ThoughtAsylum

HootSuite is an iPhone/iPod touch social media dashboard app. It originally appeared as a mobile Twitter client but has expanded to incorporate links to other social networks. HootSuite also have their own URL shortening service Ow.ly, and in version 1.1.5.1 they introduced the option to prefix a URL in mobile Safari and have HootSuite launch with an Ow.ly’fied URL prepopulated into your message. I’m not one for remembering the details for things like this that I won’t use every day so I chose instead to create a simple little bookmarklet.

We have a number of iPhone users in our office and I was asked a couple of days ago to have a look at something a few users had recently noticed - the appearance of a new calendar called Birthdays. Whilst the users had a variety of iPhone models 3G through to iPhone 4 (both work and personal), I quickly noted that each of the phones was running iOS4. So my instincts were that this was probably gong to be related to a new iOS4 feature or maybe something to do with a new version of iTunes choosing to sync a non-existent MobileMe calendar.

It’s been some time since I had a phone upgrade but yesterday I finally got a new phone. In fact this phone is very new for me as it is running an operating system I’ve had no prior experience with - Android.

Today I’ve started a new project that’s going to take me a year and will need some creativity, a steady hand and my new phone.

Evernote is one of my favourite applications on any platform and I use it on several for a huge variety of things. The nature of Evernote is to provide a system that can hold any information and be accessed anywhere. This lends itself to storing just about everything in it. I certainly try to keep as much as possible in it, but this innate power and flexibility also makes Evernote potentially dangerous to use and so I thought I’d write something about securing Evernote. This won’t necessarily be a definitive guide of making your Evernote account into Fort Knox, but it will hopefully give you some options to consider in terms of how you use and access Evernote.

Offline access to notes in Evernote is a must for me.  Whilst much of my time is spent in areas with a good enough reception for my phone or with access to a WiFi network, there are occasions where getting online and connected is not so easy if not impossible as anyone who travels the UK rail network will attest to for example.  Now whilst the Mac and Windows clients have offline access by default, the mobile clients are not so fortunate.

A little while back, Evernote launched a new feature known as the trunk.  It is a platform through which Evernote promoted partnerships and integrations with the Evernote system.  Whilst it is a new system I have three ideas on how to make it even better.

I’ve been doing a lot of spring cleaning recently and came across quite a few old computers that I’d stashed away at the back of a wardrobe.  Not exactly noteworthy, but I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve done to clear the space and retain my archives.

Do you suffer from finger prints on any of your touch screen devices?  Do you ever forget things and wish that you had a photographic memory? Well maybe Evernote has the solution…

For ten or so months now I’ve been clipping web pages from Safari on my iOS devices into Evernote using a one touch bookmarklet. Whilst Evernote’s own bookmarklet works for this activity, you have to enter some details for the note, maybe even login. For me this was just too much to be concerned with when I’m browsing on the move. My solution simply pushed the whole page into my default Evernote notebook for dealing with later.

So for some time now Evernote users have been clamouring for a way to work with rich text (e.g. bold, italics, fonts) on their iOS device (iPhone/iPod/iPad).  The issue has been that iOS at a base level does not functionally support rich text editing.  To implement this sort of function would require the Evernote iOS developers to develop an entirely new text editing interface and given the complexity/flexibility of the note format this could be quite challenging (and there are lots of other pulls on their time for develpments such as access to shared notebooks in the client (… which they did say would be this year and there’s only a month left).

One of the things I like most about my Mac is the automation and control I can have without having to fight the operating system.  Don’t get me wrong I really like Windows and many other operating systems (I very much like the right tool for the right job approach), but the Mac along with some little helper apps makes this quite straight forward.  Today I thought I’d share a couple of the utilities I use to keep my Mac awake and to send it to sleep.

I’ve frequently found myself needing to pad text strings with other text when putting together VBScripts. Typically this is with regards to time related outputs (pre-fixing with zeroes), or numeric outputs for things like filenames (again prefixing with zeroes). Occasionally I need to do more advanced padding and so I created a set of code to add to my code library to cover a wider set of padding circumstances including not only pre-fixing, but also post-fixing variable length strings … and even bo

It’s time for my annual review of what’s been most popular on my past year’s foray into the blogosphere. This year has been all change as I consolidated my blogs into a new site on a new platform and as you may be able to tell from how quiet I’ve been for the last few months I’ve been quite busy with a few other things that have been changing my life in more than a few ways. Anyway, on with the show as they say.

