One of the first commands I learned to use on a PC was the tree command in DOS. This was a command that let me see what files and subdirectories were present in a particular directory in a structured, visual way. The tree-like nature coming from the way folders were represented as branches and files as leaves on that branch. At the time, it was just a fun and useful way to visualise the files on the PC. However, I still find myself wanting to represent file and folder structures in documentation that I write and information that I provide to others. Sometimes this isn’t even on a PC, but rather on my Mac. Fortunately, there’s a way to reproduce this functionality, and furthermore, I can have it right at my fingertips thanks to the power of Keyboard Maestro.

With the increasing availability of assistive AI, many people have turned to AI frameworks and harnesses (Hermes Agent, Claude Cowork, etc.) to help them achieve day-to-day goals. In many cases the AI has been directed to carry out those tasks that people want to hand-off. That is good, but is it the right thing to do? Is AI actually the ideal solution, or is it something to help you create that solution?

Lately I have found myself dealing with more and more terminal sessions on my Mac. These were not just sessions where I had specific areas of work open. These were long running processes. Local website servers. Local LLM servers. Processes to serve dashboards and apps. While gathering them into multiple tabs on one Terminal window helped, I would end up on that window when I didn’t need to be. I began having trouble finding the right tab, and even came close more than once to killing processes that I wanted to keep running.

This was quickly becoming a problem rather than simply an occasional inconvenience. I looked for a solution, but did not find anything that quite matched my need. This then became an opportunity to build something to help me manage these sessions, and so the idea for Sentinel began to emerge.

I have come to realise that the biggest limitation of my local digital assistant is not its capability but my imagination. When situations arise where I know AI can help, it is usually obvious whether my local assistant is up to the task. There are certainly times when chatting with a frontier model through an existing subscription is going to be vastly more effective than anything I can run locally on my Mac. Even so, a relatively modest model integrated into a local assistant still has enormous potential — potential I was sure I was leaving untapped.

My solution is to have my digital assistant generate ideas of how it could help me. In this post, I’ll be talking about my Opportunity Engine.

I create lots of automations to help me work more effectively on my Mac. One of the things I like to build into these automations is audible feedback to tell me when certain steps, phases, or overall completions occur. Rather than visual feedback, I tend to use audible cues. On macOS there are only a few standard audio files to choose from. And I like to have some variety so that I can actually associate an audible event with a particular activity, but I am always running out of good short sounds to use for those cues, so I decided to create something that would give me more options.

While having a do anything and everything digital assistant is one approach, we all know that it’s team work that generally delivers the best results on projects. Well, when you have a good team to rely on that is. That was one of the points I took when starting to build out my digital assistant. Rather than just one do-everything assistant, I wanted to build up a team of AI specialists to support my digital assistant needs.

In my previous post about my private digital assistant, I explained the challenges I encountered and how I ended up at Hermes Agent as my choice of framework. The next step on my journey was to give my digital assistant a brain. This process was happening in parallel and was intrinsically linked into every stage of what I discussed previously. It was painful, but I did find what seems to be a reasonable baseline.

Over the last three or four months I have been on a bit of a quest. I have been looking for a private digital assistant. Not another chatbot or the latest frontier model, but something I could run on my own machine. Something that would genuinely support me whilst keeping my data under my control.

It has been a busy time with work and other commitments, but I managed to carve out an hour here and fifteen minutes there to explore some of the more exciting developments in AI. I think I have finally found what I was looking for.

It is not some amazing secret project. Far from it. However, getting to this point involved a surprising amount of experimentation, frustration, and the occasional dead end. In this series I intend to share the challenges, discoveries, successes, and inevitable setbacks that I have encountered, in the hope that my experiences and insights might help some of you avoid the same rabbit holes.

In the past I have employed numerous solutions to capture a link to a web page into another app. I think that in every case I was focused on working in that other app and pulling in a link to the current page, or perhaps a set of links for all open pages. This works fine for most of my use cases, but recently I encountered one where what I actually wanted was to stay in the browser and send the links to the other app rather than pulling links in from that app. That avoids constantly switching back and forth and pulling them in or leaving lots of browser tabs open. To that end I quickly put together something to let me quickly send a link to a web page into my favourite capture app, Drafts.

We have long been able to trigger processes on remote computers. It is what the World Wide Web is built on for example, and how we login to hugely powerful physical and now virtual devices, to carry out operations. We can also do the same with macOS. I’ve done it in so many ways in the past for my personal setup. Using Hazel and Dropbox to trigger commands via file sync, using browser bookmarks and Keyboard Maestro remote triggers, using remote screen sharing apps like Screens, and even via a home network VPN and connecting at the command line.

Those are all still options, but in this post I am going to set out a way that I think is easy to set up and use, such that you will be able to trigger any number of things on your Mac right from your iPhone (or iPad).

If you write online, the chances are, you have heard of Markdown, the syntax created by John Gruber as a simplified way of marking up plain text with simple formatting that can then be processed to other formats, such as HTML. The premise is based around maintaining simplicity and portability of content. Once the domain of bloggers “in-the-know”, Markdown has become much more commonplace and is supported to some extent by many online systems that accept content. Not just content management systems, but also generic forms, case management tools, e-mail clients, and even many desktop applications too. It is almost a lingua franca for simple text formatting.

I have been writing in Markdown for about 20 years now and I have definitely developed my own quirks and nuances in how I use it. Usually these are compatible with tools, but occasionally I get caught out in some tools by things like a lack of spacing. As such I had never subscribed to beautification or formatting tools because of the prescriptive nature they often employed. However, I have now been converted. Well, kind of.

It is spring and so the time to do some spring cleaning. Inspired by some recent amendments to Conductor, my Alfred workflow for Keyboard Maestro, I decided to tidy up some of my macros and macro groups. As part of that, I realigned some of my macro groups to my current conventions, and in this post, I’m going to share a few details about my approach.

In September last year I passed my UK foundation exam for amateur radio exam and became a licensed amateur radio operator. After attending the RSGB conference, I also walked away with my first high frequency transceiver and a couple of of antennas. A 40m end fed half wave (EFHW), and a portable multi-band vertical. Due to external factors I didn’t get much time to experiment with these before the weather got cold and precluded longer set up and take down times. Given I had purchased both antenna to be used portable and set up away from home, I decided it would be worth getting a permanent set up for my home office to make getting on the air quicker and easier.

For the last few years I have had a partially written Alfred workflow that I was finally able to finish and am now in a position to share thanks to a change that came in with macOS 26, Tahoe. It has something that has been technically possible for much longer, but not in a way that allowed enough flexibility for me to be happy with the path it would have had to have taken. But things have changed and now I can share a workflow for setting your focus mode.

Just a quick post today about a useful little command line script I created. The script takes an image file and converts it into a format designed for seamless embedding within a web page.

Since moving away from Evernote, DEVONthink has been my go to solution for storing my reference materials. Everything from manuals and papers to bills and diagrams. Effectively anything I am not actively maintaining but need a copy of ends up in one of my DEVONthink databases. Recently I have been capturing lots of PDF materials for my amateur radio database, but I have found it is not always as easy as I would like to get my content into the database.

Usually I open DEVONthink and then drag them in via the DEVONthink Sorter I have in my menu bar. It works, but I find the database inbox I want has often been collapsed, or it is cumbersome because I have several databases open and available for dropping into, or even I do not have the database I want open.

I figured that there must be a better way.

I am a big proponent of the Elgato Stream Deck, and I love the dynamic nature of the keys and having them switch based on the in focus app or to match the needs of a particular piece of work. However I am not a fan of the mobile app, or more specifically the mobile app model. In this post I will explain why I am not a fan, about some alternatives I have been using for some time, including Alfred’s Remote app as a phone app based option.

I have not written about XYplorer for a long time, but it remains one of my favourite Windows apps, and I do still wish I had as powerful visual file manager on macOS. In this post I’m going to share a little about some simple techniques that I use to allow me to effectively create workspaces within XYplorer that I can quickly switch between and give me access to the files, folders, and tools I might need for an area I want to work on.

In my last post I wrote about using Piper to convert test to speech on the Mac and my helper utility, for Piper, Pan. In this post I am going to explain the main reason I had to want to do this, and it is all based around creating a personal audio feed.

With large language models (LLM) dominating the technology space in recent years, multi-modal input, and speech to text transformations have come on leaps and bounds to the point where large swathes of text can be converted relatively accurately and very quickly from content with an audio component. But, did you realise that speech synthesis has also come a long way. There are again AI models that will throw text into cloud-scale engines and output some amazing realistic sounding results. Whereas access to Whisper models for local transcription is relatively common, text-to-speech (TTS) is a less common need and a less common requirement - which I find a little strange as I consume probably as much content via audio and video each day as by what I read.

In this post I am going to walk through how I am converting text to speech on my Mac using a tool called Piper.

With the introduction of the Integrated Learning Experience (ILX) user interface for SuccessFactors Learning, SAP introduced a new option called custom cards. These custom cards allow administrators to create bespoke elements on the home page that users can select to link out or display information in a pop-over window. Curiously, one of the link options is for a JavaScript URL and the documentation offers no details or examples. Even on SAP call for the ILX, this was glossed over when customers asked about it. This feature had my attention from the start, and I actually implemented a few instances of this in the ILX setup for my employer.

In this post I am going to explain the details of what I did and of how you do the same.

Ever since I purchased my Elgato Stream Deck I have wanted to have a go at creating a plugin for it. It provides a convenient one button press access to some of my most used automations, and it reconfigures itself to the application I am using. It is an absolute delight, and now it is making ample use of a plugin I created.

Recently in my day job I have been leading on an effort to resolve some performance issues in an online system. After completing various tests, we have traced the issues to being specifically around the overheads for processing files after upload. The performance issues only occurring when a large batch of files are loaded at once - at which point the amount of time to process each file becomes noticeable.

In determining this, a couple of people asked me how I got my hands on such precisely sized test files. I had created a script to do it, and I ended up sharing it with them. Based on this, the chances are there are others out there who might find it useful too, so that’s what I am doing in this post.

I have been using the “new” version of Outlook since it was released. It certainly isn’t “new” any longer. Given the technology base Microsoft has adopted for it, it is unsurprising that it looks the same everywhere, and it has come a long way from the first release. There are still plenty of things about it that feel rough to me (copy and paste calendar entries anyone?) but something that has just bitten me a few too many times recently is the convenience of being able to use the CTRL and ENTER keyboard shortcut to send a mail, yet for it not to be possible to disable that. Having hit the keyboard combo accidentally twice in the last couple of weeks and sent partial e-mails I decided it was time to take action.

Last year I did a little exercise in my day job to address something that has bugged me for years. In the SuccessFactors Learning system, there is an administrator only part of the system which provides a centralised location to all the configuration and details one might need for configuring and running a Learning Management System (LMS). When the administrator logs onto the system however they are confronted, by default, with an image of a fairground carousel. To date no one has been able to give me the slightest indication as to what this pertains to in relation to the system, learning management, learning in general, or even just SuccessFactors It just feels like a random choice. As part of addressing a related issue I shared some details within the SuccessFactors Learning special interest group, and I was asked if I could provide a few more details as to the setup I applied. It was more than I could reasonably include in a forum post, and so I offered to write up a more detailed post - this post.

Back when I was at university reading for my MSc. I was working with some data files on Windows and I reached the point where Windows’ notepad application simply reached the point where it couldn’t cope with the size of the data files I was throwing at it. By today’s standards, they would be trivially small, but back then, not so much. To address this, I grabbed a CD from a computing magazine that contained over 100 free utilities, and found a text editor called NoteTab, and it was able to not only open and edit my files with ease, but it had lots of fantastic features I went on to make use of in my personal projects and professional work. It had its own scripting language (very odd, but very useful, and Drafts reminds me a lot of its basic setup - though not the language), a pre-cursor to wikis with its outline file format (which I used for my first PKM solution back in the 1990s), and a feature which monitored the clipboard and automatically added any text copied to it to a running pasteboard file open in the editor.

While I had NoteTab running on my Mac at one point (using CrossOver), I have not done so for a long time, and I decided recently to rebuild the functionality, but using Keyboard Maestro.

I recently updated from an Intel MacBook Pro to a Mac Studio as my main Mac, and I switched around a lot of my desktop set up as I would no longer need to keep switching in and out my work laptop running Windows, with my MacBook Pro. Part of this involved bypassing my USB 3.0 dock into which I is what I have my Jabra speakerphone plugged into. I hadn’t given it much thought and as a result my Mac Studio was using its own internal speaker which is good for a beep, but not much else.

I could set up my Jabra to connect to the Mac Studio over Bluetooth, but I figured it might be better to grab a HomePod Mini and use that instead. It didn’t have an AUX connection, but it had AirPlay and I figured that would be fine. The reality was unfortunately a little different.

I have been a long time user of iTerm, but when the AI powered Warp terminal app came onto the scene I tried it out and ended up mostly switching over to it. My terminal skills are okay, but I don’t spend my working day in the terminal, so a bit of help with syntax comes in handy, and that’s where it adds value. I had still continued using iTerm for some pre-sets I could launch and run (like a local version of this website), and I still ended up using Terminal in my Alfred set up because I had not seen a way to use Warp instead. Finally, I got my act together and came up with what feels like a good solution.

Over the course of last year I saw several mentions on social media and other online posts about Obsidian, the personal knowledge management application, not being able to lock posts. I had an idea about this at the time and finally got around to picking it off my to do list. In this post I’m going to outline something that I believe is at least a workable partial solution for this.

Last year we finished the conversion of our garage into a small office, and I guess it must be the time of year, but recently there were a number of occasions I was being washed out in video calls. I looked more like the mask from the Scream movies than a human being. Closing the blinds helped, but then unless I put the full room lights on, it just wasn’t light enough. While I do have a (cheap) ring light encircling my web cam, I do find that a little harsh at the best of times, even on its lowest setting. I decided therefore it was time to invest in a new light for my desk to help with this.

After a bit of research on lighting options and pricing things up, I settled on the Logitech Litra Glow light. It did what I needed, is relatively flattering, not blinding, and not so expensive to make my wallet run for cover. It was great except that the button for it on the back and I kept nudging it around and it was a bit weird and obvious when I was doing it live on a call (after forgetting to turn it on before joining). That and the Logitech software to control it was not something I really wanted to install on my Mac and was never going to be permitted on my work PC.

Fortunately, I was able to piece together a solution that got around all of this and works really well for my setup. In this post, I’m going to walk through the setup.

In my previous role I used to deliver a fair number of workshops, extended planning sessions, etc. These would often run for a day or more, and so having regular breaks was a key consideration in keeping everyone fresh, alert, and engaged. However, I did find that many customers treated the breaks as more of a rough guide than a set period. Even when stating we would start on time, inevitably key people would be missing from the room and we would be forced to wait otherwise we would waste time repeating things to get them up to speed when they did resurface. Eventually, I began using a set of slides that conveyed a sense of urgency for me, and seemed to have a better psychological effect. They were in effect a countdown timer, but something that involved a few additional visuals.

In my day job, I work on a near daily basis with SAP SuccessFactors Learning, a learning management system (LMS) which while utilising a web-based administrative user interface also boasts some flat-file like configuration. This configuration appears in the localised labelling functionality. Is suspect the data is held in a database when in use, but like many admins and consultants, I do tend to just copy and paste the content into a text editor to work with it, utilising all the text management tools this affords. At the end I can then copy and paste it back in. This also gives me the option for adding some version controlled backups as I also have colleagues who are at liberty to work with these settings. The ultimate responsibility lies with another external team, but I’m a be prepared kind of guy.

The one thing I have been missing though is some nicer formatting. The configuration is very similar to an ini or properties file, but with a few differences. A few weeks ago I finally decided to see if I could put together a little definition of my own to style the file in Visual Studio Code.

My previous post on some useful file renaming in Finder, Forklift, and Path Finder gave me a mental nudge to write up and share with you all some automations for getting some content into files from Safari. More specifically ways to generate links and snapshots of web pages and store them away in the current folder. This time however, rather than using Shortcuts, the tool of choice is Keyboard Maestro.

On Windows, I use the amazingly functional file manager XYplorer, and I have various scripts that allow me to work with files in a variety of ways that just make it one of my most productive tools on the PC. I would love to have something as functional on macOS, but instead I end up using tools outside of my file management apps (I actually use Finder, Path Finder, and Forklift in different circumstances as each has their particular strengths) to enhance them. One of the things I created some XYplorer scripting for over on Windows was converting to and from spaces in file names. I like spaces in file names, but sometimes downloads come with spaces replaced by other characters, and sometimes uploads or system configurations don’t like spaces.

While it is less frequent outside of the day job, I do still get these challenges in my personal computing, and so I came up with a semi-smart Apple Shortcuts-based automation to do some file renaming for me.

Earlier this year we finished converting our garage into a home office. As part of this effort we replaced all of the electrics. For the lighting I asked the electrician to install Zigbee compatible spot lighting (I don’t have a lot of head space, so small recessed lighting was essential). The bulbs he installed were dimmable, but the switch he installed was a simple Zigbee on/off switch. After discovering this and having had a clear couple of conversations on the requirements I decided to replace the switch for a dimmable one. My first attempt went nowhere, the switch simply either functioning as a simple on/off or not at all (the instructions for that one were absolute garbage), but my second choice of switch succeeded and gave us a Zigbee light switch that allowed us to dim the lights. But I hit a problem. Home Assistant didn’t support it and so I embarked on an exercise to get it working.

In May 2024 I was a returning guest on the Automators podcast, a show on the Relay network that looked at the use of consumer technologies to automate tasks. On the show I announced the release of a project I had been working on for over a year that related to the podcast - an Obsidian vault of content for the podcast.

In October 2024, an announcement was made that the podcast was ending, and a week ago the final episode was released.

In this post I will outline my plans for the vault as the ending of the podcast does change how I plan to manage things a little bit.

Having recently converted our garage into a home office, I have been able to indulge in a few additional, but small, home automation projects. One of these is something to let my family know when I or my wife are not to be disturbed. This is only when we are on important calls, recording podcasts, videos, etc. To facilitate this I found it was useful to create a little “On Air” set up based on a few LEDs I could display on the window next to the office door. In this post I will go through how I used Home Assistant, ESPHome and a couple of little modules to quickly create this.

I was posting a reply to a forum post about Moom (the macOS Window Manager by Many Tricks) this morning and was about to make a reference about using it with Bunch (the automation tool by Brett Terpstra). As I was composing the reply I realised I was using a small modification to the standard set up that I don’t think I’d shared before; and so I figured I’d share it out in a quick post.

For those of you who follow along with my posts and creations, you will no doubt have noted that I have created more than a few workflows for Alfred, the launcher app for the Mac. In fact the number continues to creep up. I don’t particularly consider myself a fanatical user of Alfred, but I find it an efficient trigger for so much of what I do and I simply centralise a lot of my automations to be triggered through it. Earlier this year I started pulling together a few bits and pieces into an Alfred workflow that helped me use Alfred and build workflows. I’ve expanded and tidied it up a little and filled filled in some gaps for things I wanted to do, and in this post I’m going to explain a little bit more about this new workflow.

One of my favourite free tools on the command line is Pandoc. Whenever you need to convert a text-focused file from one format to another, Pandoc more often than not has you covered. Have command line tools to let you do conversions like this lets you build transformative workflows as well as conveniently just change from one format to another on the fly.

I am also a big user of Obsidian, the Markdown-based personal knowledge management app. While there is an Obsidian plugin for Pandoc that works well on the Mac, I found it didn’t work as well on Windows for me, and I also had issues because you can’t sync its settings and have it set up for multiple operating systems.

This resulted in me putting together a specific set-up for my Windows set-ups that I can sync and extend as I like, and utilises a portable set up of Pandoc; and that’s what I’m covering in this post.

As you may know, I am active in a little corner of the technology community through a few appearances on podcasts on the Relay network, my regular contributions to discussions on the Automators podcast forum, and my relatively recent release of the Automators Podcast Obsidian Vault. This past weekend, I travelled down to London to join in the celebrations of 10 years of Relay, and in this post I’m going to share a bit of what I got up to.

I have had a busy few months finishing off a project, but I finally found some time to take a look at a relatively new utility by Brett Terpstra to use with his Marked 2 application. Marked 2 is a powerful Markdown preview application and the new utility introduced a new flexible framework for custom processors and pre-processors. I had already being using a simple custom pre-processor, but this gave me a nice way to branch out from that, and in this post I’m going to walk through a use case for using Marked 2, and this new utility, with one of my favourite applications, Drafts.

As you may be aware, I’m a daily user of the note taking and management application, Obsidian. It is an incredibly useful tool that lets me build my own vaults of information that I can then easily cross reference and search. It has become my personal wiki tool of choice. My use of Obsidian runs a wide gamut across personal and professional aspects of my life, and I can often be found in deep focus working on any number of notes. But times are that sometimes I want to quickly add something to another note. Typically this might be to add an activity log entry to a daily note, but it could also be to add an idea to a running note, or the name of a TV show to watch.

I have found myself skipping in and out of notes and disrupting my flow of work. I decided that I should come up with a solution that allowed me to add entries to other notes from any note, and that is what I’m going to cover in this post.

