Auditing Your AI Skills for Vulnerabilities

Power AI users rely heavily on skills. If you fall into that group, then Nvidia's SkillSpector is worth running.

Designing Diagrams With AI

I wanted to learn how to spruce up website graphics. I took the following Venn diagram I created in Canva from this post:

I installed this skill in Claude Code. It helped me generate this animated one.

Hosting Third-Party Data in Notion

Workers are incredibly powerful. Say that you'd like to view Salesforce, Google Drive, or other systems in Notion. (Yes, you can also send Notion data to those systems.) If this functionality sounds useful, but you lack the time or knowledge to set it up, we should chat.

Importing Slack Data Into Notion

Many organizations opt to stay on Slack's Free plan. As a result, they can only access 90 days worth of data. If you'd like to change that, I built a gratis tool and published it on GitHub.

Adding Audio Effects to Your Regular Keyboard

Plenty of paid apps let you simulate the sounds of a mechanical keyboard. Thock is free and ships with some nice effects. (Pro tip: Keep the volume low if you're working in an office.)

Best Sticky Note App. Ever.

You're welcome.

Feedback

Any tips for me?

For years, Shottr has been my go-to screenshot app. I used the free version for maybe a week before upgrading to the paid one. If I had to guess, Shottr has helped me create thousands of marked-up images for clients, friends, and support agents.

Typically, my markups were pretty standard, like this one of Claude:

While updating the app recently, though, I stumbled across images of a feature that I hadn’t been using. I didn’t know that I could make my notes appear handwritten.

But Shottr lets users do much more. This guide details the myriad ways to customize screenshots. TL;DR: I was using only 30 percent of its rich functionality.

That fact doesn't make me special.

The Moral of the Story

Pick an application—either personal or professional. Odds are that you're using only a fraction of its valuable features. (I've known about this 80/20 rule for decades.) Now that AI lets companies roll out capabilities at a frenzied pace, maybe that heuristic has moved to 90/10.

Nowhere is this gap more true than with Notion. When I talk to clients and prospects, it quickly becomes obvious that they either overlook or ignore a great deal of its power.

If you'd like to change that, we should chat.

Deep domain expertise has long fascinated me. My favorite tale on the subject involves Charles Proteus Steinmetz. Roughly a century ago, the Prussian-American engineer billed Henry Ford $10,000 for quickly solving a thorny production problem.

Steinmetz did, and submitted the invoice to Ford. Ford balked, and asked his hired help to itemize it. The Wizard of Schenectady gladly did as follows:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford remitted payment.

A Century Later

It took decades for Steinmetz to become proficient in mathematics and electrical engineering. A poseur he was not. At the time of his death in 1923, he held more than 200 patents. Imagine what the polymath could have done with today's crop of genAI tools.

Today anyone can easily access the greatest cheat codes in human history—and not just college students too lazy to write their own papers. Claude, ChatGPT, and their ilk are remarkable Swiss Army Knives.

Anyone can appear to be an expert on anything.

Anyone can appear to be an expert on anything. As one of many examples, a mediocre programmer can pose as an advanced one. Ditto for writers, designers, lawyers, and architects.

The cost isn't time to learn one's craft à la Steinmetz, but tokens:

Simon Says

It's only a matter of time before Anthropic, OpenAI, and other companies raise prices, restrict features, or some combination of the two. (Yep, enshittification at its finest.) Perhaps in an attempt to prepare themselves for the inevitable, senior leaders are increasingly pruning their organizations' AI budgets.

Have at it. Just remember the lesson that Henry Ford learned: true subject-matter experts aren't cheap.

In November 2022, I published Low-Code/No-Code. The book's central thesis: non-techies are building increasingly powerful business applications and systems. As its cover implies, the mouse could be just as useful as the keyboard.

Was I right?

In a word, yes.

In the past four years, agentic AI, vibe coding, AI skills, MCPs, and Claude Code have all arrived in earnest. As a result, anyone today can now speak apps, websites, and systems into existence.

The tools are certainly impressive, but there's a catch: building and launching anything willy-nilly is a recipe for poor user adoption and other undesireable outcomes. Double that in an enterprise or workplace setting.

Why I'm Releasing an Audiobook Now

A few months ago, I began noodling with the idea of creating a proper Low-Code/No-Code audiobook. As of why, reasons include:

1. Most important, the book's thesis and framework hold up well.
2. Thanks to AI, creating an audiobook is much easier and affordable today compared to 2022. (The idea of constantly tweaking .mp3 files to pass quality control is my idea of hell.)
3. Audiobook popularity continues to surge.
4. There's less of a stigma around using digital voices. In a related vein, more outlets are accepting AI-generated audiobooks.

