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 … | Continue reading
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’ … | Continue reading
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 t … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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, a … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 buil … | Continue reading
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. E … | Continue reading
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 setti … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 the … | Continue reading
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 writ … | Continue reading
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 v … | Continue reading
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 o … | Continue reading
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 var … | Continue reading
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 asso … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 ins … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 solution … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 ha … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 inv … | Continue reading
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 kno … | Continue reading
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 r … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 improv … | Continue reading
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 tradi … | Continue reading
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 w … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 frustratin … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 additi … | Continue reading
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 the … | Continue reading
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 fur … | Continue reading
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 qui … | Continue reading
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, … | Continue reading
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 th … | Continue reading
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 h … | Continue reading
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 b … | Continue reading