Where I live we have three types of waste collection. One week we get our refuse collected and the next week we get our recycling collected. For about eight or nine months of the year we also get garden waste collected along with the recycling. I have linked up my Home Assistant instance so that every week, the night before collection I get a notification on my mobile phone as to what is being collected the next day. It has worked great, but I often found myself having to open the Home Assistant app on my phone and find what the collection was going to be ahead of time. As a result I decided I would like to have some sort of visual indicator in my kitchen to let me know what collection was due next. In this post I am going to set out my little journey and what I ended up with.

All of my jobs have involved me communicating information to people during presentations, and during the last decade I have regularly found myself building out non-linear slide decks in Microsoft PowerPoint. These are slide decks that bring together multiple sets of small ‘micro’ presentations on a very narrow and specific topic. I can then use the slide deck to cover any of these topics in any order via a ‘switch board’ slide that simply lets me jump out to these presentations in any order I choose.

I have found this type of deck invaluable for workshops, training sessions, and ad hoc meetings. Being able to jump around seamlessly makes things easier for me and looks slick and professional too. In this post I am going to set out my approach in setting up this sort of slide deck.

This past month I attended my first conference of the year. It was actually a forum of several hundred people, but I have a couple of other similar events coming up. A two day exhibition at the London Expo this coming month and an SAP HR event in May. At this first event all of the non-networking events were taking place in a single large room and I just captured everything on my phone and my work laptop. The next events however are going to be bigger venues with multiple locations for sessions, and even though my laptop is pretty light I’d like to travel lighter still. Dumping the laptop, spare USB-C battery pack & cable and replacing them with my iPad and a keyboard (but keeping my iPhone) would be better.

To that end I set about coming up with a new workflow for capturing information at conferences.

Recently, while working on a new Alfred workflow, I found myself once again wishing that Alfred workflows supported subroutines or functions. Something that would give me better reuse of chunks of my workflow so I could keep things as a single source. For the most part I rely on using a single script for this kind of work, but sometimes a script alone isn’t the best way to do it, rather multiple workflow steps would provide a better result. After thinking it through and tinkering, I came up with a solution that worked and I have since put into practice. A kind of pseudo-function approach if you will.

This post is, in a sense, a natural follow up to my Path-based Commands in Obsidian post from around this time last year. In that post I demonstrated how you could trigger command line tools from within Obsidian using the Templater plugin. In this post I’m flipping that around, and rather than going external, I am focusing on the internal. The text within an Obsidian note. However, rather than adding new content, I am going to tell you a little about how I am also using Templater to convert existing content, transforming it in a variety of ways to effectively build my own text processing functionality within Obsidian.

Do you ever find yourself needing to visit web pages that are no longer available? I seem to go through phases of this, and being able to reference back to an archived copy is very useful. There are a number of services and approaches where you can archive your own copies of web pages, but that does not help when it is a site you never visited before and so did not have a chance to archive a copy for your own use.

Enter the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine”, and I have a little Keyboard Maestro macro to make it a little easier to use of it.

A few months ago I wrote a post about my tiny Home Assistant powered desk clock, and in that I mentioned that while it would be possible to have little notifications pop up on it, I actually had a separate set up for that. In this post I am going to cover the details of my set up for this additional display, including the details of how to configure both the device and Home Assistant aspects, and also setting out some use cases.

Recently I was exporting some web pages in PDF format. It was a simple enough task, and I was making use of the PDF option in the macOS standard print dialog window. The thing was I kept generating them, dragging them off into Dropzone (a shelf app with a plugin architecture for processing files) while I sorted and gathered, and then I dragged each off where it needed to go; a variety of folders and e-mails. Really what I would have liked to do was to simplify that middle step of saving the PDF somewhere and then dragging it into Dropzone for easy access. I had a bit of time to work on something today, and so I created a little workflow to just reduce that friction a little bit.

There is a wonderfully powerful utility app on the app called TextSoap that has been around on the Mac long before I ever really started using Macs. Its premise is simple - it cleans up text; but its power is huge. The app is really approachable and allows non-programmers to build sophisticated processes for not just “cleaning” text up, but for transforming it in any number of ways. If you aren’t a Unix nerd who was sed tattooed on their left knuckles, awk on their right and has either vi or emacs emblazoned on their chest, then TextSoap might be the text processing utility for you.

For small, frequent jobs, I will be honest and say I usually just default to the built-in functions of my text editors (or Drafts), or a bit of regular expression manipulation. But for the more involved multi-step things, I turn to TextSoap, and in this post I’m going to share a tip for using lists in TextSoap.

I’ve been using an Apple Watch for several years now, and currently own a series 4. I’m not big into tracking my fitness, or hiking the back woods, but I do benefit from being able to get key notifications on my wrist and from being able to capture thoughts and notes on the go. Earlier this year, or maybe late last year, my watch succumbed to what looks to be a surprisingly common issue whereby the watch runs out of space. Not because I have hundreds of apps or thousands of songs, but because of an excessive amount of utilisation of storage space by content my iPhone Watch app classifies simply as “other”. While I fixed that previously, it happened again and the fix was a different one, so in this post I’m going to cover what I’ve done so that anyone else lost down this ‘other storage’ blind alley might find their way out a little bit quicker than I did.

Like many people, my day job involves a PC. A PC that is relatively locked down in terms of what I can and cannot do to it. One of the things I miss from having more access is the option to set the clock in the Windows Taskbar to show the time including seconds - a registry setting can enable this. This may sound odd, but given 30 seconds I can nip out of my home office and grab a cold drink for example; I find knowing where in a minute I am when I am due in a call to be really useful as I detest being late.

This situation was recently compounded by a problem I’ve been having with my system clock slipping out of time. I can correct it at the BIOS, but my NTP access for automatically setting appears to be linked to another issue my laptop has been experiencing. The solution is simple - I just needed a little physical clock for my desk I could pop next to my Taskbar. I could not find any that I liked, so I decided it would be a nice little project to create one and maybe add a few features.

I recently moved into a new house and have finally been able to begin looking more seriously at my home automation options. I have invested some time and resources into using Home Assistant as my underlying automation control platform. I had run it several years ago and had given up on it due to a lack of stability, but these days it is a much more reliable and capable product.

In my experimentation to date, I found I had a bit of friction in testing my automations, and so I set to work on finding something to help make things easier. The result was something I have subsequently found to be massively convenient.

Whether I’m at home, or travelling, I often find I want to access my home-based Mac Mini from my Macbook Pro. I have several options at my disposal for doing this, and when I want to access the graphical user interface, then I want to be able to use all my usual tools. One of these is the launcher utility, Alfred.

By default, if I were to have Alfred configured the same across my devices, then it would be very difficult to know which device Alfred should trigger on, and it would default to my local device. For a good while, I used different triggers on different devices but I found it a little frustrating to have to switch up what was effectively muscle memory depending upon the device I was using.

In the end, I came up with a little automation to help me with this.

Writing blog posts is something that I generally struggle to make time to do. I have always got several parallel activities on the go and writing everything down takes time and slow down progress. Things also come up and disrupt the flow, providing further challenges. I feel writing blog posts is useful as it allows me to share thoughts and solutions that others can then build on and utilise for their own needs, but I don’t have a way to set a structured regular time to do this, so it is an ad hoc activity. This frequently results in me starting writing up a post to be published on one day, but it getting delayed. Because my blog posts and assets utilise the publish date, this can lead to a bit of remedial work to line things up again prior to publishing.

After doing this manually a few times, I created an automation to allow me to quickly shift posts and assets to a new publish date. In this post I am going to outline how I do this to give you some ideas of how you might accomplish something similar with your own similar scenarios.

Drafts, by AgileTortoise, is my ubiquitous note app. I use it for capturing ideas, drafting content, shopping lists, general note taking, and more besides. The content is often temporary, but when it isn’t, the content gets reflowed off into files (such as in one of my Obsidian vaults), social media posts, e-mails, or some other channel. Last year I also began using another note app - Tot by the IconFactory.

Tot has a very different view of notes. It is a much simpler app and is opinionated in how complex it can get. But, what it gave me on the Mac was a free menu bar app that I could keep snippets on for short periods.

In real world terms, I think of Drafts as my ubiquitous pocket notebook, and Tot as the pad of last few sticky notes on my desk. There is undoubtedly overlap, and I am sure I could make Drafts provide near identical functionality to Tot. However, having a distinction between them works for me, and having Tot as a separate app to fulfil a niche requirement in my workflows has stuck.

The only friction that occurred is where I wanted to transfer information between the two apps. But I’ve been able to smooth that over and I’m going to explain how in the remainder of this post.

An online forum is a great place to ask questions and generally seek advice on what you want to do with technology. I spend a bit of time each day catching up on the latest discussions across maybe a half dozen or so technical fora. On some of them I am a heavy contributor, and on others I generally lurk, just gleaning insights and keeping up with the latest conversations. Having been involved with technical forums for the past thirty years or so I’ve seen plenty of good and bad practices, and in this post I am going to share five tips on what I think are valuable and practical considerations for posting queries to technical forums.

I was listening to a recent Automators podcast episode on hardware launchers when a device was mentioned that caught my interest. The Xencelabs Quick Keys Remote. Currently I utilise an Elgato Stream Deck at my desk and my Macbook Pro’s touch bar when I’m on the go to trigger various automations I have put together. While I also utilise keyboard shortcuts, conflict palettes in Keyboard Maestro, and of course various Alfred keyword triggered workflows, having single touch buttons that carry out named functions as I switch between apps helps reduce that cognitive load of trying to keep track of all the possible keyboard shortcuts I might wish to employ.

The reason it caught my attention was that I know at some point I will update to an Apple Silicon Mac and have to say goodbye to my touch bar. While I do have a carry case for my Stream Deck, it is bulky, and after reviewing the Quick Keys Remote, I figured it might just be something that would work as my portable solution. However, enabling it for my use involved being a little creative.

Last year I wrote several posts about using Hookmark (neé Hook) to link to automation documentation. At the time I was a little frustrated in that I had several complex Alfred workflows that I was unable to use Hookmark for to link back and forth between the workflow and the associated notes. However, Vitor of Running with Crayons replied recently to my feature request on the Alfred forums, and with the latest Alfred beta (v5.1 build 2130), I now have a working solution.

Since I began using Jekyll as the static site generator for my web sites, I have been hosting locally while I modify structural changes and write the content prior to publishing. Serving the sites locally involves me running terminal sessions that run the web server. Unless I am actively working on something where I need to check what the web server is doing, I always wanted it to be out of the way, ideally tucked under some icon on the Mac’s menu bar. A menu bar terminal app kind of felt like what I was after.

Recently I was reading a post that made reference to “bitbar” an application that allowed you to put text and menu items into your menu bar based on a script. I’d come across this and similar apps many times before, but never had a reason to use them. Until now that is, as I realised I might just be able to create my own solution for my out of sight, but still accessible local web server management.

In many of my posts I share solutions to technical challenges I have come across. In this post there is certainly an element of that, but it is building on some earlier work and is perhaps more about sharing a real view of what I use day to day, as a way of providing a bit of insight or inspiration into how you may be able to employ something similar. Specifically, in this post I am going to share some details of my “general” meeting template in Obsidian. Oh, and that’s “general meeting” template as in a generic template for a general, run of the mill, ad hoc meeting, not a general meeting as in governance (e.g. AGM, EGM).

With a relatively recent update around views in the beta of Readwise’s Reader service beta, I am now getting deeper into its use and building it into my various workflows in an aim to help me better manage and process the various feeds of information I have coming in. The Reader service includes an option to accept input via e-mail for newsletters, etc. While I plan to set up a number of e-mail redirect rules in my personal Gmail account to push some newsletters into the service, I also have a backlog of newsletters I want to pick from and pass them to Reader.

I didn’t want to blanket forward sets at this point and drown my Reader feeds, so I decided I wanted to redirect on a per e-mail basis. Fortunately, I use Mailmate as my Mac e-mail client of choice, and I ended up scripting something I think provides an easy way of adding this sort of functionality for yourself.

While Drafts is my ever present information capture app, Obsidian is the destination for a large amount of that information as I build the content into cross-referenced, meaningful notes. Much like Drafts, Obsidian has a framework through which people can develop plug in solutions (literally “plugins” - core and community), which in many ways mimics Drafts’ actions.

While some of my own work on Drafts actions has yielded libraries and reusable actions that others can build into workflows, the nature of some of the amazing plugins in Obsidian takes things further and uses plugins to open portals to allow you to interact directly with the underlying Obsidian API. As a result you can build some quite useful commands without having to build your own plugin.

In this post I am going to share the construction of some simple ‘path-based’ command examples to illustrate how you can take advantage of this.

Last summer I created a Drafts action for a user to allow them to mark some text in IA writer’s Markdown syntax for a highlight. Now my solution was not the first solution offered, but it was a little different to the others, and I have been meaning to write it up for quite some time now to go into a bit more detail about how it works and the benefits it provides over other, existing solutions.

A few days ago I published a post about a change to how I am managing my daily tasks in Obsidian. Within that post I included a bit about how I am pulling that task list through into my dashboard canvas, and this threw up a bit of interest on Mastodon with a few people asking how I had produced a timeline on my dashboard. While I provided a few pointers at the time, I promised to go through in more detail what I have in place, and that is what I will be doing in this post.

My use of Obsidian as a personal knowledge management (PKM) tool sees me making extensive use of daily notes. Each day I work, I create a new note and use it to keep an activity journal of all the key things I have done, link out to notes for meetings I have attended, things I have learned, etc. I also display my key tasks (for today and a soon as possible) and record any of the key tasks I have completed that day.

I have always taken to cutting and pasting to transfer incomplete tasks to transfer them forward to the next daily note. But after having tried out Roam Research a few years ago and working with their task management approach, I have always felt that my method was inefficient; but as with many things Obsidian, I found a better way utilising a third-party plugin.

Practically, since Apple made Shortcuts available on the Mac, Drafts has supported executing Drafts and processing the return. To do this, Drafts passes control to Shortcuts, bringing it to the foreground, and then switches back to Drafts at the end. This feels suspiciously like an x-callback-url call of a shortcut.

While x-callback-url is a very useful option, on the Mac, we have more options and control over how we interact with other automation applications, and in this post I’ll outline an alternative that allows you to run a shortcut in the background.

Yesterday I posted some details around using Shortcuts to send a new note to Obsidian. Today, I’m going to look at a different and also popular capture option for Obsidian; using one of my favourite applications, Drafts.

Something I have seen come up time and again is the use of Apple Shortcuts to create content inside of an Obsidian vault. Since it seems to be something that so frequently comes up, I thought I’d try my hand at explaining a couple of techniques that can be used, and what the pros and cons are around these methods.

Computer systems have been managing data for us since their inception, and these days we have sophisticated systems that do so at an incredible rate and with accuracy far exceeding human standards. Many organisations stop at the out-of-the-box functionality of their systems, and make assumptions about what is and what is not possible. We are here to tell you that through the application of automation techniques even more is possible, and this is no less true for the domains of HR and payroll than for any other. In fact many HR and payroll processes are highly automatable.

The primary reason that HR and payroll departments do not explore this is because they do not full understand what investing in automation solution could deliver. In this article we are going to take at why it is worth exploring automation for HR and Payroll.

I have been using Obsidian as my personal knowledge management app of choice now for a few years, and recently I have been modifying one of my note vaults to a new indexing system. However, I stumbled across an interesting search issue with the indexing that required a bit of investigation to resolve.

My efforts to link together my documentation and automation took a little jump forward recently with a new beta of the code library utility called SnippetsLab. A small update to the user interface has enabled me to construct a basic integration with Hookmark (the app formerly known as Hook). In this post I am going to explain a bit more about this.

You may have heard of Doctor Drafts. It is my Alfred workflow for working with the app Drafts on the Mac. It has proven hugely popular, and I continue to expand and enhance the workflow as time permits. But, Doctor Drafts is already quite expansive, and more capable than people realise. While I’ve expounded in the past on how it is designed so that others can build their own custom workflows on top of Doctor Drafts, most people don’t realise that this extends beyond Alfred too. In this post, I am going to walk through how you can leverage Doctor Drafts functionality in your own scripts.

There was a recent discussion on the Drafts Slack group (used mainly by beta testers), about action editing and I shared a little trick I use for creating action templates that give me a quick start. In this post I’m going to outline the approach that will hopefully also save you time on creating new actions.

Like many computer users, I work with text a lot, and I am thankful every day for the first person who came up with the idea of copy and paste. I cannot even begin to think about how my computing life would be without this wonderful addition. But, even the clipboard can be improved, and there are clipboard manager apps that let you supercharge your workflow, giving you access to your clipboard history. With these powerful tools at my fingertips, I still found a niggle, so I fixed it with a little Keyboard Maestro macro.

Tags are commonplace in computer systems these days. They are a way to assign a piece of meta data to something that allows them to be associated with one another and usually to be searched for and filtered with. They are powerful, and in fact typically more powerful than a traditional folder structure. Tags are a brilliant concept and I use them in numerous places. However, it may be a little surprising to discover that I don’t really use them all that much in my personal knowledge management system application of choice - Obsidian. Let me explain why.

As organisations grow, reliably managing HR enquiries at scale becomes more pressing. That is where SAP’s Employee Central Service Centre solution for SuccessFactors comes into play. It allows HR to provide a single hub through which to provide support to colleagues and through which HR can track queries and activities to ensure they are dealt with in a timely and professional manner.

The solution is component-based, and as well as some general SuccessFactors infrastructure, it relies specifically on Employee Central and the SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) system’s service functionality. As a result, the solution benefits from quarterly updates for Cloud for Customer and bi-annual SuccessFactors updates. In this post, I will look at how the updates to Cloud for Customer in Q1 and Q2 2022 and the Employee Central Service Centre specific updates to Employee Central come together for the 1H 2022 SuccessFactors update.

I am fortunate enough to have a couple of Mac computers. An old Mac mini functions as an always on Mac carrying out tasks on demand and on a schedule, whereas my slightly newer Macbook Pro is the machine I use directly. But, I have Keyboard Maestro installed on both machines, and I needed to be able to determine which machine a macro was running on in some cases, as in some cases it should not run at all. This was particularly the case with scheduled macros. In this post I am going to share a couple of macros I am using for this.

Better Touch Tool now includes (beta) support for the Elgato Stream Deck, and I’ve been investigating how I can make good use of this functionality. During my experimentation, I came across something rather curious about trying to work with my notes app of choice, Obsidian. Menu automation appeared to be a stumbling block - at least at first.

Today’s post is a quick one about something I find quite useful when working in Drafts on my Mac. It relates to hyperlinks and the feature of Drafts known as link mode that allows you to make links clickable at the expense of making the content non-editable. I found it frustrating to keep switching back and forth to access a link, but with the help of a small Keyboard Maestro macro, I was able to speed this up.

Earlier this week I wrote about how I was using Hook and Obsidian to support my documentation of automations. In this post I will aim to explain how I am using this set up to help me access documentation for my Apple Shortcuts automations.

In my post yesterday, I described how I was using Obsidian and Hook to help me support my documentation of automations. Today, I am going to share something that helps me work with documenting Keyboard Maestro macros.

For anyone who follows me on this blog or anywhere else, you are probably familiar with the fact that I enjoy automating things. Having my devices do things for me. This has numerous benefits including saving me time and effort in the future, reducing the opportunity for human error, teaching me new skills, etc. But the fact is, when you start building up a large toolbox of automations it can be hard to keep track of the details. Some automations lend themselves to inline documentation, but what if you want to do something more?

In this post I am going to describe some of my set up around documenting automations using two tools on the Mac - Hook and Obsidian.

This is the third and final post in my introductory series for the Pimoroni Badger 2040. So far, I have talked a little about getting things set up so you can easily work with and find out about the Badger 2040, and about the physical additions I have made to turn my Badger 2040 into a functional eInk badge. In this post I am going to cover the programmable side of this eInk badge, and what (simple) revisions I have made in order to turn this into a badge suitable for my own purposes.

I recently wrote about getting set up for working with a Pimoroni Badger 2040, a small piece of hardware that functions as a programmable eInk badge. The basic unit is the electronics, but in order to make it a functional badge for my own purposes, I found there were a few additions required. In this second post in my introductory series of posts for the Badger 2040 I am going to briefly set out what other physical elements have been added.

As soon as I had attended my first external work event and been issued a cheap paper badge, I began wondering why conference organisers were not using digital badges using eInk technology. I figured it was probably because people would “accidentally” leave the conference with them and they would be more expensive than the cheap paper print out in a plastic wallet on a lanyard. But, within a few years, eInk badges began to appear, and I felt things were catching up. Roll on a few years and I began attending public and private business-related events where people were not issued badges. Again I wondered why people were not issued badges, beyond the occasional sticky label that leaves a not so delightful slightly sticky patch on your business attire?

It was around this time, almost a decade ago, I began dipping in and occasionally looking around for an eInk badge option of my own. I often saw ones available from Chinese marketplaces, but they were typically vaguely specified, only available in bulk and thus expensive for an individual to experiment with.

Then several weeks ago I spied something new that looked ideal. I purchased a Pimoroni Badger 2040.

Last year I released Conductor, my Alfred workflow for working with Keyboard Maestro. It allowed you to launch Keyboard Maestro macros, get information about them, open them for editing, and even the run them with a preset delay. In this new release I’ve taken things a little further and I’m going to provide a brief overview in this post.

