I have been messing around with apple shortcuts lately and now have three I’m really quite pleased with – I am sharing them here with the caveat that they may not do what you need or want them to do! Please do use them as a base for your own though, or as inspiration for other stuff. The more I think about and get to know how shortcuts work the more things I think of adding in or creating. For example I haven’t even started looking at APIs yet, and if I can get the Discogs API working with it then that opens up many possibilities.

For now though, here are the three I am regularly using.

Create Songlink URL & Copy To Clipboard

This I find really useful for hashtag games on mastodon, or for simply sharing a track with family friends via Signal etc.

The basic flow is:

• Get details of now playing track in Apple Music
• Build URL based on songlink syntax and in markdown format
• Copy URL to clipboard

Then you can paste that URL anywhere you like – I use it for music hashtag games and it saves a lot of typing!

Grab it here

Post Now Playing Track to Mastodon & Buffer

This takes the songlink URL further and uses it to post details about the currently played track in Apple Music.

The basic flow is:

• Get details of now playing track in Apple Music.
• Build URL based on songlink syntax
• Uses a few regular expressions to clean up artist and track names for hashtags
• Checks if the file is local or cloud and sets that to a MusicLocation variable
• Prompt for extra comments (or leave blank)
• Build the post body
• Post to mastodon via Mona

Grab it here

Music Recognition to Mastodon & Buffer

This does a similar job but takes the track details from Shazam.

The basic flow is:

• Open Shazam and recognise music (error if no song found)
• Save track to playlist of your choice
• Get current location
• Read in tracks in Apple Music playlist and get latest item
• Get track details
• Save track artwork to local folder
• Create basic Alt Text for image (working to improve this)
• Use regular expressions to tidy artist name for hashtag
• Prompt for music recognition source – user can put things like a TV programme or venue/restaurant etc.
• Create image attachment from local folder (based on artwork above)
• Build post
• Post to mastodon

Grab it here

I’ll build some more out over the coming weeks and months and post them here if I think they will be of interest.

Let me know if you use them and if you find them useful!

The post No Shortcuts In Life appeared first on SoundHog.

I have been thinking about a cyberdeck for a while now, looking to create something out of a raspberry Pi or other single board computer, something to resemble the Free Write or the old Alpha Smart devices. I just wanted to have something ultra portable with little distraction and no purpose other than writing. Then I came across the concept of a writerdeck, or Write Deck – a cyberdeck specifically for the purpose of writing.

Reading other blogs and searching for writerdeck projects it became clear that a lot of what I wanted to do could (and perhaps should) be achieved with an old laptop or tablet and keyboard. Not so much fun maybe, but after all I wanted to end up with something productive, not overly complicated and a solution that just works.

So I took on board the advice, and repurposed an old iPad that I hardly ever used.

I even had an old folio case in a drawer with a keyboard and stand, again going unused. So once all charged up and, for the keyboard at least, a change of battery, I had something with potential. I looked for the best minimal, distraction free writing apps and ended up simply using Apple Notes in full screen mode. Lots of advantages to that of course with iCloud synch meaning I can continue back at home on the MacBook. I removed almost every other app apart from WordPress so I can share directly from Notes to a new draft on either of my sites, but even that isn’t vital as, like I said, I can always resume from my laptop.

So I have got myself exactly what I wanted – something very portable, lightweight, distraction free and most importantly something that does the job I wanted it to do perfectly. Oh, and it didn’t cost me a penny! (I mean, a ‘new’ penny. Obviously I paid for this stuff at the time.)

You can pick up an old iPad Air for around £50 on eBay, and folio cases are ridiculously cheap now for early iPads. I assume something similar can be achieved with an Android tablet but for me at least, immersed in the apple eco system as I am, the iPad made sense.

Anyway, I have used it now a few times ‘out in the field’ and it is a joy to write on, I just wish I had thought of it sooner!

The post writerdeck appeared first on SoundHog.

First of all, after buying a Raspberry Pi OS image to the SD card, I followed the documentation – nothing outrageous here, just followed it through and made all changes as recommended. The only thing I tweaked was media size limits (including local emoticons) as I have a large 1TB SSD to play with so wasn’t too bothered about limiting sizes. Oh and despite the documentation stating otherwise, I changed the default database from Postgress to Sqlite.

The location of the hierarchy ‘gotosocial’ I put on the external drive for obvious reasons.

After installation (basically just downloading the binary from the address in the documentation) I started the service up and it just worked!

Dynamic DNS

I had at first just added an A Record for the subdomain to point to my router’s external address, just to get things working. I have now enabled the ASUS DDNS service and pointed a CNAME record to my new DDNS domain. That was surprisingly easy and works well.

Port Forwarding

Also, of course, I needed to add port forwarding from the router to the Pi ports, ensuring the firewall was ON! And of course this requires a static LAN IP set for the Pi itself.

Backup & Restore

After playing around with it for a couple of days, the next step is making sure backups are working and recoverable.

By far the simplest way to back up is to stop the service, and then compress all files and copy them to a backup location. Something like:

In theory then a restore would simply be a case of expanding the file to the correct location. I may at some stage get another cheap Raspberry Pi to test the restore process.

I’ll have to play around a bit more with this and create a way of moving the file offsite and into the cloud, but for now this is working ok.

Next steps, tweaks and improvements will appear here over the coming days/weeks…

The post GoToSocial on a Raspberry Pi B+ appeared first on SoundHog.