Notes and such regarding keyboard macro products for Mac OS X, circa late summer 2015.

Doing a bunch of data entry on Quickbooks Mac I was grated on by the numerous anti-usability design decisions that seem endemic to accounting software in general but are especially egregious in certain Intuit products.

The primary work-flow offender in QBX is the lack of keyboard shortcuts to power through required data-entry issues when entering charges and expenses – if the charge requires data entry to capture surcharges, such as a purchase with a sales tax, there does not appear to be a no-mouse way to open the ‘splits’ view, even when the program auto-populates the expenditure with a multi-line charge based on the last prior charge associated with the vendor.

Worse, ones you correct the incorrect amounts, rather than automatically recalculating, you must mouse to the button labeled ‘Recalc’ and THEN the charge is entered. As I recall, the Windows version has some slight usability advantages in similar matters but I have to get Viv using this too and that was something that proved impossible under Windows over a period of five years, soo…

At any rate!

(I do realize Automator might be able to provide what I need and will take a look at it too when I am ready to define a specific actionset. However, as QBX has a long track record of doing things its own way I’m not really expecting Apple’s tool to provide what I need.)

QUICK KEYS – $59.95/seat
No longer the same product or ownership as the venerable System 7 keyboard automation software.

• Latest release and date? Unclear, but likely release date of 2009: “Designed for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. With assistance from our Support Department and our customers, QuicKeys 4 substantially works with 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.9 Mavericks, and 10.10 Yosemite.”
• Demo download? Download before purchase, yes.

KEYBOARD MAESTRO – $36/seat
From Stairways, former and original developers of Anarchie. The KM site notes that KM was an acquired product.

• Latest release and date? 7.0.1, 18 August 2015 – clearly under active development.
• Demo download? Yes.

iKEY – $30/seat
Developers Plum Amazing offer a range of apps on several platforms and the iKey site prominently features an Adam Engst ‘Take Control’ Book.

• Latest release and date? 2.5.3, 6/17/14
• Demo download? Yes.

And some dark horses…

Mac Mouse Recorder – $19.95/seat
From JitBit, distributed indie team with a contemporary sensibility.

• Latest release and date? 0.7, 9/16/2012
• Demo download? Yes.

Macro Recorder for Mac – Free? I could not find a price. $5.00, although I am not sure how to pay.
From MurGaa. Given the barebones site design and Quirky use of Language and Capitalization, I surmise this is a one-person shop with cultural roots in the subcontinent. There is quite a range of automation apps here. The UI design on them is pretty engineering-forward, but hey, if it’s free…

• Latest release and date? 5.0, Feb. 5, 2015
• Demo download? Yes.

OK, that’s the lineup. I’ll continue when I have implemented.

Ah, data entry with Quickbooks, how I loathe your nonsensical, sandpaper-like forced use of the mouse and outright rejection of graceful entry-button focus shifts. You’ve driven me into the arms of Keyboard Maestro and other macro overlays yet again.

Over the past few days we’ve done a few things. We went to see a movie at the Crest, Avengers, Age of Ultron, which I had actually both forgotten about and forgotten the generally negative reviews of. The reviews were right, which is too bad. Still, it made Viv happy.

We then dined nearby at a very old-school (American) Chinese place which we picked because the parking lot was packed, and it was a good call. The food was nothing special or spectacular but it was good and tasty and fast and cheap.

We went to a baseball game on Friday with Spencer and Daena and many members of Daena’s professional association, which was fun. By happy chance it was an Iwakuma start and I was pleased to be going. I finally got around to taking the damn bus, which is the most practical choice when Vivian and I are meeting to attend a game on a Friday. Unfortunately beginning Tuesday or Wednesday I began feeling poorly, apparently a major arthritis and inflammatory disorder flare-up and was feeling weak and in pain all the way through the weekend. I was somewhat subdued, I am afraid.

I had to go try to take a nap after we’d eaten before Spencer and Daena showed up and walked to the car to try to do so. It was an unseasonably warm day and the car was parked in full sun, and I unthinkingly turned it on and ran the A/C for a little bit before realizing that was hopeless and useless and rolling down the window instead. I then turned the car off.