Last year I wrote a post about automation with Templater for Obsidian. I showed some examples of using Obsidian’s Templater plugin to do some automation a little bit beyond what you might typically consider as the basics. One of the things in one of the examples bugged me for quite a while, and in this post I’m going to go through how I improved things for creating a link to a new page, and the correctly filed new page at the same time.

I write a lot of things in a plain text format known as Markdown. It provides a set of standardised ways to mark up text for processing into other formats (such as HTML), whereby formatting and other rich content elements are applied. I write all of my blog posts in this format, and also posts for other sites where I publish and contribute. One of these sites is Buy Me a Coffee (BMAC), a site where you can donate to my coffee fund if you like the stuff I do. It is also where I post each month to let everyone know what I have been up to. It regularly surprises me just how much content and support to other Internet denizens I’ve actually provided during the course of a month!

Over the course of the month I jot down notes in Drafts, and then in the following month I write these up, in Markdown ready for posting. Unfortunately, BMAC does not support Markdown, but it does support rich text.

Anyone who has been following my efforts over the last few months may have noted that I have occasionally made reference to migrating from Evernote to DEVONthink. As part of that move I have been taking the opportunity to sort out some of my lax filing. One of those aspects is the naming of files and specifically the inclusion of date stamps where relevant - e.g. on bills, documentation releases, etc. Fortunately I was able to bring a little bit of automation to bear on this activity, which has been helping speed things up significantly.

In my day job, I work on Windows, and XYplorer is my file manager of choice due to it’s configurability and extensibility through scripting. One of my most used extensions is one which will move the last downloaded file to the directory in the currently focused XYplorer pane. I have written about a very similar XYplorer script in the past that works in the same way, but rather than the last download, it grabs a copy of the last screenshot I took.

Recently I realised I was missing this functionality over on my Mac, and so I decided to redress the imbalance through a little scripting.

Yesterday, I was catching up on some reading and I came across something rather exciting - The Ubiquitous Linking Manifesto. This might first sound like something written for a rather out there UK political party, but it is a set of logical recommendations for something that is becoming ever more important in a world so dependent upon digital information and action.

With the public release of macOS Monterey, I have been trying out a few ways of interacting with Shortcuts from a number of automation tools. Shortcuts can be triggered on macOS using AppleScript or shell script, both of which are relatively easy to do with the Swiss Army knife of Mac automation, Keyboard Maestro. However, I thought it would be fun to create a convenience plugin to make it even easier to integrate Keyboard Maestro with Shortcuts.

A few weeks ago I released version 1 of an Alfred workflow called Bypass. I created it to help use Apple’s Shortcuts app on the Mac. I have been continuing to expand the functionality, and have now released v1.1 with many new features.

One of the areas I spent a bit of time working on was a way to make Shortcuts easier to use with the Elgato Stream Deck, and in this post I’m going to walk through how Bypass now supports setting up Shortcuts on the Stream Deck.

Last year I decided to spruce up my home office for Christmas a little bit, by using an LED light strip around the cupboard door that sits behind my desk. Rather than just using an off the shelf solution, I used a couple of BBC Micro:Bits (aka BBC MicroBit), to control the lighting effects and to provide a remote control. In this post I’m going to cover how I did this.

When I am writing blog posts for this web site, I frequently need to take screenshots on my Mac and put them into the relevant assets directory to enable them to be included in my post. While I had a way of doing this that was relatively quick and easy, I found that I always needed to subsequently rename the screenshot to something meaningful and in a format that conformed to my naming standards. I recently addressed this by developing my workflow a little and creating something new in the process.

Over the past year or two, transclusion is a topic that has come up several times in the Drafts forum, particularly in the context of other apps for personal knowledge management (PKM), such as Obsidian, Roam Research and Logseq to name just a few. In this post I’m going to talk a little about what transclusion is and how you can include some of the functionality in Drafts.

With the seasons changing again, it is time to take another look at the developments in SAP SuccessFactors. In this post, I am taking my regular dive into what is new with one of SAP’s less well known SuccessFactors solutions, Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC).

For those who are unfamiliar with ECSC, it is an HR service desk solution. It provides a back-office system to allow HR service agents to process and manage tickets raised by employees. Employees can submit tickets by telephone, e-mail, text chat or via a web portal. The solution is built on SuccessFactors Employee Central for the employee information and the service functionality of SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) for ticket processing. An SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) application known as Ask HR provides the employee web portal.

In this release, we will look at the usual updates in C4C and Ask HR that affect ECSC users, but I am also going to take a slight diversion to discuss the direction of SAP’s development of C4C that will no doubt have an impact as to how ECSC will develop.

Earlier this year, Drafts version 26 was released with support for custom syntaxes and themes. Syntaxes are used within the Drafts editor to specify the look and in-app behaviours of the content. Themes are used within the Drafts editor to specify how the editor interface is displayed. The two work closely together.

For example you may have a syntax for lists where the syntax is configured to allow you to toggle a single character check mark at the end of a line. The theme could then specify what colour a checked line is and what colour an unchecked line is.

I have been experimenting in a bit more depth with this functionality over the last couple of months, and I want to share a little tip I have been using in speeding up my theme development process.

I recently updated my Macbook Pro to macOS Monterey, and with it I got access to running Shortcuts on the Mac. Being a long time power user of Shortcuts, all the way back to the first release of Workflow, it was quite exciting to get my hands on the app. I’ve been enjoying experimenting with it, but I decided I needed to improve the accessibility. Enter one of my favourite Mac apps, Alfred.

Mermaid is a popular web-based diagramming tool that allows you to generate a variety of visualisations based on sets of text instructions that tell Mermaid how to generate the diagram. I’ve been using it for a little while to generate relatively simple flow diagrams that I need to build out iteratively or require regular updates. This is because once I have the structure in place it is often much quicker for me to add an instruction to change such a diagram than it is for me to rework a diagram in a visual editor.

I recently used some Mermaid generated diagrams in a post on this site, and I’m going to share a tip for a challenge I encountered.

Obsidian is a popular tool for managing notes in Markdown format. It is cross-platform, uses files direct from a file system location, and has some rather useful features, including a range of plugins created by the developers and the wider community. In this post I am going to walk you through how I have used some of the community plugins to give me better control over a feature known as workspaces.

Recently I was working on an update to an Alfred workflow, and at triggering the workflow from another application. Alfred supports AppleScript, but I was curious to note that it didn’t seem to support triggering workflows with its URL scheme (alfred://); or at least I couldn’t find any documentation to say that a workflow could be triggered this way. Not everything can work with AppleScript directly, but hyperlinks are far more commonplace. To that end, I came up with the idea of using Keyboard Maestro to bridge the gap.

The personal knowledge management application Obsidian has a built in templating system that allows you to insert boiler plate text into an Obsidian note. While it is entirely functional, the Obsidian community is full of talented developers, and through its plugin architecture, a templating plugin surfaced that provided considerably more functionality than the core plugin. I recently posted about one of the more advanced uses for this plugin, and was contacted by one of my readers to note that I had not actually explained how to use templating. In this post, I’m going to attempt to address that omission.

During 2020/2021, the world has seen significant changes in how we have lived our lives. Most of us have spent a lot more time indoors. Many of us have also spent a lot more time away from friends, family, and colleagues. On the whole, we have been leading a more isolated existence.

Organisations have been supporting employees in these situations through remote working practices and collaborative technologies. There has been a pronounced increase in video calls, replacing face-to-face meetings and even many telephone calls. Chats over messenger solutions have replaced water cooler and cross-desk conversations. Thrust into a new world of remote work, somehow, everyone just about managed to keep up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

After my appearance on the Automators podcast, there was a pleasant boost in interest in the ThoughtAsylum Action Group Suite for Drafts. One of the things that came out of this was people wanting to have a way for the underlying ThoughtAsylum Drafts Library (TADpoLe) to be automatically updated. In this post I’m going to talk about the solution I’ve come up with and the approach taken.

Towards the end of 2020 I was caught by surprise and asked to appear as a guest on one of my favourite podcasts; Automators from Relay.fm. As the name implies, this is a podcast about automation, and is very much based around end-user personal automation rather than larger business and enterprise automations. Having never been on a podcast before, I took the plunge and accepted.

This is a brief post that addresses an obstacle I find myself coming across quite frequently when I’m working with images on my Mac. While I use several image manipulation apps for various purposes and levels of work, Pixelmator Pro is my daily driver. One thing I find overly complex however is getting a clipboard image into the app as a new image. There’s just a couple two many manual navigation bits that in many other apps is a simple key press. But there’s a simple solution.

I’ve been a long time user of Markdown and have found it a convenient format in which to capture notes and documentation day to day. Utilising Markdown opens up a wealth of options for me in terms of capturing and processing content. I’ve been using Obsidian for a while as a repository for notes and I’ve been expanding my use into some new vaults recently, but as a cross-platform user I’ve been limited in my ability to easily capture thoughts when away from my desk. Until now. Now I have a solution that allows me to easily capture using Drafts.

Late last year, I got involved in a discussion on the Drafts forum about resolving an issue with a Bear action that was a little outdated, and more recently in an ongoing thread about importing content from Bear into Drafts. Through looking at these, my interest was piqued and I decided to have a look at adding some Bear integration into the ThoughtAsylum Library for Drafts , TADpoLe.

As a passionate user of the Drafts app by AgileTortoise, I usually spend at least some time each day on the Drafts forums catching up on the latest news and discussions, and helping other users with their queries where I can. Sometimes that help requires a few iterations of questions, tests and reviews. At times people can struggle as to what it is they are looking for. Recently I gave some consideration as to what I could do to speed up the process and help people provide pertinent information faster.

I am an avid creator of Shortcuts on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices, and also of Elgato’s Stream Deck hardware that provides me with additional dynamic trigger buttons to use on both my personal Mac and my work PC. I personally make use of a lot of text-based identifiers for content on my Stream Deck, but in other areas I revert to meaningful pictograms. I posted earlier this year about a number of repositories that would give you over 3,800 icons for use with your Stream Deck. But I’ve moved on a little from that.

I would like to explain how I am now generating icons using Apple’s Shortcuts app, that I can then use with my Stream Deck, Shortcuts (on device home pages), or in fact, any other place I would like to use a set of icons. From the variety of icon glyphs available, and the colour combinations, it works out as a possible 478,507 Billion icons, though admittedly not every colour combination would work. Still I think there must be several billion options that would, which is likely to cover many user’s day-to-day needs.

As you may already know, the Drafts app by AgileTortoise is a highly flexible application, and through it’s actions functionality, it effectively provides a framework through which to create customisable operations such as those you might find with plug-ins on desktop only applications.

One of the features of the actions is that you can tie them to particular keyboard shortcut combinations. But what isn’t quite so easy is the auditing of those keyboard shortcuts, and a number of people on the Drafts forums voiced their desire to have something to do this. To that end, I created a way to do this.

How? By using an action of course!

For the past week, Zalaris has been publishing its usual series of articles to cover the upcoming SuccessFactors release. The updates are already in preview systems and are set for release into production systems over the weekend of 20 November 2020.

As 2020 closes out, SAP brings a final instalment of SuccessFactors updates, and Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) carries with it, numerous tweaks and more than a few new features. In this article, I will guide you through changes for service agents, administrators, and employees, as well as a few additional areas of interest.

I will also highlight a few things we can expect to see in 2021 and perhaps even suggest a few things I would like to see next year.

It’s really rewarding when people get some benefit from the things that I’ve shared. It is even better when they choose to share that on through their own channels. I’ve noticed over the past month or so that my ThoughtAsylum Action Suite for Drafts has been garnering a bit of coverage recently on some podcasts which was a nice surprise when you happen to be listening along and hear something you created given a positive mention and review.

I’ve collated the episodes and rough timings for anyone interested in listening to them.

I’ve been a long time Evernote user and while the application and services have certainly seen a lot of issues arising in the last decade, I still rely on it for some of my workflows. One of these is my daily journal, and this is a topic I have written about several times before. I recently had a bit of a change to this, and it is time for another quick write-up.

Back in July of this year (2020), I released the first version of the TADpoLe library for Mac app Drafts, and with it the ThoughtAsylum action group. It was the culmination of very slowly taking two years of action creation and bundling it up for others to make use of. Only two months later and things have had to undergo what has been a pretty significant change.

XYplorer is one of my favourite Windows apps and it has been a little while since I’ve shared anything about how I’m using it. So, when I added a new script this week that uses 7-Zip I thought I’d draft a quick post about it along with a related script also using 7-Zip.

SuccessFactors may be on bi-annual releases, but SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) continues apace on its quarterly-release cycle. Since Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC), the SuccessFactors solution for running an HR service desk uses this system as its service back-end system. It means that ECSC users continue to receive updates every quarter. In this release, SAP is releasing several home page-related updates, which may be an indicator of things to come given how under-utilised this area of C4C has been in the past. Along with this, there are ticket processing updates, some features to please the administrators, and of course, some additions around reporting and analytics.

When developing JavaScript for drafts, logging to the console or using well-placed alerts and other visual indicators can be useful for what is going on, but a more advanced logging solution can make things much easier. The latest update to the ThoughtAsylum Drafts Library includes a new class that provides functionality to help Drafts action creators with their testing.

I’ve recently been working on a new project (more on that soon I hope), where I have been titling content. My use of consistent styling for titling of various blog posts and the like has probably been less than consistent, so I figure that this was a good opportunity to have a got at turning that around. The Chicago Manual of Style choice of titling rules seemed pretty good and so I’ve gone with that, but consistency is key and ease of use is required, so here’s a little Mac automation using Keyboard Maestro that sorts it all out for me.

When I’m creating Drafts actions and testing them out, I quite often need test data to work with. Rather than creating test data each time, I figured I should sort out some standard test data. While I could certainly have used a tool like TextExpander, which Drafts notably supports natively on i*OS, I decided instead to roll it into some actions, and in this post I’m going to explain a little bit about that and how you can make use of them too.

While I definitely tested the update mechanism for the ThoughtAsylum Drafts Library, somehow between testing and release a small change crept in that has resulted in at least one user (probably more) not being able to easily refresh the library, which is part of the ThoughtAsylum Action Group set-up. Fixes are already in place in the library and the action group. Users having issues should update the action group to the latest version from the action directory and run the usual update and refresh action.

Should that not work, please download and run this action which will force an update of the settings JSON file and directly download the library file to the expected library file name, regardless of what is specified in the settings. It utilises the embedded TADpoLe library in the TAD-Library action, so it is necessary to have a version of the ThoughtAsylum Action Group available.

Drafts has a hugely powerful area known as action. Actions are made available through action entries in the action list that can be displayed down one side of the user interface. Actions can also be displayed via an action bar, effectively a toolbar of actions, and can of course be triggered by shortcuts. Yesterday I described an option I referred to as slash commands that could be used to trigger actions, and today I’m going to show how you can in effect overload one action to give you a choice of several.

Slash commands are something that I think rose to prominence through the Slack collaboration platform. They are a way of invoking commands by entering a forward slash character followed by a string of text into. Effectively a quick entry method. I figured this could be useful for me in Drafts, and so wrote something to do it.

The Drafts application is an amazing tool for capturing and working with text. One of its greatest strengths comes from its extensibility through its actions system. And certainly one of the most powerful action steps is the Script action step which allows you to program actions in JavaScript utilising much of the core iOS JavaScript engine and interfaces into the Drafts app itself.

I have a few things that I do to make it easier for me to work with JavaScript in Drafts, and I’m going to share some of them in this post.

With the introduction of the TADpoLe library, I’m able to share an action via the ThoughtAsylum Drafts action group that I think a lot of people who write for the web may find useful. It’s a special web preview action that incorporates a number of features that I think make it pretty special. Welcome to my explanation of the “Exploded Markdown Preview”.

I’ve been a user of the Drafts app for many years, and while I have written some posts and regularly try to help people out on the Drafts forum, I’m quite excited to be sharing the first of a couple of bigger Drafts related projects I’ve been working on. In fact this one has effectively been years in the making, and is finally in a form where I think it is fit for sharing; though time will tell as to how true that really is. One can never truly tell until that first step is taken. Today, I’m releasing something called “TADpoLe”.

A few months back I posted some instructions on the Automators podcast forums that I thought it would be worth re-posting here as it seems there are quite a few people out there who would like to utilise Shortcuts to control their computers from the command line. Which of course is an admirable endeavour.

Back in November last year, I finally made the switch away from SquareSpace to Jekyll and Github Pages. One of the changes for the worse that I highlighted in that was the lack of scheduling of posts. SquareSpace’s functionality enabled me to create posts in advance to be published at some point in the future. This allowed me a hands-off way to create content in advance that could be automatically spread over a period of time. It was the number one thing that I missed, and I said at the time that it was something I hoped to return to.

In this post I’m going to cover the solution I’m using to schedule posts.

SAP have begun a new phasing for their 2020 releases by moving to a biannual release. Unfortunately, much like everything else, the COVID-19 global pandemic has put a little bit of a kink in the plans. In an attempt to accommodate customers who were hit hardest by the pandemic, SAP has extended the systems preview phase of the release by three weeks to give organisations more time to try and get the requisite testing carried out. The release to preview systems occurred on the weekend of 15 April 2020, and the release to production systems will now take place on the weekend of 5 June 2020.

But what does the H1 release bring? Does it bring two quarter’s worth of features? Perhaps a little more since SAP haven’t had to support a Q1 release? Well, if the raw figures are anything to go by, in comparison to last year it is actually fewer. But here’s the thing. There are quite a few big features. I suspect the complexity of some of the features is also something to be considered. SAP have had longer to work on SuccessFactors, uninterrupted by other releases, so perhaps this has simply given them the opportunity to pick off some of the bigger tasks? It still doesn’t quite fit to the last roadmap I saw, and we have seen various challenges pop-up in the last few months, not the least of which is COVID-19. I suspect the truth is that there have been many mitigating factors that have resulted in SAP brining forward fewer changes than we would have perhaps initially expected, but I promise you, there are quite a few in this release that have been well worth the wait.

It may be the first SuccessFactors release of 2020, but we are already up to the second release for Employee Central Service Centre, as Cloud for Customer (C4C) remains on a quarterly release cycle. In this release, it is like someone opened the flood gates on “useful for Employee Central Service Centre users” ideas and we had a barrage of updates and improvements that would take me an article easily twice as big to cover. I usually drop the features that are least likely to be useful. In this release, I have had to use a higher bar in making the selection of what to write about. Inevitably, this has resulted in a much higher number of features than usual being relegated to obscurity. And you know what? That is great!

In this release, there is a considerable amount of value to be taken up. As a result, in this article, I’ll be running through what I see as the key changes. Once you have everything from the article in hand and under consideration, if you do have time, go and dig a little deeper into SAP’s release notes for C4C (due for release mid-May on the SAP Customer Experience Wiki). There are a whole host of user interface changes that are going to make the lives of your service agents and administrators that much easier.

With that in mind, I will kick off with a look at Cloud for Customer and some updates to the ubiquitous communication channel of e-mail.

SAP has been pushing hard over the last couple of years to up their game regarding mobile support. The ever more mobile global workforce’s need to be able to operate effectively via SuccessFactors has been increasing, and while the COVID-19 situation that has seen many geographic regions subjected to restricted mobility, the use for mobile has not subsided. Mobile continues to be a key operational channel.

2019 saw a general parity in features achieved across the mobile platforms. Judging by the monthly mobile app releases for 2020 thus far, it seems that SAP has shifted to bringing more of the web application features to their mobile applications.

It is time for the patient users of SuccessFactors Learning to be rewarded. After what seems like an aeon, the release of a new administrator user interface into production use is in sight, and organisations with access to preview systems can get their hands on a fresh new version of SuccessFactors Learning right now. And it is not just a new lick of paint. This really is a ground-up rebuild of a large chunk of functionality, and that brings many additional benefits rather than just cosmetic changes.

This update is long-awaited, and it is critical. The legacy of the Plateau system from which SuccessFactors Learning comes is such, that to deliver a flexible interface, it was developed in a web technology created by Adobe. A technology known as Flash.

Flash has been famously plagued with issues around security and performance, to the point where even Adobe has thrown in the towel. The bell sounds on Flash at the end of this year with all major browsers pulling mainstream support. Therefore, a full replacement administrator interface must be in place for SuccessFactors Learning before then.

Back in 2017, Spotify made a rather curious change to their web player app. They made some changes to stop it working in the Safari browser. The native Mac app was still there, but if you wanted to web it up, you needed another web browser. Now I used to be Chrome all the way on both Mac and PC, but since I got a new MacBook Pro last year which actually had what seems to be a reasonable battery life (compared to its nine-ten year old predecessor), I figured a switch to a power optimised native browser was worth considering. But this presented me with a bit of a challenge for a particular use case I have.

Drafts is utilitarian text app available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that I use frequently. To say I’m a daily user would not do justice to the app. As the tag line says this is the app where text starts, and that’s certainly true of my use cases. It provides a quick point of capture and powerful tools to let me do more with the text to prepare and send it to its final destination than any other app possible could; and that says a lot when you look at apps like Keyboard Maestro, Text Soap and Sublime Text!

In the latest release (version 19) of the app on macOS, developer Greg Pierce (aka AgileTortoise) has significantly extended the automation and processing scope through the addition of AppleScript, and in this post I’m going to walk you through some example set-ups related to this.

The first SuccessFactors release of 2020 is just around the corner, and with it will come the release of the new SuccessFactors Learning administrator user interface.

