ThoughtAsylum

Alfred is an essential app for many Mac users, myself included. It is so much more than an application launcher and as of this last weekend, version 2.0 has been released to beta testers.

Since the beta release of Alfred 2.0 I’ve been working on several workflows that I’ll be sharing here (as well as in the Alfred 2.0 Beta Workflow forum). Some of these are practical workflows (such as Evernote Search+ which is still under development for version 1.1) and some are example workflows that I think might be of help to other Alfred workflow creators. Today I’m going to share a workflow that uses an audible notification at the end.

Today Nakisa formally launched their new OrgHub for Mobile application onto the Apple App Store. It seems every man and his dog seem to be developing mobile applications to serve up corporate data and services, so how does this new application stack up?

Well January’s almost over and it’s the twilight of my days as SCN Member of the Month. So it seemed to be a good time to reflect on my time in the spotlight so to speak.

In November 2012 Nakisa released the latest version (4.0) of their visualization product suite and with it a number of changes to the availability of modules, nomenclature and licensing.  In this post I’m going to outline some of the importance of these changes in an attempt to try to help translate between versions for anyone who might be considering upgrading or applying unused existing licenses (shelf-ware).

Some time ago, Google contacts used to include an option which allowed you to add a profile picture for a contact directly from a web site. At some point last year this option disappeared, but did you know the functionality is still there?

As most of the Internet seems to have noticed, Google has plans to decommission Google Reader this coming July. This has caused quite a flurry of activity around RSS readers in general and there are numerous ideas, cloning projects and the like springing up. My approach to resolving this scenario however is a little different…

For some time now I’ve been using Notepad++ as my primary text editor. Given how much time I spend modifying configuration files, writing scripts and scouring log files its not exactly a surprise that I’ve come up with some nifty workflows for working with text in this editor. Whilst I do occasionally shift back to NoteTab Pro for its immensely useful scripting options I try and stay in Notepad++ as much as I can.

In my work I regularly have need to take screen shots and to make the process of taking screen shots easier I use the open source utility Greenshot. I have Greenshot configured to not only copy the screen shot to the Windows clipboard, but also to save it to a screen shots directory.

I take a lot of screen shots in my work. They are invaluable in recording issues and producing software instructions and the like. To assist me with taking and saving screen shots I use Greenshot. I have it configured to not only copy the screen shot to the Windows clipboard, but also to save the screen shot to a specific directory.

In this post I’m going to share a tip about auto incrementing numbers in Excel. I’ve frequently found myself creating incremental number lists (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …, etc.) and whilst Excel is quite helpful at providing ways to create such lists I find its methods are often a bit limited for my needs - so I came up with another way that I think you might find more resilient.

Pythonista is a Python based IDE for iOS and has formed the basis for finally getting around to teaching myself Python. I’m still in the earliest stages of getting to grips with Python but I thought I’d share one of my most useful scripts thus far. One to execute a remote command on a server using SSH.

Whilst doing some house keeping on some old VBScript files the other day I came across one for creating test files. I’ve blogged previously about creating test files using my MTF utility and whilst it or fsutil can be very useful, this script filled a particular niche. It was created as part of a test suite of scripts it creates multiple files of a specific size filled with random printable content.

Digital technology is a huge part of my life and who I am. I’m one of those people who actually finds it relative easy to read on a screen rather than having a preference for a paper book. So it’s unusual for me to find myself writing a blog post that is about something rather analogue - but it’s something I think fills a niche in the way I work and I expect could for you to. It is something brilliantly simple and fits in your pocket - a foldable whiteboard.

I have frequently found myself needing to add a link into a blog post for an existing web page where I’d like to link it as the page title. Rather than a couple of copy and paste actions I decided to create a TextExpander snippet to do the (not particularly) heavy lifting for me.

TextExpander is a great piece of software that can save you a lot of effort when you want to insert pieces of boiler plate text. However it is a much more versatile piece of software and I’m particularly fond of its capability to process text using shell scripts. In this post I’m going to give some details about how I use it to sort lines of text into alphabetical order.

It’s the new year so as has become a bit of a tradition it’s time to review the past 12 months and see what’s been going on at thoughtasylum.com and with me.

Android devices don’t have any native feature (currently) to mirror the display onto a PC. There are however a few alternative ways to accomplish this. In this post I’ll be giving a quick run down on how I got my Samsung Galaxy S2 to mirror it’s display onto my Windows laptop using Droid@Screen

Over the years I’ve been doing technical support I’ve had quite a few useful VBS scripts that I’d copy over to a user’s machine. Then if it necessary, they could be run again at a later date (by remote control or referring the user to it’s location and get them to run it). However I quickly tired of manually doing this and dealing with the instances where I’d accidentally copied the script to the user’s desktop instead of the location I’d really wanted. As a result I created some extra lines to add into these scripts that would install the script to the desired location and then run it from there. This meant I could run it from a flash or network drive and it would automatically go to the right place - even updating older scripts.