On leaving when I rolled up the windows I noticed that they were verrry slugggggiish but didn’t really think about it.

When we reached the car after the game, the doors would not unlock for the key fob and when we finally got in the car would not start. Somehow, I had drained the starter battery.

I called triple A. It was hard to convey the address of our location and I ended up on the phone with their intake person for about 30 minutes. During that time a random sportsbro saw what was up and offered to try a jump. Viv and I had both thought that Priuses could not be jumped but that proved, happily (and logically) to be incorrect. Priuses apparently cannot jump other cars, if I understand correctly, but they are quite jumpable. Which is a relief.

So I was able to cancel the call to AAA and off we went.

Then last night we drove to Bellevue to have dinner with my old girlfriend Julie, whom I hadn’t seen since just after Suzy’s death. Julie and I have been in touch on and off online for many years so we knew the general outline of each others’ lives and have also kept up via Facebook for the past decade or so but we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for thirty years or so. Of course Viv had never met her either. We all had a great time, and it was very pleasant to catch up.

Julie was in town for a presentation and instructional seminar on hair techniques – she is a traveling trainer and presenter for Redken – and we had both known that at some point she would get to do a session here. It was great to reconnect.

My job hunt has been going OK, not great but not terrible. I have had two face-to-face interviews, both times for jobs that I was clearly overqualified for, so it’s no surprise I have not heard back from the interviewers for these gigs. It’s just a sales-contact problem so they key thing here is to maximize contacts and keep plugging away.

I stopped posting here just before the change in months mostly because I am still working on the database export and did not want to increase the entry base here while still trying to get everything out. After working out the methodology I need to run the experiments, there’s no harm in adding entries, so I have a few to run through.

First, over last weekend in August we bought Viv a new desk, a low-boy fold-out secretary which looks to be prewar and probably local – the wood is bone-dry cedar and the desk is light as a feather, which was kind of a relief because it meant I didn’t hurt myself hauling it into the house.

It was a little convoluted to set up, as Viv has been using the built-in kitchen-counter desk that was built when they remodeled the house in the late 1960s. It was a very simple, small des, 18″ x 42″ with a laminate surface and a two-cubby masonite dependency just big enough for a could of phone books. Plainly meant as a palling desk for the home’s domestic needs such as bill-paying and meal-planning, Viv was never happy with it and it offered zero storage.

In order to move her new desk in, I had to demo the old desk, spackle, mud, and repaint the wall, install the old desk downstairs as an additional work surface in the tool/mud room, and conduct a series of minor repairs to the incoming antique desk.

It took a few days but everything went well and she is now happily ensconced in the new work environment.

An article on Slog prompted a memory, which I posted as a comment over there, and then reshared on Facebook, and which also should be here.

Inside the Seattle Clinic That Survived the Darkest Days of AIDS, by Matt Baume, looks at a doctor and clinic whose career coincides with the time I have lived in Seattle.

My original comment on Slog:

Then in the discussion on Facebook another memory cropped up.

Old pal Jennifer Johnson noted to me that it was possible this fellow might have been suffering from AIDS dementia, which seems like a good guess. Anyway, it’s a damn shame he, and they, passed away.

So naturally windstorms are now also scary. Good lord. What’s next, dinnertime?

At least he’s not scared of shadows like Snickers (some friends’ dog) used to be!

Hoo boy, full-on ninety-pound dog sitting on my lap while I sit at the computer attempting to type. Don’t eat the doorframe this time, buster.

He demolished the door to his kennel last time this was happening. Since then we bought a huge cage which he recognizes and does not like (presumably from his shelter days) but which does not suffer from the design flaws that allowed him to break out of the kennel. The AIRLINE APPROVED kennel. Good thing we didn’t ever try to fly him anywhere.

We have these tranqs that work OK but they take an hour or two to metabolize. And there’s controversy about what they do, exactly – it’s acepromazine, and although it’s been used as an anti-anxiety treatment in animals and humans, it actually effects only the physical expressions of anxiety. So it’s thought that there may be a potential to increase anxiety trauma by actually increasing negative conditioning in association with anxiety-producing stimuli.

