A guide to digital text fuckery (largely on Apple Platforms) from one of the world’s foremost authorities.

My project to properly document Bluetooth keyboard support on iPhone has given me a new reverence for accessibility, generally, which might come as a hypocritical statement at the beginning of such a piece, but I did explicitly ask you if you felt this subject was anti-accessibility before I officially embarked upon writing This Post. I don't consider the answer – a very weak “no” – to be an all-encompassing excuse, whatsoever. If you feel this post's existence has the potential to do real harm, contact me and I will straight up take it down. I dare you. Since I consider myself a genuine authority on Text Fucking, however, I am going to do my best to main unapologetic language when expressing opinions in orbit of the matter. You can trust me, I think.

It’s already as good a place as any, editorially, to initiate the goddamned “good vs. evil” discussion because we could very easily find ourselves sincerely addressing the class implications of Text Fucking, otherwise. I want to offer myself, fully, as your test target and/or guinea pig, if you will. If you’re looking for a phone number upon which to set the sights of any of the methodologies shared here (or otherwise, for that matter,) here is mine: +1 (573) 823-4380. If you’re on a mobile device, definitely try out this link to my full contact card, and consider this brief list of some other potential targets of mine:

• Telegram
• Email
• Twitter
• Mastodon
• Discord
• Everywhere...

I won’t share any of your identifying information anywhere, nor will I respond unless you ask, but I guarantee I will be utterly delighted to receive any volume of Fuckery in any inbox you’re capable of sending it to because I have been so at the half-dozen or so message strings I’ve received over the past few weeks. Even if you somehow manage to find a means of undelighting me, that would be a far better scenario for all involved parties than my catching word you used one of my shortcuts to send Mein Kampf to a prayer request line or some shit. I promise it will always be more fun to shoot for constructive disruption over edgy bullshit, especially in this New Age when nothing is certain and nobody is talking. As much as the person who wrote the Yelp! review, below, would’ve loved to advocate for contribution to the noise for the simple sake of it, he’s fucking dead.

Hopefully, we’re now free to get specific. Here’s my definition from the “Text Fucking” entry in The Psalms wiki:

text fucking 1. Text Fucking verb a.) hardcore text manipulation. b.) destruction of usable digital text.

1. Text Fuckery noun the discipline of text fucking.

2. Text Fuckery noun the output... the result of the verb.

disruption

I might also append an esp. in either neutral or constructive applications. Again, a Zalgoed Tweet every once in a while is funny, but mass spamming strangers in peer-to-peer spaces is not. Not funny in any sense. To draw a medium parallel with audio – as I will several times in this guide, you’ll find – genuinely disruptive text manipulation is like choosing to push your pirate radio out on the volunteer-run community station’s frequency instead of the corporate-owned hits channel’s. Any sense you might be doing something worthwhile dramatically vanishes and the possibility of accomplishing something a bit original, even, is nullified in the womb.

I won’t say Text Fucking is an art. Indeed, perhaps it is anti-art. It is a discipline, nearly. At least enough so that I believe this Post is worth it[^1]. Like most disciplines, it can be used for your particular definitions of “good” and/or “bad.” I would like to think most of my use over the years has been toward my own of “good,” but – as per the unsearchable nature of Fucked Text, generally – this is not easily verifiable or citable. Regardless of my performance, however, I genuinely believe Text Fucking can be an endeavor that leads to more “positive” outcomes, whoever you may be. As I did, you might find yourself with a greater appreciation of and a desire to learn more about those individuals and organizations working in the Accessible Technology industry, ever toward a more inclusive digital future. It’s my hope that the weaponization of such an otherwise banal part of life might empower you with the simple fact of your capabilities, even if you don’t ever choose to actually implement them in a single instance.

History

As detailed in the audio account embedded above, I believe my Text Fucking career began somewhere around the 7th grade, at 13-14 years old. It was my second or third time flunking MS02 – the Microsoft Office II course – taken on fairly outdated school desktop machines in the 2007-2008 era, all running Windows XP. Because of some inexplicable ability to simply do what I was told, I would spend class periods trying to create the largest possible text file in Notepad by copying and pasting huge, exponentially growing globs. Eventually, I did crash a machine at least once. Though it could very well be simply the self-exaggerated recollection of preteendom, I even remember crashing the school server with one of those files. They were ginormous for plaintext.

if you don’t think Z̸͔͈̮̠̓͋ͧ̚̕͞͡a̡̨͇̳̹̯̞̓ͦͨ͢͡͝l̞̭̻̃̚͠҉͙g̩͒̀͗̾͏̶͇̮͍̋̄̀̄ͬo is the digital text form of audio clipping, I want you to call me right now. +1 (573) 823-4380

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 20, 2022

My Text Fucking reached its peak proliferation in the Drywall Era, when I first discovered the magic of Zalgo Text. The original generator at eemo.net has been replaced by an exact duplicate at eeemo.net. I have actually managed to successfully duplicate it on my own NeoCities website, as well. You might say that this original Zalgo Generator is The Original Text Fucking Tool. It can still generate quantities of fucked digital text information that will Fuck Shit Up on any social network, and as far as I can tell, the entire program is contained within a single HTML file.

As Drywall’s first and second albums – Hamura and Suburban Anarchy, respectively – were studies in audio clipping, I felt strongly at the time that Zalgo Text was the digital text equivalent, though there were others. The latter’s most wildly-entitled track, “ͣ͆̄̓̇̿͛͏͎͍ͬ̃&ÍÌµÍ‡Ì Ì¥ÌªÌ„ÌÍŒÍ¯Ì“​$​̯̻̣͚͒̉́͑,” does not actually include any Zalgo text in its title’s final form, on Bandcamp[^6], yet I think we can agree it is thoroughly Fucked. Beyond The Rails was my cringey “label” name, directly describing, technically, the matter of clipping audio. Indeed, Zalgo Text goes beyond the “rails” of text input/display fields reliably, depending on the intensity of the configuration you’re using to create it.

?́́ ̷͢?́?͜?̛
͏̸?̢҉
̶͟?͝͡
̢͝?͜?̛?̴
͟͠?̶͡
̀?̀
́?̛

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 14, 2022

When iMovie for iPhone first became available, making actual video editing and creation possible on iPhone OS in the iPhone 4 era, I took advantage of a very particular – but extremely powerful – function that was originally allowed creators on YouTube’s iOS app. It’s very hard to describe without being able to show, but it allowed for the rapid addition of tags to any video via an autocomplete-ish feature, up to the full tag limit. The series of Drywall videos that were essentially just vlogs shot from our high school lunch table – entitled Men and Women of The Armed Forces, This is What You are Fighting For[^7] (MAWOTAFTIWYAFF) – were all thoroughly tagged this way.

The most notable event in my personal text history, though, happened on Mastodon – as much does these days, if you weren’t aware. I was posting about Zalgo text’s creation when its actual creator, Dave Higgins – with whom I’d unknowingly been mutuals for some time, apparently – replied:

If there is a living God/Ultimate Sage/Premiere Authority/Professor of Text Fucking, surely it is they, so to have a conversation with them was quite an honor, especially to be able to call them father, of sorts. I continue to pursue this discipline in a largely automated way, as we’ll discuss in depth. It’s not an especially practical or beneficial one, no, but it is mine. (And Dave Higgins’, to be fair.)

