Overfowing Cubby

Enhancing MeetingBar’s Calendar Integration: My First Pull Request

2025-05-30T21:47:00+00:00

As a technical professional who doesn’t code, I work around limitations in software by finding alternative solutions that involved using other software or scripting. So when I encountered a limitation with MeetingBar, a menu bar app for managing calendar events, and my typical pattern of finding alternative solutions didn’t work, I pointed my Windsurf IDE at the MeetingBar repository and started working on a solution.

I wanted the Internet Account and Calendar names available in the AppleScript automations available on the advanced tab:

I wanted this function provided by MeetingBar to contain calendarName and calendarSource:

on meetingStart (eventId, title, allday, startDate, endDate, eventLocation, repeatingEvent, attendeeCount, meetingUrl, meetingService, meetingNotes, calendarName, calendarSource)

end meetingStart

A few hours later, I had enhanced MeetingBar’s AppleScript interface with the two new parameters - calendarName and calendarSource and had it working in a new virtual environment. Here is a screenshot of the new Edit Script screen:

The next morning, I submitted Issue #805 describing the need for calendar source information and a corresponding Pull Request #806 implementing the solution. And while waiting for my pull request to be merged, I’m using my enhanced version of MeetingBar with the new calendar information feature in production locally!

I never thought I’d be contributing to open source projects. Thanks to AI tools like Cascade in the Windsurf IDE, I was able to make meaningful contributions to MeetingBar, a popular macOS calendar enhancement app, that adds real functionality.

The new calendar integration feature enables powerful automation scenarios. Now you can write AppleScripts that handle events differently based on their source - for example, automatically creating Drafts notes for work calendar events but not personal ones, or using different notification styles for events from different calendars. It’s a small change that opens up many possibilities for customization.

I’m happy to report that MeetingBar v4.11.2, which includes my contributed calendar source integration, is now available in the Mac App Store. This update brings enhanced calendar automation capabilities to the broader MeetingBar community.

Check out the App Store listing highlighting the new feature:

How to Change the Keyboard Shortcut for Perplexity in macOS 2

2024-12-07T14:12:01+00:00

If you use popular development tools like VS Code, Sublime Text, or JetBrains IDEs, you might have noticed that Perplexity’s default Command+Shift+P (⌘⇧P) shortcut conflicts with these apps’ command palette shortcuts. This happens because Perplexity registers its shortcut at the system level, which takes precedence over individual app shortcuts. After searching the web for a solution and finding no clear guide, I decided to document the process of changing this shortcut - both for my future reference and to help others facing the same conflict.

Many popular macOS apps use Command+Shift+P for their command palettes:

Visual Studio Code - Command Palette
Sublime Text - Command Palette
JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, etc.) - Search Everywhere
GitHub Desktop - Command Palette
Obsidian - Command Palette
Microsoft Edge - Show Browser Commands

Here’s how to resolve this conflict by changing Perplexity’s shortcut:

Steps to Change the Keyboard Shortcut

Open the Perplexity app and click on the command symbol (⌘) in the bottom-left corner.

In the shortcuts window, edit the “new thread” shortcut to your desired keyboard shortcut.

Apple Finally Adds Duplicating a Tab in Safari 13.1

2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

In Safari 13.1 Apple finally added built-in support for duplicating a tab. In the past, there were workarounds, but they were not ideal because they didn’t preserve the history of the tab. You couldn’t go back forward on the duplicated tab like you could in the source tab.

Unfortunately, there is no keyboard shortcut. You can create a keyboard shortcut in Keyboard preferences.

Congratulations to The Colorado Sun

2018-09-11T03:00:00+00:00

Congratulations to The Colorado Sun on today’s launch.

The Colorado Sun is a journalist-owned, ad-free news outlet based in Denver but which strives to cover all of Colorado so that our state — our community — can better understand itself.

I wish you much success and I hope that many other news organizations follow in your footsteps.

Subscribe to The Colorado Sun’s RSS feed here.

Facial Recognition Prevention as the Apple Glasses Killer Feature

2018-08-23T13:00:00+00:00

On August 21, 2018 Nick Heer wrote Thousands of Stores Will Soon Use Facial Recognition Without Consent. IRL tracking seems line a new battle ground for the contenders in the Internet Tracking Arms Race to compete. I can see a future where Apple Glasses become a weapon in this arms race because they include a feature to disrupt facial recognition technology.

Lookup Word Definition in Feedly, Finally

2018-08-22T23:00:00+00:00

I really like RSS. I am currently following 160 different feeds. I use Feedly to manage my feeds. I also use the Feedly iOS App. I have tried many other clients but I always come back to the Feedly iOS App. But the fact that it lacks a feature to look up the definition of a word in the content menu has always frustrated me.

The Instapaper App does this nicely:

And so does the Kindle App:

So when I signed up for Feedly’s Mobile+AI Lab, a project to rebuild the iOS client app with community feedback, I took the opportunity make a feature request in the slack channel for this project. The Feedly team liked my idea enough to add it to their Trello Board for the project.

So all I had to do is wait.

But then I realized that I already had this feature because the Feedly iOS client provides access to the share sheet from the context menu:

From the share sheet I could run the Define Word Workflow and I finally have my feature!

Internet Tracking Arms Race

2018-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

Bruce Schneier’s article New Ways to Track Internet Browsing is a reminder of the perpetual arms race between companies that want to track and companies that try to prevent tracking. While I don’t think our government is up to the task, regulation that clearly defines the ground rules around tracking could curb the resources that are ploughed into this game and they could be redeployed elsewhere. Hopefully towards something more productive in the grand scheme of things.

