Thought Asylum

Clearly I need a new mobile web browser

2012-01-28T19:59:18Z

I use my iPhone for keeping up to date on a number of social media platforms. It's how I consume news and what's going on in my areas of interest. I've pretty much abandoned RSS feeds these days for the curated content of Twitter, and I now would find it had to operate as effectively without my nice ordered Twitter lists. The problem is the information I often require is in linked to articles and posts. This involves my Twitter client either using it's internal browser or spawning out into mobile Safari. Not too bad in the main, but some sites are poorly formatted for mobile browsing. Either I get a desktop experience crammed onto a tiny screen or a poorly styled (usually some odd Wordpress theme) mobile page that doesn't actually let me scroll the whole article onto the screen. Clearly what's needed is a better mobile web browser...

24 Hour Clock Calculations in Excel

2011-12-28T17:33:27Z

Recently I've been doing some work with Excel to carry out some time calculations based on the results of an automated job. The job is sometimes triggered one night and finishes in the early hours of the next morning. After loading the figures into Excel I discovered that time calculations aren't always as simple as subtraction when times cross midnight. A quick test later and I had a workable solution that I thought might be useful to share.

Automating Mail-ins to Evernote from GMail

2011-12-27T22:53:19Z

For some time now I've been hampered by Evernote's e-mail in service. Let me re-phrase that; I've been hampered by the limitations of e-mail in making the best use of Evernote's e-mail in service. Now however, I've found a service that lets me overcome the limitations and open up a wide range of opportunities for today and unimaginable ones for the future.

Set an Evernote template file (in ENEX format) to open in Evernote

2011-11-30T22:25:28Z

I recently had an e-mail about one of my posts on Evernote templates on Windows. I've previously recommended using an application launcher to provide a list of evernote imports, but the e-mail was asking if there was an easier way to import templates directly? Well as it happens there is.

The Ideal Twitter Client Top 10 Feature List

2011-10-05T08:15:33Z

Each day I access Twitter using a variety of platforms and whilst I find that the clients I use are workable, none of them quite matches up to my ideal. I thought I'd share my top 10 wants from a Twitter client … just in case someone knows of an existing Twitter client that meets these criteria or even wants to create a client that meets all of them.

TextExpander: Change Clipboard Case

2011-10-01T17:35:42Z

On Windows I have a useful function in one of my text editors that takes some text and converts the case - to upper case, lower case or sentence case. I realised that on the Mac I could use TextExpander to carry out these functions, so if you're a TextExpander user and want to have this functionality available to you, I've provided some details and a downloadable snippet group for you to use.

Using SED on Windows

2011-09-30T09:00:33Z

The other day I needed to trawl through a rather unappealing log file. Over 18,000 lines and over 12,000 occurrences of the word error. A quick scan of the log showed that the vast majority of these were more a warning than a significant error. However I knew the error I was looking for was in there somewhere. I decided that I needed to weed out the non-error lines before I even started to tackle this one. I remembered that the stream editor (SED) utility in UNIX was ideal for this sort of thing so I had a look to see how I could apply this in Windows.

Evernote Power Tool: Online ENML Editor

2011-09-29T12:42:10Z

Recently I was contacted by Stephan Heuel about a new online application he had created. I've written several posts about how you might want to use Evernote files saved to a local machine (or attached storage) as the basis for template notes. These have involved editing the note files in a text editor to produce various effects. Even changing the background colour of a note in Evernote. It was this post that inspired Stephan to think - what if you could edit them in-place, online…?

Sharing Textexpander Snippets

2011-08-20T22:05:57Z

TextExpander by Smile software is available for the Mac (OS X) and for iOS devices. It allows you to define snippets of text that can be inserted into another application (any on Mac, only compatible ones on iOS) by either selection from the TextExpander menu or by entering a user defined abbreviation. The application allows for some quite sophisticated macro and script based snippets to be built, and can save you a good deal of time and typing. Whilst many snippet might be quite personal (e.g. e-mail signatures), some snippets might be useful to lots of people and fortunately there are some easy ways to share them with others.

A Quick Tip for Researching iOS Apps

2011-08-08T09:00:21Z

A couple of weeks ago I was involved in researching some iOS applications for a potential business need to connect iPads and iPhones to some internal systems. Some third party apps existed that would allow the access, but as part of the comparison price was a consideration … only for every search I did on Google I got the US app store (and I'm not in the US).