Apps

The core necessity of any good Text Fucker is a robust text editing and/or word processing application. Zalgo text is a real bitch for Electron apps like my dearest Typora, unfortunately. On iOS, this summation also applies to Obsidian, I’m afraid. I recommend native apps like Drafts (big surprise) – which astonishingly has its very own native Zalgo action as developer Greg’s gift to me! – and Bear (no less of a surprise.) In terms of default configuration intensity, the Drafts action hits the sweet spot out of the box.

N̡̥̬̆͏͊҉̷̧̧o҉̗͖̣ͨ̽͝͏͗̀̿̕t̡̰͢ t͋o̬̟̙ h̲̲̹̓̑ͨạ̸̧̡̨ͯ̋̊r̶̛̩͍̖̹ͥ̽͜d̲̙ͬ?̶̛̱͉̓ https://t.co/2W0ZJTtkbV

— Drafts (@draftsapp) February 12, 2022

If you don’t believe me, here are some more particularly robust text editors on iOS:

• Kodex
• Koder
• Taio
• Typewriter
• Runestone (Beta)

If that’s not enough for you, I suggest perusing Brett Terpstra’s iTextEditors Wiki.

I have previously reviewed two wonderful Text Fucking iOS apps on this blog: UniChar and Zalgo Generator. There’s now a macOS version of the latter which is particularly powerful – or at least has particularly powerful implications. There are a few more to be discovered, though:

Textcraft

Textcraft, by Aviary and Mast creator, Shihab Meboob, has become my goto Text Fucking app – even above Zalgo Generator, I’m somewhat sad to say – on both iOS and macOS.

Textcraft offers a customizable list of 90 live “transformations” to the text you’re entering. Here’s a directly-quoted list of use cases from the app’s press kit:

• For a casual tweeter who wants to TyPe LiKe ThIs with minimal effort.
• For an influencer needing to add hashtags before all of their words in a massive word cloud sentence before uploading to Instagram.
• For the coder/designer needing to strip HTML or encode/decode strings in Base64.
• For the blogger wanting fancy text in bubbles, squares, cursive, or stylised differently on their website.
• For the website designer who wants to add underscores between all words for use in code, or change the format between cases.
• For the journalist who wants to redact or underline some text.
• For the cryptographer who wants to convert strings to SHA128 and SHA256.

In my personal use, I’ve noticed it’s by far the quickest way to add m u l t i p l e c h a r a c t e r s p a c e s I’ve ever come across, all enabled by the app’s one-touch-to-copy function. As I said in my App Store review, the iOS app weighs in at a featherweight 3.7 MB and a reasonable $4.99 one-time purchase fee, which is high value for someone like me.

TextExpander

Another cross-platform application – this one extending to Windows, too – TextExpander has very recently (and quite swiftly) become an integral part of my day-to-day creative life. It’s used by professionals at companies with “thousands of people,” supposedly, to “expand” any sort of text, set off scripts (on macOS,) and paste fill in-able templates. These functions are divided into “snippets” as part of “snippet groups.” In fact, I’ve created a dedicated snippet group to accompany this guide. You can view all my TextExpander snippets in this GitHub Repository.

It’s not much just yet, but if you “subscribe” to my dedicated Text Fuck snippet group from your own account, you’ll be treated to whatever I come up with in the future, delivered to your devices in real time.[ ^5] The great pro of TextExpander is its target pro usergroup, for which it is built to be reliable and very powerful. It enables quick macros for strings as short as ⁌•-¬䷂☃︎𝄫𝄢⟫L𝔒’⌤⌄∔×−฿🄕𝄢 up to entire book chapters. It also has more complex functions, likely the most relevant to our use of which being clipboard insertion anywhere within a snippet. Crucial to the strong Text Fucker, this function has high potential for multiplied volume. One might set up a snippet that duplicates the clipboard’s content nine times on new lines and attach the macro \9.

Automation

Debatably, my personal history with automation began with the release of IFTT (now IFTTT) somewhere around 2010-2011. Once it was integrated with Twitter and Evernote, I set it to save all of my Twitter favorites in separate, tagged Evernotes. The result was quite tremendous, as you might imagine, and is partially immortalized in my current Twitter Raindrop collection. Tremendous, but not in a Text Fucking sense. Sometime just after high school, though, I configured an IFTT recipe that posted “WHEN IM COMIN DINE IN MY FOREIGN AND IM ROLLIN ONE DEEP THAT SHOULD TELL YA BOUT ME” across my social networks, every morning at 6:10 AM.

holy fuck this is disturbing. https://t.co/7a96mgYELI pic.twitter.com/fr9dorHtsO

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 13, 2022

It was in the same era that one of my handful of lifetime genius ideas came to me: it occurred to me that I could automate the Drywall Tumblr page entirely by signing up its “post via email” address for all the spam lists I could find. The result is axiomatic. It is also Text Fucking, emphatically. Though I certainly didn’t know it by the name “automation,” then – nor did I associate the term with anything digital, really – contemporary personal automation enables virtually infinite Text Fucking possibilities. No longer does one have to manually copy the entirety of a huge Wikipedia page in order to break their friend’s phone for 5 days – now, they need only configure a native app on their cellular telephone to send the whole of the Spy Kids 3 screenplay, for instance, to said friend, in the background, even, as they continue scrolling through the Ticking App.

Of course, while the means of distributing Text Fuckery have gotten vastly more robust, capable, and sophisticated, so too have the terminals by which intended targets experience the Fuckery. The friend’s handset and elemental carrier plan in our example may very well be perfectly capable of receiving an entire film script, line-by-line, also in the background, perhaps even without the target ever noticing or suffering a single consequence.

Siri Shortcuts

A standalone method of general Text Fuckery on iOS is achieved through its relatively “new”[^2] personal automation system, Siri Shortcuts. In fact, Apple includes what I would define as a genuine Text Fucker™ of a shortcut in its default shortcuts gallery, called “All the Single Ladies ASCII” which can be used to create rather adorable text snippets like this:

(•_•)
<)   )╯DAVID BLUE
 /    \ 

  (•_•)
 \(   (> WROTE
  /    \

 (•_•)
<)   )╯THIS.
 /    \

Through a Reddit thread I’ve never been able to find again, I discovered a method of randomizing strings of text that led to the creation of the Shortcuts you see at the bottom of this section, all with native actions (aside from the outputs of those with specific services.) If you’re willing to splurge on the whole 3.3mb, free (for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS) Actions app, you can accomplish the same task, but much more quickly and with less resource consumption. I think you can spare the space.[ ^3]

Perhaps the best place to start would be with the most documented (and perhaps most unique) Text Fucking Siri Shortcut I have to offer you. “The Fastest Route to Twitter Jail” in fact details the workings of my Twitter Jail shortcut, which uses Tweetbot’s shortcuts actions to send 310 Tweets of random text in less than four minutes to an account of your specification.

If you’re new to Shorcuts entirely, what you see above will result in a string of random text copied to your clipboard, so that you can paste it whereever you might “need” to. Notably, I’ve been extremely lazy with the strings, despite having the absolute best app for creating them on my iPhone. I’d suggest you download it and play around yourself. As I said in my review, UniChar is a beautiful celebration of the diversity of Unicode. If what I’m talking about isn’t straightforward-sounding to you, let me know! I absolutely will sit down and build something just for you.