Several months back (March 2010 in fact) I posted how to create a daily journal in Evernote on Windows using a bit of script. The script creates a new note in evernote with a dynamically generated title (the current date) and pre-populated with an Evernote tag. Whilst I use this to log everything I do at work, at home I have an Apple Mac that I use most of the time and I hadn’t quite got around to porting the script to OS X … until now.

This year sees the 24th annual AUA Telecoms conference being held in Manchester. It is a conference where telecoms managers and engineers get together to look at the telecoms in the UK Higher Education sector. I’m predominantly focussed on the IT side of things at work, but with the prevailing convergence of telecoms technologies and IT it is becoming ever more important for me to better understand the whole ICT sphere and so this was an opportunity I didn’t really want to pass up.

The second day of the 24th annual AUA Telecoms conference has come to a close and it was certainly a busy one with presentations from telecoms managers and suppliers on a wide range of topics. Some dry, some interesting and some that I’m sad to say I found interesting but would probably be some people’s idea of hell.

The third and final day of the 24th annual AUA Telecoms conference closed on Thursday with a set of four sessions three of which were case studies.

It’s all been a bit quiet in the Thought Asylum for the last couple of months and I’m now in a position to get back into some blogging. So what’s been going on and what’s coming up. Allow me to explain…

For several years I managed not to make the move to what I have considered (and if I’m honest still do) the dark side of the Internet. Facebook. Concerns around security have plagued Facebook over the years and whilst the release of “The Social Network” movie did eventually lead to a greater rise in popularity of the network and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, I still have several years of mistrust to get past. So why is it a few weeks back I took the plunge and signed up? Well it’s all to do with a chap called Svend.

I had a comment recently relating to my post about a templating system for Evernote. The approach is that on Windows a system tray/notification area menu utility is used to call a batch script with some parameters and this uses a command line tool for Evernote (ENScript) to create a new note based on a template file based on an exported and amended note in Evernote. The comment noted that the new note that was created was not selected automatically in Evernote and asked if there was a solution. Well, there is….

I was upgrading the storage on my Android mobile phone (an HTC Desire) a few weeks back. It seemed simple enough, just a case of swapping the micro-SD card for one with a greater capacity. Simple. Simple if you’re not a Mac user that is.

Many people who have to give presentations ask that questions be saved until the end. This lets them maintain the flow of the presentation and gives a nice interactive way to round off the session. This approach then mean that in order to reference back to a slide the presenter then has to page back and forth through the presentation. This is mentally cumbersome for the presenter to remember where in the slide deck the relevant slide is. For presentations with a large number of slides this can also be time consuming. But there is a better way….

Like 99% of the planet I hate junk email (a.k.a. spam). In the past I had to give up on one e-mail account as I received almost 1,000 junk e-mails per day. I’m very protective of my e-mail address and I refuse to put it out on the Internet. I’d like to recount a tale of woe and PDFs and an experiment I’m about to undertake in obfuscating e-mail addresses.

Have you ever created a service in OS X using Automator only to realise later on that you need to rename the service to something more meaningful? There’s no services manager application to do this for you, but there is still a relatively easy way to do this.

Evernote is my ubiquitous deposit spot for the overflow from my brain and everyday (unlike my brain) it grows in size. Being able to access the information held in Evernote in as easy a manner as possible is a key part of the way I work and I recently wrote a little script to make it that little bit better. The script allows me to search Evernote from Alfred (a keyboard driven app launcher on my Mac) which is always just a hot key away.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing in Microsoft Word 2007 recently and each document I’ve produced needs to be saved as a PDF. Fortunately this version of Word offers a nice plugin feature to do just that. However it’s several clicks to do and I wanted to see if I could make it any quicker.

At the time of writing, this new version of Alfred really is hot off the keyboard. It may be by the time you’re reading this post that the new features are on general release, but if not I grabbed my copy of Alfred 0.9.9 dev 1 build from the dev download page. The feature you’re going to need available is that of importing an extension in order to use this Evernote Search.

One of the big advantages of using an Android phone is the open nature of the platform and as a result of this you can change the default keyboard on your device to be something other than the standard Android keyboard on one bundled by a hardware manufacturer or reseller (e.g. cell company). One of the options out there is Swype which is a keyboard option where instead of tapping away at keys you can swipe your finger between them and the keyboard will take a guess at what you were aiming to type. It’s nice and fast and currently my preferred keyboard option for my HTC Desire Android phone. The problem is it doesn’t always work as expected.