Author: eperitus

Putting a Screen Time prefpane in your macOS Dock

Apple’s new Screen Time feature is a handy way to track how much time you’ve worked on various projects (or how many hours you’ve been at work) throughout the week.  I use it so often, I turned it into a dock icon.

But there’s a bug in Screen Time (that still exists in Catalina 10.15.3), whereby if you launch it, sometimes the number of hours shown will not match reality.  And there is no refresh button to get the hours shown re-calculated.

To get a the number of hours of screen time updated within the last minute, you have to close the prefpane and relaunch it.  I was getting tired of opening Screen Time, closing it, and then opening it again, so I built a simple AppleScript to do that automatically:

screentime.jpeg

To do the same:

  1. Open Script Editor.
  2. Type in the above code exactly as written in the screenshot.
  3. Pull down the File menu and Export it with a File Format of App and drag it to your dock.

You now have a “working” Screen Time prefpane which is always updated when you click the dock icon.

The Rational Bible: Exodus

Just started reading my first Dennis Prager book: The Rational Bible: Exodus. A couple quotes really stuck out to me:

Fear of God—when that God is the moral God of the Torah, the God of the Ten Commandments, the God Who commanded, “Love your neighbor as yourself”—is necessary to make a society of moral individuals. Of course, there are moral atheists, just as there were moral pagans, and moral individuals in even the worst cultures. But you cannot build a good world with a handful of individuals who happen to be good people. You need a universal moral code from a universal God Who is the source of that moral code, and this God must judge all people accordingly.

Consequently, “fear of God” is as inevitable as it is necessary. If God judges how moral we are, of course there will be fear of Him—just as there is of a human judge. Conversely, if God does not judge people, there is no reason to fear Him.

Rational-Bible-Exodus-2.jpg

Really good book so far; in the first chapter alone, there have been several “a-ha!” moments aiding my understanding of the history of the Jewish people and the Bible. Recommended.