Yesterday, I finally pulled the trigger. Here's Chapter 1:

As for how, I'll be transparent: AI did most of the heavy lifting on the conversion. Specifically, I used ElevenLabs and a healthy dose of Claude. (I'm sure that I'll write a long post about what I learned during the process at some point.)

Available Outlets: Updated November 6, 2026

I'm pleased to announce that the audiobook version will be hitting certain outlets over the coming weeks, including:

• Google Books
• Audiobooks.com
• Barnes & Noble
• Bibliotheca
• Chirp
• Curios
• Everand
• hoopla
• Kobo
• LibraryOne
• OverDrive
• TuneIn

Astute readers will notice a glaring omission from the list above. The audiobook won't be available on Audible anytime soon. Amazon doesn't play nice with independent audiobook services. (Shocker, I know.) The Everything Store offers an in-house digital narration tool, but I don't trust it,

Wrapping Up

I hope that you'll check it out.

Fixing the Steps-Taken Command

I wrote a few weeks ago how iOS27 has been a disappointment. Yeah, Apple's recent cyclical fixed some bugs, but real problems remain. Here's one particularly annoying limitation: the ostensibly smarter Siri AI cannot reliably tell you how many steps you've taken during the day. Sometimes asking it works, but most of the time it pauses before telling you why it can't. (When it works, it takes far longer than it did in iOS26.)

Here is a simple Apple Shortcut that circumvents that issue. Just say “Steps” and you're good to go. Tweak it however you like.

Insane Local File Conversion

Say adios to sketchy sites whose operators do who knows what with your data. Filee offers a slew of conversion options. Even better, you can access it right from Finder or Windows Explorer. Cost: nothing.

Sizing Up Local AI Models

Sure, you can download a 30-gig model and then see if your computer can handle it. The better method: Evaluate your hardware first with llmfit.

Quickly Viewing Notion Metadata

Want to easily find your workspace, page, and user ID? It's easy.

Open settings.

Click Developer and go to any page.

Voilà!

Bonus: An Open-Source CleanMyMacX Alternative

I had used the popular Mac maintenance tool for years. Ultimately, it caused a minor but irritating problem that took nearly a year for me to solve. (TL;DR: It broke my Mac's Continuity features.) Calm blue oceans . . .

I'm on Purge now. I couldn't be happier.

Feedback

Any tips for me?

In my days as an enterprise systems consultant, I typically worked on projects easily exceeding six months and $2 million. Many healthcare and public-sector gigs went far beyond that.

Sales cycles lasted years—yes, plural. RFIs gave way to RFPs. A few vendors and consultancies would eventually make the cut. Subsequent negotiations were rarely short. Lawyers argued over terms. What's more, promising deals could fall through. Sometimes a firm would compete for large ones only to come away with squadoosh.

My ERP consulting days are far behind me. That doesn't mean, however, that I never encounter a sales cycle. I certainly do—just in different areas. They include ghostwriting, Notion development, and speaking.

Say that someone fills out the Contact form on my site. Odds are that an individual, team, or firm is evaluating me against other competent professionals. To this end, I want to put my best foot forward. Doing so means responding to a reasonable number of emails and participating in a discovery call to assess the gig.

Weighing the Factors

Every time independent service providers respond to sales inquiries, they need to evaluate the following factors:

1. The size of the opportunity.
2. Their likelihood of landing it. (That is, is the query a cattle call?)
3. The anticipated amount of unpaid work they'll have to do to land it.
4. The chances of a successful project.
5. The project's timeframe.
6. Their other existing projects.
7. Their pipelines.
8. Their personal lives.
9. Where they are in their careers. (People just starting out in a field or industry will generally work harder to land smaller deals to establish credibility.)
10. Their own financial needs.
11. The estimated probability of future client references and referrals from this engagement.
12. Logistical considerations, such as billing, travel, nondisclosure agreements, and the like.

I could go on, but you get my point. Brass tacks: evaluating opportunities is far more art than science.

Evaluating opportunities is far more art than science.

This raises the question: How much time should a service provider devote to pre-sales?

I'll answer that query as succinctly as possible:

Because I like graphs:

An Example

Consider two scenarios:

1. A year-long ghostwriting nonfiction gig.
2. A three-hour Notion mop-up project.

To state the obvious, I expend far more effort trying to land the first than the second. Along the same lines, I chafe when a prospect wants hours of free hand-holding and multiple calls for a simple engagement that might net me $1,000.

Feedback

How do you evaluate opportunities?

Putting Spotlight on Steroids

I'm still in awe of Raycast. It's the best $100 I spend every year. Even better, Windows users can install it now as well. The ability to customize is unlimited. For instance, it's simple to add bespoke commands that Claude Code lacks, like this one.

Creating Interactive Data Visualizations

I've been a dataviz geek for decades. In 2014, I even penned a whole book on the subject. The Visual Organization covers the power of contemporary tools to create interactive charts and graphs. On the flip side, learning Tableau or a similar tool takes time. Depending on your facility to pick up new applications, the curve may be steep.