In case you have not yet thought about your preparations for the transition to the new interface, I would like to draw your attention to the SAP transition guide and FAQ, and provide the following suggestions which I hope that you will find useful in planning your activities.

My Elgato Stream Deck is a great little piece of hardware that I can have dynamically offer up differing controls depending upon the application I’m working with, and the type of work I’m doing. For my MacBook Pro use, it is generally on my home office desk as an alternative to the Touch Bar which is less easy to view, and I also use it almost daily with my work PC. But, there are occasions, COVID-19 restrictions aside, when it is useful to take my Stream Deck with me. It certainly elevates my PC usage and makes jumping around non-linear PowerPoint presentations much easier. For the MacBook Pro, my Touch Bar is usually sufficient, but sometimes I want the Stream Deck with me so that I can create things for and utilise it directly. But simply slinging my Stream Deck into my backpack for my travels would not give it much life before it inevitably broke, and for that reason I decided to purchase some Stream Deck armour.

Last year I finally made my big web site move from Squarespace to Github Pages. In that post I went into some of the background of the move, and while the vast majority of things have improved in terms of my requirements, one thing has been much worse. For the site I use a static web site generator known as Jekyll. It works by converting various configuration templates and content files into a web site. Locally, on my Macbook Pro, I tend to use an incremental generation during my testing and within a few seconds it churns out the new site. With a full site generation it actually takes closer to a minute. This site is many hundreds of cross referenced pages, so it takes a while.

When I upload the content to Github Pages, which also utilises Jekyll, it takes even longer. Minutes in fact. This is where it falls down in comparison to Squarespace. I don’t get a near instant publish. This means that I could inadvertently post links too soon, or I have to check back to see if it has published yet. Sometimes, there can even be failures (very few and far between fortunately). This has been an annoyance for a few months now, and so I recently took a look at creating something to help me with this.

While SAP SuccessFactors has now moved from quarterly to bi-annual releases, SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) remains on a quarterly release schedule. This means that Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) continues to get quarterly updates on the C4C-side of the solution, with updates to other solution components following the SuccessFactors release timelines.

In this article, I’ll briefly cover some of the features that have reached general availability before examining many of the enhancements relevant to employee service use. Particularly surprising is the number of enhancements in this release are related to e-mails in and out of the system.

I’ve been a Google Chrome user for many years, but with my regular use of i*OS and spending more time using my Macbook Pro out and about, battery life management and sharing of bookmarked sites across device has become more important for my everyday use. As a result, I’ve been using Safari as my default Mac web browser.

But there are a few tab management features that I was missing from Chrome, so a while back I set about adding those in using some of the tools I had at my disposal.

Working with shell scripting is in essence very similar to programming in a more traditional compile-to-run language. The key differences for me are the depth of access and that it is interpreted. On occasion the scripting commands available simply don’t do everything you might want in one simple to execute command, and so, just like any other areas of coding, you can go down the path of creating your own functions and shorthand. In this post I’m going to share a few functions I’m using for adding content to the Mac clipboard/pasteboard.

The Elgato Stream Deck is a versatile piece of hardware that allows you to have dynamic buttons to trigger processes on your computer via the Stream Deck software. These can then trigger actions such as interacting with a piece of software insalled on your device, or even an online or network service, which in turn can do things like automatically update a social media profile, or turn on lighting in your home/office. Each button is programmable, even dynamically, to display text and images to illustrate the current purpose of a button. But where do the images that you can use come from, and where can you get them?

This week saw the public release of the i*OS app, LaunchCuts. It’s an app created to fill a gap in the functionality of the i*OS Shortcuts app. Specifically the challenges of trying to organise Shortcuts. It’s something I’ve covered before in my posts on smart folders for Workflow and in passing on a post about Shortcuts, my naming conventions for shortcuts. There are a few other bells and whistles to it, but the core function is simply that it allows you to organise shortcuts into folders for ease of launching and editing; albeit outside of the Shortcut app itself. The functionality it delivers is something I’ve been waiting on for several years, and in this post I’m going to share a little bit about how I’ve set it up.

Last year, Keyboard Maestro 9 launched with official support for a piece of hardware known as the Elgato Stream Deck. Providing a set of dynamic buttons, the Stream Deck in conjunction with Keyboard Maestro fundamentally allows you to trigger macros from the Stream Deck’s buttons. This makes for a versatile and engaging set-up for anyone wishing to streamline their workflows and make them easily triggered. The integration through works through the use of a Stream Deck plug-in, but did you know you can use more than one Keyboard Maestro plug-in for the Stream Deck?

Keyboard Maestro is an awesome application for anyomne who wants to automate their Mac. One of the less commonly known features is that there’s actually a way built into the application to generate a picture of a Keyboard Maestro macro. The challenge of late for me has been that since finally moving to a Macbook Pro with a retina screen, the resulting macro images have been very large. Too large for reasonable sharing in an e-mail or document in fact. The solution? A Keyboard Maestro macro of course.

Last year, Keyboard Maestro 9 was released, and with it, official support for a piece of hardware called a Stream Deck. Stream Decks are made by Elgato, and are a special type of keyboard with programmable buttons that can display updatable icons. This Keyboard Maestro release finally tipped me to the point of purchasing a Stream Deck.

The Workflow app was an amazing gateway app for automation on iOS when it first appeared, and I’ve been using it since its very first release. It built on x-callback URLs and revolutionised the way people can interact with their hand-held Apple devices. After it’s acquisition by Apple, the app evolved into Shortcuts, and in 2019 underwent major developments with the introduction of third party donations through actions and advanced intents as well as automation and parameters.

Now that the ThoughtAsylum web site update is in place, I’ve turned what attention I can spare to some additional projects; one of which is a new and ongoing collection of shortcuts.

In the final release of 2019, SAP are bringing quite a few useful updates to their SuccessFactors HR helpdesk solution. These range from speed and efficiency improvements through to significant enhancements of existing functionality. It’s a release that introduces something for every Employee Central Service Centre user, be they a service agent, a service manager, or an employee.

As usual I’ll split things up into updates around the service agent facing part of the solution (Cloud for Customer, C4C), and the employee facing part of the solution (Ask HR).

If you have visited thoughtasylum.com much in the past, you may have noticed a change recently. The site has been rebuilt. It isn’t just a makeover, it’s actually a rebuild from the ground-up. In this post I’m going to give a little bit of background to the what, why and how.

The i*OS Shortcuts application has a surprising amount of numerical functions tucked away within its calculation actions. These include not only statistical functions, but also some arithmetic functions familiar to many programmers. One of these is the modulus function. Many of you may have used this in your mathematical studies at school. It is frequently used as the basis for time calculations on 12 and 24 hour clocks. But there’s more than one way to apply a modulus.

Recently there was a query on the Automators podcast forum, where someone wanted to know how to retrieve a mobile phone number from a contact using Shortcuts. This isn’t something that Shortcuts supports “out-of-the-box”, but it is something that Shortcuts can do with a bit of cajoling. In this post I’ll explain some of the details about one way of doing it.

The weekend prior to 9 September 2019. Updates are currently available in customer test systems, but what are those updates?

With each release, SuccessFactors release a flood of information in the form of webinars and documents that most customers simply don’t have time to process. This makes it difficult at best for customers to get the best value from the solutions and partners to keep on top of all of the key aspects.

To that end, every quarter for the past four years, my colleagues and I have been analysing and summarising the changes, and drawing upon our SuccessFactors consulting experience to provide additional insight into the impact, uses and benefits these changes can have for an organisation who have implemented, or are currently implementing, SuccessFactors modules.

After a packed second-quarter release of features and improvements for Employee Central Service Centre, quarter three eases off a little and to my mind focuses on maturing some of the existing aspects of the solution. Nevertheless, the updates this month are important and will almost certainly have significant impact. For example, I can see many of the user interface enhancements making a real difference to the efficiency of agents – freeing up more of their time to deal with requests versus spending it on data maintenance and system navigation. Likewise, administrators will find useful options introduced that could open up some new opportunities.

Once again, we’re experiencing a very quiet quarter for SuccessFactors Learning, with the administrator user interface refresh being such a large piece of redevelopment work and consuming the development team’s time. Learning is set to receive some updates via the mobile app and through some updates to system integrations.

But what SAP did choose to do this quarter, was to share some details as to what is coming up for Learning. How People Analytics is going to impact Learning, a peek at the administrator user interface redevelopment and a ‘heads-up’ on some changes due next year where affected customers will need to act.

SuccessFactors mobile holds a special place in our quarterly reviews as unlike other areas; it isn’t exactly matched to the quarterly release cycle. Instead, the iOS and Android mobile apps are released on a monthly cycle, and so we have a look back at recent updates and forward to pending and upcoming ones. This quarter though we have a mixture as some of the features are ones that happen behind the scenes and will be accessible to apps as soon as the core functionality is updated in the quarterly release.

But before we begin looking at new and updated features, we need to look at some platform-related changes that SAP is introducing.

Shortcuts is a versatile automation tool on iOS, but it does have limitations. Many of these stem from it not being a true scripting/programming language, but rather a visual automation tool. When compared to alternatives like Pythonista or Scriptable, the app comes up a little short on things you might like to do with it sometimes that would be easier in other programming languages? But what if I told you that Shortcuts can actually tap into some of that coding power through a technique for evaluating JavaScript? Interested? Well let me explain.

I recently got a new Mac laptop, my previous one being the best part of a decade old, and I found myself copying new (non-app store) applications from the Downloads folder to the Applications folder far more often than I was comfortable with. To that end I decided to automate the process.

If you are a Drafts user, you may be familiar with the concept of workspaces, but there’s also a (related) folder concept too that’s been around since much earlier versions of Drafts. In this post I’m going to explain a little about these folders and what they actually contain in regards to your Drafts.

It’s already drawing to a close on the first quarter of the year and spring is upon us in the UK. That can only mean that the Q1 release of SuccessFactors is in preview environments and ready for imminent release. The question then is what does this mean for organisations who are using SuccessFactors?

That’s what my colleagues and I strive to understand and share in our quarterly review of the SuccessFactors release. We sift through the information and draw upon our own experiences to pick out the key information and distil it down into a format that can be understood by everyone. Hopefully the insights we’ve provided over the last three and a half years help both clients and partners get more value from the releases and we’re always keen to hear feedback where about how the articles help people understand and get more from their investment.

The quarter sees a wide range of updates across Cloud for Customer, Ask HR, and SuccessFactors Mobile, that will affect customers utilising Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC). It’s time for some significant changes to take place, so let’s dive in.

In my day job I work with a lot of raw data, and I make judicious use of Microsoft Excel to help me in the builds and transforms I need to accomplish. As many people are no doubt aware, Excel can be quite useful with the use of tab separated text as it treats each tab as a way to separate data out into cells and each new line as a new row in a spreadsheet. At least that’s what I thought. Recently however, I fell foul of finding tab separated data on my Windows clipboard not pasting into Excel in this way. But I did track down why this occurred.

I was working on a slide deck for work recently where I wanted to transition from one slide to another after a specified period of time. I was using PowerPoint and figured this would be no problem at all. I’d used this approach many times previously, but on this occasion it simply wouldn’t advance. The reason I eventually discovered was down to some on-slide animation.

We’re now well into the second quarter of 2019, and that means that it’s almost time for the Q2 release of SAP SuccessFactors to be released to customers. The questions are, what’s in this latest release and what do customers need to know?

That’s exactly the overarching question my colleagues and I at Zalaris tackle with our quarterly reviews. We compile the information SAP release, check the preview systems and then draw upon our own analytical skills and implementation & support experience to filter the wealth of information down to the key elements, presenting them in a format we hope is friendly and consumable by all.

Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) is the integrated HR ticketing solution for SuccessFactors. Based on several components, the solution leverages functionality from Employee Central (EC), SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C), SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) and other optional components. In reviewing this Q1 2019 release, I’m going to look specifically at the SCP and C4C updates that impact the use and implementation/maintenance of ECSC.

Early last month, a student teacher was posting on the Automators forum about using Drafts to make dealing with templates such as lesson plans easier. Through a bit of discussion in the thread, it came about that the student teacher really just was looking for a way to get simple text entry into a format compatible with the template - i.e. printable vs. editable. With this amendment I was able to put together an example based on the template they provided that would transform text in a draft via a Drafts action and Shortcuts into a nicely formatted PDF document.

In this post I’m going to review the solution and approach as to how I did that.

Last year I posted a small piece on text editing to the Automators forum. It was inspired by another post on the Drafts forum and focused on coming up with a way to edit text making more use of the screen estate than the paltry offering of the standard text options in Shortcuts. The premise was simply to enable a larger text editing area via Scriptable.

The latest iteration of the iOS app Launch Center Pro comes with an option to use a Shortcuts shortcut to add launchers for shortcuts to Launch Center Pro. It allows you to grab a shortcut from Shortcuts, and to set the launcher icon and the launch URL in Launch Center Pro. Very meta, and very cool. However, I have a lot of shortcuts. I’m often at the four figure mark, and it just doesn’t give me the ease of set-up I need, and also I often like to run my shortcuts via a shortcut launcher to speed things up. To that end, I took it upon myself to produce an enhanced version of the original shortcut.

Did you know there’s a way to speed up Shortcuts shortcuts on iOS? It’s really simple and can make a huge impact. Particularly on more complex shortcuts.

A few days ago over on the Automators podcast forum I answered a query about making use of the iOS app Launch Center Pro, which had recently been updated. The post was fairly extensive and received a lot of positive feedback. I therefore decided to paraphrase it here on my own web site as a reference for those who follow my writing.

The posting came about in response to queries from a couple of users about use cases and a general utilisation of the app and so, in response, I decided to share some details about what it does for me. It focuses on the fact that Launch Center Pro offers me some specific features that I find useful, but for some of these features there are certainly alternative approaches. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as different approaches suit different workflows and different mind sets. Based on that I set out the following assertion for everything that follows.

Launch Center Pro isn’t necessarily an app for everyone, but it can be an app for anyone, from novice through to advanced iOS user.

Shortcuts on iOS is a wonderfully versatile tool and I use it for a wide variety of things. Sometimes I even use it hands free as Shortcuts support Siri trigger words. Unfortunately, the shortcut’s subsequent interaction tends to be rather one way unless you are able to access your device’s keyboard. But it is just a tendency. Shortcuts can still interact with you on basic decision making operations and I use this in a number of shortcuts, including, most notably, a briefing routine that not only varies by time of day, but allows me to customise the content as it runs.

In this post I’m going to show you the basic building blocks for how this works.

We’re fast approaching the end of the year and so it’s time for SAP to roll-out the last of their SAP SuccessFactors HCM product suite quarterly updates for the period. In Preview systems at the moment it seems SAP have been pushing as hard as ever to get some great updates out to clients.

As ever, my colleagues and I at Zalaris have been taking apart the information about the release and figuring out what’s actually important, and what has the greatest benefit potential for the customers. There’s certainly been a lot of new and interesting updates to pick through, so it’s a pretty jam packed review overall.

As 2018 draws to a close, SAP is set to release a good range of feature updates to Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) users. While information on Ask HR is oddly scarce, there’s plenty of Cloud for Customer updates to keep everyone very happy.

With the move from Workflow to Shortcuts, I’ve come a little unstuck with a new issue around sharing them on iOS. Previously, if I wanted to get the name of a workflow and it’s URL in a Markdown link format, I could use a workflow to grab the title of the download page of the URL, which would match to the name of the workflow. After that it was just a case of wrapping the details in some Markdown syntax and we were done. Unfortunately that approach doesn’t work any more, but I have come up with a workaround utilising Scriptable.

I occasionally get mentions on my favourite podcasts, and it was a lovely surprise to hear my name mentioned on Episode 7 of the relatively new Automators podcast.

Back in the Workflow days, the iOS app allowed for the triggering of IFTTT actions via a special Workflow recipe action trigger. While it worked, I actually found it quite cumbersome to configure. As a result I switched to using the IFTTT web hook trigger for triggering IFTTT actions. It turns out that in the move to Shortcuts, the app that Workflow evolved into, support for IFTTT was dropped, so I figured I’d share how to do the web hook triggering as that’s still viable.

It’s that time again.

SAP have put another quarterly release of their HCM suite (SAP SuccessFactors) into preview environments. As always, my colleagues and I at Zalaris have been digging into the updates to figure out what’s important and what has the greatest potential. With GDPR now live, this quarter does not disappoint as it branches out in numerous ways, though you’ll still see some security and data related updates for some of the modules.

The Q3 2018 release certainly brings one of the more unusual updates around reporting and analytics in SuccessFactors. To begin with, SAP is releasing a set of updates around the report tool, known as BIRT (Business Intelligent and Reporting Tool), and considered by most SuccessFactors users as a legacy reporting tool. Alongside this, they are also applying some updates to Report Centre and setting up some important changes for the Q4 2018 release.

It is certainly quite unusual, so what’s going on?

We’re over halfway through 2018 and in this release, we see SAP pull back a little and work on stability and tweaks rather than lots of new features. But while there’s no game-changing functionality in this Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) release, we do see some notable incremental changes and some important news for the future.

Let’s dive straight in with a look at what’s new for employees in Ask HR.

Whereas many of the specific modules in this release are receiving low volumes, small updates, or a combination of the two, the underlying platform functionality for SuccessFactors is receiving a wide array of updates including many significant ones. Normally we’d go deep on just the key ones, but this time around, it’s going to be a wider whirlwind tour.

Drafts is an iOS app that’s been around for quite some time. In it’s fifth iteration it has become a veritable power house of an app with advanced automation features and a pro subscription option to match; though there’s also now a free tier too. For many, Drafts is a bit of a conundrum. Not fitting neatly into categorisation as a text editor, an automation tool, or anything else. It is quite distinct, yet overlaps many traditional app areas. But today I thought I’d give you some reasons as to why you should use Drafts.

Occasionally, I have a need to know the precise version of the OS of the Mac I’m using. This is particularly true when I get involved with beta testing software for developers. Whilst I can get the information manually each time, this was something that was ripe for automation. To that end I put together a shell script-based TextExpander snippet to output the information for me.

A lot of my work revolves around documentation and in business, Microsoft Word documents still rule. Word of course comes with it’s own built-in version tracking feature, but by default this feature is enabled. It has to be purposefully enabled as it can make documents confusing and cumbersome for those who don’t fully understand how to use it. Unfortunately from time to time, people send me document revisions where they have neglected to enable track changes, and it is important to identify what has actually changed. In these scenarios, we can fall back to Word’s document compare feature to identify the changes.

Normally, you would open Word, navigate to each file in turn and trigger the compare. This is all fine and good, but as someone who is usually working with the files directly in XYplorer (my Windows file manager of choice), I figured it was more efficient to trigger it from within the app.

My colleagues and I at Zalaris have been hard at work once again analysing the information from SAP in relation to the SAP SuccessFactors update that dropped into production environments this last weekend (3 June 2018). We try to distil the wealth of information available into the core aspects that we feel customers and those with an interest in keeping up to date with SuccessFactors can really benefit from. We share our thoughts and insights alongside the news of what’s new and what’s changing in order to ensure you understand the benefits and impact each release brings.

With the second release of 2018, SAP SuccessFactors is releasing a handful of notable updates for Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC).

1. Data Protection and Privacy – some key info for everyone with interest in the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
2. Machine Learning – new functionality to automate some ticket related decisions.
3. Ask HR Enhancements – some good news for global implementations and service agents.
4. Responsive User Interface News – an update on the Fiori based user interface for Cloud for Customer.

The BBC Micro:Bit (or MicroBit) is a great, cheap piece of kit for budding coders. It isn’t Raspberry Pi Zero, but it is geared around helping develop coding skills in visual blocks, JavaScript, or Python that you can see interacting on the device without the need to have lots of additional hardware. It has LEDs, GPIO pins, buttons, a gyroscope, some rudimentary options for measuring temperatures and light levels. It’s just a solid little gadget that can be found in many UK schools today. I’ve been using them as an option for my children for coding and experimenting for some time, and there are some rough edges - particularly around streamlining the process of getting the compiled code onto the device.

Do you use SAP SuccessFactors? Well if you do and you haven’t already read through the quarterly release review articles from Zalaris, then you really should. The team go in depth on a module by module basis picking out the key things that customers need to know about.

Find out what the impact will be on you and your organisation. Get tips on what features and options to use and what you might want to steer clear of or simply ignore at this point.

Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) is an unusual SuccessFactors solution in that it isn’t really a single module. Rather it is a combination of modules that integrate with SuccessFactors to provide an HR service desk with self-service functionality as well as the usual incident* management functionality.

* If ‘incidents’ seems an unfamiliar term, it may be that they are known simply as ‘tickets’ or ‘cases’ in your organisation.

As a result, there are different stages at which updates are applied to different systems and in turn, ECSC can receive updated functionality in a staggered manner. However, by the time this post is released all of the details should be applicable to production ECSC systems.

Whilst there are many integrations, hooks and instances of building on top of other systems involved in deploying and running ECSC I’ll be specifically covering the following areas in this review of the Q1 2018 releases.

1. Ask HR – the employee’s interface to ECSC.
2. C4C (SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, Service) – the HR service agent’s interface to ECSC.
3. Languages – a brief not on updated language support.
4. Product News - A new ECSC offering from SAP.

