The Aptly Named, Sam's Blog

About three months ago I heard of someone using a trackpad with their non-dominant hand at their Mac. Now I’d heard of such a use before but this time I had a trackpad lying around. I’d gotten it with my Mac instead of a mouse because I already had a mouse, but had stashed it away. So I got it out and set it up for my left hand.

A month passed. I was using it rarely. One day the battery in my mouse ran out in the middle of the workday, so I plugged it in and moved the trackpad over to the right side.

A day passed, and the mouse had long been charged, so I unplugged it, but for whatever reason I kept using the trackpad.

A week passed and I realized that I was liking the trackpad a lot more than the mouse. So I put the mouse in the closet.

Now two months have passed and I can’t think of going back. The gestures are intuitive and I’ve found several operations to be a lot smoother.

I’m a happy Magic Trackpad 2 user 😊.

Inspired by Patrick Rhone’s /reading page, I’ve created a Books page on my site.

Following is the process I followed to make that happen on my Mac:

• Export all my books out of Goodreads. You can find the page to do that by navigating to “My Books” and selecting “Import and export” at the bottom of the left sidebar under “Tools”. The exported file is of CSV format, which is pretty standard.
• Open the export file in a spreadsheeting app. I use Numbers.app. Here, you can clean up any data. I added some ISBNs that were missing. I also saved this file so I can just update it in the future as I read books. Another reason I went through this step was because I was having a hard time parsing the original CSV file using the script I wrote.
• Export the spreadsheet file as CSV.
• Run it through the script below to generate Markdown that can be pasted directly into the page on my site.

And that’s it!

Here’s the script:

1: Open 2: Sight 3: Reflect 4: Spot 5: Hide 6: Plant

7: Above 8: Contrast 9: Lull 10: Sign 11: Plain 12: Attachment

13: Rise 14: Warmth 15: Balance 16: Rest 17: Cool 18: Oppose

19: Space 20: Scale 21: Progress 22: Spectacle 23: Station 24: Double

25: Hurdle 26: Escape 27: Together 28: Below 29: Leap 30: Vision

Some notes:

• I constrained myself to photos taken on that day. No digging into the archives.
• A lot of these were taken around the house or the neighborhood. I work from home and tend to go on walks at various times during the day.
• Some days I took the photo but forgot to post and posted the next morning.
• I don’t usually do photo challenges, daily or otherwise, so this was harder than I expected. Some days I kinda winged it, as can be seen 😜.