09 Jan 2017
Working with data and configuration files is a part of my day job and this presents me with many opportunities to automate the things I need to do with them. Recently I had a need to check a large set of XML files to make sure there were no obvious errors in them and the approach I settled on was to integrate a command line tool into XYplorer - my Windows file manager of choice.
Read More06 Jan 2017
Another year ends and so it’s time to take my regular look back at what’s been particularly popular on thoughtasylum.com over this period and to also reflect on what I’ve been doing.
Read More19 Dec 2016
It’s the little things that really irritate me. I’ve just got one of those personalities I guess. I can’t help myself - if there’s an itch I always have to find a way to scratch it. One of these itches for me is copying and pasting text out of PDFs and getting unwanted line breaks in the resulting plain text. I decided to address this irritation with a little bit of text manipulation.
Read More04 Nov 2016
As part of my day job I work with lots of files and one of the common activities I need to carry out is to compare the contents of those files to find omissions and inconsistencies. Fortunately most of the files I need to compare are pure text based files (e.g. XML, XSL, LOG, TXT, INI) and there are plenty of tools available to help work with those files. To work with files in general on Windows I make use of the XYplorer file manager and fortunately for me it is pretty easy to integrate my comparison tool of choice into it.
Read More28 Oct 2016
A month or two ago I had a bit of a problem with Windows Explorer and Google Drive that was rather painful. I lost a day of work to putting right an issue that simply shouldn’t have occurred and to be honest I’m quite glad it happened to me and not one of my colleagues as I imagine that for many of them things would have ended a lot worse. It was at this point that I began looking at alternatives to Windows Explorer.
Read More01 Sep 2016
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post I have quite a few Workflow app workflows on my iOS devices. Like many other long time Workflow users I’m looking forward to having a better way to keep track of and structure my collection of Workflows. However unlike everyone else I don’t want folders…
Read More31 Aug 2016
I spend quite a bit of time experimenting with the Workflow App by the folks over at DeskConnect. It’s an iOS application that brings Mac automator-style automation into the palm of your hand. As a result of my experimentations I’ve built up quite a library of workflows and whilst I wait for some sort of structure for the workflows I’ve come up with a few little tricks, notations and workflows to help me keep things organised. I’m going to share one of those with you today.
Read More06 Jul 2016
Like many who blog I keep a list of topic ideas which I plan to blog about at some point. When I get some time to write I pick a topic that I like the look of and get some words thrashed out. I was surprised when I saw something in last week’s MacStories members’ newsletter that directly related to something rather niche I had on my list.
As I expect you’ve already guessed, this post is about that particular topic. It’s about getting text to and from the iOS app Drafts from Dropbox.
Read More30 Jun 2016
I love finding little shortcuts to help me get things done. Sometimes it’s through automation of processes I do occasionally and sometimes its through speeding up something smaller that I need to do frequently. In this post I want to share something that definitely falls into the latter category. Duplicating files in Windows Explorer.
Read More30 May 2016
The majority of configuration in Visualization Solutions by Nakisa (VSN) applications is achieved via the changing of settings in the AdminConsole, Nakisa’s standard administration interface. For a typical configuration this is all that you would require. Unfortunately all too often, typical is not what a client wants and so we have to look beyond the current capabilities of AdminConsole. There are other occasions too where perhaps it is a laborious or inefficient task to do a particular piece of configuration in AdminConsole compared to another method. In those situations I turn to configuring the underlying configuration files directly.
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