Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from somenice
Life is like a pack of hockey cards – You never know what you’re gonna get. Chocolates on the other hand have that little map that tells you what each one has inside. So you can avoid the orange ones, anyway… When I came across a couple bags of old hockey cards at a thrift […]
I’ve got a bunch of old film I need to get through. Stored properly – I shouldn’t need to add too many additional stops.I think this may be the golden age. Enjoy while you can.
My latest interest in microcontrollers has me learning all about Meshtastic mesh radio devices.The Meshtastic website puts it concisely – “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices”.A lot to unpack right there but definitely within my Venn diagram of interests. As I dig in to this niche community […]
At todays “blink to think” event a new Arduino board was released, the Arduino Q, however perhaps most important was the announcement that chipmaker Qualcomm had acquired Arduino for an undisclosed amount. After watching the entire two hours of announcements I’m not crazy about this but I remain cautiously optimistic. My first Arduino was the […]
More in technology
I love Letterboxd, but I hate how they show you the cast on the web app. Here's the cast of The Batman on the web. I mean, that's them, but I'm often going to this page wondering who played someone, and that is an
If you visit, someone someone will inevitably tell you: “The Day of the Dead parade isn’t a real tradition!
In short: I use iOS Shortcuts to run a Mastodon bot. I run a Mastodon bot that posts random quotes from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. (The writing in that game is so charming!) I used to run it off a server, but for the past few days, it’s used an iOS Shortcut on my phone. How it works The bot is called Ulrira, named after a beloved Link’s Awakening character. Ulrira (the bot, not the character) samples a line from the text dump, then makes an HTTP request to post it. Here’s a screenshot of the full thing: As you can see, everything here is hard-coded, from the server credentials to the file name. (It probably wouldn’t be hard to make this more generic, but I didn’t bother.) This used to be a short, hand-written Bash script. I used the new AI-powered Shortcut creator and prompted this into existence. I said something like, “Here’s a Bash script. Turn this into a Shortcut.” Like a lot of LLM output, it wasn’t quite right, but it was useful for getting started. Shortcuts doesn’t seem to have an elegant way to express something like “run this every 6 hours”, so I created four additional scheduler Shortcuts that call the main one. They run at 12am, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. That means there are five shortcuts in total: one to actually make the post, and four to schedule the main Shortcut at different times. Why do it this way? I didn’t want to pay for my server anymore, nor did I want to maintain it. When I went looking for alternatives, they either (1) cost money (2) had some significant limitation (for example, GitHub Actions requires me to update the repo every 60 days). This solution runs on a device with high uptime and is effectively free. If you’re a pro software genius, you might complain that this is not reliable! It doesn’t work if my phone is offline, for example. Or what if I change timezones? But in the words of Link’s Awakening: You’re good! You’re a pro, aren’t you? ………… Well, beat it! Pros aren’t allowed in here! Follow the bot here.
