Workflow (iOS): Some Example Workflows for Dates

14 Jan 2015

Whilst experimenting and answering occasional Twitter questions relating to date manipulation in the iOS Workflow app I’ve created a few example workflows. These workflows are not intended to be stand alone workflows with a practical purpose, but simply as ways that the dates can be manipulated.

Date manipulation is a common requirement. You may need to extract elements of a date (e.g. the month) or rearrange to another format. You can use them for queries, web site links, file names and a myriad of other things. So getting an idea of how to do some manipulations in Workflow could potentially prove quite useful.

Workflow (iOS): A Workflow to Duplicate Workflows

11 Jan 2015

Late last year I was eagerly awaiting the release of a new iOS application that promised a new level of automation. Whilst I do like using Launch Center Pro, Drafts and Pythonista, Workflow promised something a little different and something that could complement these other tools nicely. I’m sure I’ll be sharing numerous workflows on this site as time goes by, but the first one I thought I’d share is one that you could say is a little bit meta. A workflow for duplicating workflows.

ThoughtAsylum 2014 Review

10 Jan 2015

It’s the new year so once again it’s time to review the past 12 months and see what’s been going on at thoughtasylum.com and with me.

TextExpander: List Browser Tabs

31 Dec 2014

Like many of us, the Internet is my go to place for immediate access information. It allows me to quickly research topics via my web browser, but for more involved topics it can be difficult for me to get enough detail in a single sitting, or I may need to pass on some details elsewhere (e.g. a reference list for a document/post/article). But when I have several tabs open (potentially across several windows) it can be a pain to manually list out the links and pages. To that end I created an AppleScript based TextExpander snippet to produce such a list.

TextExpander: Inline Calculation

30 Nov 2014

There are many options these days for carrying out ad hoc calculations. Personally I ditched the desktop calculator as soon as I got a personal computer for my day to day work - after all a computer is a very capable calculator. But that left me with various options of how to carry out a calculation. On the Mac there’s the calculator app and following in the steps of launchers like Alfred even Spotlight allows you to carry out quick calculations. If you have a browser open you could even tap into the calculation potential of engines such as Google search of Wolfram-Alpha. However in order to retain my clipboard and tap into something that allowed for some more complex calculations I created a TextExpander snippet to help with this.

TextExpander: Get Domain Information - WhoIs Record

29 Oct 2014

A little while back I spent a bit of time investigating some domain names for a project I was working on. As you may know, you can see all sorts of useful information about a domain by looking up it’s Who Is record. In order to save time I came up with a couple of TextExpander snippets to help with that.

Archiving Folders With 7ZIP

30 Sep 2014

Recently I was carrying out a bit of house keeping on my work laptop’s hard drive. I have a folder in Windows that contains daily folders of temp files and every so often I compress them and archive them off to free up some space. Usually it just takes me a few minutes to run through the folders and compress them into archive files. Unfortunately over the past year I’d not gotten around to doing it so I had rather a lot of folders to archive and I decided to quickly put together a little script to help me.

Why HCM Data Quality Matters

31 Aug 2014

There’s an acronym in computer science that holds true in many areas of business including that of HCM - GIGO. It stands for “Garbage In, Garbage Out” and refers to the fact that computers will process things literally and if you enter data that is no good you’ll end up with data that is no good. Even when you put an intelligent human in the mix and give them poor quality data you’re more than likely to end up with rubbish results.

How to Have More Effective Meetings

30 Aug 2014

Recently I spotted a number of people I’m connected with on LinkedIn and a number of people I follow on Twitter sharing an image about Tips for Running Effective Meetings. Since I’m always interested in ways to improve what I do I gave it a read through. I was surprised to find that as I read it through I found myself having an issue with almost every point given.

In this post I’m going to describe why I have issues with the suggestions and what I’d offer up as alternatives.

Read Batch File Script Info

29 Aug 2014

Recently I was updating a rather complex DOS batch file that we track the changes on. Each time we update it, we update a comment in the batch file for the version number. Since we sometimes get logs sent to us about the script’s operation I figured it would be useful to add the version number to the log file.