What can you do with the NFC in the Xteink X3?

September 9, 2026 | Comment

A while back I wrote a review of the Xteink X3 in which I said “Has NFC for, well, we’ll discuss that later”. Brian left a comment recently to ask “Will you still discuss the NFC later?” By later I had meant later in the review but it seems I never got round to it so I am rectifying that now.

What is it?

A Near-Field Communications tag is a small, passive microchip (i.e. requires no battery) with an antenna that wirelessly exchanges data with a nearby device—like a smartphone or card reader—over a distance of four centimetres or less … Read the rest

Creating a website link file in macOS

September 2, 2026 | Comment

Sometimes, something you think should be simple turns out not to be. I’d assumed that it would be simple to create a file with a URL in it and then when it was double clicked would open the browser to the URL. This is partly true but not completely. For the gotchas read on.

The webloc format

You CAN simply create a file with a URL in it and opening it will open that URL in your default browser. This file is called a webloc file and the contents look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST

… Read the rest

Headwater app – Summarising YouTube

August 26, 2026 | Comment

After I posted my review on the Xteink X3 someone left a comment about it and made an oblique reference to something that they were working on:

I learned this working on my CrossPoint fork (hoping to get the device to pull my daily youtube summaries automatically).

This sounded interesting and while I was glad there wasn’t any self promotion in the comment it didn’t help with what the app was. Fortunately, Adam got in touch and I was able to try out the app properly.

Introducing Headwater

Once you have registered from Headwater you are able to feed it … Read the rest

Ai Transcription Gone Rogue

August 19, 2026 | 1 comment

I wrote recently about using Ai to help Transcribing handwritten diary entries into Day One. On the whole this has been a great success but there have been one or two interesting hallucinations.

A Blank Page

Not every page in my diary has a written entry but I have been scanning and transcribing them all for completeness. This is the prompt that I have been giving Google Gemini:

You are an expert palaeographer and archivist. Transcribe the handwritten text from this image.
Crucial: Do not insert a line break at the end of every handwritten line. Instead, join the

… Read the rest

Foursquare Check-in Stats

August 12, 2026 | Comment

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:

Exporting Foursquare check-ins to Day One

I felt that there was more that could be done with the information held in Foursquare and set about extracting it.

Into the Dataverse

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

Checking which macOS apps rely on Rosetta

August 8, 2026 | 3 comments

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.

What is Rosetta and why is it needed?

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:

Before 2020: Macs used Intel processors, based on the x86-64 instruction set.
Since 2020: Macs use Apple’s own ARM-based Apple Silicon processors.

The … Read the rest

Transcribing handwritten diary entries into Day One

July 8, 2026 | 2 comments

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.

Transcribing Old Diaries

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

Xteink X3 Review

July 1, 2026 | 3 comments

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 X4 Review

What is the X3?

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:

The X3

… Read the rest

Google has made us Stupid

June 19, 2026 | Comment

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.

Don’t Search

I have an iPhone but others in … Read the rest

Decoding the Evernote Auth Token

June 3, 2026 | Comment

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.

What does it contain?

The raw Auth Token looks like this:

S=s3:U=13d80:E=1a4b63e2798:C=19d5e8cfb98:P=185:A=application-id:V=2:H=a3b92abc123567d7a6ec10b23cad2dfc

Which breaks down into eight parts as follows:

S=s3
U=13d80
E=1a4b63e2798
C=19d5e8cfb98
P=185
A=application-id
V=2
H=a3b92abc123567d7a6ec10b23cad2dfc

What each part means

`S=s3`

Shard ID – Tells Evernote which backend cluster your account lives on.

`U=13d80`

User ID (in hex) – Internal Evernote user identifier

`E=1a4b63e2798`

Expiry

… Read the rest