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10 Years of 40Tech

I must not be big on anniversaries, because I completely missed the 10 year anniversary of this site. A “Coming Soon” post went live on May 28, 2009, with the first substantive post going up on June 4, 2009. I remember sitting at the table at my sister’s beach house that May with my laptop and finding the domain name after deciding I wanted to do this. I never thought I’d still be writing, albeit sporadically, 10 years later.

I probably should have some deep thoughts about the anniversary, from years of crazy traffic (by my standards) and coverage on big sites, to the more cozy, personal place this is today, but all I have to say is yay, and thanks for reading. And a special shout out to Bobby Travis, who wrote with me in those early years. This site has opened some doors for me, and has been loads of fun.


Make Your CAPS LOCK Key Do Double Duty As a Modifier Key and Caps Lock

Your Caps Lock key might be underused on your Mac. If you’re a big automation geek, why not use it for something else, in addition to its built-in functionality? Karabiner Elements is a Mac tool that lets you customize the keyboard on your Mac, including the Caps Lock key. In this post, I’ll talk about how I’ve set up my Caps Lock key to be used as an extra modifier key (similar to the Command, Control, Option, and Shift keys), while at the same time preserving its normal functionality.

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HomeRun – Customize your HomeKit Complications on the Apple Watch

Ryan Christoffel writing for MacStories:

First, HomeRun now provides the option to set different complications to appear on your watch face throughout the day during select time periods. You can, for example, tell HomeRun that starting at 6:00am every day, you want its complication to trigger your ‘Good Morning’ scene, then at 8:00am it should instead trigger your ‘I’m leaving’ scene, and at 5:00pm it should change to activate ‘I’m home’. Not only will the action change, but the complication itself will visually transform at the time you’ve programmed.

If you have the nagging feeling that your Apple Watch should be better at triggering HomeKit scenes, check out HomeRun. You can add customized complications to your Watch face, and this latest update allows those complications to change based on the time of the day.


TECHSHOW “Mac Mastery” Downloads

In addition to attending great sessions and meeting interesting people, I presented two sessions at the ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago last week. One of them, Mac Mastery: Top Mac Workflows Used By Real Attorney, featured a few automation workflows and other processes I use in my practice. I shared a link to a page during the presentation, and indicated I would later publish downloads of the various workflows to the page. That page is now populated with the downloads and other information:

TECHSHOW 2019 – Mac Workflows


BBEdit to MarsEdit (AppleScript)

You can never own too many text editors. Okay, I can never own too many text editors. I recently splurged on BBEdit, the venerable HTML and text editor for the Mac. There’s something pleasurable about tweaking BBEdit to use it as a blogging tool. One such tool I hacked together is an AppleScript to send a post from BBEdit to MarsEdit for final publishing. Here’s how you do it.

Paste the following text into the Script Editor app on your Mac (warning: I’m no coder, and did this through trial and error based on other scripts, so this script probably contains some completely unnecessary code):

on run
	tell application "BBEdit" to set theFile to file of document 1
	
	
	set appleScriptPath to theFile as text
	set currentURL to POSIX path of appleScriptPath
	set currentURL to ("file://" & currentURL)
	
	tell application "MarsEdit"
		activate
		make new document
		tell document 1
			set body to theFile
		end tell
		activate
	end tell
end run

Compile then save the AppleScript. For the final step, you need to move this AppleScript to the BBEdit scripts folder. Get there by clicking on the Scripts icon near the far right of the BBEdit menu, and choosing “Open Scripts Folder.”

BBEdit menu item - Scripts folder

Once the AppleScript is in place, it will appear at the bottom of the dropdown when you click on the Scripts icon. Selecting it will take the text in BBEdit, and open it in a new MarsEdit document. I wrote the initial draft of this post in BBEdit, before using the AppleScript to send it to MarsEdit for final edits, adding of the image, assigning tags and categories, and sending off to WordPress.