Applescript

Safari on macOS offers a means of deleting saved site-specific data (cache, cookies, etc.) under Settings > Private > Manage Website Data.... Your options from there include searching for and deleting specfic content vs. vapourising everything. The latter option is the safest from a privacy and security perspective; but if you’re interested in focusing on specific cookies and other privacy leaks, you have to search one-by-one. The following script can be used to manage automate this.

A few years ago, I wrote about my problems with HTML in Anki fields. If you check out that previous post you’ll get the backstory about my objection.

The gist is this: If you copy something from the web, Anki tries to maintain the formatting. Basically it just pastes the HTML off the clipboard. Supposedly, Anki offers to strip the formatting with Shift-paste, but I’ve point out to the developer specific examples where this fails. Basically, I only want plain text. Ever. I will take care of any and all formatting needs via the card templates. Period.

In my perpetual effort to get out of work, I’ve developed a suite of automation tools to help file statements that I download from banks, credit cards and others. While my setup described here is tuned to my specific needs, any of the ideas should be adaptable for your particular circumstances. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you already have Hazel. None of what follows will be of much use to you without it. I’ll also emphasize that this is a macOS-specific post. Bear in mind, too, that companies have the nasty habit of tweaking their statement formats. That fact alone makes any approach like this fragile; so be aware that maintaining these rules is just part of the game. With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

In DEVONthink, I tag a lot. It’s an integral part of my strategy for finding things in my paperless environment. As I wrote about previously hierarchical tags are a big part of my organizational system in DEVONthink. For many years, I tagged subject matter with tags that emmanate from a single tag named topic_, but it was really an unnecessary top-level complication. So, the first item on my to-do list was to get rid of the all tags with a topic_ first level.

Since DEVONthink is my primary knowledge-management and repository tool on the macOS desktop, I constantly work with mechanisms for efficiently getting data into and out of it. I previously wrote about using Hazel and DEVONthink together. This post extends those ideas about and looks into options for preprocessing documents in Hazel before importing into DEVONthink as a way of sidestepping some of the limitations of Smart Rules in the latter. I’m going to work from a particular use-case to illustrate some of the options.

Following up on my recent article on cleaning up Zettelkasten WikiLinks in DEVONthink, here’s another script to solve the problem of linking notes.

Backing up to the problem. In the Zettelkasten (or archive) - Zettel (or notes) are stored as list of Markdown files. But what happens when I want to add a link to another note into one that I’m writing? Since DEVONthink recognizes WikiLinks, I can just start typing but then I have to remember the exact date so that I can pick the item out of the contextual list that DEVONthink offers as links. Also, if I took that approach I would end up with the same problem of excessive text in the link that I would then have to clean up with the previous script.

Organizing and reorganizing knowledge is one my seemingly endless tasks. For years, I’ve used DEVONthink as my primary knowledge repository. Recently, though I began to lament the fact that while I seemed to be collecting and storing knowledge in a raw form in DEVONthink, that I wasn’t really processing and engaging with it intellectually.¹ In other words, I found myself collecting content but not really synthesizing, personalizing and using it. While researching note-taking systems in the search for a better way to process and absord the information I had been collecting, I discovered the Zettelkasten method. I’m not going to go into it here because it has been exhaustively described elsewhere. But I’ll just say that:

The AppleScript Safari API is apparently quite finicky and rejects Russian Cyrillic characters when loading URLs.

For example, the following URL https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/стоять#Russian throws an error in AppleScript. Instead, Safari requires URL’s of the form https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian whereas Chrome happily consumes whatever comes along. So, we just need to encode the URL thusly:

use framework "Foundation"

-- encode Cyrillic test as "%D0" type strings
on urlEncode(input)
   tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input)
   -- 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding
   set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 
   return theEncodedURL as Unicode text
end urlEncode

When researching Russian words for vocabulary study, I use the URL encoding handler to load the appropriate words into several reference sites in sequential Safari tabs.

Generate iterated tracks at normal, 75% and 50% speeds

In previous posts I described a group of Audacity macros that create iterated tracks for chorus repetition practice. As Dr. Kjellin described we use Audacity to create a total of six repetitions per track.

Automating the generation of tracks with AppleScript

On macOS, AppleScript is the core technology used to automate routine tasks. In this case, we make extensive use of UI scripting since Audacity is not a scriptable application.

This is an update to my previous post on automating iTunes on macOS to support chorus repetition practice. You can read the original post for the theory behind the idea; but in short, one way of developing prosody and quality pronunciation in a foreign language is to do mass repetitions in chorus with a recording of a native speaker.

Because in macOS 10.15, iTunes is no more, I’ve updated the script to work with the new Music app. It turns out that it’s a lot simpler. No need to dive into the application classes.

Applescript

Automatically clean up Safari cookies on macOS

Getting plaintext into Anki fields on macOS: An update

Automating the handling of bank and financial statements

Bulk rename tags in DEVONthink 3

More on integrating Hazel and DEVONthink

Copy Zettel as link in DEVONthink

Cleaning up Zettelkasten WikiLinks in DEVONthink Pro

URL-encoding URLs in AppleScript

A comprehensive system for generating chorus repetition source material from Glossika sentence tracks

Generate iterated tracks at normal, 75% and 50% speeds

Automating the generation of tracks with AppleScript

Scripting Apple Music on macOS for chorus repetition practice