So I try to avoid it unless it seems clear he’s going to hurt himself, like by trying to eat lumber, or for example if we have to cage him or leave him alone in the house and he’s really fighting it. When he broke out of the kennel he bent the doorframe by pulling on it with his teeth and managed to hurt himself to the point he was bleeding from his mouth and paws.

I bundled him into his thunder shirt but of course he’s still freaked out.

Looking out at my yard, I notice part of my neighbor’s fence has blown down. Naturally, this fence is technically on my land, which means, I suppose, it’s actually mine and my maintenance responsibility. I foolishly gave my former neighbor Josh permission to site his posts on our side of the property line, and he quite reasonably set up the fence with the facing to his side of the line. After he sold the house shortly afterward I realized what he’d done – he installed and paid for a fence that is actually now in part my maintenance responsibility, although the finished side faces his yard.

I actually helped him build the retaining wall that made it most practical to put the fenceposts on my side of the line, too. Grr.

A github-hosted method to export from MT. Possibly the same as or using the same approach as the index-template method.

Aargh, exporting from MT times out – on an entry from *2004*.

Here is another fellow’s walk in the park. He at least figured out how to run a perlscript against MT directly – I am somewhat skeptical I will be able to implement that based on the non-console hosting I run this on.

I suppose a line to support might not be a bad idea.

All week the dog has been having thunder fright, and he is observably reacting to thunder generated as far away as 200 miles distant. This could really be a problem!

On the other hand, it’s also interesting as it provides a mechanism for the observed dog-based early-warning earthquake alert system. Getting him in his thundershirt clearly helps. He also seems to like having the harness on. It’s somewhat amusing how he reacts with the harness on when I have to pull out a leash to keep him out from underfoot in the kitchen during these fear times – he’s scared out of his mind and unable to obey verbal commands but he sees the leash and starts wagging his tail because “walk!” apparently.

Viv ended up going to California on her own after Logan’s apparent injury while I stayed here trying to work through what to do about it. I noted it here in a one-sentence entry on the day it happened.

Here’s what I wrote about it on August 2 in an email to family and neighbors:

Logan came down from a ball toss a week ago today with a yip. We were concerned as when this had happened to Rocket it was bone cancer and both expensive and futile to stem the tide via surgery.

On Monday, we took him to Value (up on 99 in Shoreline) because we are dissatisfied with the cost of Northgate Vet, the provider who took care of Rocket during his illness. The quality of care there is great but our annuals + shots this year for the dog and the cat came out to $800, and that’s just too much, even if it’s market rate for Seattle, something I am not yet convinced of.

They diagnosed a CCL tear, the canine equivalent of an ACL tear in humans, and suggested surgery to the tune of $2.2k, later corrected in estimate to $2.6k. Interim treatment was anti inflammatories and pain meds. Overnight Monday he was whiny and wanting the meds.

By Tuesday, after the meds were metabolized and worn off, he displayed no further evident pain and we scheduled a second-opinion visit with Northgate (who, on the phone, were audibly sniffy that we’d gone to Value). That visit went well in terms of quality of care but less so in terms of diagnosis, and they confirmed the CCL tear diagnosis and seconded surgery.

Looking into this, it seems that lab-like dogs have a high rate of this, like over 70% of older lab-like dogs will experience this injury. Surgery is indicated because they compensate by shifting the work to the other leg, which then also has the same injury, leading to a situation where both legs need surgery at the same time.

Pre-surgical care involves activity restriction: no running, jumping or climbing. There is no way into our house without a full flight of stairs.

I built a 14 foot ramp on Tuesday. He doesn’t want to use it and it’s too steep if I put it all the way to the head of the stairs. I figure something is better than nothing and have been training him on it with a partial coverage tilt. He’s accepting of it.

All of that said, he shows no interest in activity restriction at all, and if we had waited a day to go to the doctor would not have built a ramp or changed travel plans.