Enter a new Dashboards—a new Claude artifact in beta as I type these words. I can't wait for Claude Motion.

Easily Undoing and Redoing iPhone Edits

I wish that I knew about this one years ago.

D'oh!

Identifying Key Notion Page Metadata

Here's a neat tip that many Notion users either ignore or, more likely, have yet to discover.

Say that you want to identify a page or database ID.

Just go to Settings.

Then look at the bottom of any page:

Upping Your Ghost Game

The burgeoning content management system lacks a few nice-to-have features. Luckily, Ghost rock star Cathy Sarisky has created a box full of goodies.

Viewing Website Essentials

Lots of tools help site owners view critical information. My friend John Hawkins recommends this comprehensive one. Pretty slick.

An Unsolicited Movie Recommendation

The Social Reckoning is disturbing but excellent. Jeremy Strong excels at playing despicable characters (NSFW).

See you next week.

Feedback

Any tips for me?

Try driving your car daily for four years without changing the oil or aligning the tires. I'm no mechanic, but you'll experience a slew of problems. I could draw the same analogy with a dentist or a doctor, but you get my drift.

By the same token, it's essential to perform regular maintenance on your computer. Yes, I have just stated the obvious, but I routinely meet folks oblivious to basic tech upkeep. (My favorite line: “I didn't know that they made viruses for Apple devices.”)

After more than 40 years using a computer pretty much every day, I know how to properly care for my MacBook Pro. This means:

For a long time, software vendors released new features at a steady pace. In other words, keeping up with new functionality wasn't so freakin' hard.

Of course, those days are long past. Thanks to genAI, changes arrive faster than ever. Expect that trend to continue, if not intensify.

Notion

Take Notion for example. Just about every business day, it seems to drop new front-end features, developer-specific ones like Workers, and a slew of API and MCP updates.

A few months ago, it became obvious to me that I needed to store all of these updates in a central place. If I didn't, I'd lose my marbles. To that end, my bestie Claude Code helped me build:

The database includes a simple chart:

I've published the database for others to copy and fork.

Yesterday, Anthropic launched its always-on agentic AI tool Claude Duet. I immediately signed up for it. A few hours later, I received my invite. In this quick post, I'll offer some initial thoughts.

First up, the product doesn't surprise me. OpenAI debuted Dots on September 29, 2025. Given Anthropic's rapid pace of innovation, I expected a competing product relatively soon. (I refuse to use Meta products, but people raved about Muse.)

Duet let users easily segment conversations and tasks into channels à la Slack:

To state the obvious, it's far easier to find things. I suspect that my Instinct usage will drop because all chats take place in the same messy thread.

Other Thoughts

A few more random musings:

• By effectively giving users virtual computers, I wonder how many people will reconsider buying Mac Minis.
• Claude Duet plays nice with Notion and other connected applications out of the box. Set-up time: minimal.
• I could see it replacing Google Alerts and, down the road, Todoist.
• Claude Duet inherits existing user skills in Claude.ai and Claude Code. I wasn't sure that that would be the case.
• Now I understand Anthropic's logic behind sunsetting Claude Cowork.
• As far as I can tell, use of Claude Duet doesn't count against session and weekly token limits. That will change. Keep that fact in mind as you build automations, reminders, and the like. Users who ignore this reality may need to purchase extra tokens or upgrade their plans.

Feedback

What say you?

Dictation With a Twist

Want to dictate in one language but write in another?

Lispr is an advanced dictation app that just dropped this insane feature. (I was one of the first people to sign up for it.) Note that right now the only three real-time translation options are English, Spanish, and French. I'd be shocked if more don't arrive soon.

An Invitation to the Hot New AI App

I wrote recently about the Siri AI that Apple should have launched. If you'd like in on Instinct, click here. (First come, first served.)

DIY Software

Want to roll your own version of [insert name of app or program]? Go nuts with Reverse Engineer Anything that's currently terrifying Adobe's senior management. Every exec at every software vendor ought to be paying attention to this powerful GitHub.

Access Your Mac Anywhere

Want to dial in to your Mac via your iPhone, iPad, or another Mac? Go nuts with Screens 5 (paid) or go the open-source route with Sill. I tried the latter. It worked like a charm.

Feed Me

Finally, looking to score a deal on food while preventing it to go to waste? Check out the Too Good to Go app.

A Rant

Last week Apple dropped the HomePod mini v2. Better chip? Check. More expensive than its 2022 predecessor? Check.

A complete product? Crickets.

Evidently, it's acceptable these days to ship a product without a key feature: Siri AI.

Would I like a new home speaker–and a smart one, to boot? Sure, but I'll pass on Apple's latest product for now.

Remembering RJ Mitte

On a sad note, the actor best known for Breaking Bad died far too young last week at 34. Damn shame.

