We celebrated the first night of Sukkot at Shir Hadash, where we also celebrated paying off the mortgage on the Sanctuary Building and thereby making the congregation debt-free.

Originally, the committee planned to burn the mortgage at the celebration, but when they told Rabbi Nico, he wasn’t sold on the idea. He suggested burying it in a genizah, but the committee didn’t like that. They wound up deciding to compost the mortgage instead of burning it, so we each got a page, tore it up, and put it into a composter. I suspect they’ll have to add other ingredients to actually get useful compost, but it’s a start!

The evening included a sustainable dinner – all vegetarian, including “Impossible Kebabs”. If there hadn’t been a sign saying that they were vegetarian, I wouldn’t have known; this was my first experience with “Impossible” products, but it won’t be my last.

Hag Sameach!

I had a brilliant idea after writing last night’s post – what if I could automatically kick off the Google Reverse Image Search after taking a screenshot, but only if I was doing it from Lightroom or Photos?

I was pretty sure I had the right tools:

• Hazel to watch the desktop and “do something” if a file with the right name was added
• Keyboard Maestro to be the “something” Hazel would activate; it can check to see if the current application is one whose screen shots I care about
• and I’d already written the Shortcut to search Google, so I could call it from Keyboard Maestro.

It seemed simple, but I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why the Shortcut saw the name of the screen shot, but the script inside the Shortcut got the name of a temporary file whose contents was the name of the screen shot.

And then I realized that that was a problem I didn’t have to solve – I could just call the script directly from Keyboard Maestro and avoid the trip through Shortcuts.

And that worked right away. I’m saving time and effort every time I need to do the image search – I might never save as much time as I wasted trying to debug my problem, but that’s a different issue, right?

I even used the new technique on a photo I took on our morning walk today – I present a California Scrub Jay. I think.