10 Jul 2021
Obsidian is my current personal knowledge management tool of choice. The primary reason for this is undoubtedly because it utilises plain text Markdown files, which gives me flexibility for the future, and access to easily process notes using any other text processing tool of choice. A second factor is the range of plugins available for the application. One of my absolute favourites is Templater, a plugin for templating within Obsidian, and I’m going to explain in this post one of the ways I use it to automate my use of Obsidian.
Read More03 Jul 2021
Zettelkasten has quite a buzz about it these days. It is a process popularised, and arguably pioneered by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. It is a powerful system, that in Luhmann’s view acted as a companion for him for in terms of being able to structure and manage the knowledge and insights he accumulated. With the rise of personal knowledge management systems (PKM) in the 2000’s, the methodology has taken on an almost mythical status. A panacea for all your knowledge needs. Why am I not making use of it then?
This is the question I’ve found myself pondering quite a lot over the last year or two. It is a proven approach for yielding some amazing results. It’s structured way of working is right up my street. Its makes sense that I would be all in on Zettelkasten. But I am not.
Read More27 Jun 2021
One of the new features in the new Apple beta OS releases that people seemed to have had some confusion about are Tab Groups. This is a way that users will be able to store sets of tabs for later loading. I have a brief theory I’d like to share about the use of this feature.
The consensus I have seen seems to be that this is just another way of bookmarking. Many people have noted that they don’t see a particular use for it as on the desktop Safari handles tabs and windows well enough that you can just have multiple windows open with different sets of work.
Read More26 Jun 2021
Last year I published a post about how I was using Keyboard Maestro along with a Python script that accesses titlecaseconverter.com to convert titles into a specified style. Unfortunately, I think there was a change at the site level that started causing issues for me either last year, or earlier this year. As a result I ended up taking the existing Python code, simplifying it for my own specific needs and tweaking it for the issue I was experiencing. In today’s post I’m going to quickly share the update.
Read More23 May 2021
Last week, Zalaris published the bi-annual set of articles reviewing the details of the upcoming SuccessFactors release. These updates are already in preview systems, and most customers I expect are busy examining the options that they might like to take advantage of and looking for ways in which they can optimise their use of SuccessFactors.
Read More22 May 2021
For me, 2021 has been a busy year to date. Shifting priorities meant that while I took stock of the Q1 updates in Cloud for Customer for Employee Central Service Centre, I never quite managed to get a full article ready for publishing. To that end, I will incorporate details of both the Q1 and Q2 Cloud for Customer updates into this article.
What can you look forward to then? Well, SAP has described its approach to service in 2021 as one of modernisation and innovation. One in which they are seeking to improve not only the end-to-end processes, but also the usability of the systems.
Let us look at how SAP has fared to date against these aspirations.
Read More21 May 2021
For anyone using a Mac for an extended period of time and looking for ways to do things better, the chances are that you will have come across the name Brett Terpstra. Brett is a creative guy who shares a lot of the things he makes that help make life on the Mac that bit easier. Something I am totally on board with, taking a similar approach myself across the platforms I deal with. A few days ago Brett updated one of his tools, and one that I use regularly. A tool called Search Link. I figured this might be a good time to publish a small Alfred workflow I have for working with Search Link.
Read More22 Apr 2021
Building on my recent spate of Alfred workflow posts, it’s time to share my most complex workflow to date, and it is for one of my favourite applications, Drafts. As you might know I do quite a lot with Drafts, and I’m really excited to share what I’ve come up with as a 1.0 workflow. It might be a bit more than you expect, and it is certainly far more than I had expected!
Read More23 Mar 2021
If you speak to anyone who more than dabbles in automation on macOS, Keyboard Maestro is almost certainly going to be a utility that gets mentioned. I’m certainly no stranger to the application and have been using it for over a decade to manage a large proportion of my Mac automations. But when you invest like that, you do tend to build up a large set of macros and having memorable ways to access them with short codes, hot keys, gestures, palettes, etc. can become a little overwhelming. I’m personally much better at remembering parts of the names and so searching an index of the available macros helps me with the ones I don’t have in regular circulation, and that’s what today’s Alfred workflow enables.
Read More22 Mar 2021
Recently I’ve been working on smartening up some of my personal workflows for Alfred, the launcher application for macOS. I’ve been a long time user of Alfred and while I created a popular workflow for working with Evernote back in it’s early days, I’ve not posted something about Alfred for the best part of a decade. This seems ridiculous to me given how often I use it and how embedded it is in so much of the way I work on my Mac.
The time is long overdue to put change that and I have several workflows to share in the not too distant future. Today, I’ll be starting off with one of my simpler workflows, but one that I use regularly. It is one to control the Mac app known as Amphetamine.
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