Last month, after an advanced preview at CES back in January, Aqara released an update to its G4 smart video doorbell dubbed the Doorbell Camera Hub G410 Select. I had been keeping my eye out for this release ever since its announcement, and it just so happened to coincide with the passing of my existing smart doorbell from Netatmo. That was more than enough reason to purchase the G410, and over a month of daily usage, I’ve been enjoying several of the camera’s excellent new features while also wishing for some improvements in other areas.
Posts tagged with "automation"
One Month with the Aqara G410 Video Doorbell
Philips Hue Adds Flexibility to the Play Line with New Wall Washer Lights
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been testing a pair of Philips Hue Play wall washer lights along with a Play HDMI sync box 8K that the company sent me to test. The wall washer lights are a new and interesting approach to accent lighting for the Hue Play line that I like a lot, but they also come with a premium price tag, so it’s worth taking a close look at what they offer.
I’ve been using Philips Hue Play lights for a while. I have two Play gradient light tubes in my office; one sits behind a shelf on my desk, providing a backlight to my work environment, while the other is on the top of a tall bookshelf, illuminating what would otherwise be a dark corner of the room. I typically set them to a natural light color using Adaptive Lighting in Apple’s Home app, but they can do fancy gradient colors, too, which can be a fun way to mix things up.
But the downside of tube lights is that they take up a lot of horizontal space. That’s where the new wall washer lights come in. They’re cylindrical with a vertical and angled slice taken out of one side, which is where the LEDs are located. Most notably, though, at around six inches tall by a little more than three inches wide, the wall washers work in a much wider variety of places than tube lights. That compact footprint has been perfect for fitting behind my TV, where I’ve already crammed gaming consoles, a Wi-Fi router, and other gear.
Other highlights of the Hue Play wall washers include:
- ColorCast, Philips Hue’s term for the way the wall washers generate highly saturated multi-colored gradients,
- 1035 lumens of light, which is impressive for such a small device, and
- the ability to display white light in a wide 2000–6500 Kelvin range.
The Play wall washers require a Hue Bridge and are compatible with HomeKit, allowing you to use either the Hue app or the Home app to turn them on and off, dim them, and change their colors.
My Latest Mac Automation Tool is a Tiny Game Controller
I never expected my game controller obsession to pay automation dividends, but it did last week in the form of the tiny 16-button 8BitDo Micro. For the past week, I’ve used the Micro to dictate on my Mac, interact with AI chatbots, and record and edit podcasts. While the setup won’t replace a Stream Deck or Logitech Creative Console for every use case, it excels in areas where those devices don’t because it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and costs a fraction of those other devices.
My experiments started when I read a story on Endless Mode by Nicole Carpenter, who explained how medical students turned to two tiny 8BitDo game controllers to help with their studies. The students were using an open-source flashcard app called Anki and ran into an issue while spending long hours with their flashcards:
The only problem is that using Anki from a computer isn’t too ergonomic. You’re hunched over a laptop, and your hands start cramping from hitting all the different buttons on your keyboard. If you’re studying thousands of cards a day, it becomes a real problem—and no one needs to make studying even more intense than it already is.
To relieve the strain on their hands, the med students turned to 8BitDo’s tiny Micro and Zero 2 controllers, using them as remote controls for the Anki app. The story didn’t explain how 8BitDo’s controllers worked with Anki, but as I read it, I thought to myself, “Surely this isn’t something that was built into the app,” which immediately drew me deeper into the world of 8BitDo controllers as study aides.
8BitDo markets the Micro’s other uses, but for some reason, it hasn’t spread much beyond the world of medical school students. Source: 8BitDo.
As I suspected, the 8BitDo Micro works just as well with any app that supports keyboard shortcuts as it does with Anki. What’s curious, though, is that even though medical students have been using the Micro and Zero 2 with Anki for several years and 8BitDo’s website includes a marketing image of someone using the Micro with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad, word of the Micro’s automation capabilities hasn’t spread much. That’s something I’d like to help change.
Testing AirPods 4’s Beta Update and Improved Recording Quality for Voice Notes
Earlier today, I updated my AirPods 4’s firmware to the beta version, which Apple released yesterday. I was curious to play around with the software update for two reasons:
- AirPods are getting support for automatically pausing media playback when you fall asleep, and
- Apple is advertising improved “studio quality” recording on AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2 with this update.
I’ll cut to the chase: while I haven’t been able to test sleep detection yet since I don’t take naps during the day, I think Apple delivered on its promise of improved voice recordings with AirPods.
From the Creators of Shortcuts, Sky Extends AI Integration and Automation to Your Entire Mac
Over the course of my career, I’ve had three distinct moments in which I saw a brand-new app and immediately felt it was going to change how I used my computer – and they were all about empowering people to do more with their devices.
I had that feeling the first time I tried Editorial, the scriptable Markdown text editor by Ole Zorn. I knew right away when two young developers told me about their automation app, Workflow, in 2014. And I couldn’t believe it when Apple showed that not only had they acquired Workflow, but they were going to integrate the renamed Shortcuts app system-wide on iOS and iPadOS.