Text-Fucking Siri Shortcuts with Actions

These three shortcuts require the Actions app, but the single action used across all of them – called Random Text – is one that works across all platforms.

• Random Characters ⇨ Clipboard
• Random Characters ⇨ Mastodon
• Random Characters ⇨ Tumblr

Text-Fucking Siri Shortcuts with Toolbox Pro, Actions, and Aviary

Here are three shortcuts that may or may not be useful to you, each using Shihab Meboob’s Aviary to Tweet images en masse. The third also requires you have LookUp and a populated collection.

• Tweet Symbol Images
• Tweet Color Images
• Tweet Vocabulary Images

Native Text-Fucking Siri Shortcuts

• Random Text ⇨ Twitter (Tweetbot)
• Random Text ⇨ Twitter II
• Random Text ⇨ Clipboard
• Random Text ⇨ Drafts
• Random Text ⇨ Mastodon
• Random Text ⇨ Tumblr
• Random Text ⇨ WordPress

Text Case

Christopher R Hannah’s Text Case is by far the most modern of all the dedicated text manipulation applications I have to share with you. Available (separately) on both macOS and iOS, it’s a “flow”-based, Siri Shortcuts-resembling text formatting app with some very powerful functions.

I know that’s basically word-for-word what anyone else’s had to say about it since its debut, four years ago... I apologize for the redundancy, but the way it works is extremely hard to describe in a way that makes any sense, especially just with a few video clips and/or static images.[ ^4]

Without being able to share my own “flows” (unfortunately,) all I can share with you is this Siri Shortcut which is called from this Drafts action to reformat selected text (or the entire contents of the current draft) into proper MLA Title format before amending the results to a specific draft. I also created and published a shortcut called “Speak Word Count” which uses Text Case’s Word Count “format” and Siri Speech Synthesis to speak aloud the word count of either the current selection (from the share sheet) or the contents currently in the system clipboard.

I’ve also created Fuck – a Siri Shortcut with three of my favorite Text Case formattings so far in succession: “Mocking Spongebob” (ick,) “Upside Down,” and “Clap Case.” It acts upon – and replaces – any text you’ve copied to the clipboard. Here’s an example:

ᴉ┴ 👏 ∀ɔʇs 👏 nԀou 👏  👏  👏 ∀up 👏 ɹƎd˥ɐɔǝs 👏  👏  👏 ∀u⅄ 👏 ┴Ǝx┴ 👏 ⅄On’Λǝ 👏 ɔoԀIǝp 👏 ┴o 👏 ʇɥǝ 👏 ɔlᴉdqo∀ɹp

Drafts

Though I already mentioned Drafts’ Zalgo action earlier, the app worth its own heading, here, because it’s what enabled me to generate the text images embedded in this Post with a single keyboard shortcut. The magic is not in fact happening within Drafts, but rather in the Siri Shortcuts it calls and provides text for. These two are customized for me (so you’ll need to delete the actions you don’t want/need,) but will faithfully reproduce the style of the images you’ve seen as configured for Toolbox Pro users.

• DraftsImage
• DraftsImageSmall

If you plan to leave the titles the same, you might just directly install their corresponding actions: DraftsImage and DraftsImageSmall. There are a few actions from other creators I have yet to mention. Tim Nahumck’s Text Modifier action – as pictured in the screenshot embedded below – is a handy one, as is Greg’s own Unicode Fun. He also published Emojify and Fake Wordle, which I find hilarious.

Other Tools

Thanks to Taro Yabuki’s project to display all graphical unicode characters in a single page, I created and uploaded a PDF of them all, hosted on my NeoCities. If you have trouble viewing it there, you should be able to download it from this iCloud Drive share link. There’s quite a myriad of available “weird text” tools available on the open web, found easily with the most basic bitch search engine queries. MegaCoolTest.com is an old favorite of mine[^8] that functions a lot like Textcraft, come to think of it.

I originally intended to thoroughly test some of the results found when searching the App Store for “weird text,” but they’re far too numerous and – for the most part – far too janky to be worthwhile.

Discuss...

#software #spectacle

[1] Whaddya think‽‽‽ Should I write a book‽‽‽ [2] I say “new” here because of how many users genuinely have never encountered the concept, whatsoever, even going on five years since Workflow was made native. [3] A few of the single images embedded in this Post are larger than that. [4] Nevertheless, I shall do my best to remain ashamed of my redundant inadequacy. [5] If you find yourself trying it out, you may as well check out my main Snippet Group, Extratext, which is documented here. [6] You might be interested to hear how human Siri Voice 2 sounds attempting to read the title aloud. [7] It just now occurred to me that the series title wasn’t exactly gender-inclusive, but the series, itself, wasn’t actually of any value, anyway. [8] I’ve also duplicated this one on my NeoCities.

One of the app's most universal 'native' advantages, revisited.

I've spent more cumulative time playing with my Obsidian configuration in the past 24 hour hours than the sum of the whole I'd spent doing so in the 3(?) years since I installed beta (or was it alpha?) one. While I still find it janky as hell and deeply untrustworthy – among far too many other woes – I must admit that the bulk of shear hype surrounding its existence has indeed resulted in enough developer attention to achieve some technically interesting capabilities. Naturally, most of these feel absurdly redundant in context and all rely on age-old dependencies, but... well, today I uploaded the text of my almost five-year-old Microsoft Surface Laptop 2 Review to its own dedicated Archive.org page in thirteen different formats rendered using Obsidian's (desktop-only) Pandoc integration!

I lambaste with the sincere intent, at least, of being genuinely constructive, and I began upon this post hoping to do so and finally get around to highlighting one of Drafts' most essential (and taken for granted, I suspect) powers in its entirely cross-platform, system-level integration with Mail on Apple Platforms.

One of Drafts' most immediately apparent advantages as a native iOS/iPadOS/macOS application is readily found in its integration with Mail. Though I've personally managed to almost escape my twenties having yet to endure an email-heavy job, I still find the practice of sending topical/sacred information to myself to be the upmost reliable and direct means of retrieving it.

As I've configured it, within Drafts on any of its 3 platforms, all I need do is press ^M to have the text of the current Draft sent instantly to an iCloud Mail alias I use for such things.

If I were sending to more folks than just myself on a regular basis, I'd definitely make use of Drafts' Mail Action Wizard to help simplify and solidify the process of creating a dedicated action, which almost certainly would not have the Send in Background toggle selected, as demonstrated, for the sake of giving myself a preview of outbound messages to... important folks. For macOS users, there's also a bespoke Catalyst app called Mail Assistant, which I've yet to try.

Formatting

The parameters of the Mail action step can be filled with any combination of items from the original Drafts template tags array or from the relatively new set of mustache template tags.

The current version of my personal Send-to-Self action sent this example result using the format represented in the Gist embedded above. If you'd like, you can wrap the [body] tag (or any part of the message, actually) in double %s and select the Send as HTML toggle to have the result rendered as HTML. (See this example.)

