Focused 180: A Focused Hodgepodge

On this episode of Focused, I’m reflecting on 18 months of freedom, Mike is reporting back from Craft + Commerce, and we’re both sharing our best advice for teaching kids how to focus. Join us.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code FOCUSED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
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Text Navigation with the Keyboard (MacSparky Labs)

You really don’t need your mouse when working with text. The trick is to just get a few, simple keyboard shortcuts under your fingers. Here’s how…This is a post for MacSparky Labs Level 3 (Early Access) Members only. <a href=”https://www.macsparky.com/join/”>Care to join?</a> Or perhaps <a href=”https://www.macsparky.com/?memberful_endpoint=auth”>do you need to sign in?</a>

Capture Text Anywhere on Your Mac with TextSniper (Sponsor)

My thanks to TextSniper for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. This is an app that I use … often. Just a few examples from the last week:

  • I got the serial number from a picture of a tool
  • I pulled text off of a donation receipt for my taxes.
  • I pulled some text from an unfriendly website about my Japanese maple bonsai.
  • I got nutrition data off a box of cereal.

TextSniper is a Mac OCR app that can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard so that you can paste it anywhere you need it. It can even read the text to you. The whole thing works a lot like the built-in screen capture on the Mac, just way more powerful.

Also, TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The text recognition is processed on your Mac and does not require an internet connection. 

With TextSniper, you can:

  • Quickly get a text from PDFs, Zoom calls, Presentations, and Videos. 
  • Copy text from anywhere, even images and websites that don’t let you select text.
  • Quickly grab data like email addresses, phone numbers, and links.
  • Read QR codes and barcodes.
  • Get text out of just about any image format, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP.

TextSniper works with macOS Catalina and later and also works with Parallels Desktop

Get TextSniper now and enjoy the fastest way to copy uncopyable text, wherever it may be. Use promo code TS2023 to get an additional 25% off. 

The Looming Threat of AI-Generated Voice

I read this post by John Gruber, and I couldn’t agree more about the shenanigans that will come from AI-generated deepfakes. The computers are so good at duplicating your voice at this point that a determined jackass could “produce” a tape of you saying anything. Conversely, an insolent jackass will deny an actual recording of him and claim it is a deepfake. Down is up. Up is down.

I don’t know that we’ll ever have “smoking gun” audio again. It’s just a question of time before that is true for video, too. The bad guys are certainly going to use this to further polarize us. Be warned.