Notably, the same two people – Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer – were involved with two of those three moments, first with Workflow, then with Shortcuts. And a couple of weeks ago, I found out that they were going to define my fourth moment, along with their co-founder Kim Beverett at Software Applications Incorporated, with the new app they’ve been working on in secret since 2023 and officially announced today.
For the past two weeks, I’ve been able to use Sky, the new app from the people behind Shortcuts who left Apple two years ago. As soon as I saw a demo, I felt the same way I did about Editorial, Workflow, and Shortcuts: I knew Sky was going to fundamentally change how I think about my macOS workflow and the role of automation in my everyday tasks.
Only this time, because of AI and LLMs, Sky is more intuitive than all those apps and requires a different approach, as I will explain in this exclusive preview story ahead of a full review of the app later this year.
Federico’s Latest Automation Academy Lesson: Building a Better Web Clipper with Shortcuts and AI→
I share Federico’s frustration over saving links. Every link may be a URL, but their endpoints can be wildly different. If like us, you save links to articles, videos, product information, and more, it’s hard to find a tool that handles every kind of link equally well.
That was the problem Federico set out to solve with Universal Clipper, an advanced shortcut that automatically detects the kind of link that’s passed to it, and saves it to a text file, which he accesses in Obsidian, although any text editor will work.
Universal Clipper, which Federico released yesterday as part of his Automation Academy series for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members, is one of his most ambitious shortcuts that draws on multiple third-party apps, services, and command line tools in an automation that works as a standalone shortcut or as a function that can send its results to another shortcut. As Federico explains:
I learned a lot in the process. As I’ve documented on MacStories and the Club lately, I’ve played around with various templates for Dataview queries in Obsidian; I’ve learnedhow to take advantage of the Mac’s Terminal and various CLI utilities to transcribe long YouTube videos and analyze them with Gemini 2.5; I’ve explored new ways to interact with web APIs in Shortcuts; and, most recently, I learned how to properly prompt GPT 4.1 with precise instructions. All of these techniques are coming together in Universal Clipper, my latest, Mac-only shortcut that combines macOS tools, Markdown, web APIs, and AI to clip any kind of webpage from any web browser and save it as a searchable Markdown document in Obsidian.
Although the shortcut may be complex, the best part of Federico’s post is how easy it is to follow. Along the way, you’ll learn a bunch of techniques and approaches to Shortcuts automation that you can adapt for your own shortcuts, too.
Automation Academy is just one of many perks that Club MacStories Plus and Club Premier members enjoy including:
- Weekly and monthly newsletters
- A sophisticated web app with search and filtering tools to navigate eight years of content
- Customizable RSS feeds
- Bonus columns
- An early and ad-free version of our Internet culture and media podcast, MacStories Unwind
- A vibrant Discord community of smart app and automation fans who trade a wealth of tips and discoveries every day
- Live Discord audio events after Apple events and at other times of the year
On top of that, Club Premier members get AppStories+, an extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast that we deliver early every week in high-bitrate audio.
Use the buttons below to learn more and sign up for Club MacStories+ or Club Premier.
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How Federico Turns Voice Recordings into Searchable Obsidian Notes with Shortcuts, Hazel, and LLMs→
Automation on the Mac is powerful because you have so many choices when building a workflow. Now, with large language models, you can do even more, which is the approach Federico took in his latest Automation Academy lesson for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members:
I built a hybrid automation to bridge spoken words and Markdown – a system that combines the non-deterministic nature of human language and messy voice recordings with the reliability of Shortcuts, the power of Hazel rules on macOS, and the flexibility of LLMs, which are ideal for processing natural language. The system revolves around a shortcut called Process Transcript that takes the raw transcript of a voice recording and turns it into a structured note in Obsidian, complete with a summary, action items, an embedded audio player, and an internal link to the full transcript.
It’s an amazing automation that takes his audio notes, transcribes them into text, structures the results in an Obsidian template that includes extracted tasks, and embeds the original audio file and transcript for reference. Along the way, Federico used Simon Willison’s llm CLI, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Hazel, Shortcuts, and other tools. It’s a great example of how to make the most of automation on the Mac.
Automation Academy is just one of many perks that Club MacStories Plus and Club Premier members enjoy including:
- Weekly and monthly newsletters
- A sophisticated web app with search and filtering tools to navigate eight years of content
- Customizable RSS feeds
- Bonus columns
- An early and ad-free version of our Internet culture and media podcast, MacStories Unwind
- A vibrant Discord community of smart app and automation fans who trade a wealth of tips and discoveries every day
- Live Discord audio events after Apple events and at other times of the year
On top of that, Club Premier members get AppStories+, an extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast that we deliver early every week in high-bitrate audio.
Use the buttons below to learn more and sign up for Club MacStories+ or Club Premier.
