If you have a shared Reminders list, Fantastical for Mac will notify you if someone else updates it. I don’t need to see these notifications, but it took me a little while to discover how to mute alerts for specific Reminders lists.

It’s not, as one might suspect, unders Preferences > Alerts. You actually mute the alerts under Preferences > Calendars, and it’s not at all obvious that this is where you do it.

First, open Preferences (Fantastical > Preferences or ⌘,). Then go to Calendars and right-click the Reminders list that you want to mute. Select Get Info.

 

Check Ignore alerts and Ignore shared calendar notifications as shown in the screen shot below. Then click .

 

This method also works for muting alerts from individual calendars.

My wife and I are looking for a new house, and I quickly realized there were two common things that took a little more effort than I liked. First, collecting the important information (address, list price, Realtor.com URL) about each house in a place I could easily find it later, and second, searching for the nearest supermarket, pharmacy and other stores and services. Using Workflow, I was able to automate these tasks.

Save House to Bear

The first workflow is called Save House to Bear. It takes the information exported to in the share sheet by the Realtor.com app and saves it to a new note in Bear. The property address becomes the note’s title, and if the Realtor.com app exports a photo in the share sheet (it usually does), the photo will be added to the note.

 

 

Search Near Address

The second workflow is called Search Near Address. When the workflow runs, it will ask you for the source of the search address. If you ran the workflow using the Run Workflow extension and Workflow detected an input address, it will ask you if you want to use the input address, the clipboard or a manually entered address. If no input address was detected, or if you didn’t run the workflow using the Run Workflow extension, it will ask if you want to use the clipboard or a manually entered address.

The workflow will then ask you for search terms, and it will show you businesses matching the search terms near the search address. Selecting one of the search results will open it in the Maps app.

 

 

Because of some constant issues with Time Machine that I just couldn’t resolve, I switched to Arq, which offers a similar “go back in time” backup solution. I’ve had a generally positive experience with Arq; it’s been much faster and more reliable than Time Machine for me.

The only problem — and this is unrelated to Arq itself — was that my network share would disconnect when my MacBook went to sleep, and I couldn’t find a simple, reliable way to automatically remount the share when waking my MacBook. Then, I happened to find this postfrom Gabe Weatherhead. The post is five years old, but his solution using Keyboard Maestro still works perfectly.

I added one condition to his setup: My MacBook must be connected to my home Wi-Fi network.

 

I had tried Keyboard Maestro in the past, but I had never really found a compelling reason to purchase it. This simple macro has changed my mind, though, and I’m now a paying customer. Now to find more uses for it…