To whom do I minister? My beloved husband and my cherished cat. And perhaps to the dancers at the local contra dance, now that we are restarting. Woodcut by Fran Tolman.
I am not exempt from the lure of a beautiful cafe drink, in this case, matcha latte.
grep, BBEdit and Obsidian to the rescue
I want to share some grep pride and also write things down for when I need it next time.
I have a new gig where I’m teaching online project management courses for another company. They give me the slides and a delivery guide, but I’m on my own for figuring out what I want to say. I’ve already delivered 3 classes and thus have figured out what I want, which includes displaying the slides in my notes.
I’m working on a new course which has 214 slides. I wanted to save some typing by setting up the structure in advance.
First step, Excel. I typed “Slide 1” and “Slide 2” in adjacent cells and then let Excel do the rest of the numbering out to “Slide 214.”
Thence to BBEdit. I did a couple of greps but the best one saved the Slide number pattern and then pasted it back in with the Obsidian markdown link pattern to transclude an image.
Here’s the match:
Slide ([0-9]+)
And here’s the replacement instruction:
Slide \1\n\!\[\[Slide\1MCAF.jpeg\]\]\n
Abracadabra!
The last step was going to Powerpoint and using their export goodness to get a resized JPEG for each slide, luckily this functionality is built into Powerpoint. I copied the resulting 214 correctly named JPEG files into the directory I use for Obsidian attachments, then pasted the text from BBEdit into my note, and voila, 214 placeholders in Obsidian including the correct slide image. I feel brilliant.
I can’t also show you the cute little slide pictures in Obsidian because the content is proprietary.
Woke up to a power outage #adayinthelife
Caturday
Morning Walk
The local mountain looking pretty in the morning.
Misty morning on the lake.
Me and my buddy, Dave, on top of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, sometime last Fall
mountain #mbmay
Symmetry #mbmay
I figured out how to put my iPad above my iMac, a la @Burk. I’m running Sidecar in this example, where I’m running Zoom on the iPad while I attend a webinar. This gives me my entire iMac free to do everything else I want to do.
Maroon #mbmay
Pot #mbmay
Bloom #mbmay
The union of my two favorite Slavic salads: Herring/beet and chicken/potato/caper. #mbmay
Woke up at 4AM so went for a long, dawn walk. #earth #mbmay
Experimental #mbmay
This #switch is open #mbmay
Catastrophic failure of UPS today. But it’s served loyally for 9 years.
The lake ice has melted! On the one hand, yay Spring 🌸. On the other hand, it’s weeks early 🙃.
Big ice storm on Friday, but not big enough to cause us to lose power. Just big enough to leave the trees encased in diamonds.
I made the family traditional Christmas Eve dinner for today instead. Herring-beet salad and Russian Chicken Salad. It’s from the German side of the family, which has some Polish roots. And it’s all SO GOOD. I love tradition.
Our general store made tarts and they made the mincemeat from scratch!
Weirdly warm, misty afternoon for a long walk
I basically got nothing done today but I did buy these nifty winter boots. That metal plate is a mini-crampon that can be flipped out when I need more traction here in the land of ice and snow.
