ThoughtAsylum

THOUGHTASYLUM

Excursions into automation, productivity, and other things.

Guides, tools and projects for using technology effectively.

Latest Content

30 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

File and Folder Trees via Keyboard Maestro

One of the first commands I learned to use on a PC was the tree command in DOS. This was a command that let me see what files and subdirectories were present in a particular directory in a structured, visual way. The tree-like nature coming from the way folders were represented as branches and files as leaves on that branch. At the time, it was just a fun and useful way to visualise the files on the PC. However, I still find myself wanting to represent file and folder structures in documentation that I write and information that I provide to others. Sometimes this isn’t even on a PC, but rather on my Mac. Fortunately, there’s a way to reproduce this functionality, and furthermore, I can have it right at my fingertips thanks to the power of Keyboard Maestro.

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Featured Content and Projects

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Alfred

Powerful Mac Launcher App
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Automators Vault

Automators Podcast Notes
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Tech Tutorials

Video Tutorials
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Shortcuts

Modern Apple Automation
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Shortcuts Library

Prebuilt Shortcuts
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Drafts

Capture and Process Text
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Forge

3D Printing Notebook
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Hermes Agent

AI Agent Framework
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TADpoLe

Extension for Drafts
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Obsidian

Markdown Knowledgebases
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TextExpander

Text Replacement
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XYplorer

Customisable File Manager

Recent Content

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20 Aug 2026

Build vs Buttle With Your AI

With the increasing availability of assistive AI, many people have turned to AI frameworks and harnesses (Hermes Agent, Claude Cowork, etc.) to help them achieve day-to-day goals. In many cases the AI has been directed to carry out those tasks that people want to hand-off. That is good, but is it the right thing to do? Is AI actually the ideal solution, or is it something to help you create that solution?

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19 Aug 2026

Monitoring Non-interactive Terminal Sessions with Sentinel

Lately I have found myself dealing with more and more terminal sessions on my Mac. These were not just sessions where I had specific areas of work open. These were long running processes. Local website servers. Local LLM servers. Processes to serve dashboards and apps. While gathering them into multiple tabs on one Terminal window helped, I would end up on that window when I didn’t need to be. I began having trouble finding the right tab, and even came close more than once to killing processes that I wanted to keep running. This was quickly becoming a problem rather than simply an occasional inconvenience. I looked for a solution, but did not find anything that quite matched my need. This then became an opportunity to build something to help me manage these sessions, and so the idea for Sentinel began to emerge.

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28 Jul 2026

Creating Opportunities With AI

I have come to realise that the biggest limitation of my local digital assistant is not its capability but my imagination. When situations arise where I know AI can help, it is usually obvious whether my local assistant is up to the task. There are certainly times when chatting with a frontier model through an existing subscription is going to be vastly more effective than anything I can run locally on my Mac. Even so, a relatively modest model integrated into a local assistant still has enormous potential — potential I was sure I was leaving untapped. My solution is to have my digital assistant generate ideas of how it could help me. In this post, I’ll be talking about my Opportunity Engine.

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25 Jul 2026

Bleep My Mac

I create lots of automations to help me work more effectively on my Mac. One of the things I like to build into these automations is audible feedback to tell me when certain steps, phases, or overall completions occur. Rather than visual feedback, I tend to use audible cues. On macOS there are only a few standard audio files to choose from. And I like to have some variety so that I can actually associate an audible event with a particular activity, but I am always running out of good short sounds to use for those cues, so I decided to create something that would give me more options.

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19 Jul 2026

Team Building For AI

While having a do anything and everything digital assistant is one approach, we all know that it’s team work that generally delivers the best results on projects. Well, when you have a good team to rely on that is. That was one of the points I took when starting to build out my digital assistant. Rather than just one do-everything assistant, I wanted to build up a team of AI specialists to support my digital assistant needs.

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11 Jul 2026

Choosing An AI Brain For My Digital Assistant

In my previous post about my private digital assistant, I explained the challenges I encountered and how I ended up at Hermes Agent as my choice of framework. The next step on my journey was to give my digital assistant a brain. This process was happening in parallel and was intrinsically linked into every stage of what I discussed previously. It was painful, but I did find what seems to be a reasonable baseline.

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