If – like me – you're an iCloud Mail user primarily from iOS/iPadOS, here's how to create an iCloud Mail rule for messages you've sent yourself from Drafts:

1. Visit iCloud.com/mail in your web browser and authenticate.
2. Open the Rules settings menu by tapping the gear icon in the upper left ⇨ Preferences ⇨ Rules.
3. Create a new rule with the “Add rule” link.
4. By default, the “If a message...” field selection should be “is from.” In the text entry field, enter drafts-mail@drafts5.agiletortoise.com.
5. By default, the “Then...” field selection is “Move to Folder.” I have personally set mine to “Move to Folder and Mark as Read,” but this depends on your preference. Select a folder or mailbox for Drafts messages to be moved to and click “Add.”

Publishing via Email

I've spent a lot of time this year working on integrating Drafts with NeoCities, Write.as, and other publishing services, but – for new users, especially – Drafts' mail integration offers a pathway to publishing with virtually zero configuration for those services who still offer mail-to-save/post email addresses. These include WordPress, Blogger, Write.as, LiveJournal, Evernote, Day One, Things, Todoist, and more.

Perhaps the easiest method of setting this up would involve finding your private email address for a given service(s), pasting them in the aforementioned Mail Action Wizard, titling the action by the name of the service, and installing. There's also an Email to Myself action on the Drafts Action Directory to get you started.

Drag and Drop to Formatted Markdown Hyperlinks from Apple Mail

Going the other direction, users of Apple Mail (the client) might find it pleasantly surprising that one can drag a message from Mail into Drafts in order to automatically create a markdown-formatted hyperlink that opens said message from anywhere.

For more details, see the official 'Sending Mail with Drafts' Integration Guide.

Discuss...

#software

*Or at least until I can regain a reasonable editorial perspective of current happenings.

As I touched on in my 2021 overview of The Psalms, this blog has undergone some very significant – and mostly involuntary – changes of late. This summer has abruptly brought some life happens which will inevitably contribute further changes to a degree that warrants a very bloggy sort of Update Post.

Most importantly, perhaps, is that I've found myself with a real, tangible, full-time Big Boy job as a nighttime custodian of my actual elementary school. Though I suppose it's never been revealed before, here, I actually love cleaning and love this school, particularly, so I'm more excited than I've ever been for any sort of documentable employment, but this means I will imminently be transitioning from a lifestyle with virtually zero time-bound obligations to working 3-11:15PM, Monday through Friday. Undoubtedly, this will have a profound effect on my recently-announced consultancy business, but I'll be making an effort to formally update the adjacent Fantastical Openings links with revised availability.

Adjacent to this news are the experiences I've had in the past few weeks helping a friend ready her third-grade, public school classroom, which have been particularly enlightening with regard to the extent that iPads have been integrated into the education of young children in this country. Some highlights from this discovery (in this particular, Title I Midwestern elementary school):

• Every child will receive a 5th-generation, WiFi-only iPad (iPad6,11) which they will be able to take home over the course of the school year.
• The district paid $299 per unit for said iPads, a mere $30 off their full retail price for the rest of us, $329.
• The random device I picked up from the pile shown in the images embedded above had not been updated beyond iPadOS 15 (since March of this year.)
• Responsibility for the maintenance, setup, and deployment of said iPads rests entirely on a single individual, who is also responsible for the “media center” (what many of us know as the Library.)
• Responsibility for ongoing hardware considerations (charging and storage) is left entirely to individual teachers.
• Net contributions from Apple, Inc. to this new aspect of childhood education reside some six or seven figures in the negative.

In the two weeks preceding our district's start date, I had the painful opportunity to tour some of my friend's colleagues' storage solutions for their student iPads. The image below is the one I chose to append to my appeal to the MacStories Discord, attempting to leverage workspace-obsessed yuppies' knowledge for the benefit of public education.

There were a few helpful replies, which made it clear that organizations with actual budgets for device storage have gravitated toward rolling carts.

I've been made intimately aware just how integral YouTube has become in public education, these past few weeks. believe it or not, there is not a program – to the educators I've spoken to's knowledge, anyway – that removes advertising from YouTube playback in this case.

— ⓓⓐⓥⓘⓓ ⓑⓛⓤⓔ (@NeoYokel) September 1, 2022

Going Forward

The time I haven't spent in this medium has been redirected toward a few key sources. My Raindrop collections have continued to grow, including a particular one I'd like to highlight here, called Blessed Web Utilities.

With its new ownership, I've continued to pour more and more energy into Siri Shortcuts published on RoutineHub. I'm proud to have been asked to participate directly in the platform's upcoming aggregatory efforts. I've also established a reliable habit of sharing Shortcuts documentation/source files on the extratone Telegram channel, among many other aspects of my ongoing Online Life.

I've also restarted an Extratone-era habit of using redirects to simultaneously simplify and index topical URLs to both my own projects and external resources. My new, NeoCities-bound Redirection Index should be a robust way to keep up with David Blue, Online, therefore.

As always, I hope you'll freely contact me with comments/suggestions/feedback/rants/etc. As for this particular feed, I doubt there will be much noticeable change from its status quo in the past ~two years.

Discuss...

#meta

The most magical configurables I've ever created for iOS by a long way.

Though I don't believe I've ever discussed it, here, the continuance of the fandom for Houston music legend, DJ Screw, on into the 21st century is an issue I remain very invested in. I doubt you want to hear much about it, but the issue of actually obtaining audio files from the Screw collection is a worthwhile one to engage for context's sake. I was first introduced to the ~343-chapter collection by my high school best friend, who'd acquired it via an ancient Pirate Bay torrent some hero set up in the early 2000s[^1]. It was complete – probably – and more or less correctly organized by chapter, but that's about it as far as reliable metadata was concerned. The results one would find elsewhere on the web, from sites like DatPiff, were hardly any better – many, in fact, were obviously sourced from that same torrent.

In the interim, a lot has changed about music consumption. You know this, but – as you might've already imagined – none of the mainstream services you fuckers partake in have managed to do Robert Earl Davis III justice in the modern era. Apple Music and Spotify, both, will send you in neatly identical spirals pretty much regardless which of their pet vectors you choose to populate with His Name. As much as I've vouched for the former, it's perhaps the worst of them all in this context – departing the marque entirely into the (respectable but... incorrect) world of non-Davis SLOWED 'n” THOWED[^2] almost immediately.

Perhaps one day, I'll find it within myself to tackle this issue – DJ Screw in the Щ́̇͋ͯ̋̅Σ̾̒͋ͯͭ ̊ᄂ̋̈͐İͬV̏̆̊͛̍̌Σ̆ͣͣͭ͐ͫ̆̊ ͪͬ̿̈́̑ͤ̚IͫП̎̿͑ͦ͆̚ ͣͫ͌ͨ̈Λ̃͛̓ͦͪ͒̑̽ ͛̑ͤ͊ͭƬ̒I̅͌̊̑ͧͪM̈́̓Σ̋̏͂͐͊͆ͣ, generally – but I actually have extremely wonderful, urgent news. You see, dearest archive.org was actually provided the entire, impeccably tagged Discography by actual Culture Heroes some years ago. All of it, accessible in multiple file formats, embeddable, superbly shareable! This is the most important truth I have to impart to you today, really, but – for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, there's even more...

Automation

As of right now, just two Siri Shortcuts – Download Random Screw Tape and DJ Screw Discography[^3]. The first is perhaps the most delightful – if all goes well, running it right out of the box should result in a random tape from the library downloaded in a folder of your specification (at install,) as well actual playback, in correct order, within the shortcut, itself.

