ThoughtAsylum

Did you know that sometimes it’s better to format text in Microsoft Excel 2007 as something other than text?  If you have cells containing more than 255 characters, cells formatted as “Text” are displayed as a series of # characters.  It makes no difference if you set the cell to word wrap, it simply doesn’t display.

So it’s just a matter of hours until the iPad is released in the US (over here in the UK we’ve got a bit longer to wait), and I got to thinking about the future of one of my favorite applications on this new platform - Evernote.  Ever since Phil Libin posted …

The bank holiday weekend has given me an opportunity to catch up on some work I’ve been toiling over the last few weeks.  My last blog post was a month ago and I’ve been desperate to get on top of one project in particular so that I can catch up on some blogging.  That project is the migration and consolidation of several of my blogs into one single site - thoughtasylum.com.

It has been a little time since I posted my improved template system for Evernote and now that the new web site is starting to come together (still lots to do) I can finally share just a few of the sample templates I’m now starting to use.

A little while back I posted about an improved template system for Evernote. This system was based on exporting a note from Evernote, tweaking it in a text editor and then importing it back again whenever you need a new note based on it.  The post was focussed on how to do this in Windows as this is the platform I commonly work with.  I’m now starting to use Mac OS X a bit more and I’ve extended the system to work on this platform too.

I frequently need to type in references to file locations.  In OS X if I Get Info on a file or folder I can get a path, but I decided to write a script to widen my options and make things a little faster.

Being able to add files into Evernote is a particularly useful feature.  On my Windows PC I have an option when I right click on a file to send it to Evernote.  By default my Evernote installation on my Mac doesn’t provide this option, so I decided to address this shortcoming with a service.

Following on from the send to Evernote addition for Evernote I also wanted to reproduce the Windows Evernote watched folders feature.  This allows a file moved to a specific folder to be automatically imported into a new note within Evernote and again can be accomplished with AppleScript.

On occasion I find that I need to take text from one Mac application and convert it into plain text for use in another application.  I’ve been copying the original content to the Mac’s clipboard, pasting it into a text editor application (to remove the formatting), copying that text and then pasting it into the application I want it in.  This is a laborious process and one which I was sure could be improved upon.

Power saving on computers is a big deal.  As well as being good for the environment it can also preserve battery life on mobile computers.  Occasionally however you need to keep your computer awake such as when giving a presentation.  Whilst many slide show applications override screen savers, screen dimming, etc. there can also be occasions where you might need to display something else - a video feed on a web page for example.

Like many Mac users I’ve spent many years using Windows and have a significant familiarity with the working practices and keyboard shortcuts of that OS.  One of the actions I commonly use in Windows is to minimise all windows.  It may not necessarily be “the Mac way”, but I still find myself wanting to do this and have spent some time trying to track down a keyboard shortcut that will let me do this.

Spell checking is one of those things that most of us take for granted these days in our applications.  Those familiar wavy red lines are all too familiar to most computer users.  You may even have noticed them in Evernote, but like many people I need to use technical jargon and in my notes and these are not part of the default English dictionary in Evernote which is a US  English dictionary adding further issues for me a UK Evernote user.  So let me explain how to update your Evernote dictionary.

A little while back I was asked to put together a twenty minute presentation for a group of staff on an ICT related topic.  After some deliberation and input from one of the team leaders I decided upon a topic of communications technology that was available to them.  As a basis for the presentation I decided to put together a diagram that showed the relationships between the technology and the features of each along with some guidance on choosing the right sort of technology for the right scenario.  At the end of the presentation I could then give the team an A3 copy of the diagram to put on their wall for reference.

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to turn your iPhone into an iPod touch?  For example in a meeting that’s being recorded but you needed to provide updates on a social media network, or even just abroad and you don’t want to run up your call/data charges.  Well there is a way and it is nice and simple.

