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29 Mar 2016
Keyboard Maestro is one of my favourite Mac utilities. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife that includes not only a simple blade but also a scalpel, chainsaw, electron microscope and a suit of armour. If I can’t easily do something in another utility chances are there’s a way to use Keyboard Maestro to get the job done.
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22 Mar 2016
Club MacStories is a membership value add option provided by the rather popular MacStories.net web site. I’m a Club MacStories member and as such receive the weekly newsletter which contains lots of additional Apple related material and articles. In last week’s newsletter (issue 24) one of the user questions was around automatically attaching and detaching DMGs and whilst a partial solution was provided, the response also invited readers to round it out to complete the last part. I figured I’d give it a go and share what I came up with.
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29 Feb 2016
As regular readers of this site may know I’m a big fan of the Workflow application on iOS. It’s an application that allows you to build up sequences of actions to carry out some sort of automation. I use it for many little helpful things on the go and one of those is combining together images into a single collage image which is what I’m sharing today.
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17 Jan 2016
On 12 January 2016 Microsoft officially ended support for all remaining versions of its Internet Explorer browser prior to Internet Explorer 11. As a result Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for versions prior to Internet Explorer 11. This can potentially leave users vulnerable to yet to be discovered security vulnerabilities and as history bears out this is a very real risk.
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16 Jan 2016
Happy new year everyone. We’ve passed another year’s end so once again it’s time to take a look back at what’s been most popular on thoughtasylum.com in the past twelve months and what’s I’ve been up to.
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29 Dec 2015
Whilst I have knowledge of coding languages is reasonably broad my knowledge of spoken and written languages is rather limited. English is pretty much my only language though I can probably get away for asking directions or buy a coffee in a handful of others. It therefore isn’t really a surprise that from time to time I come across information that’s in a language I don’t understand well enough to translate it myself. When I’m at a laptop or desktop computer with an Internet connection I use an online translations service like Google Translate. Sometimes however I’m on an iOS device and whilst I can use such services I decided to put together a little Workflow app workflow to try and speed up the process.
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30 Nov 2015
In my work I regularly work with software that (unfortunately) has a dependence on Adobe Flash Player. There can be compatibility issues with particular version combinations and so occasionally I find myself needing to verify Flash player versions. Normally I’m able to do this by visiting any of a variety of web sites that can query the version number of Flash player. However I recently found myself in a position where I was remotely accessing a client machine, but it had no Internet provision meaning I couldn’t query it from any of the usual sites I use. Instead I employed a simple trick to work out the Flash player version.
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31 Oct 2015
A while back I refreshed and expanded upon my TextExpander snippet groups and promised to start covering some of the inner workings of what the snippets actually do. Today I found a bit of time to make a start on that and I’m beginning with some of the snippets related to underlining.
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12 Sep 2015
Today I was using one of my TextExpander snippets that utilises form fields to add some content to this site. I’m one of those people who still typically works in HTML when working with a content management system (sometimes it is the only way to get things how I want them) and when I was adding HTML content into one of the form fields I noticed that the double quotes for the attributes were being automatically being turned into smart quotes rather than staying as the nice simple dumb quotes I needed. It wasn’t something I’d noticed before and it was incredibly frustrating to correct after using the form field each time. After a bit of digging around in TextExpander preferences, etc. I finally found the rather simple solution.
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02 Sep 2015
I was recently having a discussion on Twitter about how to get into creating workflows for the amazing iOS app known simply as Workflow. It allows you to use Automator style actions to put together simple yet sophisticated sequences of actions to carry out an operation such as manipulating a photograph or sending a message out on social media channels. Unfortunately the problem currently is that the available resources can be difficult to find.
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