This is magic, yes, but the second is true power. After picking folders at installation for 1) downloaded archive.org-sourced .zip files to live in temporarily before they are extracted and deleted and 2) your complete, correctly metatagged DJ Screw Tape library could – in theory, anyway – magically appear in a single, undoubtedly several hours-long run. I have yet to actually test the full bit myself, technically, but I can advise you to set Auto-Lock (Settings ⇨ Display & Brightness ⇨ Auto-Lock) to Never, make sure you leave the Shortcut open within the Shortcuts App, itself, and give it a shot, if possible.

Discuss...

#software #automation #music

[1] I attempted to find this torrent for the sake of this post and well... The Pirate Bay looks a lot different than I remembered. [2] This is not criticism. If it was, it would be ridiculously hypocritical. [3] If RoutineHub is struggling/you find it untrustworthy, the direct iCloud Share links are here and here. Please contact me if you encounter any issues.

During the course of my iPhone Keyboarding project, I managed to discover “a command line tool to document and describe keyboard shortcuts in a standardized and properly formatted way” called ksc. It's a Python utility that translates natural-language-formatted keyboard commands “command control q” into symbolized and standardized form: ⌃+⌘+Q. Though it's not of particular use to me at this point, with my now well-established Text Replacements and TextExpander Snippets, I realized – being a Python thing – that ksc might work with the iOS/iPadOS shell emulator, a-Shell, and therefore, that a Siri Shortcut for converting plain language input to formatted key commands might be a cinch, and it was!

Requirements

1. a-Shell for iOS/iPadOS (Free)
2. Actions for iOS/iPadOS (Also free)
3. ksc installed in a-Shell (Which should be as easy as pip install ksc)

Using an Ask For Input action, my shortcut will prompt you to enter a natural language keyboard command. For the fullest explanation of supported inputs, see ksc's documentation. Your inputted command will be “transformed” via Actions' action into “dash-case” and placed within a command in the following format:

ksc -ms -p command(Pre-Transformation Text) > Transformed Text.txt

By default, the arguments -ms and -p are included, but these are entirely optional. From said docs:

There are several command line options to modify the output. The -ms or --modifier-symbols options output the modifers as unicode symbols:

$ ksc -ms shift command u ⇧⌘U

Apple says you should include a plus sign between symbols, but I think that it looks ugly, so that's not the default. If you want it, add the -p or --plus-sign when using -ms:

$ ksc -ms -p shift command u ⇧+⌘+U

Creating a text file for each command within a-Shell may not be Best Practices, per se, but it's the simplest method I've found of reliably retrieving text back from the app within Siri Shortcuts. That said, the above command creates a text file containing the formatted output. A Get File a-Shell action paired with a Get Text From Input native action then retrieves the file contents, which is first cleaned up via another Actions action (trimming leading and trailing whitespace) before being copied to the system clipboard.

Download my Key Command Formatting shortcut on RoutineHub.

Discuss...

#software #automation

A modified shortcut to query live program information from your NPR station.

This past month, MacStories hosted a community Siri Shortcuts contest called Automation April. One of its winners – a shortcut called “What's on KUTX?” credited to Jack Wellborn – caught my eye as a lifelong dependent upon National Public Radio. Via John Voorhees' comment:

The solution Wellborn came up with is ingenious. It turns out that KUTX uses a web API that can return information about the currently playing track. The API is used to drive an ‘On Now’ widget on the station’s website, but Wellborn discovered that they could query the API and get the track information back as JSON. So, they built a shortcut that queries the API when run, returning the info about the currently-playing song.

I began playing around with the NPR API Jack used and discovered quite accidentally that their shortcut could be modified to display current program information for those NPR stations that are not music-oriented, like mine. For the vast majority of the 24-hour cycle, KBIA – “Mid-Missouri's NPR station” – plays news programs, mostly from NPR, itself, supplanted by BBC news late at night.

hey locals! I made a Siri Shortcut that displays live program information for @KBIA. https://t.co/QVsr0jb85y

— ⓓⓐⓥⓘⓓ ⓑⓛⓤⓔ (@NeoYokel) June 5, 2022

After some trimming and the addition of the URL for KBIA's Apple Music Stream, I came up with What's on KBIA?, which displays upon run the current program's title as well as a hyperlink to open its distinct webpage. By way of a simple Choose from Menu action, it then prompts one with three options:

1. Open the program's webpage (again.)
2. Open KBIA's stream in Apple Music.
3. Open KOPN's stream in Apple Music. (KOPN is Columbia's community radio station.)

Creating a Shortcut for Your NPR Station

All I really needed to customize Jack Wellborn's original shortcut was my NPR station's “UCSID,“which, for reference, is 5387648fe1c8335046a1d4b4. Upon installation of my What's on NPR? shortcut, you'll be prompted to specify this. Unfortunately, retrieving it via NPR's API requires special authorization, for some reason, but – since we're retrieving data from an NPR station's playback widget already configured to use the API – it's actually as easy as opening your browser's “Dev Tools” or showing on your given station's homepage. If you're unfamiliar, here's a handy guide to doing so on some popular desktop web browsers.

Honestly, though, if you're already on your iOS/iPadOS device and you're willing to install a single, free Safari Extension, I believe you'll find Web Inspector to be the single, simplest method of retrieving your station's UCSID.

Finding your station's UCSID with Web Inspector

1. Navigate to your station's homepage (ex. kbia.org.)
2. Start playback of the live stream you'd like to query (may or may not be necessary, depending.)
3. Open Web Inspector via the Safari Extensions Menu.
4. In the DOM tab, use the search icon to filter for ucsid.
5. Your station's UCSID is the value for the data-stream-ucsid field.

Depending on how modern your station's website is (I think – I'm supposing, here,) you may or may not find this field. For reference, here is the HTML source of KBIA's webpage from which I drew in its entirety. If you're having trouble, please feel free to contact me however you wish, ideally with your preferred station's identifier/web url.

“Integration” with the Broadcasts app

Broadcasts is a very popular and highly-praised universal Apple application for internet radio streaming. By default, my What's on NPR? shortcut includes an action to begin streaming a station in Broadcasts, but it requires further configuration.

In all likelihood, a search of the Broadcasts Directory for your station's four-letter identifier should yield results. Once you've added your station to your library in Broadcasts, hold its icon (or ^ Tap) to present the context menu (shown in the screenshots embedded above) and select Edit. The exact value for the Name field in configuration menu that results must be supplied as the answer to the second configuration step of my What's on NPR? shortcut. If you do not wish to use Broadcasts, you need only delete or replace its single action in the shortcut's default configuration.

If you've followed along this far, you now have both values you're prompted for at installation of said shortcut, by default: your station's ucsid and its name in the Broadcasts app. You need only continue if you'd prefer to add options for Apple Music and/or VLC.

“Integration” with Apple Music

If you'd like to have a menu option to begin streaming your NPR station in Apple Music, begin by searching within the app for your station's identifier (as shown in the screenshot embedded above.) Use the triple-dot menu's Share Station option to copy its Apple Music URL. (WBEZ's, for example, is https://music.apple.com/us/station/npr-news-wbez-chicago/ra.872998937.) Replace or append to the Broadcasts option with a menu option pointing to an Open URLs action containing the resulting URL. (Refer to my What's on KBIA? shortcut to see this implemented.)

