Software History

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.

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.