404 - Page Not Found

I have an issue with Short.io. I want to contact their support to find a solution to something that partially works, but no contact information is available in the /Support section. The /Blog section shows a small “Contact Us” button leading to a page not found error. There is no mail address either. They ask for $ 250 / year for a “Personal” subscription plan. How can I trust them if I cannot contact them for support?1🤔

The problem: not all links are leading to the destination page under the go.numericcitizen.me domain name. Why? This used to work for all links, but it’s no longer true. Why? Exhibit one: this link works. This one won’t.

Instead of 404 - Page Not Found, this should be 404 - Support Not Available 😔

Update: I got my answer after chatting with tech support through their chatbox on their website, which wasn’t initially showing because of content blocking in Safari. 🤦🏻‍♂️ All is fine now.

  1. Their Twitter account is a ghost town; the last tweet was posted in 2021. ↩︎

A Definitive Solution to a Simple Problem

I finally found the right setup to definitively fix my audio record quality. The problem triggering this endless trial-and-error journey is that the Blue Yeti microphone can be too sensitive and pick up too much background noise1. On paper, the macOS Voice Isolation recording should fix this. However, ScreenFlow 10.0.9 has issues with audio recording from a USB microphone while Voice Isolation is active2.

The solution? Use Audio Highjack3 to record from the USB microphone with Voice Isolation active and output to the ScreenFlow audio capture driver. When recording, I start the Audio Hijack session, then switch to ScreenFlow and hit record. Voilà. I do use Adobe Podcast Audio Enhancer too. The results are quite good! You can hear it in my latest podcast episode. A screenshot of my Audio Hijack workflow is included so you can look at it4.

  1. People in the house don’t always pay attention when I’m recording my stuff. We could hear them quite easily. ↩︎

  2. The sound is highly distorted. It’s a known issue, apparently. ↩︎

  3. Audio Hijack is a superb piece of software if you ask me. ↩︎

  4. More tiles are included so I can make sure there are no lingering background noises after Voice Isolation makes its magic. ↩︎

I’m getting an issue with Short.io where domain name cloaking is no longer available. It used to be just fine. Something has changed recently. To get it back, I have to subscribe to the personal plan costing 250$. Looking for alternatives. Cc @Mtt who uses the same setup as mine.

Discovery of the day: I can use Audio Hijack with ScreenFlow to record the Mac audio from the Finch Pixel USB-C1,2 mic and the Mac screen. Why use Audio Hijack? Well, so that it can use the macOS Voice Isolation feature and output the results to the Mac audio, which the special audio driver of ScreenFlow, in turn, picks up. Without this, ScreenFlow 10.0.9, with direct voice isolation, creates distorted sound.

  1. With the Lightning version, I had no issues with the iPhone 13 Pro, macOS Voice Isolation and Screenflow. The problems come from using USB (A or C) microphone devices. It’s a known issue, apparently—no fix in sight. ↩︎

  2. I spent way too much time and money trying to fix the sound quality for my recordings. ↩︎

hey, bloggers and writers on WordPress1, enable the Fediverse plugin and share your blog “handle” with the world so we can follow you right from here! Can’t wait!

  1. I left WordPress.com a while back, but I’m happy to see them adopt Fediverse! ↩︎

Sometimes, a website doesn’t work well (or at all), and the problem is that my NextDNS client blocks some traffic. When that happens, I turn it off… and forget about it, only to find out a few days later that I forgot to reenable it. This makes me angry—all the time.