“Integration” with VLC media player

The VLC media player iOS app does not yet have its own Siri Shortcuts actions, but it does have a handy URL scheme which allows one to stream or download the contents of any raw media URL. Using Web Inspector as described above, I was able to find the raw stream URL for KBIA (https://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/api/livestream-redirect/KBIAFM.mp3) quite quickly in the Resources tab whilst streaming live.

To add an option to my shortcut to open the stream in VLC, I would add the following value in an Open URLs action:

vlc-x-callback://x-callback-url/stream?url=https://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/api/livestream-redirect/KBIAFM.mp3

Once again, if you have any trouble configuring What's on NPR? – whether that be with finding your station's UCSID and/or “integrating” playback with another app, please do reach out.

Links

• What's on NPR? on RoutineHub
• What's on NPR?'s Issue on my iOS-specific GitHub Repository
• Source-HTML
• Source-JSON
• Source-PLIST

Discuss...

#automation #configuration #local

As I wrote in my app store review of Terminology (which is not shown publicly, I’ve since learned,) I prefer it over popular dictionary apps like LookUp (which I also have and use regularly) because it allows me to add new terms that don’t show up in search results. Somehow, the idea that one might store words that don’t necessarily appear in any dictionary seems a foreign one to the creators of LookUp, which I’ve since found out to be the cause of its Siri Shortcuts actions failing on me.

@lookup_ios it'd be so amazing if this worked. or is there another way of batch importing a list of terms to a collection? pic.twitter.com/QBASeQzyXO

— ⓓⓐⓥⓘⓓ ⓑⓛⓤⓔ (@NeoYokel) January 1, 2022

Terminology does support adding “custom” terms, if unintentionally, through its “notes” function. Because it’s related to Drafts (they’re from the same creator,) it was quite easy to “integrate” the two in order to form the workflow you see demonstrated in the video below.

First, I use the Lookup in Terminology action paired with a keyboard shortcut (^⇧D) in Drafts to search a selected word in Terminology. There, I “like” the word and – if needed – add a definition via the notes button (immediately to the left of the heart in the upper right corner.) I’ve configured a custom button – “Drafts-definition” – (which you should be able to import with that hyperlink) that sends the term including its notes back to Drafts with the following configuration:

drafts://create?text=[[definitions]]%0A[[note]]

That button results in a new Draft in a specific format, demonstrated by this example:

I then manually add the “Vocabulary” tag to the Draft, completing the process and placing it within the parameters defined by my Vocabulary workspace, which shows only drafts with that tag, sorted alphabetically.

Publication

For the past few weeks, I’ve been wreaking havoc on NeoCities’ global activity feed using the action group I created on the /drafts directory of davidblue dot wtf. Specifically, the action that uploads HTML files to that directory named by the UUID of the draft. (Here’s the corresponding link for this post, for example.) With consequent draftopenurls left in the footer of each as per my current, more or less universal HTML template, I’m able to immediately open the appropriate draft locally.

In order to maintain an updated index of the whole list, I’ve created a Siri Shortcut which transforms the UUIDs of the drafts in the vocabulary workspace into markdown-formatted hyperlinks of their web-dwelling counterparts.

Even if you’ve no intention of publishing your personal vocabulary – or integrating it with Drafts – Terminology is still the dictionary app I’d recommend over any others.

Discuss...

#configuration #software #automation

The ideal means of On The Go participation in The Tildeverse.

I was completely unaware of the Tildeverse’s origin story – documented in a Medium post by WIRED Editor-in-Chief, Paul Ford – until this year, somehow, though I knew of its existence as far back as 2018. I was living in an unairconditioned Portland apartment, then, and had found myself stuck with Linux for the first time in my adult life. Consequentially, this period of my life became my first true introduction to the Command Line – a space about which I knew no more than the layest layman. Hopping between my ten-year-old, post-corporate system’s shell and the DOS machines I was emulating on it (exploring the history of word processors, mostly,) I believe I struggled through dare I say a Rite of Computing Passage, obtaining the capability (and eventually, the muscle memory) to navigate a filesystem with cd, ls, and (on DOS) dir. It wasn’t until I came home in ‘19 that I discovered the two primary emulated Linux shells on iOS: iSH Shell and a-Shell.

The former is designed to emulate Alpine Linux and has just recently added direct filesystem access via the Files app. The latter is, I’m told, quite extensible, and includes Siri Shortcuts actions that have enabled it to underpin powerful scraping shortcuts like SW-DLT – a sort of frontend for youtube-dl and now yt-dlp. Both are open source, but a-Shell is actually a fork of our subject app, now called “Blink Shell & Code” in the App Store.[^1]

Blink’s tag is “a professional, desktop grade terminal for iOS.” Its landing page touts a “first class iOS experience, with software and hardware keyboard, and the full edge-to-edge experience” experience. On iPad, Blink’s heyday was well documented by the likes of Paul Miller’s 2018 article for The Verge and Fatih Arslan’s 2019 “Using the iPad Pro as my development machine.” These pieces more or less detail different use cases of the exact sort Blink was designed for – “professional” work done using an iPad as the terminal for a remote Linux/macOS machine.

Since I’ve apparently ended up with a primary life mission of doing stuff on my iPhone originally meant to be done on iPads, I’ve managed to find myself an active member of the Tilde.Town community – a place exclusively accessible via SSH, aside from public pages – exclusively through my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I’m not the first to use Blink to do this – note Apreche’s reply to my thread, embedded above – but I suspect I’m the first to spend significant Town Time on my fucking phone, so I thought it might be worth laying out some of the particulars I’ve learned along the way.

It’s important to note that 99% of the use detailed in this guide/account involves the use of a paired Bluetooth keyboard.

Locally

First, Blink’s settings menu is accessed by typing config and/or ⌘,. Unfortunately, there’s no method of installing the entire selection of available fonts or themes – you’ll have to do so one at a time, though you can optimize the process by learning/copy-and-pasting the url scheme for the fonts/themes directories on their respective repos. I especially recommend CLRS, Man Page, and MonaLisa, but this Post is saturated with too many mocked up screenshots of Blink themes to reasonably continue that list any further.

Compared with its fork, a-Shell, Blink’s local UNIX command list is a bit sparse. It’s accessed exclusively with TAB. Where a-Shell has pickFolder, Blink has link-files, which does effectively the same thing: the Files app is opened, prompting you to select a folder, which will become visible and accessible in the command line.

Linking The Psalms’ GitHub Repository in Working Copy with link-files in Blink had profound results. I was offered a brief glance of that enhanced productivity command line evangelists always seem to be on about, if only because the files and directories were color-coded by type so distinctly. open also somehow lead to swifter previews than in Working Copy, despite that app’s brilliance.

Some other particularly intriguing standouts include say, which unfortunately does not use your preferred Siri voice to speak aloud text, but rather the oldest there is. facecam will open a manipulatable circle of your device’s front-facing camera view, as shown in the screenshot embedded above. openurl will instantly open a formally-formatted web URL in Safari, which can come in handy. pbcopy and pbpaste really do manipulate the iOS system clipboard, which I probably find more impressive than I should. code is the newest to the bunch and will open a local instance of GitHub Codespaces(?) If this is truly useful on iPad – which plenty of positive feedback on social suggests it is, to at least a few human beings – it is barely usable on iPhone, which is to be expected, really.