See you next week.

Feedback

Any tips for me?

Yesterday Notion announced a modified pricing scheme. Simple it is not. AI credits now fall into three buckets.

The company's post here explains the changes but lacks a proper visual. I fired up Claude and decided to create one. I know that my clients and I will benefit. Maybe you will as well.

From the post:

Simon Says

We'll see if Notion's claim ultimately holds true.

All prescriptive nonfiction titles should contain clear, professional visuals. The right charts, graphs, and tables don't just give readers' eyes a break from endless text blocks. They also prove that the authors have done their research. Think of them as credibility steroids.

My 2022 release Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace is no exception to this rule. One of many its figures compares two popular but contrasting software development methods: Waterfall and Agile.

Is this representation glamorous? Hell no, but it effectively serves its purpose.

AI Experiments

On a sleepy Tuesday afternoon, I asked the revamped Claude Design to create a visually pleasing infographic based on that table using my website's palette.

Five minutes later, voilà!

Note that Claude independently added the infographic's title and its one-sentence description. No prompts necessary. Ditto for the URL in the footer, although I can't copyright it.

Pro Tip: Limit Your Use of Cool Infographics

Claude's interpretation of my table works well, but only in the right contexts. Viewing online is one of them. For two reasons, though, I would never include it if I were writing Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace today. First, there's the aforementioned copyright issue. Second, the infographic's relative complexity would make presenting it in a 5.5" x 8.5" book challenging—and those numbers exclude margins. Brass tacks: most readers would struggle to digest it.

As always, remember your audience.

What about using it during a keynote or webinar?

Hard pass—largely for the same reasons. Speakers who present dense slides and tables often lose their audiences. (Case in point: the clueless presenter in this post.) Conference attendees are doing one of the following:

1. Listening to the person on stage.
2. Trying to absorb the content on the slide.
3. As is frequently the case, neither.

Foolish are the souls who believe audience members are concurrently reading and listening.

Simon Says

Design whatever you like using these newfangled tools, but remember your audience. Put simply:

AI doesn't change that simple heuristic one bit.

Not a day goes by that I don't noodle with artificial intelligence in some way. For example, last June, I used NotebookLM to generate two podcasts based on a chapter of Low-Code/No-Code. It also churned out a respectable book trailer based on its synopsis. The results impressed me, but AI is rapidly advancing, I wondered:

How much have AI multi-modal capabilities improved the last 16 months?

I decided to answer this question by giving a few new open-source video-creation tools a spin in Claude Code. Could they generate compelling book trailer for my latest effort, The Nine?

Let's find out.

Brag

I began with Brag. As expected, installing it was easy:

/plugin marketplace add latent-spaces/brag
/plugin install brag@brag

By way of background, I'm on Anthropic's Pro plan. To minimize the tokens required to create the trailer, I ultimately went with Brag's slim version. I then entered the following prompt in Claude Code:

Maybe a minute later, the following Brag/Claude offspring appeared on my computer:

The new Siri AI remains decidedly uneven at best. At worst, it is frustrating as hell. If I only had a nickel for every time I've seen or heard this message over the last three weeks.

Maybe Apple's is trying to boil the ocean with new Siri. A truly smart AI companion isn't impossible.

Exhibit A: Instinct.

Perhaps you've heard of it. The buzzy startup has raised funding at a $2.5 billion valuation. Instinct works inside your messaging app of choice.

I've been kicking its tires for the past week, and I'm very impressed. Instinct makes reservations and can also purchase items on its own. As you'll see below, it also monitors websites when corporations fail to provide their customers a rudimentary way to keep appraised of product updates.

Oh, Brother

Brother has yet to drop a proper macOS27 driver for my 12-year-old printer. As a result, I cannot print from apps. From the ancient company's remarkably user-unfriendly website:

Instead, I have to rely on a Band-Aid.

Why Brother doesn't let customers sign up for product updates absolutely mystifies me. After all, a simple button asking for an email address isn't a tough ask in 2026. Turns out that my first law of tech is alive and well.

Yeah, I can use Change Tower as a website monitor, but I wanted to try a new, AI-centric way. In the Apple Messages app, I asked Instinct keep an eye out on the Brother site for me:

As of now, Instinct is free—not that I expect that to last.

At least one new Safari feature compensates for the deficient Siri: Apple's browser lets create website alerts, as I've done below:

Simon Says

Will Apple will right the AI ship anytime soon? I'm skeptical. (How Siri AI launched in a state of eternal beta positively mystifies me.) Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that new CEO John Termus doesn't care much what others think.

I'm not holding my breath for a better Siri. Never again will I update to an Apple OS before its third iteration.

Postscript

True to form, on October 13, 2026, Instinct did something that Brother was unable or unwilling to do: it alerted me of the new driver. I can now print from any application I like.