05 Apr 2016
I haven’t posted about Workflow for a little while, but it remains one of my favourite applications on iOS and I’m still actively creating and revising workflows. In fact I’m currently clocking in at 176 workflows on my devices. Today I thought I’d clear up the dry spell on Workflow related posts and put something together around one of my text manipulation workflows. This particular one manipulates the character case of text on the device clipboard.
Read More04 Apr 2016
In my last post I described a method for tagging temporary TextExpander snippets with a date stamp and using some scripting to automatically remove expired snippets. In that post I mentioned that I use Keyboard Maestro to schedule the expired snippets clean-up script and that I also used it to help me in setting up those temporary snippets. In this post I’m going to provide some details on exactly how I’m using Keyboard Maestro to help with this.
Read More03 Apr 2016
Any Mac user interested in things such as automation and productivity will no doubt have come across TextExpander, Smile Software’s utility that allows you to instantly replace a string of text with a different string of text. This can be used to auto correct typographic errors, insert boiler plate chunks of text or even trigger scripts or fill-in forms that can return more dynamic sets of text. Like so many others who start using it I now find it indispensable.
Read More29 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.
Read More22 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.
Read More29 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.
Read More17 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.
Read More16 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.
Read More29 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.
Read More30 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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