Two thoughts on productivity

2018-08-09T23:00:00+00:00

I just found a great post by Sam Altman where he writes about Productivity. There are lots of gems in there but I really enjoyed these two thoughts:

The most impressive people I know have strong beliefs about the world, which is rare in the general population. If you find yourself always agreeing with whomever you last spoke with, that’s bad. You will of course be wrong sometimes, but develop the confidence to stick with your convictions. It will let you be courageous when you’re right about something important that most people don’t see.

Try to be around smart, productive, happy, and positive people that don’t belittle your ambitions

Be suspicious about automation as driver for dramatic change

2018-07-30T20:00:00+00:00

Susan Houseman is a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute in Michigan. I first discovered her work in the Quartz article titled The epic mistake about manufacturing that’s cost Americans millions of jobs. But the title of this article isn’t quite right. America has lost millions of manufacturing jobs:

Between 2000 and 2010, manufacturing employment plummeted by more than a third. Nearly 6 million American factory workers lost their jobs. The drop was unprecedented—worse than any decade in US manufacturing history.

And Susan Houseman has discovered a flaw in how manufacturing output is measured:

even as US factories laid off an historically unprecedented share of workers, the amount of stuff they made rose steadily—or at least, it appeared to. The sector’s growth in output, adjusted for inflation, had been chugging away at roughly the same pace as US GDP since the late 1940s.

The problem is, the processor released in 2017 is superior to that sold in 2016 in many tangible ways. But how do you account for the fact that a 2017 processor provides users with more value? In general, statisticians assume the difference in value between the two models is just the difference in their prices. If, say, the 2017 processor costs twice as much as the 2016 one does, then selling one 2017 processor counts as selling two of the 2016 versions in the statisticians’ books.

the method statisticians use to account for these advances can make it seem like US firms are producing and selling more computers than they actually are.

This “epic mistake” Houseman discovered exposed artificially inflated manufacturing output which means that manufacturing output did not grow consistently as perviously thought. Therefore the narrative that “American factories are about twice as efficient today as they were three decades ago” must be false.

The article then goes on to say that:

China’s accession to the WTO in 2001—set in motion by president Bill Clinton—sparked a sharp drop in US manufacturing employment. That’s because when China joined the WTO, it extinguished the risk that the US might retaliate against the Chinese government’s mercantilist currency and protectionist industrial policies by raising tariffs.

And claims that:

US policymakers put diplomacy before industrial development at home, offering the massive American consumer market as a carrot to encourage other countries to open up their economies to multinational investment. Then, thanks to the popular narrative that automation was responsible for job losses in manufacturing, American leaders tended to dismiss the threat of foreign competition to a thriving manufacturing industry and minimize its importance to the overall health of the US economy.

So that article is arguing trade is responsible for the loss of millions of Americans manufacturing jobs and not the “epic mistake” that Susan Houseman uncovered. The mistake served to obfuscate the truth about trade but that is all.

I find the title of this post to be a more appropriate title for the article. We should always be suspicious of claims about dramatic efficiency gains. Improving processes is hard and only happens gradually, slowly and iteratively. Just ask Elon Musk.

A Credit Bureau You Never Heard Of

2018-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

According to Krebs on Security, it is time to setup a few more credit freezes!

A freeze works to protect one’s credit file only if a potential creditor (or ID thief) tries to open a new line of credit at a company that uses one of the big three bureaus or Innovis. But Kerskie’s investigation revealed that the mobile phone merchants weren’t asking any of those four credit bureaus. Rather, the mobile providers that dinged the credit of Kerskie’s clients instead were making consumer credit queries with the National Consumer Telecommunications and Utilities Exchange (NCTUE), or nctue.com.

The whole article is worth a read but this part is extra horrific:

Many people who have succeeded in freezing their credit files with Equifax have nonetheless had their identities stolen and new accounts opened in their names thanks to a lesser-known credit bureau that seems to rely entirely on credit checking entites operated by Equifax.

You can create the NCTUE freeze here. I just did it and it worked fine. Seems like they have cleaned things up a bit since this article was written on May 9th, 2018.

I disagree with one of the article’s closing thoughts:

“It’s frankly laughable that consumers should ever have to pay to freeze their credit files at all, and yet a recent study indicates that almost 20 percent of Americans chose to do so at one or more of the three major credit bureaus since Equifax announced its breach last fall. The total estimated cost to consumers in freeze fees? $1.4 billion. With a freeze on your files, the major credit bureaus stand to lose about one dollar for each time they might have been able to sell your credit report to a potential creditor, or potential identity thief.”

If anyone should pay for the management of credit files, it should be the subject of the credit file. Requiring the assessor to pay creates a perverse incentive for the manager seek as many assessments as possible with limited accountably to the subject. It also inspires accessors to create organizations like the NCTUE that will allow them to operate under the radar of the subject.

When a manager can sustain a viable business when only the subject is responsible its fees to manage the credit file, the subject’s incentives and the manager’s incentives are more closely aligned. (There is room to debate if this payment should come in the form of fees to the the private sector or in the form of taxes in the public sector.) In the age where so much values is placed on our personal data, this kind of incentive alignment is the only way the subject’s credit file will be protected.

This industry seems ripe for disruption. It needs a new model that can take into account the need and incentives of the credit file subject, accessor and contributor.