PowerPoint is a term used to strike fear into the hearts of office workers the world over, but much like a firearm it is more about whose hands it is in that makes the difference. I may not be a PowerPoint guru, but on many occasions over the years I’ve found myself needing to wrestle with its functions and features to produce the effect I (or more frequently someone else) want(s). One effect that keeps cropping up is that of a jigsaw. The analogy of the complete picture and how pieces fit together (or are missing) lends itself well to many aspects of business and life in general. Since it has been such a popular request I thought I’d share some techniques and some templates that I use to produce jigsaws in PowerPoint.

Every now and then you get a day that you know is going to be a little different and more challenging than the typical one. You can tell right away it will be “one of those days” by the first thing someone says to you when you walk into the office. Some time back I was heading up a small IT department and occasionally I would walk in to an “I’m glad you’re here”, “server A is down” or “X has rung for you twice already”. None unusual in themselves, but all harbingers of what was to come. However, the strangest greeting I ever had was as I walked up to my desk one morning and a colleague turned to me and with a wry smile said … “There’s a bird in the server room”.

“Change is the only constant.” - Heraclitus of Ephesus Change. It’s happening all the time, everywhere we look. In order to survive we need to adapt to the changes. In order to prosper we need to drive the changes. We need to constantly strive to improve and be smarter about what we do and how we do it.

Over the last few years I’ve created a number of useful diagrams in OmniGraffle that describe some technical architectures and requirements for some of the software that I work with. Whenever there is a new release I update the diagrams and then export each in turn as an image file. Because of the number of diagrams involved this became a rather laborious process … so as usual I decided to make things a bit more automated.

We all get stuck from time to time. A mental block, a change in plans or the proverbial brick wall. Dealing with such impasses is challenging and can create periods of stress and low productivity. They are nothing to be ashamed of and in fact we often find that when we overcome these sorts of issues we are rewarded with valuable skills and experience that benefit us from that point on. In this post I’d like to share a few methods I use that can help you deal with these sorts of scenarios. Not all are applicable on every occasion, but hopefully there are at least a couple that can be applied to a particular situation.

For some time now there have been techniques around for having a set of slides that loop at the start of your PowerPoint presentation. These generally involve hiding your main presentation slides, adding an invisible button to each of the visible slides (that allows you to jump to your first hidden slide), setting those slides to auto advance and then setting your presentation to loop continuously. But what if you want to add more loops and/or want to control everything from a presentation remote? Last year I was working on a webinar where we wanted to have a couple of looped sets of slides and I needed an alternative - ideally one that didn’t involve having to break out and run a separate presentation. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to come up with a solution.

When I’m not working, sat at a computer creating things or spending time with my family I can usually be found helping people with their studies of the martial art of Jiu Jitsu. I’ve been doing this for well over a decade and like to think I have developed at least some modicum of aptitude in helping people develop the a range of physical, mental and emotional skills to allow them to advance in their studies. But no matter how much teaching I do and how many techniques, approaches and lessons I develop myself it is the lessons of my first instructors that I come back to time and again as being some of the simplest and most useful. Like many lessons in the martial arts there is a deep wisdom to be found in them that is applicable beyond the confines of a dojo and equally as relevant in the walls of an office. I’d like to share one of these with you today.

Outside of my work I spend several hours each week volunteering as a teacher. I have some modest skills and experiences that people seem to be interested in learning about and developing themselves and that’s something that gives me great pride to be able to do. One of the most important lessons I try and teach my students is about the awesome power of mistakes.

We all have things that we want from people and of course there are things they want from us. Recently I was thinking about what this actually meant and I think I managed to boil it down to just three things - things that I think we all look for from each other.

In several of the template Excel spreadsheets I use in my work there are references to clients and version numbers that are included. This is for reference purposes, particularly if the spreadsheet might be printed or exported as a soft copy (e.g. PDF). Whilst it is possible to maintain this information manually I decided that this should be something that could be improved by virtue of the file name containing such information (as these are the very basis of file management on projects). I’d referenced the file path and elements of it in the past and I thought that this would be something that should be relatively straight forward to achieve; and here’s how I got on ….

If you work with computer aided presentations on Windows, then you probably know PowerPoint has options to show blank screens. Pressing “B” will give you a black screen and “W” will give you a white screen. These are useful options when you want to focus people’s attention on what you’re saying and away from any slides you might have up. For example if you need to discuss a point for which you don’t have a slide or if you want to tease something.