In my work, I work with PDFs on a daily basis. Typically I’m generating them as documentation, or reading documentation. But I also occasionally work with PDFs in different ways. Pulling out pages, replacing them with others, or building entirely new ones. When I’m doing that on my work laptop running windows, I fall back to using the PDF Toolkit utility. Whilst there are visual interfaces to use this tool I most often identify a need to do something with a PDF when I’m working with the file itself. For that reason I’ve created some XYplorer scripts that make accessing common PDF manipulations even easier.

Another quick but useful script for the Windows file manager XYplorer today when using it alongside my favourite screenshot application on Windows, Greenshot.

Whilst I’m not a presenter on radio or podcast show, I do actually spend a fair amount of time speaking to people via my computers. I join conference calls, webinars and everything in between. For this I have my trusty Blue Yeti microphone. Not a top of the line microphone, but a notable improvement over the USB Jabra Speakerphone I used previously; though I still use this as my speaker and as my travel microphone.

Today I’m going to share an XYplorer script for combining files through concatenation - i.e. merging them together by appending the files to one another in order to create a new combined file. Whilst it isn’t the sort of script I use everyday it does speed up the occasions when I need to combine plain text based files into a single file; in my case often for post-test data loading.

2017 has passed into history and so I’m taking my annual look back at what’s been getting the page hits on thoughtasylum.com and a personal look at the past year.

Something I find I need to do quite regularly is take a snap shot of a folder. For the purposes of saving space (and often for passing on the folder to someone else) I like to compress the folder into a ZIP archive and prefix the current time stamp to the file name.

This little activity was perfect for a bit of automation and so I created a little script in XYplorer (my Windows file manager of choice) to make this as easy as clicking a button.

Recently I was using an Excel spreadsheet to prepare some data and I had a constraint to work to in the number of lines of data the target system could display. Unfortunately rather than rows of data in Excel this was to match against rows of data in a single Excel cell. So the question is, how can you count the number of rows in an Excel cell?

I’ve been on Twitter a while now, but since starting in my current business role I’ve had a separate account for my work posts. I’ve been posting non-work things to @sylumer and work items to @SAP_Stephen. However last month I changed my work Twitter account and in this post I’m going to talk a little about the reason and approach.

TextExpander is a fantastic tool that fundamentally allows you to enter a string of characters and trigger a response that can replace the text with different content (e.g. plain text, formatted text, an image). On some platforms it can do even more, triggering scripts; though generally the intent is to then return and output some content.

Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the Jam (collaboration) module and the platform’s mobile functionality.

Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the reporting functionality.

Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the platform and underlying technologies.

Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the Employee Central Service Centre module.

Recently I was working on processing a file of data and in order to deduplicate and sort it, I decided to employ Windows’ PowerShell scripting functionality. It’s a very powerful tool-set and perfectly suited to what I needed to do, but I ran afoul of a small detail that caused me some confusion at first but that I resolved in the end. Just in case anyone else comes upon such an issue I thought it might be useful to write up the problem and the simple solution.

The cloud-based cross-platform release of TextExpander has been around for over a year having launched in early April 2016. Whilst there has undoubtedly been a lot of progress on the apps (the Windows version in particular) the promise of the cloud platform I still don’t think has been realised and there’s still a lot of scope for improvement.

In this post, I’m offering up a handful of ideas of where I’d like to see an improvement or offering from TextExpander. Most of these have already been shared with TextExpander, but the more consumer interest in a feature the more likely they’ll be to implement it and the sooner they’ll consider doing so.

In my work, I write a lot of documents. A surprising amount in fact, probably equalled only by the number of spreadsheets. The majority of these (Microsoft Word) documents are produced for clients and I like to ensure as, best I can, that they are not only accurate but well presented. However, in order to simplify document production I make judicious use of templating and Word’s fields functionality. I use not only standard fields but also custom ones as well to update content in multiple places simultaneously on refresh.

Workflow is a fantastic automation app for iOS that allows you to build sequences of actions to achieve some sort of repeatable ‘workflow’. This has benefits in saving you time, providing consistency and in some cases simply providing you with a way to actually do something that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to with the tools at your disposal. Whilst there is a synchronisation service available to keep workflows aligned across your iOS devices and there is a gallery of workflows available through the app it can be useful to share workflows directly with others. In this post, I’m going to quickly cover the primary options you have.

Every quarter SAP releases a set of updates for its SuccessFactors suite of products. With each release my colleagues and I examine the updates and analyse what is important and the impact it has for SuccessFactors customers. Be it change, enhancement or deprecation we’re on it. For the Q2 2017 release I picked up the analysis for the SuccessFactors service desk solution - Employee Central Service Centre

In my work I often find myself building spreadsheets to carry out calculations, manage sophisticated processes and capture information. These spreadsheets can often extend to covering many worksheets and as a result it can be awkwardly slow to navigate to particular worksheets just by paging back and forth with the navigation buttons.

In this post I’m going to illustrate a couple of useful techniques to help you navigate around.

XYplorer is my preferred file manager on Windows. It contains a large number of features that are just too enticing for someone like me to pass up so it came as little bit of a surprise to me when in its tab based interface I couldn’t find a way to quickly duplicate a tab. However XYplorer is a scriptable file manager so it was a pretty easy to create a solution.

Around a year ago Smile released their new version of TextExpander. This new version created quite a bit of ‘heated debate’ in the Mac community and whilst many eschewed the update I chose not to. I’m glad I did and I thought others might find it interesting to get some idea of why that’s the case.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time helping out others on Twitter with their use of the Workflow app on iOS. In doing this I’ve fairly frequently come across people who are having notable issues that come down to it being a bug in the application. I’m often surprised that people seem to think that the best place to report a bug is via Twitter with a few vague sentences of description. To that end I figured I’d put together a quick overview of how I think I’d want the issues reported if I were one of the Workflow developers; which just to be clear, I’m not.

Working with data and configuration files is a part of my day job and this presents me with many opportunities to automate the things I need to do with them. Recently I had a need to check a large set of XML files to make sure there were no obvious errors in them and the approach I settled on was to integrate a command line tool into XYplorer - my Windows file manager of choice.

Another year ends and so it’s time to take my regular look back at what’s been particularly popular on thoughtasylum.com over this period and to also reflect on what I’ve been doing.

It’s the little things that really irritate me. I’ve just got one of those personalities I guess. I can’t help myself - if there’s an itch I always have to find a way to scratch it. One of these itches for me is copying and pasting text out of PDFs and getting unwanted line breaks in the resulting plain text. I decided to address this irritation with a little bit of text manipulation.

As part of my day job I work with lots of files and one of the common activities I need to carry out is to compare the contents of those files to find omissions and inconsistencies. Fortunately most of the files I need to compare are pure text based files (e.g. XML, XSL, LOG, TXT, INI) and there are plenty of tools available to help work with those files. To work with files in general on Windows I make use of the XYplorer file manager and fortunately for me it is pretty easy to integrate my comparison tool of choice into it.

A month or two ago I had a bit of a problem with Windows Explorer and Google Drive that was rather painful. I lost a day of work to putting right an issue that simply shouldn’t have occurred and to be honest I’m quite glad it happened to me and not one of my colleagues as I imagine that for many of them things would have ended a lot worse. It was at this point that I began looking at alternatives to Windows Explorer.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post I have quite a few Workflow app workflows on my iOS devices. Like many other long time Workflow users I’m looking forward to having a better way to keep track of and structure my collection of Workflows. However unlike everyone else I don’t want folders…

I spend quite a bit of time experimenting with the Workflow App by the folks over at DeskConnect. It’s an iOS application that brings Mac automator-style automation into the palm of your hand. As a result of my experimentations I’ve built up quite a library of workflows and whilst I wait for some sort of structure for the workflows I’ve come up with a few little tricks, notations and workflows to help me keep things organised. I’m going to share one of those with you today.

Like many who blog I keep a list of topic ideas which I plan to blog about at some point. When I get some time to write I pick a topic that I like the look of and get some words thrashed out. I was surprised when I saw something in last week’s MacStories members’ newsletter that directly related to something rather niche I had on my list.

As I expect you’ve already guessed, this post is about that particular topic. It’s about getting text to and from the iOS app Drafts from Dropbox.

I love finding little shortcuts to help me get things done. Sometimes it’s through automation of processes I do occasionally and sometimes its through speeding up something smaller that I need to do frequently. In this post I want to share something that definitely falls into the latter category. Duplicating files in Windows Explorer.

The majority of configuration in Visualization Solutions by Nakisa (VSN) applications is achieved via the changing of settings in the AdminConsole, Nakisa’s standard administration interface. For a typical configuration this is all that you would require. Unfortunately all too often, typical is not what a client wants and so we have to look beyond the current capabilities of AdminConsole. There are other occasions too where perhaps it is a laborious or inefficient task to do a particular piece of configuration in AdminConsole compared to another method. In those situations I turn to configuring the underlying configuration files directly.

I was reading through issue 33 of the MacStories newsletter (to which I’m a paid subscriber) and I spotted an interesting request from one of the readers to do with efficiently creating presentations to have multiple outputs for a small variety of uses. The reader was hoping to find a way to maintain multiple versions automatically when updating source material. The MacStories team called out to other readers for suggestions on addressing this. In this post I’m going to outline my approach to the issue.

TextExpander has long used Dropbox to synchronise snippets, but with the advent of the latest version (v6 on Mac), the snippets are now synchronised by a proprietary synchronisation service. Thoughts about the move to a software as a service (SaaS) model aside this then poses the question how can you access your snippets for the purposes of independent backup or sharing with users on earlier TextExpander versions?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A while back I refreshed and expanded upon my TextExpander snippet groups and promised to start covering some of the inner workings of what the snippets actually do. Today I found a bit of time to make a start on that and I’m beginning with some of the snippets related to underlining.

Today I was using one of my TextExpander snippets that utilises form fields to add some content to this site. I’m one of those people who still typically works in HTML when working with a content management system (sometimes it is the only way to get things how I want them) and when I was adding HTML content into one of the form fields I noticed that the double quotes for the attributes were being automatically being turned into smart quotes rather than staying as the nice simple dumb quotes I needed. It wasn’t something I’d noticed before and it was incredibly frustrating to correct after using the form field each time. After a bit of digging around in TextExpander preferences, etc. I finally found the rather simple solution.

I was recently having a discussion on Twitter about how to get into creating workflows for the amazing iOS app known simply as Workflow. It allows you to use Automator style actions to put together simple yet sophisticated sequences of actions to carry out an operation such as manipulating a photograph or sending a message out on social media channels. Unfortunately the problem currently is that the available resources can be difficult to find.

Since the release of TextExpander 5 on OS X and TextExpander Touch 3 on iOS I’ve been updating and revising my TextExpander snippets to take advantage of some of the new functionality and to get some of the contents better aligned for sharing online with the public. Today I’m happy to say I’ve taken a significant step forward with a new update to the Thought Asylum TextExpander snippets groups.

The final part of my blogging about Workflow workflows is focussed on tidying up. When I produce the composite screen shot described in the Blogging About Workflows blog post I almost always end up with a small stack of screen shot files sat on my device. Once the final cropped image is produced, I have no further need for them and this workflow is used for deleting them, but it will work stand alone just fine; deleting any screen shots generated in the last twenty minutes.

A big piece of my workflow blogs (and something readers have commented on many times) are the workflow screen shots I produce. As detailed in the Blogging About Workflows blog post I take several overlapping screen shots and use an iOS app to stitch them together into the mega-length screen shots that you’ll see scattered through the workflow related blog posts on this site. However the images that it creates include parts that I don’t which to use. These are the top bar that shows my time, battery level, etc. (which many people including Federico Viticci and Dr Drang find a need to remove - ref. MacStories) and the workflow bottom bar (Actions and Workflow buttons). I’ve automated the cropping of the screen shot with a workflow to do exactly this. It also saves the file into Dropbox for me and offers to delete it from my device camera roll.

One of the elements I use in my blog posts (among other places) are workflow icons. I try and choose meaningful pictographs for the icons (though the set could do with a significant expansion) and I try to use the base icon colour in a meaningful way. Within my blog posts I often use them as the intro image - as I do in this post and so having a copy of the icon image ready and waiting for me when I blog is a real boon.

This workflow I don’t tend to use as part of the process of creating my blog post information. Rather it is a way of giving myself a backup of the workflow in case I need to restore it and find for some reason that the online page is unavailable. Remember it is easy and painful to not have enough backups and only slightly more effort and a lot less pain to have enough … I’ve yet to meet someone who has too many. Also since this runs as a fully automated part of my blog post preparation process it really is no effort to have it included and run.

Part of my blogging about Workflow workflows involves me capturing some basic details about the workflow. This includes the name of the workflow and the link to download it. As part of my reference system these are both key items that I wanted to make available in a text file in my Workflow folder in Dropbox. This is the first workflow step in my blogging process.

Since the release of the Workflow application for iOS I’ve written quite a few workflows and as time as permitted I’ve been sharing many of them out to the world via this site. They’ve taken the form of full blog posts describing how the more complex workflows work through to simpler example workflow posts where I’ve just posted a description of what the workflow is intended to do.

As part of these posts I’ve been creating full screen shots of the workflows which a number of people have asked me about. In this post I’ll be revealing how I create them along with some details of a workflow that I developed out of these blogs and has enabled me to fairly quickly put together the example workflows.

Workflow is a fantastic iOS automation app that allows you to do many wonderful, amazing and even crazy things. One of the problems for me through has been controlling process flow can be quite cumbersome - particularly with the larger and more complex workflows as well as workflows that I’d like to loop in some way or re-use. The programmer in me has certainly been pining for this sort of feature.

Of course workflow being workflow there is a way to work around this limitation - at least to an extent which has improved workflow creation vastly for me.

Recently I was working for a client who had particularly strict controls around access and tools that I could use. Whilst the bulk of the work I was carrying out on their Linux box could be managed using vi, I found it a little limiting when analysing some of the log files the work was producing. On the Windows machine I was using to access the files I only had Windows notepad and this really doesn’t handle Linux file endings well. As a result I put together a quick VBScript to help with this.

Workflow app is one of my favourite iOS apps.  As well as being incredibly innovative and useful in so many ways, it is also something I enjoy exploring and tinkering with.  In fact I’ve pitched in on Twitter several times to give people a hand figuring out how to do what they want in Workflow.

Smile Software have just released a new update to their TextExpander product that brought a particularly interesting new feature. The option to run JavaScript based snippets. At first this may appear unremarkable given that the previous OS X snippets could take advantage of AppleScript, or shell script based options such as BASH, Perl and Python (to name just a few). The exciting thing to me however was that the JavaScript based snippets could also run on the iOS version; whereas AppleScript and shell script based snippets cannot.

As an initial foray into using JavaScript snippets on my iOS devices I decided I’d try recreating one of my existing snippet groups.

In Q1 of 2015, Nakisa released the latest iteration of their visualisation suite (VSN) of applications - version 4.3. With 4.2 being an interim release for Nakisa’s Performance and Goals product or perhaps an internal working version, 4.3 can probably be considered an upgrade from the 4.1 SP2 release. As well as rolling in various bug fixes and general performance improvements, version 4.3 includes some great feature enhancements.

During my career I’ve encountered dozens of processes, agreements, work packages, projects and changes that have, for one reason or another, failed. Whilst the contributing factors varied, there was one that has almost always appeared somewhere in the chain of events responsible for the failure. A deficiency in communication.

Even with the advent of iOS8 and custom keyboards and customised keyboard lines in specific apps, one thing I still find myself wishing I could get on my iPhone and iPad keyboards is a tab key. Fortunately there is a nice easy way to work around this using one of my favourite iOS utilities - TextExpander Touch.

TextExpander is one of my most frequently used Mac utilities and I have all sorts of snippets that help me with all sorts of tasks. From correcting my seldom perfect typing and inserting standard sets of boilerplate text through to more advanced ones that produce fill-in forms and carry out conversions of clipboard text. This focus of this post certainly falls into the latter, but does so in doing something surprisingly simple. It takes plain text and simply adds HTML paragraph tags in at the appropriate locations.

Continuing with my little spate of sharing workflows for the iOS app known as Workflow, I’ve decided to share another simple action extension workflow that allows you to save web pages as a simplified style PDF Whilst I personally use Evernote as my snap shot repository and page cleaner of choice, sometimes I want to be able to send other people a snap shot of a page and Workflow provides a relatively easy way to do this.

I use various services for web pages I want to take a deeper look at later, Pocket and Evernote being my favourites for my personal reading. However I frequently come across things I want to take a look at more closely for my work. Rather than creating a task (which I’ll then probably defer ad infinitum) I choose the simpler option of mailing myself details of the page. Whilst this has never been a particularly onerous task I found that I could use the wonderfully flexible iOS app Workflow to help me make it even easier.

I continue to find great personal uses for the iOS app Workflow. One of the ones I’ve been experimenting with recently relates to quickly taking contextual notes and adding them into Evernote.

It’s amazing how many computers we all work with these days. Our phones, our tablets, work computers, personal computers, remote servers, Raspberry Pis; the list goes on. I frequently find myself wanting to action things on a computer other than the one in front of me and I now have another tool in my arsenal to do this … the iOS app Workflow.

I’ve been experimenting a lot recently with the iOS Workflow application and whilst it is an initial release it has a lot of power and a vast amount of potential. Whilst there are a number of features I’m hoping will be included in upcoming releases I have a few workflows that are already saving me some time and one of those relates to a site called jaymantri.com. The site offers up a set of photographs for download each week and when the e-mail comes to let me know they’re available I dutifully went to the site to download each of them from. But now with Workflow I can grab them from across the site with the push of a button.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you think of productivity I’m guessing that for most people the first word that springs to mind probably isn’t “lazy”, but for me it’s been like that from the start. It’s my mind-set.

If you work with computer aided presentations on Windows, then you probably know PowerPoint has options to show blank screens. Pressing “B” will give you a black screen and “W” will give you a white screen. These are useful options when you want to focus people’s attention on what you’re saying and away from any slides you might have up. For example if you need to discuss a point for which you don’t have a slide or if you want to tease something.

In several of the template Excel spreadsheets I use in my work there are references to clients and version numbers that are included. This is for reference purposes, particularly if the spreadsheet might be printed or exported as a soft copy (e.g. PDF). Whilst it is possible to maintain this information manually I decided that this should be something that could be improved by virtue of the file name containing such information (as these are the very basis of file management on projects). I’d referenced the file path and elements of it in the past and I thought that this would be something that should be relatively straight forward to achieve; and here’s how I got on ….

We all have things that we want from people and of course there are things they want from us. Recently I was thinking about what this actually meant and I think I managed to boil it down to just three things - things that I think we all look for from each other.

Outside of my work I spend several hours each week volunteering as a teacher. I have some modest skills and experiences that people seem to be interested in learning about and developing themselves and that’s something that gives me great pride to be able to do. One of the most important lessons I try and teach my students is about the awesome power of mistakes.

When I’m not working, sat at a computer creating things or spending time with my family I can usually be found helping people with their studies of the martial art of Jiu Jitsu. I’ve been doing this for well over a decade and like to think I have developed at least some modicum of aptitude in helping people develop the a range of physical, mental and emotional skills to allow them to advance in their studies. But no matter how much teaching I do and how many techniques, approaches and lessons I develop myself it is the lessons of my first instructors that I come back to time and again as being some of the simplest and most useful.

Like many lessons in the martial arts there is a deep wisdom to be found in them that is applicable beyond the confines of a dojo and equally as relevant in the walls of an office. I’d like to share one of these with you today.

For some time now there have been techniques around for having a set of slides that loop at the start of your PowerPoint presentation. These generally involve hiding your main presentation slides, adding an invisible button to each of the visible slides (that allows you to jump to your first hidden slide), setting those slides to auto advance and then setting your presentation to loop continuously. But what if you want to add more loops and/or want to control everything from a presentation remote?

Last year I was working on a webinar where we wanted to have a couple of looped sets of slides and I needed an alternative - ideally one that didn’t involve having to break out and run a separate presentation. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to come up with a solution.

We all get stuck from time to time. A mental block, a change in plans or the proverbial brick wall. Dealing with such impasses is challenging and can create periods of stress and low productivity. They are nothing to be ashamed of and in fact we often find that when we overcome these sorts of issues we are rewarded with valuable skills and experience that benefit us from that point on.

In this post I’d like to share a few methods I use that can help you deal with these sorts of scenarios. Not all are applicable on every occasion, but hopefully there are at least a couple that can be applied to a particular situation.

Over the last few years I’ve created a number of useful diagrams in OmniGraffle that describe some technical architectures and requirements for some of the software that I work with. Whenever there is a new release I update the diagrams and then export each in turn as an image file. Because of the number of diagrams involved this became a rather laborious process … so as usual I decided to make things a bit more automated.

“Change is the only constant.” - Heraclitus of Ephesus

Change. It’s happening all the time, everywhere we look. In order to survive we need to adapt to the changes. In order to prosper we need to drive the changes. We need to constantly strive to improve and be smarter about what we do and how we do it.

Every now and then you get a day that you know is going to be a little different and more challenging than the typical one. You can tell right away it will be “one of those days” by the first thing someone says to you when you walk into the office. Some time back I was heading up a small IT department and occasionally I would walk in to an “I’m glad you’re here”, “server A is down” or “X has rung for you twice already”. None unusual in themselves, but all harbingers of what was to come. However, the strangest greeting I ever had was as I walked up to my desk one morning and a colleague turned to me and with a wry smile said … “There’s a bird in the server room”.

