Linked List: May 23, 2022

Monday, 23 May 2022

XKCD on Apple Maps 

From the department of “It’s only funny because it’s true”.

Keyboard Maestro 

My thanks to Keyboard Maestro for sponsoring last week at DF.

Keyboard Maestro is a Mac utility that lets you automate applications or web sites, text or images, simple or complex, on command or scheduled. Anything you can do on your Mac manually, Keyboard Maestro can almost certainly automate for you.

Even if you’re just getting started, Keyboard Maestro’s intuitive, approachable interface — and library of hundreds of built-in actions — will enable you to build complex macros to make your daily life more pleasant. Power users can even include their own custom scripts — written in AppleScript or any Unix shell scripting language. It’s like Shortcuts, but faster and more powerful.

But, speaking of Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro 10.1 — released just last week — adds Shortcuts support to Keyboard Maestro. You can trigger Shortcuts to execute within a Keyboard Maestro macro and execute Keyboard Maestro actions from within a Shortcuts shortcut.

I can’t say enough good things about Keyboard Maestro, or describe how essential it is to my daily workflows on the Mac. It is, in short, indispensable. Try the full-featured demo version, free of charge, and see for yourself.

Roger Angell Dies at 101 

David Remnick wrote a wonderful remembrance of the great Roger Angell, who died last week at 101:

“Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love,” he wrote in This Old Man. “I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach.”

Roger died on Friday. He was a hundred and one. But longevity was actually quite low on his list of accomplishments. He did as much to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine’s nearly century-long history. His prose and his editorial judgment left an imprint that’s hard to overstate. Like Ruth and Ohtani, he was a freakishly talented double threat, a superb writer and an invaluable counsel to countless masters of the short story. He won a place in both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the Baseball Hall of Fame — a unique distinction. The crowd of friends from the magazine who drove four hours north to watch him receive the J. G. Taylor Spink Award at Doubleday Field, in Cooperstown, wore custom jerseys declaring themselves Roger’s “Angells.”

Angell, more than any other writer, understood intuitively why baseball is a special game. It was because Angell was such an astute writer about life, in general, that he was so good writing about baseball, particularly. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

Michael Chabon, on Instagram:

My dad taught me to love baseball, but Roger Angell taught me how to love it: unreservedly, with a writer’s nosiness, a historian’s stance, an ear for comedy, and a skeptical but not a jaundiced eye. And above all: patiently. You cannot enjoy a baseball game without first settling into it, getting its feel, and then giving it time.