Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, July 27, 2025, and this is show number 1055. Before we get started, I want to let you know that there will be NO LIVE SHOW next Sunday, August 3rd. Steve and I are taking Lindsay and her family to Michigan for a week-long vacation on Lake Charlevoix, so we won’t be home on Sunday. I’m super excited because my family used to sail out of Charlevoix when I was a kid, and I haven’t been back there in 55 years! I bet nothing has changed… Anyway, I know it’s all about you, so don’t worry, you’ll get the show on Friday, August 1st, before we leave on our trip. We’ll be back for the show on Sunday, August 10th.
15 Years of Hazel
15 years ago this week, I started to use the app Hazel from Noodlesoft. Hazel is a fabulous app that runs in the background on your Mac and follows rules you set up to take action on files and folders. My biggest use case is that I create a lot of very large files when I record the podcasts, and often multiple copies of each file are created. This week’s Chit Chat Across the Pond folder alone has 2.3GB of files in it.
I created rules for my audio file folders that tell Hazel after 2 weeks to move those files off of my local disk and onto Synology my network-attached storage. A few years ago, I made it even snazzier by adding a shell script to the rules that checks to see first if my Synology is on the same network, because I don’t want this running and erroring out when I’m on travel. If it finds the NAS, it mounts the drive so the files can seamlessly slide over and keep my disk from getting full.
Years ago, David Sparks and Katie Floyd pretty much lead the paperless revolution where many of us began to scan in all of our old paper bills, and they were the champions of using Hazel to automatically recognize a scanned document by the OCR’d text, and to rename the bill with who it was from and the date of the bill. Steve uses that technique to this day to take some of the dreariness out of our remaining paper bills.
Over the years, I’ve pestered developer Paul Kim (who calls himself Mr. Noodle) with endless questions, and he’s always been there for me with a quick response. My favorite thing with Paul, though, was when I did a talk at Command-D, a conference put on by Sal Saghoian, where I explained my process of keeping my files from building up using Hazel…and Paul turned out to be in the audience!
Anyway, I just wanted to give a big shout out to Paul for 15 years of fantastic support on an invaluable tool for my Mac. If you haven’t tried Hazel, go check it out at noodlesoft.com
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Support the Show
For the last few years, Steve and I have enjoyed hanging out with Patrick Brennan and his daughter Rhea at Macstock. Rhea spent some time with me showing how she designs her own cross stitch patterns using different tools. She turned me onto FlossCross, a free online cross stitch pattern maker, and Stitchly, a dedicated app for iOS, iPad, and macOS that lets you import your own images to create designs and has a one-time fee of $40. She also turned me onto these really cool type of scissors that I think are called thread snips. Rather than two pieces of metal with a screw hinge at the center, these thread snips are hinged at the end, making the scissors more parallel. It’s hard to explain why these are easier to use than scissors, but you can buy a whole slew of them for under $10 on Amazon.
Anyway, imagine my surprise after all that fun at Macstock when Patrick sent a lovely donation to support the show through PayPal. He didn’t need to do that, of course, but it sure does help pay the bills to keep the show running. You too can be a hero like Patrick and go to podfeet.com/paypal to make a donation like he did.
CCATP #818 — Adam Engst on New Mac Migration
Transcript of NC_2025_07_27
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Did you know you can email me at [email protected] any time you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeet.com/mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcasts on YouTube, you can go to podfeet.com/youtube. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com/slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely NosillaCastaways. You can support the show at podfeet.com/patreon or with a one-time donation at podfeet.com/donate with Apple Pay or any credit card, or through podfeet.com/paypal like Patrick. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, don’t look for us on August 3rd, but if you wait till August 10th, you can head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5 PM Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.