Late last year I wrote a script that took my Foursquare check-ins and created an entry for each of them in the Day One app. This continues to work well and you can read more about it here:
I felt that there was more that could be done with the information held in Foursquare and set about extracting it.
I decided that the best way to get the data in a usable form would be to extract it and store it in a database, choosing SQLite as the repository (Read … Read the rest
Do you keep seeing this notification pop-up on your MacBook? Do you know what it means? Do you know what to do about it? If not read on to find out.
Rosetta 2* is Apple’s translation technology that lets Intel Mac applications run on Apple Silicon Macs — Macs with the M1, M2, M3, M4, M5 etc. chips.
Apple changed the processor architecture of the Mac in 2020:
The … Read the rest
I recently wrote a post about the ongoing project I have been doing to transcribe all my physical diaries and journals into the Day One app. In this post I lamented that when I had tried transcribing my handwritten entries using AI the results had been less than perfect with too many changes and some pretty bizarre hallucinations.
Given the speed with which technology moves and AI even quicker I decided that it was time to give the project another go. Previously I’d used ChatGPT but this time I used Gemini to transcribe a couple of sample … Read the rest
I’ve made no secret of my love for the Xteink X4, the tiny ereader that you can take with you wherever you go (and I do). So why did I also buy the X4’s little sibling? Read on to find out…
Xteink is a Chinese company that manufactures and sells small, basic and, importantly, cheap e-readers (they also sell a Tong card but not internationally).
They started with the X4, which I have written about a number of times before, and quickly followed it up with the X3.
Major differences are:
I’ve been away on holiday, on a cruise at it happens. I mention that only as it is important to this story. On board there is a dedicated website that you can access to check your account, see what’s on today, book restaurants etc. The web address for this site is:
http://myholiday.pocruises.com/
Now, I know and you probably know too, that this is a local website running on a server somewhere on the boat. Unless you pay a heafty fee you don’t get access to the internet just this local website.
I have an iPhone but others in … Read the rest
If, like me, you are still persisting with Evernote’s aging API (I have two projects that use it) you will have come across the Auth Token that is used to validate requests. In today’s post we are going to try and unpack that.
The raw Auth Token looks like this:
S=s3:U=13d80:E=1a4b63e2798:C=19d5e8cfb98:P=185:A=application-id:V=2:H=a3b92abc123567d7a6ec10b23cad2dfcWhich breaks down into eight parts as follows:
S=s3
U=13d80
E=1a4b63e2798
C=19d5e8cfb98
P=185
A=application-id
V=2
H=a3b92abc123567d7a6ec10b23cad2dfc
S=s3U=13d80E=1a4b63e2798
In today’s fast changing AI world Apple is very much coming from behind with it’s products and services in this space. Apple now groups its on-device AI under the Apple Intelligence umbrella and includes things like Siri.
Launched At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024, Apple officially unveiled Apple Intelligence. This marked a shift toward “personal intelligence” – AI that (supposedly) understands your personal context (emails, calendar, messages) while maintaining strict privacy. This included:
I’ve written about directly accessing the Day One database before along with a number of posts about getting data in from other services.
This week I came across a niggle with the Day One Mac app in that you cannot go directly to a specific dated post just by typing the date you want. You can scroll through the calendar and you can filter by year but that’s about it.
As usual, I wasn’t willing to accept this deficiency, so I decided to build something to get around it.
The app consists of three files:
A while back I wrote about my experience of computer science education in the 1980s and, in particular, use of the CESIL language. You can read about that here:
Since then I have been contacted both by the daughter of the pupil that wrote the CESIL interpreter and someone that is writing a book about the ICL Computer Education in Schools programme. This led me down a rabbit hole when I was asked to look and see what my ‘O’ Level project was. This required a trip to the loft and a root … Read the rest
I have a PHP application that I use to post to my X, Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. This works well but I noticed the last time I posted an image from my iPhone that while it was fine on X and Mastodon on Bluesky the image was upside down (see above and here)!
Interestingly this only happens when posting via the Bluesky API, if you upload the same from the web interface, for example, it works fine.
When you take a picture with a modern digital camera, such as an iPhone, it embeds into that … Read the rest