PowerPoint is a term used to strike fear into the hearts of office workers the world over, but much like a firearm it is more about whose hands it is in that makes the difference. I may not be a PowerPoint guru, but on many occasions over the years I’ve found myself needing to wrestle with its functions and features to produce the effect I (or more frequently someone else) want(s). One effect that keeps cropping up is that of a jigsaw. The analogy of the complete picture and how pieces fit together (or are missing) lends itself well to many aspects of business and life in general. Since it has been such a popular request I thought I’d share some techniques and some templates that I use to produce jigsaws in PowerPoint.

Over the years I’ve been doing technical support I’ve had quite a few useful VBS scripts that I’d copy over to a user’s machine. Then if it necessary, they could be run again at a later date (by remote control or referring the user to it’s location and get them to run it). However I quickly tired of manually doing this and dealing with the instances where I’d accidentally copied the script to the user’s desktop instead of the location I’d really wanted. As a result I created some extra lines to add into these scripts that would install the script to the desired location and then run it from there. This meant I could run it from a flash or network drive and it would automatically go to the right place - even updating older scripts.

Android devices don’t have any native feature (currently) to mirror the display onto a PC. There are however a few alternative ways to accomplish this. In this post I’ll be giving a quick run down on how I got my Samsung Galaxy S2 to mirror it’s display onto my Windows laptop using Droid@Screen

It’s the new year so as has become a bit of a tradition it’s time to review the past 12 months and see what’s been going on at thoughtasylum.com and with me.

I seem to be having a bit of a spree on TextExpander posts at the moment looking at my last few posts - can you get too much of a good thing?. This time I’m going to be sharing some snippets I have for getting useful information from the Mac using some terminal commands.

TextExpander is a great piece of software that can save you a lot of effort when you want to insert pieces of boiler plate text. However it is a much more versatile piece of software and I’m particularly fond of its capability to process text using shell scripts. In this post I’m going to give some details about how I use it to sort lines of text into alphabetical order.

I have frequently found myself needing to add a link into a blog post for an existing web page where I’d like to link it as the page title. Rather than a couple of copy and paste actions I decided to create a TextExpander snippet to do the (not particularly) heavy lifting for me.

Digital technology is a huge part of my life and who I am. I’m one of those people who actually finds it relative easy to read on a screen rather than having a preference for a paper book. So it’s unusual for me to find myself writing a blog post that is about something rather analogue - but it’s something I think fills a niche in the way I work and I expect could for you to. It is something brilliantly simple and fits in your pocket - a foldable whiteboard.

Whilst doing some house keeping on some old VBScript files the other day I came across one for creating test files. I’ve blogged previously about creating test files using my MTF utility and whilst it or fsutil can be very useful, this script filled a particular niche. It was created as part of a test suite of scripts it creates multiple files of a specific size filled with random printable content.

Pythonista is a Python based IDE for iOS and has formed the basis for finally getting around to teaching myself Python. I’m still in the earliest stages of getting to grips with Python but I thought I’d share one of my most useful scripts thus far. One to execute a remote command on a server using SSH.

In this post I’m going to share a tip about auto incrementing numbers in Excel. I’ve frequently found myself creating incremental number lists (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …, etc.) and whilst Excel is quite helpful at providing ways to create such lists I find its methods are often a bit limited for my needs - so I came up with another way that I think you might find more resilient.

I take a lot of screen shots in my work. They are invaluable in recording issues and producing software instructions and the like. To assist me with taking and saving screen shots I use Greenshot. I have it configured to not only copy the screen shot to the Windows clipboard, but also to save the screen shot to a specific directory.

In my work I regularly have need to take screen shots and to make the process of taking screen shots easier I use the open source utility Greenshot. I have Greenshot configured to not only copy the screen shot to the Windows clipboard, but also to save it to a screen shots directory.

For some time now I’ve been using Notepad++ as my primary text editor. Given how much time I spend modifying configuration files, writing scripts and scouring log files its not exactly a surprise that I’ve come up with some nifty workflows for working with text in this editor. Whilst I do occasionally shift back to NoteTab Pro for its immensely useful scripting options I try and stay in Notepad++ as much as I can.

As most of the Internet seems to have noticed, Google has plans to decommission Google Reader this coming July. This has caused quite a flurry of activity around RSS readers in general and there are numerous ideas, cloning projects and the like springing up. My approach to resolving this scenario however is a little different…

Some time ago, Google contacts used to include an option which allowed you to add a profile picture for a contact directly from a web site. At some point last year this option disappeared, but did you know the functionality is still there?

In November 2012 Nakisa released the latest version (4.0) of their visualization product suite and with it a number of changes to the availability of modules, nomenclature and licensing.  In this post I’m going to outline some of the importance of these changes in an attempt to try to help translate between versions for anyone who might be considering upgrading or applying unused existing licenses (shelf-ware).

Well January’s almost over and it’s the twilight of my days as SCN Member of the Month. So it seemed to be a good time to reflect on my time in the spotlight so to speak.

Today Nakisa formally launched their new OrgHub for Mobile application onto the Apple App Store. It seems every man and his dog seem to be developing mobile applications to serve up corporate data and services, so how does this new application stack up?

Since the beta release of Alfred 2.0 I’ve been working on several workflows that I’ll be sharing here (as well as in the Alfred 2.0 Beta Workflow forum). Some of these are practical workflows (such as Evernote Search+ which is still under development for version 1.1) and some are example workflows that I think might be of help to other Alfred workflow creators. Today I’m going to share a workflow that uses an audible notification at the end.

Alfred is an essential app for many Mac users, myself included. It is so much more than an application launcher and as of this last weekend, version 2.0 has been released to beta testers.

2013 got off to a great start for me - I was selected from millions of people as the SAP Community Network’s Member of the Month.

The SAP Community Network (SCN for short) is the online network for SAP professionals. It has well over two and a half million members and for one month only I’ve been highlighted as one of the community’s star members by being interviewed and having pride of place in the “MoM” corner on the SCN home page :-)

Like most bloggers I’m hoping I’ll get a lot more blogging done in 2013. However I thought this would be a good time to cover a few changes and the top items on thoughtasylum.com for 2012.

After the recent gradings I was asked the perennial question by one of my students - “Which side do my mons go on?”. So I thought this was worth writing a little piece about.

I spend a lot of my time working with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets - it’s in the nature of what I do. I frequently found that I need to create PDF copies of these files (to send out to clients) and eventually I grew tired of having to open the files one by one and select to save each as a PDF. As a result I created a bit of VBScript to automatically convert files for me (in Windows).

Whilst storage is continuing to get cheaper all the time I occasionally find myself needing to save some space. Usually where some cloud storage and archiving of old material is involved. ZIP files are very convenient for compressing files, but sometimes I need to go a step further. In these cases I opt for the 7z archive file format used in the free and portable software 7-Zip as I’ve always ended up with a smaller archive file.

It was mainly this last factor that was the driver behind my particular recent use, but it really is amazing what can be done with such scripts and there are a lot of great resources out there that show you how to do some pretty incredible things.

I spend a fair bit of my time checking the results of automated jobs over the course of a few days for different clients. As a result I frequently ended up creating temporary folders for several days in a row and naming them with the current date. After a few weeks the penny dropped and I decided to automate the process a little.

I’m a big fan of AutoHotKey a great scriptable automation tool for Windows and I use it for a number of things. One of these is to quickly access favourite files and folders.

A little while back I was scanning through some questions on Quora when I spotted one relating to Evernote that I thought I could help with.  The question was “Is there a shortcut to copy the note URL in Evernote on Windows”….

I hope at least some of you have been following my posts of the last week about contributing to SCN. In this my final post in the series I thought I’d just wrap things up with a bit of a summary of what’s come before, some background to the series and something a little special that I hope all of you will take the opportunity to join in.

Creating something new is one of the most rewarding things you can do and for the last few days I’ve been posting about why, what and how to do just that on the SAP Community Network (SCN). In this post I’m going to take a look at some examples of things we can all do to improve the content we see on SCN. Whilst it isn’t an exhaustive list by any means (that would be impossible) and whilst you may in fact do all of these things I hope there’s at least one thing in here that can help improve what we have.

If you’ve been following my previous posts on whether you should contribute to SCN and how you can contribute to SCN I would hope that by now you have made some sort of commitment to yourself that you will be adding some great content in the very near future. However there’s something I haven’t discussed yet and that’s about how much to contribute.

In my first blog post in this series on contributing to SCN I wrote about making the decision to contribute to the SAP Community Network (SCN). In this blog post I’m going to take a look at some of the ways in which you can contribute to SCN. From what might qualify as a contribution, through to the different ways and mediums that SCN can allow you to create and publish your contributions. Finally we’ll take a look at some ideas for the sorts of things you might like to consider for your next or even first contribution.

A little under a year ago I joined the world of SAP. I’ve been working in IT for some time now in a wide variety of roles, but it is only relatively recently that I’ve entered into the mysterious and at times daunting world of SAP. Whilst I have experienced and helpful colleagues I can call upon for assistance they are not my only source of the latest SAP related information.

When it comes to SAP Visualization Solutions by Nakisa (VSN), the log file is king. It is the source of information about all the transactions and activities carried out. In my first few weeks working with SAP VSN products I was quickly made aware of just how significant the CDS (Corporate Directory Services) log is and it is the foundation to solving at least a good 90% of issues encountered when configuring VSN applications.

SAP Org Visualization by Nakisa (SOVN) OrgChart allows you to visualise the hierarchical structure of an organisation based on HCM data held in SAP. It is the foundation of the SAP Org Visualization by Nakisa solution extension and can be installed for a variety of reasons.

Visualisation is a powerful tool for conveying information in a succinct and digestable manner. In business we see diagrams versus narrative text and bullet points on a daily basis, but have you ever stopped to really consider why this is and why data visualisation in particular is such a key part of modern business?

Before we dive in I’d like you to take a few moments to consider a few questions.

Clearly is a browser add-on created by the team at Evernote. It allows you to reformat the content of a web page into a cleaner simpler one for easier reading (like Readability) and of course also integrates seamlessly into Evernote. This application fits my way of consuming and saving interesting articles almost (see later) perfectly and I thought I’d share with you a few features you may not be so familiar with.

So this post is just a quick tip for anyone getting started with AutoHotKey. Whilst editing an AHK script, you probably often find you need to reload the script into AutoHotKey. Whilst this is available from the application icon in the notification area, it seems ludicrous to have to do for an application called AutoHotKey - why not trigger a reload with a key press? Well the answer’s in the help file…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many people who have to give presentations ask that questions be saved until the end. This lets them maintain the flow of the presentation and gives a nice interactive way to round off the session. This approach then mean that in order to reference back to a slide the presenter then has to page back and forth through the presentation. This is mentally cumbersome for the presenter to remember where in the slide deck the relevant slide is. For presentations with a large number of slides this can also be time consuming. But there is a better way….

I was upgrading the storage on my Android mobile phone (an HTC Desire) a few weeks back. It seemed simple enough, just a case of swapping the micro-SD card for one with a greater capacity. Simple. Simple if you’re not a Mac user that is.

I had a comment recently relating to my post about a templating system for Evernote. The approach is that on Windows a system tray/notification area menu utility is used to call a batch script with some parameters and this uses a command line tool for Evernote (ENScript) to create a new note based on a template file based on an exported and amended note in Evernote. The comment noted that the new note that was created was not selected automatically in Evernote and asked if there was a solution. Well, there is….

For several years I managed not to make the move to what I have considered (and if I’m honest still do) the dark side of the Internet. Facebook. Concerns around security have plagued Facebook over the years and whilst the release of “The Social Network” movie did eventually lead to a greater rise in popularity of the network and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, I still have several years of mistrust to get past. So why is it a few weeks back I took the plunge and signed up? Well it’s all to do with a chap called Svend.

It’s all been a bit quiet in the Thought Asylum for the last couple of months and I’m now in a position to get back into some blogging. So what’s been going on and what’s coming up. Allow me to explain…

The third and final day of the 24th annual AUA Telecoms conference closed on Thursday with a set of four sessions three of which were case studies.

The second day of the 24th annual AUA Telecoms conference has come to a close and it was certainly a busy one with presentations from telecoms managers and suppliers on a wide range of topics. Some dry, some interesting and some that I’m sad to say I found interesting but would probably be some people’s idea of hell.

This year sees the 24th annual AUA Telecoms conference being held in Manchester. It is a conference where telecoms managers and engineers get together to look at the telecoms in the UK Higher Education sector. I’m predominantly focussed on the IT side of things at work, but with the prevailing convergence of telecoms technologies and IT it is becoming ever more important for me to better understand the whole ICT sphere and so this was an opportunity I didn’t really want to pass up.

Several months back (March 2010 in fact) I posted how to create a daily journal in Evernote on Windows using a bit of script. The script creates a new note in evernote with a dynamically generated title (the current date) and pre-populated with an Evernote tag. Whilst I use this to log everything I do at work, at home I have an Apple Mac that I use most of the time and I hadn’t quite got around to porting the script to OS X … until now.

It’s time for my annual review of what’s been most popular on my past year’s foray into the blogosphere. This year has been all change as I consolidated my blogs into a new site on a new platform and as you may be able to tell from how quiet I’ve been for the last few months I’ve been quite busy with a few other things that have been changing my life in more than a few ways. Anyway, on with the show as they say.

I’ve frequently found myself needing to pad text strings with other text when putting together VBScripts. Typically this is with regards to time related outputs (pre-fixing with zeroes), or numeric outputs for things like filenames (again prefixing with zeroes). Occasionally I need to do more advanced padding and so I created a set of code to add to my code library to cover a wider set of padding circumstances including not only pre-fixing, but also post-fixing variable length strings … and even bo

One of the things I like most about my Mac is the automation and control I can have without having to fight the operating system.  Don’t get me wrong I really like Windows and many other operating systems (I very much like the right tool for the right job approach), but the Mac along with some little helper apps makes this quite straight forward.  Today I thought I’d share a couple of the utilities I use to keep my Mac awake and to send it to sleep.

So for some time now Evernote users have been clamouring for a way to work with rich text (e.g. bold, italics, fonts) on their iOS device (iPhone/iPod/iPad).  The issue has been that iOS at a base level does not functionally support rich text editing.  To implement this sort of function would require the Evernote iOS developers to develop an entirely new text editing interface and given the complexity/flexibility of the note format this could be quite challenging (and there are lots of other pulls on their time for develpments such as access to shared notebooks in the client (… which they did say would be this year and there’s only a month left).

For ten or so months now I’ve been clipping web pages from Safari on my iOS devices into Evernote using a one touch bookmarklet. Whilst Evernote’s own bookmarklet works for this activity, you have to enter some details for the note, maybe even login. For me this was just too much to be concerned with when I’m browsing on the move. My solution simply pushed the whole page into my default Evernote notebook for dealing with later.

Do you suffer from finger prints on any of your touch screen devices?  Do you ever forget things and wish that you had a photographic memory? Well maybe Evernote has the solution…

I’ve been doing a lot of spring cleaning recently and came across quite a few old computers that I’d stashed away at the back of a wardrobe.  Not exactly noteworthy, but I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve done to clear the space and retain my archives.

A little while back, Evernote launched a new feature known as the trunk.  It is a platform through which Evernote promoted partnerships and integrations with the Evernote system.  Whilst it is a new system I have three ideas on how to make it even better.

Offline access to notes in Evernote is a must for me.  Whilst much of my time is spent in areas with a good enough reception for my phone or with access to a WiFi network, there are occasions where getting online and connected is not so easy if not impossible as anyone who travels the UK rail network will attest to for example.  Now whilst the Mac and Windows clients have offline access by default, the mobile clients are not so fortunate.

Do you use Evernote on Windows? Do you ever put files into Evernote notes? I’d like to share a little tip with you for making your life with files and Evernote bit easier.

Evernote is one of my favourite applications on any platform and I use it on several for a huge variety of things. The nature of Evernote is to provide a system that can hold any information and be accessed anywhere. This lends itself to storing just about everything in it. I certainly try to keep as much as possible in it, but this innate power and flexibility also makes Evernote potentially dangerous to use and so I thought I’d write something about securing Evernote. This won’t necessarily be a definitive guide of making your Evernote account into Fort Knox, but it will hopefully give you some options to consider in terms of how you use and access Evernote.

Today I’ve started a new project that’s going to take me a year and will need some creativity, a steady hand and my new phone.

It’s been some time since I had a phone upgrade but yesterday I finally got a new phone. In fact this phone is very new for me as it is running an operating system I’ve had no prior experience with - Android.

We have a number of iPhone users in our office and I was asked a couple of days ago to have a look at something a few users had recently noticed - the appearance of a new calendar called Birthdays. Whilst the users had a variety of iPhone models 3G through to iPhone 4 (both work and personal), I quickly noted that each of the phones was running iOS4. So my instincts were that this was probably gong to be related to a new iOS4 feature or maybe something to do with a new version of iTunes choosing to sync a non-existent MobileMe calendar.

HootSuite is an iPhone/iPod touch social media dashboard app. It originally appeared as a mobile Twitter client but has expanded to incorporate links to other social networks. HootSuite also have their own URL shortening service Ow.ly, and in version 1.1.5.1 they introduced the option to prefix a URL in mobile Safari and have HootSuite launch with an Ow.ly’fied URL prepopulated into your message. I’m not one for remembering the details for things like this that I won’t use every day so I chose instead to create a simple little bookmarklet.

Earlier today I posted about some VBScript that deals with variable positional formatting of tabs within strings. This was related to a system I was working with where the information needed to be copied from the screen. In an attempt to make things simpler for the user my overall script worked with the Windows clipboard as the data source rather than having the user paste it into a text file and then import that into the script. In case you haven’t come across this technique before, here’s how I did it.

I’ve been working with colleagues in our finance department recently to streamline and automate some of their processes. An interesting little technical problem that cropped up was taking some output from the accounts system and pushing it into an Excel spreadsheet. The problem was that the formatting was done with varying numbers of tabs and spaces. My solution was a little bit of VBScript.

I recently had a technological Wizard of Oz moment where I was having a problem with a piece of video equipment. That is I had a black and white image from a web camera where there had previously been glorious technicolour. Given the amount of time I invested in resolving the issue I thought I’d perhaps share it in case anyone else comes across the same problem.

The big day finally arrived for Evernote today. They revealed the second phase of the big Evernote plan and revealed the secret they’d been keeping up their trunk.

The latest release of Evernote for the iPhone is 3.3.5 and it includes an elegant yet simple solution for what was previously a frustrating oversight around taking photos.

A chance look on Twitter today lead me to discover what I can only describe as a quaint partnership with Evernote in Japan.

I had thought that everything was digital in Japan these days and Evernote has certainly taken off in a big way this year.  However I was surprised to discover that abrAsus seem to have released what I assume is a notepad holder for use with Evernote.

A rat is a small mammal with a bad reputation. The R.A.T. however is a fighting system that has a similar reputation in that it has been used to train US Navy Seals amongst others. It is a system that is focussed on survival in dire circumstances and certainly isn’t something I’d recommend to someone working the doors as a way to safely escort people form the premises. Last weekend I had the opportunity to give it a go at a seminar in Catterick.

Over the weekend, Evernote have announced that they have a secret to share on July 14 2010 at 10 AM.  So I guess the big question is what is the secret and are elephant’s good at keeping them?

Whilst working on another Evernote related post today I came across a suggestion from someone that I thought I could help with.  Would you like to be able to colour code your notes in Evernote?

A couple of months back Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) did another public Q&A session on the Evernote blog.  During the course of this session he set out a range of updates that would be carried out in the Evernote-sphere over the course of the rest of the year.  I’ve finally managed to get a few hours to filter the whole question-response set and categorise them into mini-road maps of what’s coming for Evernote users.

All of the rumours are that the latest iPhone from Apple is imminent. It’ll be running the new Apple iPhone OS 4 for sure, but what will the fourth generation iPhone have in store in terms of hardware features?  Well I’ve put together a list of ten things - five near certainties and five “wouldn’t it be cool if…” things.

WWDC 2010 is taking place tomorrow and the Internet is awash with rumours of what Apple might be announcing.  After dominating the tech news in the last few months with the iPad, iPhone OS 4 preview, the leaked iPhone and the release of the new MacBook Pro devices (though admittedly this was a little quieter than the others), what will Apple be covering?

Today I took my final ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) module assessment. ECDL is a syllabus that has seven modules of assessment on what many people might consider to be the day to day forms of IT literacy in a typical workplace.  In my role as an IT professional (Head of ICT), with a masters degree in Computer Science, and a decade of IT industry experience, why did I decide to do this course?

The migration of my blogs to thoughtasylum.com was about a month ago now, so I figured I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the move away from several split Wordpress blogs onto this consolidated SquareSpace driven platform.

Today Evernote released the 3.5.4 update of the Windows client.  Evernote’s blog post on the release covers many of the new features, but there was one notable absence of one of the new features that also reminded me of another obscure feature of Evernote I discovered a while back.

Each year the organisation I work for holds a conference and my team provides technical support.  This year is slightly different in that we’ll be using the venue’s ICT equipment rather than our own.  Whilst this has many advantages in terms of simplifying things it has thrown up a little issue around something we normally do with the desktop background.