Join Club MacStories+:
Join Club Premier:
Using Simon Willison’s LLM CLI to Process YouTube Transcripts in Shortcuts with Claude and Gemini
I’ve been experimenting with different automations and command line utilities to handle audio and video transcripts lately. In particular, I’ve been working with Simon Willison’s LLM command line utility as a way to interact with cloud-based large language models (primarily Claude and Gemini) directly from the macOS terminal.
For those unfamiliar, Willison’s LLM CLI tool is a command line utility that lets you communicate with services like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude using shell commands and dedicated plugins. The llm command is extremely flexible when it comes to input and output; it supports multiple modalities like audio and video attachments for certain models, and it offers custom schemas to return structured output from an API. Even for someone like me – not exactly a Terminal power user – the different llm commands and options are easy to understand and tweak.
Today, I want to share a shortcut I created on my Mac that takes long transcripts of YouTube videos and:
- reformats them for clarity with proper paragraphs and punctuation, without altering the original text,
- extracts key points and highlights from the transcript, and
- organizes highlights by theme or idea.
I created this shortcut because I wanted a better system for linking to YouTube videos, along with interesting passages from them, on MacStories. Initially, I thought I could use an app I recently mentioned on AppStories and Connected to handle this sort of task: AI Actions by Sindre Sorhus. However, when I started experimenting with long transcripts (such as this one with 8,000 words from Theo about Electron), I immediately ran into limitations with native Shortcuts actions. Those actions were running out of memory and randomly stopping the shortcut.
I figured that invoking a shell script using macOS’ built-in ‘Run Shell Script’ action would be more reliable. Typically, Apple’s built-in system actions (especially on macOS) aren’t bound to the same memory constraints as third-party ones. My early tests indicated that I was right, which is why I decided to build the shortcut around Willison’s llm tool.
Recording Video and Gaming: A Setup Update→
It’s been a couple of months since I updated my desk setup. In that time, I’ve concentrated on two areas: video recording and handheld gaming.
I wasn’t happy with the Elgato Facecam Pro 4K camera, so I switched to the iPhone 16e. The Facecam Pro is a great webcam, but the footage it shot for our podcasts was mediocre. In the few weeks that I’ve moved to the 16e, I’ve been very happy with it. My office is well lit, and the video I’ve shot with the 16e is clear, detailed, and vibrant.
The iPhone 16e sits behind an Elgato Prompter, a desktop teleprompter that can act as a second Mac display. That display can be used to read scripts, which I haven’t done much of yet, or for apps. I typically put my Zoom window on the Prompter’s display, so when I look at my co-hosts on Zoom, I am also looking into the camera.
The final piece of my video setup that I added since the beginning of the year is the Tourbox Elite Plus. It’s a funny looking contraption with lots of buttons and dials that fits comfortably in your hand. It’s a lot like a Stream Deck or Logitech MX Creative Console, but the many shapes and sizes of its buttons, dials, and knobs set it apart and make it easier to associate each with a certain action. Like similar devices, everything can be tied to keyboard shortcuts, macros, and automations, making it an excellent companion for audio and video editing.
On the gaming side of things, my biggest investment has been in a TP-Link Wi-Fi 7 Mesh System. Living in a three-story condo makes setting up good Wi-Fi coverage hard. With my previous system I decided to skip putting a router on the third floor, which was fine unless I wanted to play games in bed in the evening. With a new three-router system that supports Wi-Fi 7 I have better coverage and speed, which has already made game streaming noticeably better.
The other changes are the addition of the Ayn Odin 2 Portal Pro, which we’ve covered on NPC: Next Portable Console. I love its OLED screen and the fact that it runs Android, which makes streaming games and setting up emulators a breeze. It supports Wi-Fi 7, too, so it pairs nicely with my new Wi-Fi setup.
A few weeks ago, I realized that I often sit on my couch with a pillow in my lap to prop up my laptop or iPad Pro. That convinced me to add Mechanism’s Gaming Pillow to my setup, which I use in the evening from my couch or later in bed. Mechanism makes a bunch of brackets and other accessories to connect various devices to the pillow’s arm, which I plan to explore more in the coming weeks.
There are a handful of other changes that I’ve made to my setup that you can find along with everything else I’m currently using on our Setups page, but there are two other items I wanted to shout out here. The first is the JSAUX 16” FlipGo Pro Dual Monitor, which I recently reviewed. It’s two 16” stacked matte screens joined by a hinge. It’s a wonderfully weird and incredibly useful way to get a lot of screen real estate in a relatively small package. The second item is 8BitDo’s new Ultimate 2 Wireless Controller that works with Windows and Android. I was a fan of the original version of this controller, but this update preserves the original’s build quality and adds new features like L4 and R4 buttons, TMR joysticks that use less energy than Hall Effect joysticks, and 2.4G via a USB-C dongle and Bluetooth connection options.
That’s it for now. In the coming months, I hope to redo parts of my smart home setup, so stay tuned for another update later this summer or in the fall.