I had a long conversation with the diagnosing doc and she endorses my proposed view that keeping the dog in the car for six days (three days down and back to Laguna Beach) constitutes acceptable activity restriction.

Since we had to make a snap decision about Viv’s travel, she bought a plane ticket on Monday and left on Saturday as previously scheduled. If I drive, we think she’ll just drive back with me.

So at the moment, I’m exploring dog sitters but expecting to leave on Tuesday with the dog. It’s important within Viv’s family to get the dog to California due to advancing Alzheimers. My own view is that he should stay here, and so should I.

A bit later I reiterated in an email conversation with an interested party.

We took him in the day after he yipped and he was diagnosed with this (apparently extremely common in his size and breed) injury. We went to Value up in Shoreline partly because we are dissatisfied with the cost of Northgate and partly because it’s walk-in and we could just get him looked at immediately.

They did not do x-rays or sedation. They diagnosed CCL tear and provided a surgery estimate of about 2.2k later corrected to 2.6k. We were concerned about the lack of x-rays (which were included in the surgery estimate). They explained that since their orientation is to minimize consumer expense, they did not want to do it unless required (as for surgery). They provided us with anti-inflammatories and pain meds (Tramadol). We only gave him the meds on Monday night; he was audibly whimpering. The next day he did not appear to feel bad or to favor the leg at all and we decided to defer meds.

The next steps would be either or both x-rays and a sedated exam. The determination of need for a sedated exam is the dog acting defensive or pained during a non-sedated exam, where the vet is manipulating the leg bones to check for a diagnostic mobility indicating damage to the ligament.

We then went to Northgate for a second opinion despite our desire to move on. They confirmed the diagnosis based on a defensive reaction in a non-sedated exam and performed a non-sedated X-ray that was inconclusive but which did NOT show characteristic bone damage that can occur from an injury of this nature. It was not clear to me if the damage they were looking for was something that was common in a fresh injury of this nature or if it was more along the lines of a long-term consequence of an untreated injury of this nature.

By the day we got him in, he was not exhibiting any apparent symptoms and was instead exhibiting impatience with his activity restriction. This behavior has increased since his Northgate appointment.

Nothgate gave us a surgical estimate and has requested a second non-sedated exam as well as a possibility of a sedated exam. Their surgical estimate was 4.8k. They will not negotiate on price. The (second) doc there who requested another non-sedated exam sounded totally flabbergasted that Logan is not displaying any notable symptoms and that we had not been using meds. He is clearly suspicious of his employee doctor’s diagnosis.

The orientation to surgery for this injury is because there is a possibility an animal who has developed this condition will shift the workload to the other leg and require surgery on both legs at the same time or in close succession, depriving the animal of independent mobility for upward of two months. Obviously this is a concern for a dog of Logan’s size, especially in conduction with our home’s architecture, which requires him to use a full story staircase in order to go to the bathroom.

Currently, we do not want to go to Northgate for another round of expensive examinations when we know we will not be using them as a surgical provider. I am concerned that if I take him to yet another vet and tell this whole story they will immediately diagnose for surgery despite what I perceive to be no symptoms. If we had not taken him in the day after his surgery, I don’t think we would have taken him in at all, although his whining overnight that night challenges this assumption on my part.

So we are still deciding what to do. My preference is to maintain activity restriction for another month or so and then assess. I think this response is exactly what the vets are trying to prevent on the assumption it will cause a dual simultaneous injury.

Since these were written he has continued to display no apparent symptoms and to prefer using the stairs over the ramp. The game plan at present is to keep him on activity restriction for 3 months and to gradually reintroduce daily walks and moderate ball tossing. We have reduced his food slightly.

Interestingly (well, to me) even though our daily walks were only about a mile long and I have been relatively consistent in running 2 two four miles a day recently I am clearly gaining a little bit of weight back, up to 165-167 from 160 at the time of my tendinosis. My BP is up as well. I’m not really sure I can attribute this to missing a mile of low-impact activity, though.

Continuing the theme of entertainment hardware failure, I experimentally fired up the Dumpsterama on Thursday and found to my sadness that the projector appears to have failed.

