lets you change metadata on the Mac app (please never take this away Apple), this means it was very easy to swap this version out in my library. Finally.

Highly recommend. This is the definitive version of this album to me.