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to turn your iPhone into an iPod touch?  For example in a meeting that’s being recorded but you needed to provide updates on a social media network, or even just abroad and you don’t want to run up your call/data charges.  Well there is a way and it is nice and simple.

A little while back I was asked to put together a twenty minute presentation for a group of staff on an ICT related topic.  After some deliberation and input from one of the team leaders I decided upon a topic of communications technology that was available to them.  As a basis for the presentation I decided to put together a diagram that showed the relationships between the technology and the features of each along with some guidance on choosing the right sort of technology for the right scenario.  At the end of the presentation I could then give the team an A3 copy of the diagram to put on their wall for reference.

Spell checking is one of those things that most of us take for granted these days in our applications.  Those familiar wavy red lines are all too familiar to most computer users.  You may even have noticed them in Evernote, but like many people I need to use technical jargon and in my notes and these are not part of the default English dictionary in Evernote which is a US  English dictionary adding further issues for me a UK Evernote user.  So let me explain how to update your Evernote dictionary.

Like many Mac users I’ve spent many years using Windows and have a significant familiarity with the working practices and keyboard shortcuts of that OS.  One of the actions I commonly use in Windows is to minimise all windows.  It may not necessarily be “the Mac way”, but I still find myself wanting to do this and have spent some time trying to track down a keyboard shortcut that will let me do this.

Power saving on computers is a big deal.  As well as being good for the environment it can also preserve battery life on mobile computers.  Occasionally however you need to keep your computer awake such as when giving a presentation.  Whilst many slide show applications override screen savers, screen dimming, etc. there can also be occasions where you might need to display something else - a video feed on a web page for example.

On occasion I find that I need to take text from one Mac application and convert it into plain text for use in another application.  I’ve been copying the original content to the Mac’s clipboard, pasting it into a text editor application (to remove the formatting), copying that text and then pasting it into the application I want it in.  This is a laborious process and one which I was sure could be improved upon.

Following on from the send to Evernote addition for Evernote I also wanted to reproduce the Windows Evernote watched folders feature.  This allows a file moved to a specific folder to be automatically imported into a new note within Evernote and again can be accomplished with AppleScript.

Being able to add files into Evernote is a particularly useful feature.  On my Windows PC I have an option when I right click on a file to send it to Evernote.  By default my Evernote installation on my Mac doesn’t provide this option, so I decided to address this shortcoming with a service.

I frequently need to type in references to file locations.  In OS X if I Get Info on a file or folder I can get a path, but I decided to write a script to widen my options and make things a little faster.

A little while back I posted about an improved template system for Evernote. This system was based on exporting a note from Evernote, tweaking it in a text editor and then importing it back again whenever you need a new note based on it.  The post was focussed on how to do this in Windows as this is the platform I commonly work with.  I’m now starting to use Mac OS X a bit more and I’ve extended the system to work on this platform too.

It has been a little time since I posted my improved template system for Evernote and now that the new web site is starting to come together (still lots to do) I can finally share just a few of the sample templates I’m now starting to use.

The bank holiday weekend has given me an opportunity to catch up on some work I’ve been toiling over the last few weeks.  My last blog post was a month ago and I’ve been desperate to get on top of one project in particular so that I can catch up on some blogging.  That project is the migration and consolidation of several of my blogs into one single site - thoughtasylum.com.

So it’s just a matter of hours until the iPad is released in the US (over here in the UK we’ve got a bit longer to wait), and I got to thinking about the future of one of my favorite applications on this new platform - Evernote.  Ever since Phil Libin posted …

Did you know that sometimes it’s better to format text in Microsoft Excel 2007 as something other than text?  If you have cells containing more than 255 characters, cells formatted as “Text” are displayed as a series of # characters.  It makes no difference if you set the cell to word wrap, it simply doesn’t display.

For some time now Evernote has supported thee-mailing of notes into Evernote to automatically create a note.  This has been fantastically useful in terms of automation of things like automatically feeding tweets into Evernote or just quickly getting pages from the iPhone Safari browser into Evernote. Today Evernote took a big step forward with this and added functionality to the e-mail processing to allow you to specify a notebook and one or more tags for the note generated by the e-mail.

Building on yesterday’s post on an improved template system for Evernote I’d like to share with you how I use a variation on this system to create a daily journal template.

ReaddleDocs is an iPhone/iPod touch app that allows you to download files from web sites (amongst other things).  Frequently you may find you want to download something when you’re browsing the web in Safari.  To open the page in ReaddleDocs, you just need to prefix the url with an “r” - i.e. “http://” becomes “rhttp://”.

One of the things that people have frequently asked for in Evernote is for the inclusion of templates.  I wrote a post in November 2009 about how ENSCRIPT could be used to automate the creation of notes in Evernote based on a template.  I’ve now taken that post which was more a proof of concept and created what I think is an improved system for using templates in Evernote.

A few days ago my partner was having a problem with her organisation’s Twitter feed.  Part of their feed is driven by an automated RSS to Twitter service and for some reason the RSS feed reset and the Twitter account was then flooded with several years of postings from the RSS feed.

I love Evernote and the flexibility it gives me to carry my information with me everywhere. What I also make use of from time to time is the option to share information with other people. Typically I share it with other individuals by sharing a notebook with them specifically or simply by e-mailing the content of the note directly to them.

I usually read manuals before using something, but in the case of my iPod Touch I pretty much dived straight in. However I recently took the opportunity to have a look at the online help within Safari and came across the instructions for using the undo operation. I think I might have accidentally used the undo function before but never realised how to activate it.

Evernoteis a tool I use practically every single day. I love the versatility of the system and its cross-platform availability as well as the fact that you can use it for free. One of the features I now take for granted are the variety of ways you can get information into Evernote.

So the much anticipated Apple announcement is almost upon us. Many of the rumours doing the rounds not only include the much anticipated Apple Tablet, but also a new version of the iPhone OS. This would make sense if the new OS is to also run on a tablet as it would presumably need to allow for a different screen size. If there is a new OS there will no doubt be other enhancements and revisions, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to share fifteen enhancements I’d like to see made to the a new iPhone OS.

We’ve recently had some Nokia E71 hand sets in for staff to use and some users are now starting to reset their passwords for the Microsoft Exchange server.  This needs to be entered on the phone, but unfortunately it doesn’t just offer up a “your current password isn’t working like to enter a new one?” option.  Instead we’re having to make our way through the following twelve step laborious process…

For some time now Fujitsu ScanSnap has been a well publicised way to get your scans into Evernote with a minimum of fuss.  I don’t have a Fujitsu scanner, but I did have a desire to get my an all-in-one print/scan/fax unit to fit into some sort of scan to Evernote work flow.  Thankfully it was surprisingly easy.

A day or two ago Bloomberg published an article that featured a rumour that the next generation iPhone might conceivably include a touch sensitive back like Apple’s latest magic mouse.  This surely has to be some sort of joke?

For a couple of years now I’ve been pulling IT service desk statistics into a spreadsheet and setting up worksheets to break down and analyse the data in various ways.  The number of worksheets has subsequently grown a significant amount and I wanted to create a front worksheet that contained hyperlinks to and brief descriptions for each of the subsequent worksheets.

Prior to Microsoft Office 2007 (MSO2007), office provided a quick and simple way to find out just how big your file was. This was done by selecting the properties option from the file menu which then displayed the same file properties dialog box that you could select from the file in Windows Explorer.

I was going to spend some time today compiling a list of keyboard shortcuts for Evernote.  I’d had a look around some time ago and been unable to find much out there, but before I began I thought I’d have another check.  This time I found a link to a PDF on site mistywindows.com that does a superb job of describing the available shortcut keys.

• Download mistywindows.com Evernote Shortcuts PDF.

I’ve been doing a little bit more work with some spreadsheets recently and I came across a situation where I needed to work with a date and carry out a comparison to a string of text.  My first attempt fell short as it wouldn’t get the value I wanted, but Excel’s TEXT() function came to my rescue.

It’s been about a year since I started blogging here and whilst it was primarily supposed to be a site for quick useful tech-related posts several have grown into far larger posts.  Whilst some posts have remained somewhat quiet on the number of reads others have generated far more interest than I could have expected.

Currently Evernote does not currently support outline structuring for notebooks.  This means that you can’t group notebooks into collections (e.g. folders) or have sections/sub-notebooks.  Recently I posted about why in many cases it is often better to use tags rather than notebooks as this allows you to better mark-up notes for searches and the like.  However there is a desire to sometimes have information hierarchically organised and this is where an outline structure for notebooks in Evernote would be useful.  Until the Evernote developers catch up on this popular request across all of the software platforms tags can provide you with a workaround.

One of my best technology purchases in 2009 was my Huawei E5830 MiFi.  The best way I have to describe it is like a smart phone without the phone bit.  It connects to a cellular data network and shares the connection over a self-generated WiFi network with up to five other devices such as a laptop or iPod touch.

This coming year I’ve decided to take a different approach with one of my core applications, Evernote. It’s based around reducing the number opf notebooks I’m using whilst increasing the number of tags. This is the opposite to what many Evernote users are doing, so I thought it might be useful to explain what my reasoning is behind this.

Several months ago I got a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop to replace my overworked Dell Latitude D410.  Along with the laptop I got a new advanced E-dock which included two monitor outputs, so I recycled an old smaller monitor that had been relegated to the stores to have a dual monitor set-up.

Evernote is a great application for jotting down a quick note about something new, but occasionally I find that I want to jot a note that’s very similar to an existing note.  I predominantly use the Windows 3.1 version and whilst it looks as though copy and paste is enabled for notes it isn’t.  So how do you do it?

I regularly make use of Evernote from my iPod touch (effectively an iPhone without the inbuilt communications) and I frequently look to add information from a web page in Safari to Evernote.  As I’ve written about before, the standard Evernote bookmarklet can be added to the iPod/iPhone Safari app and this will then provide an option to set a title for the note as well as providing an option to add tags.  I find this useful but invariably it is quite slow.

If you’ve used Google Earth on the iPhone or iPod Touch have you ever visited one of the poles?  If you do be sure to check out the compass in the top right corner of the screen.  If for example you zoom in on a point roughly 90°N & 135°W you will see the compass rotate and spin freely.

We have a number of E-series Dell laptops in my organisation and whilst we don’t configure it many have Dell’s Latitude On installed.  This is a small Linux install that gives quick read only access to things such as recent mail, calendar and even a web browser.

I’ve had an iPod touch for a few months now and I’m a little frustrated by one of the keyboard elements.  The keyboard has a backspace key but has no delete key  i.e. you can delete characters to the left of the cursor, but not to the right.

Recently one of my colleagues was having issues in registering a piece of Adobe CS4 software on one of our user’s PCs. The product code was numeric and it was being refused each time he entered it. It even got to the point where he had another colleague check he was entering it correctly. After some frustration and a bit of research he discovered a surprising fact….

I recently got a Starbucks card.  As well as getting a free shot in my latte when I pay by card I can get free WiFi access with my mug of coffee.  However all was not straight forward for me because of one mis-communication when I got my card which caused a bit of a problem.

I really like Evernote and the more I use it the more I like it.  For anyone who hasn’t used it, Evernote is a free piece of software that allows you to capture notes in a variety of formats and synchronise the electronic notebooks it creates with other machines via ‘the cloud’.  It has lots of other features, but one thing it doesn’t do is templates.

This evening I had the pleasure of attending a special Microsoft event hosted just a few minutes away from my office.  A team of Microsoft employees are currently traveling across Europe on the Microsoft Get on the Bus tour.  York doesn’t really strike people as being the heart of UK ICT, but Andrew Bettany of the University of York managed to arrange for the tour to swing by the National Science Learning Centre and it was a fantastic opportunity.

The default browser on the iPhone and iPod is Safari which is a built in application.  As it currently stands inbuilt applications on Apple’s hand held device operating system doesn’t give much to developers who would like to be able to add extra functionality (at least not without jail breaking).  The option to send page content to Evernote from Safari is something I had hoped would be easily available, but found myself having to manually copy content from Safari to Evernote.

I recently bought an iPod touch and for several days struggled whenever trying to type in acronyms like “BBC” as the iPod’s on screen keyboard didn’t seem to have a way to lock capitals on.  I finally came across the solution when looking through some of the settings.

I’ve been using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 (Express Edition) recently to create some utilities.  As part of this I needed to have an application start-up but only display as an icon in the system tray.  After attaching a notify icon control to my main form I set the form’s load method to set the display in task bar and visible properties of the form to be false.

I was challenged to work out a little problem someone was having with Excel today.  The expectation was that I could write some VBA to resolve it, but once I found out what the task was I quickly managed to put together a purely Excel function based solution.

I run XBMC on a Mac Mini plugged into my TV.  Sometimes XBMC gets a bit caught up and freezes or gets locked into some sort of loop.  I have it running in full screen which makes it rather hard to quite when the application with focus is non-responsive.  So to get past this, press F8 to bring up Spaces and navigate to another space.  From here right click on XBMC in the dock to reveal and select Force Quit.

Since Google Notebook went out of development earlier this year I’ve made the migration over to Evernote. It has many cool features one of the coolest being the ability to upload images and have Evernote run OCR to index the content of the image.  The mobile phone Evernote applications allow a phone’s camera to be used to take a snapshot image and to upload it to Evernote over a 3G connection.  Unfortunately the Windows desktop application has no functionality for capturing images in the same way through a web camera and with the proliferation of netbooks I feel that this is a feature that is sadly missing - well for me anyway.   So after a bit of research I embarked on a quick weekend VB.Net project to put together a little application that could do this - and so I created “SnapIT”.

I’ve spent a little while today looking at putting something together for Evernote.  Hopefully I’ll have it finished pretty soon and I’ll probably share it with you when it’s done, but whilst I’ve been experimenting, I’ve also been looking at ENScript a command line utility that allows you to interact with an Evernote database.

I tried adding my Twitter RSS feed to FeedBurner a little earlier.  Even though FeedValidator identified the feed as valid FeedBurner wouldn’t.  Googling this suggested that either Twitter isn’t producing nice RSS feeds (which FeedValidator’s validation seems to contradict) or FeedBurner has blocked it.

I’m been a huge fan of DokuWiki for many years now.  Since I worked in a huge corporate development environment where structured documentation was hard to set-up I managed to pull a great number of resources together using DokuWiki and make it available to my whole team.  The culture was such that I was pretty much the only person keeping it up to date … but that’s a different story.

DOS is one of those handy things that in a technical sense you never quite seem to get away from.  The command line often allows you to do things quicker than the over designed graphical options and sometimes simply allow you to do things that there isn’t another option for.

I briefly had a problem with the web server that’s running my personal wiki yesterday.  Try as I might it just wouldn’t start-up.  I hadn’t had a problem before and after three or four attempts at clicking the start option I took a step back and surveyed my machine - a useful option in many circumstances.

In preparing a post today I’ve been through a bit of a winding process whereby I came across an issue I’d never encountered before with a VBScript.  At first I thought I’d made some sort of mistake, but it appears I’d come across a limitation of a VBScript function I use all the time - MsgBox.

I’ve been using DropBox for some time now and I use it in some ways that I think are quite innovative and will be the subject of future blog posts.  However in the last few days I’ve been having a few problems with Windows Explorer taking forever (well over a minute or two at times) to respond and it responds very sluggishly.  I’ve managed to track the problem down to DropBox misbehaving.

Following on from my ZoomIT post and thinking again about presentation tools,  I started thinking about the ways in which magnification tools generally work an how you might want to use it in a presentation scenario.

After FlagIT, RebootIT, PostIT and SpotIT, ZoomIT sounds like part of the theme. Unfortunately it isn’t, but it is a great free tool from SysInternals.

I probably should have realised a lot sooner than I did, but there has been something a bit odd with my SpotIT feed on my RebootIT blog of late.

Last week I attended a second workshop on Evidence Net.  It was launched a few weeks ago at The Higher Education Academy Annual Conference 2009 and has been growing in use across the HE sector ever since.

Annoyingly VBScript does not have a “Ceiling” function, i.e. one that takes a number and rounds it ‘up’ to the nearest integer (whole number).  So since I had need of one I wrote one.

Recently a number of my friends have hard hard drive failures and have asked me to retrieve data from their hard drives.  I’ve been reasonably successful in each case recovering well over 95% of the data in each case - thanks not to me but the proliferation of free data recovery tools out there on the Internet.

In the past I’ve used FSUTIL to create large test files of data to process.  Unfortunately you need administrator permissions to use this utility.  I decided to write a command line utility (called “Make Test File” but abbreviated to MTF.EXE) to allow non-administrators to do the same.  It’s written in VB.NET so it isn’t as quick as FSUTIL, but as they say “it does the job”, and it fulfilled my immediate needs.

I was scripting some Active Directory extracts today and I needed to check if a string of text contained two colons.  I was checking if the detail on particular entries was to minutes or seconds; e.g. 13:25:33 vs. 13:25 .  I couldn’t find a function to count occurrences within a string so I ended up writing my own….

I spend an inordinate amount of time at home sat on the sofa in front of my TV working on my laptop.  I have a nice little media set-up consisting of a Mac Mini connected to my Sony Bravia TV which provides me with a nice little Internet connected multimedia option.  Rather than watching TV all the time I frequently find that I want to listen to some music while I work and because I’m quite fickle with what I want to listen to at any time Spotify has proven to be a great little piece of software.

On Windows XP you may find that you need to carry out some tasks as an administrator for which you would logon as  an administrator (local or network/domain).  If the user is already logged on then you can choose to run as administrator for many activities by selecting run as from a file’s context menu.  However not every type of file has this option.

There are lots of Twitter clients out there for smart phones, but you can also tweet from a ‘dumb’ phone.  The trick is to use a service like TwitSay or TwitterFone.  Once you register, these services give you a local telephone number to call.  You can then record a short voice message.

National Rail Enquiries in the UK have cornered the market for iPhone apps for UK rail.  It used to be open and there apparently used to be a pretty reasonable app out there for free.  National Rail’s app on the other hand is not as nice and costs a few too many pennies for many people.

Power saving options on computers are something that I personally think are great.  They not only help reduce carbon footprints, but they also help draw out even more life from your laptop battery.   One of the main ways in which this is done (others being things such as disabling hardware) is by having an inactivity option that turns off the screen and the hard disk after a period of inactivity.  Unfortunately there are times when this isn’t something you want.  The primary example of this is when you are giving a presentation.

I’ve seen a few variations over the years on how to create a progress bar and an update window in VBScript.  I’ve taken many of the ideas and some of my own to create what I hope is a flexible solution that not only allows you to display updates, reports, etc., but also a reasonable looking progress bar.   If you want to skip ahead then the code is at the bottom of this post and includes an example, but for those of you who want to know a little more about how to use it or how it works I’ll explain some of the whys and wherefores.

Sometimes I need to create shortcuts with VBScript especially if the script is being installed and a shortcut needs to be created to the script.  The code to create a shortcut is quite straight forward,  but the CreateShortcut() function presented here pulls everything together into a single reusable form.  Optional parameters that you don’t want to use can be filled by the use of NULL and environment variables can be included in file paths to make this as flexible as possible.

I like using VBScripts and the Windows Script Host to resolve issues as it has proved quick and flexible for most tasks.  One thing I have found problematic on occasion is the installation of the scripts on a user’s PC.  It takes time to do if it is not being deployed using logon scripts, group policy, etc.  To this end I decided to write a function to allow a script to install itself.   The script below is primarily made up from three functions/routines.

It’s been quite a few weeks since I’ve been able to devote any time to blogging. It has just been a really busy time for me. However I’m currently sat on a train between Edinburgh and York so it’s an excellent opportunity to have a bit of a catch up. Specifically I wanted to post something about one of the biggest things I’ve worked on recently - The Higher Education Academy Conference 2009.

I’ve been tinkering recently with some things around portable applications which I will probably post more about in the hopefully not too distant future.  One of the things I’ve been trawling around for and busily configuring are various free web server packages that are “portable”.  Unfortunately it has taken a fair bit of effort to actually track down and configure something that is portable enough.   The problem for me is that I have a particular need to locate the web server within a particular sub folder and in the case of most software packages this is not an option.

Recently I’ve been working a little bit with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  It is recommended that Internet Explorer is used to interact with this web based system as it provides the widest and tightest integration and range of features.  Unfortunately I have a strong preference for Mozilla Firefox over Internet Explorer.

It’s been rather busy of late and I’ve only just got chance to start posting again.  So I thought I’d best begin by posting about the weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th of May.

Today I came across an issue in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS).  I was trying to upload some Microsoft PowerPoint slides into a slide library in a My Site and everything had gone fine with the first presentation, but the second one I tried came up with an error:

I have a problem with my mobile phone number … I can never remember it because I rarely tell it to anyone any more.  So when I do need to tell someone and there’s no one around who can tell me what it is from their phone I have to resort to looking it up on my own phone.  The quickest way I’ve found to do this is to punch in a special Vodafone code.

Here’s a little tip for anyone who owns a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader.  It has a couple of expansion slots on it for an SD card and a Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo, and whilst these are intended to allow you to expand the number of books you can carry around there’s a bit of extra functionality you can draw upon here.

Today I was taking part in an online presentation from Dr. Simon Ball of JISC TechDis; one of his regular HE updates.  They use an online presentation system known as Instant Presenter to deliver the presentations on a roughly quarterly basis and they last for about half an hour.  A genuine whistle-stop tour.