Naturally, I posted to AVSForum.

Today, trying to work through some configurations for the sake of completeness, a weird image which appears to be native to the projector partially displayed on the screen. The device seems hosed but shows signs of life. Given that crappy consumer projectors are at $100 on Amazon it seems foolish to spend much time worrying about something I rarely use. Undoutedly I will continue to do so.

Here are the AVSForum posts, and below them a link to a community with lots and lots of LP350 hacks. I suppose I should pick up on the Epson 76c too while I’m at it.

InFocus LP350 weirdness

Hi all – I know this projector is practically stone-age by now, but I love keeping old stuff running as long as possible. Anyway, I had this set up and operating for a few years sharing inputs between an S-video out pre-HD DVD player and an HDMI-out ATV2. It worked with both inputs just fine (up to a point – the ATV2 enforces HDCP on some media and the projector predates HDCP, which is another tale). Our use patterns changed and it’s been hanging from the ceiling unused for a couple of years. Today I got a wild hair and hooked it up to a PC running Win 7 with both onboard VGA/HDMI out and a GTX 470 with dual DVI.

Windows recognizes the projector when it is attached to the HDMI out. I did not get as far as testing the 470 DVI connection due to some oddities.

First, I did not note any visible startup screen. I didn’t think anything of this as the machine always powers on with the lamp running quite dimly and since I was shuffling cables around I wanted the room illuminated.

Second, I was only able to note the menu displaying for a brief instant before I had set the focus.

Third, after realizing there was clearly something going on with the projector, I was able to get it to display the HDMI out at the correct and expected resolution of 1024×768 – but again, just for a couple of seconds, and the display went blank.

The bulb illuminates. It does not appear to be reaching full brightness. The output on the projection screen is a bordered square of indeterminate color. If I look directly into the projection beam and sweep my eyes across it, I can see the rainbow shifts associated with the display technology of this era.

The bulb was replaced some time ago after the typical series of bulb failures associated with this model. The last time I had occasion to check the use hours on the bulb, it was along the lines of 20 at the most.

The keypad appears to be operating correctly, with the standby button placing the unit in standby and waking it, the menu button illuminating the menu navigation keys (and as glimpsed the menu proper).

I am stumped. I have attempted a bulb-timer reset. What the heck is going on here?

Second post in-thread:

Continuing to mess around with the projector. I hooked up an old VCR to the RCA S-in and started running a tape just to see if I could get anything. Yesterday late and at first power-on today I noticed a faint black bar appearing across the projection area, something like the frame gap that would occasionally occur in non-digital broadcast days if your reception was slightly out of sync. The bar appears in different locations each time the projector comes out of standby. After one of the standbys I noticed the the bulb flickering more than usual, accompanied by some faint clicks, and then it began to ramp up to normal brightness.

A bar began to appear at the top of the screen, but bright white with a black stippled pattern. After it stabilized, it appeared to be the top eighth or so of a bitmapped image which looked somewhat like it might have been originally taken from a 19th century anatomy text or equally possibly a 1980s punk rock poster. There was a strange form on the left of the image which resembled a large-mammal rib and in the center there was a form which seemed possibly to be the top of a drawing of a person’s head. However it was objectively impossible to identify the subjects of the image as there was simply not enough shown on screen.

The image was a 2-bit bitmap with characteristic gridlike dithering, very closely resembling the sort of thing one might have drawn in the mid 1980s with MacPaint or a similar 2-bit graphics program. The image was displayed on screen regardless of the inputs connected to the projector, so my operating assumption is that it is an image stored in the device’s ROM or equivalent and used in assembly testing and verification at component assembly.

It was also reminiscent of cracker credit screens and the like seen on warez or malicious virus incidents. I don’t think I have ever attempted to use the device’s USB interoperability features. I don’t really think it’s too likely that there’s a virus in the machine, the image just sort of resembled that kind of thing.

Since noting the image I have standby-cycled the projector several times and the image has not recurred. I did take a couple of pictures with my cell phone so I will try to make them accessible here in time.

DIY Audio search results for LP350.