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28 Feb 2012
When I’m working on Windows one of the applications I really miss from the Mac is TextExpander. I’m not the world’s greatest typist and being able to auto correct words I commonly mistype (I can spell by the way - it’s just typing I have issues with) as well as being able to quickly enter common phrases (a.k.a. boiler plate text) is a real boon for me. Fortunately I came upon AutoHotKey - a fantastic free utility that is capable of creating these text based replacements. I’ve been using it for a while now and it occurred to me I haven’t actually shared any of the things I do with it. That’s about to change.
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27 Jan 2012
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.
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28 Dec 2011
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.
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27 Dec 2011
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.
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30 Nov 2011
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.
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05 Oct 2011
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.
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01 Oct 2011
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.
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30 Sep 2011
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.
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29 Sep 2011
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?
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20 Aug 2011
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.
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