When I’m asked about setting up a new wiki for a group, I often recommend PBWiki as it has a number of good features and for education it can be used for free.  Since I work within the HE sector this is a simple and quick solution for many of the cross-institutional groups and many people are familiar with it.

I’ve recently been helping some colleagues develop some reporting templates and they had a very particular requirement around drop down lists (which I’ll probably post about at some point in the future).  One issue that did occur however was that the dynamic lists that were incorporated into the workbook were added to and even though I had mentioned to the users about using Excel’s name manager to redefine the range of cells with that name, they forgot and inevitably the workbook would end up back with me to rectify.

For the second time this week I’ve been out of the office and working in one of York’s many hotels.  This time rather than a team away day I was at The Grange Hotel attending the first of a series of workshops on Evidence Net.

Today has been a very busy day!  An early start saw me pulling together a variety of thoughts and pieces of information in preparation for the Higher Education Academy’s ICT team away day.  This was the first away day the team had ever had and there was certainly some apprehension as to how the day would pan out.

Unfortunately due to illness it’s taken me a couple of extra days to put this together, but at the weekend I attended The Gadget Show Live (GSL) at the NEC, Birmingham.  The Gadget Show is a UK television programme shown on Channel 5.  Each series has a weekly show and it showcases new technologies and compares leading products against one another.  it’s usually a good watch and the journalistic comparison is presented at a layman level and at the same time tends to offer some insightful points on practicalities of individual items.

A little while ago I received a request for the installation of Spotify on a work computer. I’d not heard of it at this point so I did some research and discovered that it was a piece of software that linked you to a massive library of music on the Internet. After a bit of discussion in trying to ascertain what the business case was for installing this to a work computer it faded away.

I recently came across a site called TED. It’s a web site for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference.  The web site itself has a showcase of videos clips from conference speakers and is worth a look.  The thing I want to quickly post about however is something I think is quite innovative … an interface I’ve not seen anywhere else (yet).

Since I had my Omina problems the other week (it’s about to go in for repair as there are still some strange hardware issues) I lost lots of basic information on the phone.  One of the things I lost was the ring tone.  I can’t remember what I had before, but I like to have something simple and professional that won’t cost me and won’t embarrass me in the office.  I don’t want the latest polyphonic chart hit blaring from my pocket as I sit at my desk.

I deal with a fair few academics and if there’s one thing they love about the Internet and the World Wide Web it’s YouTube and the vast resources it offers.  Giving multimedia presentations is obviously a great way of getting people engaged, but an issue is that when visiting an institution you can’t always guarantee that you will have access to the Internet so being able to download a video from YouTube is a huge benefit.

I came across a bizarre issue today in Microsoft Word. A user had a document containing a set of information laid out in a tabular format where the text in each cell was being condensed and overlaid so that the text was all being placed one character on top of another

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation I’d been trying to put together for the best part of six months and this evening I’ve sent it on to the users who attended and who were unable to attend but showed an interest.  I realised at this point I hadn’t actually blogged about it so I thought I might put together a little post about it.

Having spent a good part of the last couple of days doing some housekeeping and updating on my Samsung Omnia I had a bit of an issue late last night.  The Omnia is aimed at doing everything (hence the name), but last night I owned an Oblivia.  I’m not sure quite what happened but I think a disagreement between Windows Vista and my Omnia may have been to blame.

A little while ago I posted about some ways to reclaim memory on a Windows Mobile device.  The reason for this was that the main memory on my Samsung Omnia was almost at zero and it had been a fairly common occurrence.  I’ve spent a little while recently trying to get a Skype client working on it and installing it to anywhere but the main memory seemed cause a few issues.  Today however I’ve had a good day working on the phone and I’ve managed to not only get the latest version of the Skype client running from storage rather than main memory but also found a few additional ways of getting some more control over the main memory.

We’re currently working with an organisation to assess some virtualisation options on our network.  In order to gather some information on our existing estate we’re running the VMWare Capacity Planner.  This is an ‘agentless’ piece of software that monitors server utilisation and uploads data to a central repository on the web.

A few days ago I was speaking to one of my users about creating some PDF files from Microsoft Word and securing them so that they can’t be copied or printed.  Rather than using expensive software from Adobe or a generic creator like CutePDF I recommended using the add-in for Word 2007 that Microsoft provide as it provides some useful accessibility options (thanks to JISC TechDis for highlighting that one to me).

Armed with my folder browser script I finally finished rounding out my script to clone / duplicate a folder structure.

Have you ever wanted to use the browse for a folder dialog box from your VBScript?  Well maybe you can make use of this function?  It’s an amalgamation of various other scripts tailored to my own needs so hopefully it’ll suit your purposes too, but if not just tweak it until it does.

I’ve been looking at a number of broadcast technologies recently like Adobe Connect and Instant Presenter.  Several months ago I came across Dim Dim and in essence I have been fond of this Open Source option as it offers free meetings for up to 20 users and it is constantly being developed.

Microsoft Exchange is a fairly ubiquitous system for handling e-mails and I made a surprising discovery today whilst amending a user’s mailbox storage limits … they don’t get updated straight away.

After spending a bit of time looking at service desk records today I had the opportunity to look at a particular request where a SharePoint user wanted to include links to files on other web sites in a document library without uploading the file onto the SharePoint site.  This is actually a really nice idea as then if the other site is updated (assuming the URL remains the same), the latest version is always accessible via the SharePoint site.

It seems that drop down lists are the in thing at work right about now.  One of my colleagues dropped by with a query about creating drop down lists in Word 2007.  So this is how to go about doing it…

I posted earlier about a better way for producing dynamic lists in Excel.  One of the “tricks” I used to simplify things was using the text values of the items in a primary list to identify a secondary list to use.

I was recently asked to look at a problem a colleague was having with an Excel spreadsheet where they wanted to use a drop down list in the cells of one column and then a drop down list in the next column that was dependent upon the selection in the previous column. This is something I’d come across before and a little browsing of the help file refreshed my memory and I gave them a solution based upon data validation and the use of the INDIRECT function.

I’ve been trying a number of applications recently on my Windows mobile device (Samsung Omnia) and it started grumbling again that I’m low on main storage memory.  I’ve made it much happier now so I thought I’d share some of my tips with you on how to keep your storage memory free.  Some of the tips may only be applicable if you have certain items of software installed.

I’ve just been installing some new software onto my Windows Mobile phone, but I kept getting an error message saying that it had been unsuccessful … nothing as to why of course.

A little while ago I spent some time outside of work struggling with a particular application on my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone.  It seemed like it just didn’t work properly and I almost reported it to the developers as a bug.  Just before I did I came across another piece of mobile software and noted a very similar problem and this time something clicked and I realised what the issue really was.

Microsoft Office Labs have launched an exciting new addition to One Note - Canvas for One Note.  This is the same idea as pptPlex for PowerPoint and instead off slides it amalgamates One Note notebook pages into a single canvas.  You can then zoom in and out and edit pages on a desktop like layout.

At Thursday’s technical community event I had a little experiment involving QR Codes and Microsoft Tags.  We have information up in our office meeting rooms about how visitors may access our wireless network.  We have an alphanumeric access key and I used this as the basis for my little experiment.

One thing I came across after managing to find five minutes to read through some news feed recommendations a few weeks ago is something which could be the ultimate ICT support tool.

Today the Academy York office hosted an event for the Academy’s technical community.  Staff with ICT interests from York were joined by a range of like minded colleagues from the Academy Subject Centres and some guest speakers from outside of the community - around thirty in total.

Well it’s been a little while since I posted my comparison of Microsoft Tag and QR Codes.  In this post I noted that there was a strange 90° anti-clockwise when using the Microsoft Tag reader on my Samsung Omnia i900. Well I stumbled across the reason today whilst testing some Microsoft Tag print outs I had produced for an event.

About a week ago the BBC ran an article about standardisation of mobile phone chargers.  Not particularly interesting at first thought, but the article was quite enlightening.

Have you ever found yourself in a pinch where there’s a QR code on a web page or stored on your computer and you don’t have your phone with you (or more often than not your smart phone’s battery has died on you {again})?  Well Zxing to the rescue.

I’m a big fan of portable applications and particularly the work driven by PortableApps.com.  The PortableApps Menu has been undergoing a revamp for some time now to work towards a number of enhancements and in the mean time I’ve taken up using a branch of this known as Geek Menu.  Unfortunately they are all quite slow as I have a huge number of portable applications on my portable hard drive.

I seem to be doing rather a lot with NoteTab at the moment and again I thought I’d share something useful I scripted. This time around, it’s relating to date/time and days of the week.

Twitter seems to have become really big in the UK all of a sudden.  Stephen Fry has been leading the way for some time, but lately there have been a whole slew of celebrities tweeting away raising the awareness and popularity of the system.

In my latest foray into NoteTab arithmetic I came across a curious fact around performing arithmetic calculations on a variable containing text.  Whilst in purely mathematical terms an arithmetic operation on something that has a numeric value is a bit nonsensical, but NoteTab is a text editor…

I’ve been working on something to help me with some logging activity in NoteTab and I’ll be posting a variety of useful bits and pieces from this in both this micro blog (FlagIT) and my main blog (RebootIT).  As part of this I was looking at producing some date related clips which necessitated looking at some mathematical clips and notably one to determine if a number is an Integer.  NoteTab is a text editor and numeric manipulations are definitely not its forte, so I needed to produce a clip function to do this.

I’m really enjoying the flexibility that Microsoft Live Mesh is giving me.  It lets me synchronise bits and pieces between various computers and means that I can have quick and easy access to files on my home computer(s), work computer, my Windows mobile phone and even on a computer used by my sports club.   It’s a bit like offline files but the Internet is your network and therefore it’s quite a bit slower to synchronise than if you’re on an office LAN for example.

Quite often when working on a file I want to clone it as a backup or to work on another copy to try something out. I was doing this so often and being such a lazy coder I whipped up a quick NoteTab clip to make it even easier. Run it with the file you want to duplicate open in NoteTab and it will create a duplicate in a new tab and give it the focus.

A little while ago I was asked by one of our finance team to see if I could help reduce the workload required in maintaining a reporting Excel spreadsheet. Along with some very specific automation amendments to the spreadsheet I also created something quite generic to allow a macro to be run against multiple worksheets in an Excel workbook.

NoteTab clipping uses the clip wizard functionality to produce sophisticated input dialog windows to obtain information from the user.  There is however a strange view produced when looking at a single check box. The clip code shown below shows the various pieces of clip code used and below that are the discussions of the approach and options along with the screen shots of what the clip wizard produces.

Sometimes when testing network connectivity to a server on the local LAN or a web site I use the ubiquitous PING command to do the job.  If I need to do it repeatedly I tend to write a quick DOS batch file (a text based script with a file extension of BAT or CMD).

Like almost everyone else with an Internet connection on the western part of our planet I use Google a lot.  Today though they seem to be having problems.  Everything I’m searching for seems to have an associated warning - this site may harm your computer.

A little clip I like to use in NoteTab is one for ensuring that I have an empty file.  I usually call it using the ^!FarClip command from a standard library before I dump out the results of something where I always want it to be separate.

When working with NoteTab clips I like to be efficient and reuse clips just like programmers do with functions, subroutines, code libraries, etc. So one little thing I like to use when dealing with some clips is a conditional statement that allows the clip to work out if it was called from another clip with a parameter.

Microsoft have relatively recently launched their new “mobile tagging” beta programme.  It’s quite similar to the existing QR codes that have been around for some time and it was for this reason that it caught my attention and I decided to give Microsoft Tag an evaluation in comparison to QR codes.

Ever sorted sticky notes (affinity diagramming) on a wall and then had to copy it all down?  Well perhaps StickySorterfrom Microsoft Offics Labs might be just the thing you need.  Combine it with an electronic whiteboard like MIMIOor a projector and a gyroscopic/wireless keyboard & mouse and you can really get to work.  With Microsoft Surface on the horizon it could be even more natural and just ever so slightly Minority Report … but not everything’s perfect.

As anyone who’s been following the RebootIT Twitter feed today will know, I’ve been at the first day of the BETT Show 09. BETT (or British Education and Training Technology) is an education focussed technology event with the global industry giants of IT such as Microsoft right the way down to businesses run by individuals providing specialised learning materials. Whilst the Academy is not dealing directly with educating students, we do work in the HE sector and so the suppliers are often the same. Additionally we do need to train our own staff in technology and so there’s some parallels there too.

For a simple screen shot taking tool, Lightscreen is a free piece of software that sits in the system tray and can assign hot keys to capturing screen areas as well as the usual desktop and active window.  It can also be set to dump out direct to file.

Every presentation these days involves Microsoft PowerPoint.  After a while no matter how much multimedia you add to it, your presentation can still look a bit dull and boring.  In order to make your next presentation a bit different why not try pptPlex?

NoteTab is a favoured text editor of mine and for a number of years I’ve used it for working with web pages and coding up HTML, PHP, Javascript and the like.  One of the best features of NoteTab (beyond the light version being free to download) is its powerful scripting language - creating what is known as NoteTab Clips.

Microsoft Word has a little known feature (unless you happen to have read Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 212251 of course) that allows you to create large amounts of sample text using what’s in effect an inline macro command.  Microsoft Word 2007 has a wider range of macro commands than previous versions, but I’ll describe the 2007 versions here.

When scheduling meetings with people who don’t share a common calendar system I favor the use of Doodle.  However you might be interested to know that Meet-o-matic are offering 1,000 free registrations for their latest more advanced beta version for online registrations.

I did a bit more tweaking of the Yahoo Pipe construct that puts the FlagIT blog and Twitter feed together onto the Reboot IT blog.  The output now combines the two feeds in a chronological order.

I was working on an Excel spreadsheet a couple of days ago where I wanted to automatically pick up the name of the current worksheet to use in a VLOOKUP function.  I came up with the following combination of functions to get it for me…

When it comes to podcasting Apple is the king.  The iPod and its variations lead the market and  the software bundled with Mac OS X makes creating any sort of podcast a breeze.  Unfortunately not everyone has access to an Apple Mac be it for financial reasons or for internal IT related issues.  Creating podcasts from Windows is a little more laborious, but with the right tools it can be made much easier.

One of the biggest things in the Academy is communication. Just like any other organisation there’s a whole heap of discussion about the right ways to communicate and about who receives what information, and about what constitutes too little and information versus information overload. There will never be a perfect fit for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth exploring the options we have available and trying things out from time to time.

My background is as a systems developer and I like to think that I’m quite a good developer in so much as I like to achieve outcomes using the minimum of effort. In my book “a good programmer is a lazy programmer”. So whilst this post does not relate in any way to programming it does relate to me finding ways in which to update this blog with the minimum of effort. In this particular case through something you may have noticed a little way down on the right side of the page called “Spot IT”.

I’ve been running a Windows Home Server for almost a year now but in trying to set-up a new FTP server (which caused some very odd networking issues with my router) and came across an odd issue. I’m guessing this may be down to one of the various updates I’ve applied to my server as I’ve not had cause to tinker with it since before I applied the Power Pack 1 upgrade.

A little while back prompted  by a discussion doing the rounds on the Academy technical group I had a bit of a look into quick response codes (QR Codes).  These are a type of data matrix represented by a collection of  pixels in a square grid that are usually used to represent something like a URL.

I thought I’d start my first post on my new blos with a bit about why I’m starting it. For the last couple of days I’ve been attending an event for The Higher Education Academy where the staff from all of our subject centres and our office in York got together to collaborate and discuss various topics as well as have a bit of a seasonal do.

One of the most useful little scripts I’ve written allows me to copy a file’s path to the clipboard.  This provides a quick and easy way of pasting it into a file attachment dialog or even into the body of an e-mail. It’s certainly one of the most useful little automations I use on a daily basis.

One of the problems I’ve found frustrating recently with my Samsung Omnia i900 mobile phone is the Opera mobile browser bookmarks. The browser has been preloaded by my operator with a number of bookmarks that I have no use for.

I recently changed my mobile phone to a Samsung Omnia i900.  Whilst there are several issues with it at the moment - mainly due to Vodafone being way behind on tweaking any of the Samsung firmware releases, I’ve found it to be a good phone, but it hasn’t been great at getting the contact data off of my previous phone; a Sony Ericsson K800i.

After trying a few options I managed to get a neat transfer of data that worked well.

I’ve been working on a few updates on web sites recently and like many web site developers I have been struggling with some nice browser based variations.  I hope one day to find that Internet Explorer will actually display pages the same way every other browser seems to be able to without a special style sheet tweak or HTML workaround.

I’ve been training in martial pursuits for my whole adult life and I am now facing a publicity problem.  What makes people want to join a martial arts club?

Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to visit Old Billingsgate in London for the MISCO Expo ‘08.  After standing in line for twenty minutes a good few hundred yards from the entrance I managed to get in and was pleasantly presented with a Wenger laptop backpack and a nifty wireless Kensington mouse.  The venue was quite small but there were plenty of suppliers packed in.

I’ve been migrating some web site content over the last few days onto a new installation of Drupal.  The original site is still in place but in order for the Drupal site to run properly I needed to install it to the site root and set it offline.  Originally I’d redirected the domain URL to the old index.html page, but this caused a few problems for Drupal saving settings.

I run a number of web sites on a relatively cheap hosting service called Dataflame.  My current bandwidth doesn’t let me run sites particularly well from home (just yet anyway), and the technical issues I’ve had sometimes have been infuriating, but for the price, I think the service is probably quite reasonable.

There are lots of different photo albums out there available to upload your photos to.  I’ve looked before at flickr and I even have a photobucket account somewhere, but I had a situation recently where these didn’t quite fit my needs.

It’s been several weeks since I last posted something here.  This is beause I’ve been rather busy preparing to get married, getting married, and then having a honeymoon.  Anyway I’m back and I’d thought I’d write a little something about a little task I set myself a few days back.

As an IT enthusiast I have far too many computers.  I won’t even begin to go into just how many and the various states of repair, but the point is I have more than one computer and from my other posts you may also have noted that I like to have my IT on the move.

As every good martial artist knows, duck the roundhouse kick to the head and you might just live long enough to be hit by the fist behind the beard of Chuck Norris. The question is how can his Walker Texas Ranger character manage to make those round house kicks to the head when his jeans fit so well?

I recently updated iTunes to version 7.7 on my XP desktop recently and today I plugged my iPod video in to synchronise.   The whole thing froze up and iTunes effectively became non-responsive.

The thing about security in the digital age is that pretty much everything is governed by passwords.  I have so many to remember these days that it’s just not funny any more.  Some of them have particularly stringent complexity enforced on them making them that much harder to commit to memory … particularly as it’s full of obscure user IDs.

I teach a lot of students a lot of locks in my martial arts classes.  This involves entangling and applying pressure to the joints of the body in order to cause a level of discomfort (pain) that allows someone to be controlled - be it wrist locks, arm locks, leg locks, shoulder locks, finger locks or head locks.

The Internet has been abuzz with the news of the release of Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server (WHS PP1) a couple of days ago.  I’ve had an HP Media Smart Server for several months and have been waiting like so many others for this update to fix the infamous data corruption bug.

A couple of days ago I posted about using NoteTab to ease the encryption of VBS files to VBE files using Microsoft’s Script Encyption utility.  I mentioned at the time that this encyption was in fact reversible.  So today I’m going to show you how this is achieved.

I’ve already raved about NoteTab and now there’s a great reason to rave some more.  The free version of NoteTab is NoteTab Light and I’ve been using this for many years both when I was a student and in a working environment where getting people to sign off software purchases for software like this was incredibly difficult.  It has been simply superb and I’m sure will be for many years to come.

Because NoteTab is my favourite text editor and it can be ‘programmed’ using the inbuilt clipping language I thought I’d share some aspects around one of my NoteTab clipbooks used for working with VBS files; Microsoft’s Visual Basic scripting still gives me a quick and easy way to implement automations and NoteTab simply helps me do that even faster.

I haven’t posted anything about martial arts yet but some activity yesterday gives me an excellent reason to post a brief congratulations to some guys who were grading for Jiu Jitsu Dans yesterday.  So congratulations to one of my old students Sensei Bhachu who gained his Shodan and also to one of my instructors Sensei Lycett who has reached the lofty height of Sandan.

Back in ‘97 I was working on a visual tool for the solution of some algebraic equations as part of my Masters in Computer Science and I reached a point quite quickly where my code exceeded 32KB.  Windows notepad stopped working.  I had a magazine CD lying around with loads of free and shareware tools on it so I had a browse through the CD and I came across a text editor that fit the bill.  It was actually quite cool and it had a tabbed interface and let me open several files at once that were bigger than 32KB - I was very impressed.

The shine may have rubbed off a little and the mullet dated somewhat but I still have a soft spot for the MacGyver series and I still wish today that I knew 1% of what he did and could do 1% of what he could with a roll of gaffer tape and a pen knife.  Unfortunately I ever did manage to cram everything into my head.

Once upon a time the humble computer was not the multimedia hub that it is today.  If you wanted a sound then you had to use the internal speaker that could just make a beeping noise.  Modern PCs still contain such a speaker -its useful for giving warnings on the POST (Power On Self Test)  part of the boot.

I’ve been looking at a number of things in the hours since my last post, but I’ve still a bit of work to do before I start blogging about any of those. Instead I thought I’d share with you a bit about one of my favourite little gadgets - The Maxell 12GB Hard Drive.