Each year the organisation I work for holds a conference and my team provides technical support.  This year is slightly different in that we’ll be using the venue’s ICT equipment rather than our own.  Whilst this has many advantages in terms of simplifying things it has thrown up a little issue around something we normally do with the desktop background.

Today Evernote released the 3.5.4 update of the Windows client.  Evernote’s blog post on the release covers many of the new features, but there was one notable absence of one of the new features that also reminded me of another obscure feature of Evernote I discovered a while back.

The migration of my blogs to thoughtasylum.com was about a month ago now, so I figured I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the move away from several split Wordpress blogs onto this consolidated SquareSpace driven platform.

Today I took my final ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) module assessment. ECDL is a syllabus that has seven modules of assessment on what many people might consider to be the day to day forms of IT literacy in a typical workplace.  In my role as an IT professional (Head of ICT), with a masters degree in Computer Science, and a decade of IT industry experience, why did I decide to do this course?

WWDC 2010 is taking place tomorrow and the Internet is awash with rumours of what Apple might be announcing.  After dominating the tech news in the last few months with the iPad, iPhone OS 4 preview, the leaked iPhone and the release of the new MacBook Pro devices (though admittedly this was a little quieter than the others), what will Apple be covering?

All of the rumours are that the latest iPhone from Apple is imminent. It’ll be running the new Apple iPhone OS 4 for sure, but what will the fourth generation iPhone have in store in terms of hardware features?  Well I’ve put together a list of ten things - five near certainties and five “wouldn’t it be cool if…” things.

A couple of months back Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) did another public Q&A session on the Evernote blog.  During the course of this session he set out a range of updates that would be carried out in the Evernote-sphere over the course of the rest of the year.  I’ve finally managed to get a few hours to filter the whole question-response set and categorise them into mini-road maps of what’s coming for Evernote users.

Whilst working on another Evernote related post today I came across a suggestion from someone that I thought I could help with.  Would you like to be able to colour code your notes in Evernote?

Over the weekend, Evernote have announced that they have a secret to share on July 14 2010 at 10 AM.  So I guess the big question is what is the secret and are elephant’s good at keeping them?

A rat is a small mammal with a bad reputation. The R.A.T. however is a fighting system that has a similar reputation in that it has been used to train US Navy Seals amongst others. It is a system that is focussed on survival in dire circumstances and certainly isn’t something I’d recommend to someone working the doors as a way to safely escort people form the premises. Last weekend I had the opportunity to give it a go at a seminar in Catterick.

A chance look on Twitter today lead me to discover what I can only describe as a quaint partnership with Evernote in Japan. I had thought that everything was digital in Japan these days and Evernote has certainly taken off in a big way this year.  However I was surprised to discover that abrAsus seem to have released what I assume is a notepad holder for use with Evernote.

The latest release of Evernote for the iPhone is 3.3.5 and it includes an elegant yet simple solution for what was previously a frustrating oversight around taking photos.

The big day finally arrived for Evernote today. They revealed the second phase of the big Evernote plan and revealed the secret they’d been keeping up their trunk.

I recently had a technological Wizard of Oz moment where I was having a problem with a piece of video equipment. That is I had a black and white image from a web camera where there had previously been glorious technicolour. Given the amount of time I invested in resolving the issue I thought I’d perhaps share it in case anyone else comes across the same problem.

I’ve been working with colleagues in our finance department recently to streamline and automate some of their processes. An interesting little technical problem that cropped up was taking some output from the accounts system and pushing it into an Excel spreadsheet. The problem was that the formatting was done with varying numbers of tabs and spaces. My solution was a little bit of VBScript.

Earlier today I posted about some VBScript that deals with variable positional formatting of tabs within strings. This was related to a system I was working with where the information needed to be copied from the screen. In an attempt to make things simpler for the user my overall script worked with the Windows clipboard as the data source rather than having the user paste it into a text file and then import that into the script. In case you haven’t come across this technique before, here’s how I did it.