Blink’s own “UNIX Command Line Tools Roundup” does an okay job of outlining the rest of the basic networking and file management commands included that act locally, though I’ve still been unable to find out what skstore does. xcall opens x-callback-URLs, though I’m still trying to figure out what the command’s options are. ed the ancient command line text editor is available, though I’ve yet to learn to use it, and uptime appears to be actually accurate? Being able to run whois locally on iPhone has its uses, especially given the aforementioned support of pbcopy. whois bilge.world | pbcopy copies The Psalms domain registry information to the iOS clipboard in a flash.

Keyboarding

To its credit, I think Blink’s landing page represents the most explicitly pro-keyboard literature I’ve ever seen for an iOS app. From my fairly extensive use, its Bluetooth keyboard support fully reflects these declarations, even on iPhone. Out of the list of shortcuts you see in the screenshot embedded above, Share Selection is by far the one I use most, usually to open a link from the Tilde IRC chat. If I’m lucky/accurate, double tapping said link will select all of it and only it.

After a link is selected – which sometimes involves rotating the phone and/or zooming far out to get longer URLS in a single line – I’m able to call it up in the iOS sharesheet with ⌥U, then open it in Safari with a Siri Shortcut I’ve placed there entitled “O P E N.” Or – in the case of a direct link to a file – I could use another shortcut of mine just below it, called “DOWNLOAD,” which uses the Get Contents of URL action to download files directly to my Downloads folder in iCloud Drive. Googling a selection (⌥G) has come in handy once or twice. I tried the Stack Overflow shortcut for kicks, but was meant with an endless string of CAPTCHA requests.

An extraordinary feature of Blink’s which I originally misunderstood and have just begun to play with: custom key presses. In Config ⇨ Keyboard ⇨ Custom Presses, one can assign any text that can be hex encoded (Base16) to a keyboard shortcut. I’ve created a Siri Shortcut that requires the free version of GizmoPack to aid myself (and you, hopefully,) in quickly converting plain text commands to this format. In the screenshots embedded above, the shortcuts listed on the left correspond in order with the commands listed on the right. You’ll note I’ve begun to attempt assigning quick keys to my most commonly typed-out commands.

Remotes with SSH and Mosh

If you’re entirely new to SSH as a concept, I’ve found no better introduction than Tilde.Town’s own SSH Primer. I screwed up my first attempt at obtaining a key, but Town Maintainer vilmibm kindly responded to my Twitter DM in December of last year asking to instate a new key. I can’t remember whether or not I generated it originally within Blink, but regardless, the app’s key management is as intuitive as I’ve seen.

One of my unexpected favorite bits about Blink is its autocomplete feature which applies to both “commands and hosts” as quoted from its singular mention in the docs. There very well could be a better means of typing out absurdly long filenames in other terminal emulators, but I’ve personally not come across anything remotely like this magic of Blink’s. Especially for someone newish to the command line like myself, its autocomplete occasionally borders on “intelligent autosuggestion” without actually crossing the threshold in an irritating way. Once I configured Tilde.Town as a host (with the local name Tilde.Town,) all I need do to connect is begin to type ssh T or mosh T (ssh keys == mosh keys, which I wish I knew weeks ago) and TAB to complete the full ssh Tilde.Town or mosh Tilde.Town commands.

Once you’ve connected to Town, you should take advantage of Blink’s Files app integration by adding a location at the bottom of its entry in the Hosts menu. This adds Blink to the master, root list of file providers in the app. From there, all of the Files app’s features (including drag-and-drop) will apply to Tilde.Town as long as you’re sustaining at least one connection via ssh or mosh.

To illustrate, here’s a wee, one-take tutorial on uploading images this way:

Mini Tutorial: Uploading images to the Tildeverse with Blink Shell

Chat

The IRC client TildeTown uses is called WeeChat and – especially if it’s been as long for you as it had been for me – you might find (as I did) learning the ropes to be a bit dubitable. I’ve duplicated the full User Guide for your consideration. I got stuck at the concept of switching buffers, so my Big Pro hint is to start off running /buffer 1 followed by help. In order to display the chat even remotely readably in portrait mode on an iPhone, you’ll need to remove the buffer list by hiding it. (Try /help bar in the first buffer.) You’ll also need to zoom out a bit and set the display mode to Fill via the menus that appear with a three-finger tap anywhere on screen. To achieve the look shown in the screenshot embedded above, you’ll need to hide a few things, but I’ll come back to those specific commands in a sec.

Assuming you intend to stay connected to Town IRC On The Go, I’d advise always starting your intended chat window with mosh, which – through a whole bunch of alchemy I’m incapable of understanding – establishes a much more flexible sort of connection that’s actually realistically dependable from within the uncertain world of a backgrounded iPhone app. Optionally, the geo command can be used to force iOS into allowing Blink a more genuine background running state with geo track. Additionally, geo current displays a nicely-formatted set of location information:[^2]

{
  “Latitude” : 38.933988900043886,
  “AltitudeRef” : 0,
  “GPSVersion” : “2.3.0.0”,
  “DateStamp” : “2022:03:09”,
  “Altitude” : 203.0797061920166,
  “Longitude” : 92.388242309618036,
  “LongitudeRef” : “W”,
  “TimeStamp” : “14:35:13.140000”,
  “LatitudeRef” : “N”,
  “DOP” : 35
}

As you’d expect, the persistence allowed by this feature – which does, indeed, extend to remote files access in the Files app as you move about the world – comes at a significant consumptive power and resource sacrifice. If you parse the slapdash language in the docs, the implication is that you should only need to use the geo command to make ssh connections persistent, not mosh connections. Since encountering this wording, I’ve yet to have an opportunity to explore the real world truth of this supposition because I have only my rotting legs to propel me around, these days.

If I remember correctly, I once found a surprisingly capable (for the time and circumstances) iPhone IRC app in Colloquy’s iPhone OS offering, though it appears to have fallen far, far out of support, now. LimeChat’s iPhone app isn’t listed on the App Store anymore and its landing page proudly touts support for iOS 4 multitasking!

Connections are kept in 10 minutes after going to background.

My memories of computer use from that time are ever so vague, but after just a brief junket to the era’s surviving app literature, some abyssal images within me were stirred. I suspect I tried every possible solution as I’ve always tended to, even back then, on my first generation iPhone and then my 4S. I remember Colloquy being the most tenable, but far from persistent, of course. As I recall, one could maintain a conversation as a passenger on a car trip, for instance, but remaining ambiently, eternally Logged In – as is the ancient custom of Internet Relay Chat – was too far out of reach to even be of consideration.

To be honest, I still find the whole idea unnatural, and I’m not alone, but I can promise you that running Blink on a recent iPhone with the average American cellular connection is as close to the full WeeChat experience as is possible on a handset, today, for whatever that may be worth to you. Thanks to some incredibly helpful new TildeTown friends, its copious configurability pivoted from an insurmountable, puzzling ordeal to a never before conceived of solution. If you haven’t already, skim the actual conversation contained within the pre-header screenshot, above.

