Mac Folder Action Scripts and Evernote

May 15, 2011 | Comment

For reasons that I have yet been able to fathom the functionality levels between the Mac and Windows Evernote clients is subtly different. For example on Windows there is the very useful ability to be able to add a watched folder that when anything gets added to this it automatically gets added to Evernote. This is not an option on the Mac version. However, all is not lost using Applescript and Folder Actions Scripts it is easy to replicate this action.

I say that it is easy but that is only the case if you are au fait with the … Read the rest

Top tech of 2010

January 16, 2011 | Comment

Last year, for the first time, I produced a list of my top tech for 2009. I thought that it would be interesting to do the same in 2010 to see how things have changed, if at all. So this is the technology that I used day-in, day-out in 2010 and could not do without.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just … Read the rest

Small Scale Outsourcing

October 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Outsourcing is big business. I should know as I have been using it for over 10 years now to get access to some highly skilled and cost effective development and testing resources. But what happens if you don’t need a resource for a long term project or just want to get access to a skill that you don’t have in-house?

For example the business I work for often needs access to designers to do small scale work for our website. We can’t afford to retain the services of someone locally as we simply don’t have enough business to put their … Read the rest

Google goes Bing!

June 10, 2010 | Comment

When Bing launched the most striking think about it was its look with backdrops made of some stunning pictures. Google suddenly seemed very plain in comparison.

Now Google has struck back even allowing you to use your own pictures as the backdrop and the results can be similarly stunning – providing you have the picture to use. To add you own picture click the “Curious about today’s homepage? Add your own background image now” and select your own picture from your hard drive or Picasa. Couldn’t be simpler than that.

The picture left is of the Cape Otway Lighthouse on … Read the rest

Subsonic vs. Spotify

May 30, 2010 | Comment

I wrote in my previous post about the really rather wonderful Subsonic and how it was part of my armoury in the battle to rid myself of iTunes. Well I discovered today that it is rapidly becoming a complete replacement for Spotify too.

In my short(ish) life I have seen a number of changes in the music world as it transitioned from records to cassettes to CDs and lately to MP3s. Now there is a new revolution in town – streaming. Up to now you have always owned what you played, or perhaps to be more strictly accurate, you have … Read the rest

The Long Memory of Zumodrive

April 25, 2010 | Comment

I am a highly active and avid user of the cloud storage system Zumodrive. In fact I have written about it a number of times before and it was one of my favourite apps from 2009.

One of the things that it can do (unless you turn it off) is to give you little pop-up messages telling you what it is up to. On a Mac this is done via the Growl notification system which I then have pushed to my iPhone. Today I received a notification from Zumodrive that it had updated six files in the list … Read the rest

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

April 16, 2010 | Comment

Google has release a number of interesting and useful updates over the last few days and removed (or planned to) remove a big one.

Firstly the good stuff. Gmail now allows you to drag and drop files to be attached – a real time saver. You simply drag the file over the attachment area and drop – job done. It works well on both Windows and Mac with Chrome. The second change in Gmail is the ability to add a calendar invitation into an email. Again a great improvement.

The other major changes have come in Google Docs where a … Read the rest

Google Street View Star

March 15, 2010 | 1 comment

Last May I wrote about working from home and seeing the Google Street View car pass my house. Now, some ten months later, the results are in and the pictures have been uploaded and there I am at our window, standing like some shadowy Norman Bates.

You can quite clearly see that I am holding a cup of tea but it also looks like I have positioned it to protect my genitals! Maybe I misunderstood those articles about Google taking your privacy and thought they meant privates!… Read the rest

Clipping to Evernote from iPhone Safari Browser

January 17, 2010 | Comment

One of my favourite tools is Evernote, the note taking application. I regularly find snippets of information on the internet that I want to retain and come back to later. Evernote provides a number of tools that sit in the browser allowing you to clip directly to your account. This is enormously helpful and I have always wished that I could do the same from the browser of my iPhone. Well, I discovered this weekend that you can. Rather than repeat the tip you can go here to see what you need to do.

Perfect Evernote bliss has finally been … Read the rest

Your Own URL Shortener

January 11, 2010 | Comment

URL Shorteners are all the rage these days what with bit.ly, tinyurl.com, flic.kr and the rest. They take the incredibly long URLs that are generated from tools such as WordPress and turn them into something shorter and more manageable. So, for example, the URL for my last post on my top tech of 2009 was http://www.spokenlikeageek.com/2010/01/07/top-tech-of-2009/ but sending it to bit.ly it becomes a more manageable http://bit.ly/7fozBD.

So why bother? Well Twitter is one driving force. With only 140 characters to play with a full length URL like that shown above would leave you very little to play with. … Read the rest