Text Expansion with Alfred

June 25, 2019 | Comment

I’ve had my MacBook Air for over five years now and by and large it is still performing pretty well. Certainly better after that time than any Windows machines I’ve had in the past would have done.

Just recently, though, I’d been having a performance problem which led me to do a root and branch check of my machine (turned out it was the Sophos Home Virus scanner). As part of this I stumbled upon the fact that Alfred can do text expansion and this left me to wonder whether it was worth having two programs sat in the background … Read the rest

photofeeler – do I look good on this?

June 18, 2019 | Comment

Everyone knows that looking good in your social media profile pictures is important and nowhere more so than on LinkedIn. But how do you know what is the best picture to use? Well that is where online service photofeeler comes in.

Photofeeler attempts to take some of the guesswork out of selecting the optimum picture by crowdsourcing views on pictures you upload aggregating the responses to give you a score.

You start by uploading a picture that you are interested in and select a category that this would be used with, so business or social. This is then available to … Read the rest

Using the iPad Mini as a Kindle Replacement

June 11, 2019 | Comment

I like reading and for years I have been happily doing so on a very old Amazon Kindle which was a hand-me-down from the wife. I never bothered to upgrade as the newer models always seemed bulkier than what I had.

That was until like everyone else on the planet when you reach a certain age you need glasses and things become difficult to see, particularly in low light. My existing Kindle had no light and so I was forced to start thinking about a replacement.

Initially I toyed with the idea of a new Kindle or more likely my … Read the rest

Sending today’s PipeDrive activities to Remember the Milk

June 5, 2019 | Comment

Until very recently Google used to allow you to forward an email based on a filter. So you could receive an email see that it was from x and then automatically forward it on to y. This was beneficial and I used it to send the today’s activity notifications from our CRM (PipeDrive) to my task manager (Remember the Milk). Now Google has ceased this functionality on privacy grounds.

With this feature gone I could no longer see my activities in Remember the Milk (RTM) which was a pain. So I wrote a little script that used the PipeDrive api … Read the rest

Is this the world’s most expensive charger?

April 9, 2019 | Comment

One of the disappointments of the new iPad Pro was that all those lightning charge cables and accessories that I’d accumulated over the years immediately became useless. However, the move to USB-C meant that the iPad had a bit of a trick up its sleeve – charging. As you can see from the image above here it is charging my Apple Watch.

The iPad Pro can charge accessories such as your watch, iPhone etc. at a 7.5W charge rate – providing that you have the right cables. To do so requires a potentially expensive outlay in new USB-C to lightning … Read the rest

Recording who clicks which link when on Sendy eMailer

February 25, 2019 | Comment

For many, Mailchimp is a reliable mailer for sending newsletters and other automated email campaigns. And for some it might even be cost effective but unless you are sending very few emails I’d suggest not. Whatever your views on costs it is very easy. However, if you’re already using Amazon’s AWS then there are other services that, with a little effort, might well be cheaper. These take advantage of the fact that you get a generous free sending limit with your account.

Sendy is one such service which does much of what Mailchimp does. It can send nicely formatted emails … Read the rest

Kablecard – The Swiss Army Utility Card for Charging on the go!

October 1, 2018 | Comment

Kickstarter has been a bit hit and miss for me but occasionally it does turn up a real gem and Kablecard is one of those.

I have to say that when I saw the video and spec list (multi-head charging! sim tool! kick stand! back light! memory storage! credit card sized!) it did seem a bit unbelievable and I wondered if it was a scam. But no, I did end up with one and it really can do all the things that it claimed.

Included inside a quite thin case is a main cable which is USB-C … Read the rest

Why I Dropped Edit for Notes on iOS

August 29, 2018 | Comment

So, this is me…

I wrote recently about dropping Drafts for the Edit app on iOS. In this post I said, and I quote:

Edit is a universal app (do we still use that phrase?) and the only feature I would like is sharing of text between the iPhone and the iPad otherwise I am set.

Of course there is already an app that does just that and what’s more it also syncs to the Mac as well. So what is this app? It’s Apple’s own Notes app of course!

I’m not sure why I missed this but, in … Read the rest

Here’s a Question that Pains me… Is Evernote Dying?

July 26, 2018 | Comment

It really pains me to say this but I am worried about the longevity of Evernote, a tool that I have been using for many, many years. So long in fact that I now have well over 30,000 notes stored in it.

Evernote co-founder Phil Libin always said that his aim was to create a “100-year startup” meaning that it’s “a company that’s around in 100 years, which means Evernote’s product needs to be durable.” Right now I cannot see them achieving that aim. Of course that aim could have been ditched when Libin left in 2016.

Why have … Read the rest

Why I Dropped Drafts for Edit on iOS

July 9, 2018 | 1 comment

I have been a happy Drafts user on both my iPhone and iPad for many years. When version 5 of Drafts was launch it moved from being a one-off payment to a subscription model which made me stop and think about whether I wanted to signing up to yet another app subscription. I knew I didn’t.

For me there wasn’t a real reason to upgrade as Greg, the developer behind the app, had said that he would continue to support the old version, but it did make me stop and think whether I was getting the most out of Drafts. … Read the rest