Evernote Family Remembers

July 1, 2025 | Comment

On long car journeys one of the favourite games for my grandaughter to play is something she calls “family remembers”. What she wants is for us to tell her interesting stories from our family past and mainly from our son, her father, and her uncle. These stories are all taken from memory and made me wish that I had recorded them somewhere for future prosperity. This in turn led me to start collecting interesting stories about my grandchildren and recording them in Evernote.

I thought that it would be nice to be able to turn these little stories locked away … Read the rest

bookISBN2Task

June 1, 2025 | Comment

In the UK, the average adult reads approximately three books per year, according to a recent poll by YouGov. However, 40% of Britons haven’t read a single book in the last 12 months. That I have read on average 19 books a year puts me very much in the upper echelons of readers in the UK. My wife, on the other hand, averages 126 a year (that’s one every three days) and very much puts me in the shade with her average!

Too Many Books

I suffer from a couple of problems where books are concerned. Firstly, books (that … Read the rest

Family History Database Searches

May 1, 2025 | Comment

Amongst all my many hobbies is researching my family history, which I have been doing on and off (well, more off actually) for the last 30 years. Over that time, how you research has changed enormously with so many records now being available online. Also, when I first started, the only way to record your information was on paper, but now there are numerous software packages that have largely replaced the need for paper.

Data Mining

The main issue with recording your family history information in a software package is that you are beholden to the developer’s choice of what … Read the rest

Evernote Rules

April 1, 2025 | 1 comment

I have been an avid user of Evernote since July 2008 and have amassed over 53,000 notes. Over those 16 years, I have seen many changes to both Evernote the company and the client itself. The recent purchase by Bending Spoons had the potential to make or break the company but has, in my opinion, been overwhelmingly positive for Evernote (despite what the naysayers on Reddit say!).

Introducing Evernote Rules

One feature I have wanted Evernote to have is some form of automation that manipulates notes based on rules – very similar to the rules available in Outlook. After … Read the rest

What Should I Watch Next?

March 1, 2025 | 1 comment

Back last December I wrote about a project that I had written called What Should I Play Next? where it would randomly choose something from my record collection to play. This month’s project, part of my 👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months challenge, is the visual equivalent.

The Plex API

When I want to watch a film I am sometimes constrained by the amount of time I have and usually have some feeling of the genre I want so I wanted something that catered for that plus could also exclude things that I had watched before.

While I do subscribe to … Read the rest

Simple WordPress Post Stats

February 1, 2025 | 2 comments

Every year, over on my personal blog, I write a round-up post covering what I have done during the year. This includes books read, films watched steps taken etc. What it has never covered are my creative endeavours which would be my developments over at Github and my blog posts.

Where are the WordPress Stats?

I sort of assumed that there would be stacks of stats in the WordPress dashboard but no if you want that you have to install Jetpack and get the nagging messages asking you to upgrade. These stats are very similar to what you … Read the rest

👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months

January 28, 2025 | Comment

It seems to be en vouge at the moment to challenge yourself to develop an application a month and do so in public. These apps tend to be AI driven, very slick, with their own landing pages etc. I wanted to stretch myself this year and increase the cadence of my development and so a 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge sounded like a good idea.

But not like that!

While a challenge seemed like a good idea, I didn’t want to be producing apps just for the sake of it. I felt that for it to be worthwhile, I … Read the rest

jolpica2ergast F1 Database Updater

January 2, 2025 | 1 comment

In addition to this blog and my personal blog I also maintain a Williams Racing fan site at https://williamsdb.com. In fact, this is my longest running site having first gone live on 6th May 1996. As you can imagine this has gone through a number of itterations over the years and the latest makes extensive use of a results database called Ergast.

And then it was gone

About a year ago the maintainer of Ergast announced that he was going to discontinue updating it at the end of 2024. To be honest, I don’t blame him as it … Read the rest