WeeChat Configuration

The following is the precise set of commands involved in making WeeChat look as the screenshot does, though in no particular order. As m455 pointed out, fset is the tool that lists available configurable options and their current status in a linear way. The default of the second option in the list is apparently 11, but I fiddled quite a bit to find 9 more optimum.

• fset
• /set weechat.look.prefix_align_max 9
• /bar hide bufflist
• /bar hide fset
• /bar hide title
• /bar hide nicklist
• /set weechat.look.buffer_time_format "%M"

If you eliminate the value of the very last command (so just “”) and add /bar hide status to the list, you’ll end up with a more minimal-looking, timestamp-less experience:

If indeed there is a “reasonable” configuration for command line IRC display on a telephone in the year 2022, surely, this is it.

Town Television

Due largely to its primary market of iPad-bound developers living and working in remote Digital Ocean droplets, significant effort (I assume) has been expended in making Blink Shell one of the few iOS apps which usably supports external AirPlay displays, even, yes, on iPhone. As far as I can tell, all of the iPad options in the appearance settings menu seen below have also functioned in my tests on iPhone, casting an entirely separate set of Blink windows to my mom’s Huge Ass Samsung television in ten-eighty pee.[^3]

If you’ve somehow found yourself this far, you’re probably looking for the keyboard shortcut⌘O, which switches your currently active cursor between the device and the external display. “You can also move windows between iPad and External Display with ⇧⌘O,” say the docs. Other considerations I’ve discovered through experiments with this: You can lock the phone with the external display running, but it won’t update, even with mosh or withgeo track. AirPlay will also cease after a period I couldn’t be bothered to determine, so if anything, this is more of an inconvenience than a feature.

Other Considerations

Blink has a URL scheme – blinkshell://run?key=[YourKey]&cmd= – but it’s not particularly useful, largely because it’s for the moment left without any real documentation. I was able to create a Drafts action that runs one’s current selection as a command in Blink, but the app doesn’t appear to like it very much, if you know what I mean. Blink also integrates with iOS system notifications – as exemplified in the screenshot embedded above – and they do work consistently with mentions in town chat, even outside the app, though I’ve yet to see one including any useful information. You’ll know that something happened, maybe. Recently, the app has taken to displaying a nondescript notification every time I re-open WeeChat, even without new messages since the last time I opened it.

Somehow, upon logging into macOS for the first time since installing all the aforementioned themes in Blink, I found the same themes available in the Mac Terminal. I’m sure there’s an explanation involving hidden iCloud Drive folders – and I can’t imagine being anything but pleasantly surprised to find oneself flush with more Terminal themes – but it’s still worth a heads up.

Philosophically, one might declare the practice I’ve outlined here to be definitively against everything the Tildeverse is about – the small web, Linuxy stuff. Bringing this up in TildeChat a few times, I was met only with acceptance. In fact, acceptance, curiosity, and support is all I’ve been met with throughout my first few months as a townie, and I hope this Post encourages/aids more folks to come join me in this shared computer. You can find the sign-up form for TildeTown here and the corresponding GitHub Issue for this post (with a bunch more screenshots) here.

Discuss...

#software #configuration

[1] Blink’s icon is perhaps my most favorite of any application, ever. [2] Yes, that is my real location information and yes, I did include it intentionally. Please come kill me as soon as possible. Also, “DOR” is apparently an acronym for “Dilution of Precision,” which is a mildly interesting measurement to read up on. [3] As the screenshots I captured suggest, anyway. Obviously, I do not posess the means to test the true resolution display to mine eyes.

Imagine running shortcuts from anywhere you can place a link.

There seemed to be a bit of confusion regarding a shortcut I posted on RoutineHub a few days ago entitled “Generate Shortcuts Run Links List,” so I thought I’d attempt to overview how I’ve come to use Shortcuts’ URL scheme as my primary method of calling shortcuts across both iOS and macOS.

The basis of the whole shit is shortcuts://run-shortcut?name= and shortcuts://x-callback-url/run-shortcut?name=. Using these along with URL-encoded shortcuts titles (for those containing a space,) we can create links that will run shortcuts from anywhere on iOS or macOS as hyperlinks. These days, this is how I run most of my even semi-regular-use shortcuts, largely from my first Dot in Iconfactory’s Tot.

With a few exceptions, all the links you see in the above screenshot above “Drafts Instrument Panel” are shortcuts run links of the same type. Most of these, I typed out by hand with a TextExpander snippet. Here’s what the mess looks like underneath:

I had a bit of an issue creating the shortcut, itself. Though Shortcuts includes a native URL Encode action, I couldn’t seem to get it to reliably generate URL-encoded shortcuts names, which is why I inserted the Text Case action, instead.

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#automation #software #configuration

A quick review of Apple, Inc’s first venture as a textile company.

Now that Apple, Incorporated is a textile company, I thought it might be pertinent of me – someone with incredibly filthy hands – to review its first textile product, the Rag. Back in my day, we were taught not to touch the screen. It’s not good for it, they’d say. Now, that’s all we do, and it makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I have used a fleet of microfiber cloths (ashamedly sourced from Amazon until recently) to rigorously scrub away the CRUD that results from my disgusting, gorgeous hands touching anything for any duration. I also use Vinegar-based Windex (which is just vinegar,) which has definitely eroded my 12 Pro Max’s Oleophobic coating away entirely. It smells wonderful, though.

What’s brought me great grief since the Apple Rag’s debut, notably, have been the discussions I’ve heard on Apple-adjacent podcasts like Connected[^1] post-release of the Rag, detailing just how sparsely Touchscreen Pros like Federico Viticci actually clean their Pro Screens. Less than once per week, if I recall correctly. I asked this question in the MacStories Discord to only a single response:

Never, really. Sometimes with the side of my hand, but that's only when I really notice the screen being dirty.

I’m assuming silence from the rest of the crowed indicates embarrassment. I clean my 12 Pro Max’s screen once every two hours, bare minimum.

Methodology

I must admit – it took me a bit to understand the correct methodology for the Apple Rag. At first, I was trying to use the Rag like I’ve used other microfiber cloths, but it’s uniquely suited to flat rubbing upon mostly already cleaned glass screens, which makes sense, I suppose. Unlike regular microfiber cloths, its surface does not lend well to liquid cleaning solutions or scrubbing non-glass surfaces. Nor does it to cleaning truly grubby surfaces. As far as I know, it’s not washable – I probably shouldn’t have thrown the packaging away, but I didn’t expect to review it.

pic.twitter.com/RwvB1lKcIH

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 26, 2022

I would advise a strong, rotational approach under moderate pressure when using the Rag on your device’s screen. I would not advise you use it on your face or hands. I also would not advise you use it to clean your dog’s paws after a muddy bout. More reasonably, it’s not even all that great for cleaning glasses lenses. (It might just be that mine are particularly dirty.)

Conclusion

It sounds a bit silly, but $20 is actually a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a single microfiber cloth. I’d link you alternatives, but I’m committed to never sharing Amazon links on this here blog. For what it’s worth, the Apple Rag appears to have a strong resistance to liquids (they just fall off,) and a truly unique competency at cleaning glass screens.

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#hardware #spectacle

[1] No, I don’t remember the specific episode I’m talking about, sorry.