Hello everyone. With more than 15k subscribers, I’m sure the Apple community has some great experiences to share with others. My question this week is, “What was the most clever way you’ve ever used an Apple product to solve a problem?”
About ten years ago a dear friend and I started a community radio station. In order to make our FCC license more competitive, we started internet streaming pretty early on.
We had great community buy-in, but we needed to broadcast 24/7 and decided to record and rebroadcast live shows.
We had no money, just a MacMini. So we had to do everything with things that came with MacOS or were free or near free.
We ended up creating a pretty impressive interlinking set of AppleScripts, Automator apps, and iTunes Smart Playlists, all driven by Calendar alarms. Calendar alarms would start recordings, which would use the magic import to iTunes folder to get it into iTunes. This would then move into a smart playlist that was set to look for certain tags and only have the most recent audio file with those tags in it.
When a rebroadcast would come up, it was pretty simple. A calendar alarm would trigger an AppleScript that triggered one of these Smart Playlists.
It all worked well for a long time. Ultimately we got our FCC license, and donations allowed us to improve our IT. But this station ran on iTunes, AudioHijack, AppleScript, Automator, and Calendar alarms for years.
I forget exactly, but I used to use Automator all the time to find and sort files. I’ve since learned Python, but Automator is a great tool. I have not tried the new shortcuts thing though.
It’s timeless and perhaps an obvious one (& perhaps not so clever), but the iPod used to always sort out situations where we never had a DJ or any music available. Gotta say RIP those innovative days for Apple, nothing was cooler than being an instant DJ while working as line cook having 160 gigs of music on a device.
For years I have been trying to get Home Assistant to work nicely with my garage door opener. I used a MyQ system that would constantly go offline and just recently switched to an ESP based switch.
What makes it Apple related is that I installed HomeKit Bridge which bridges all compatible entities from Home Assistant to HomeKit. The new garage door switch is now reliable enough that I can now say “Siri open the garage door” and immediately it will open.
Only Apple for the first 5% of the automation, but boy after all the headaches I’ve suffered to reliably open my garage door, this one feels so damn good.
If you are wondering why I don’t just use a radio remote, I do. But no matter which remote I try, I cannot get them to work through the steel door, they will only work reliably if I am beside the garage, not in front of it. Also when I’m out for a walk or a bike I don’t usually bring the radio remote. So this automation gets used about 3-4 times per day. Plus it will remind me if the door was open for more than 3 minutes!
I use automations to turn down the volume to 5% when I open games with obnoxious, loud intro sounds. So no more judging faces and annoying questions.
I’m pretty pleased with my automation that plays BBC 6Music on my iPhone at a set time each morning (as a wake up alarm) then automatically sends the audio to my HopePod mini and sets the volume level. It’s a nice way to wake up to the radio each day.
