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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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08 Aug 2011
A couple of weeks ago I was involved in researching some iOS applications for a potential business need to connect iPads and iPhones to some internal systems. Some third party apps existed that would allow the access, but as part of the comparison price was a consideration only for every search I did on Google I got the US app store (and I’m not in the US).
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07 Aug 2011
One of the big advantages of using an Android phone is the open nature of the platform and as a result of this you can change the default keyboard on your device to be something other than the standard Android keyboard on one bundled by a hardware manufacturer or reseller (e.g. cell company). One of the options out there is Swype which is a keyboard option where instead of tapping away at keys you can swipe your finger between them and the keyboard will take a guess at what you were aiming to type. It’s nice and fast and currently my preferred keyboard option for my HTC Desire Android phone. The problem is it doesn’t always work as expected.
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08 Jul 2011
At the time of writing, this new version of Alfred really is hot off the keyboard. It may be by the time you’re reading this post that the new features are on general release, but if not I grabbed my copy of Alfred 0.9.9 dev 1 build from the dev download page. The feature you’re going to need available is that of importing an extension in order to use this Evernote Search.
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30 Jun 2011
I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing in Microsoft Word 2007 recently and each document I’ve produced needs to be saved as a PDF. Fortunately this version of Word offers a nice plugin feature to do just that. However it’s several clicks to do and I wanted to see if I could make it any quicker.
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12 Jun 2011
Evernote is my ubiquitous deposit spot for the overflow from my brain and everyday (unlike my brain) it grows in size. Being able to access the information held in Evernote in as easy a manner as possible is a key part of the way I work and I recently wrote a little script to make it that little bit better. The script allows me to search Evernote from Alfred (a keyboard driven app launcher on my Mac) which is always just a hot key away.
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31 May 2011
Have you ever created a service in OS X using Automator only to realise later on that you need to rename the service to something more meaningful? There’s no services manager application to do this for you, but there is still a relatively easy way to do this.
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22 May 2011
Like 99% of the planet I hate junk email (a.k.a. spam). In the past I had to give up on one e-mail account as I received almost 1,000 junk e-mails per day. I’m very protective of my e-mail address and I refuse to put it out on the Internet. I’d like to recount a tale of woe and PDFs and an experiment I’m about to undertake in obfuscating e-mail addresses.
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