Gosh, it’s easy to miss this one:
Finding the Undo and Redo keys on the iPad
I’ve been using the vigorous-shake-to-undo feature when I’m working in apps which don’t have an Undo button, but it isn’t always convenient. Especially late at night when I’m trying not to wake Rose…
And your second interesting technology statistic of the day:
I’ve been trying to shift much more of the paperwork in my life into the digital world, but I was very keen that filing a bit of paper electronically should be as easy as putting it in a folder in the filing cabinet. “Wouldn’t it be nice”, I thought, “if the only thing I had to do was type a name or a few keywords and everything else happened automatically?”
So I built a system which did just that. This video describes in some detail how the script is set up. You may want to use the full-screen and HD options to make things more readable. If you’re less interested in the details and would just like to see it in action, watch the first couple of minutes and then skip to about 13:30.
One thing I don’t talk about in the video is the fact that Hazel rules can also look at the contents of the file. So, once the document has been OCRed, the automatic filing can happen based on words that actually occur on the paper — it might detect your car’s registration number (licence plate), for example, in a document and know to file that under ‘car stuff’ — which I think is very cool.
Some further links:
It’s 12 years today since my first blog post — the first post, at least, on a publicly-readable system that we’d recognise as blog now. I had registered this ‘statusq.org’ domain a couple of days before, and started tapping out miscellaneous thoughts with no particular theme, and no expectation of an audience.
I was using Dave Winer’s innovative but decidedly quirky ‘Radio Userland’ software, a package which is long since deceased but was very influential in the early days of blogging and RSS feeds. Over the years I’ve moved the content through a couple of different systems but I think — I hope — that all the URLs valid in 2001 still work today! Most of my early posts do not have a title. The convention of giving titles to what we thought of as diary entries wasn’t yet well-established.
Things that caught my attention in the first couple of months included:
Here’s a snapshot of Status-Q captured by the Internet Archive in early May 2001
Ever needed to configure a network-based device using a web interface, but found that its default IP address doesn’t match the setup of your network? e.g. Your new device uses 192.168.1.* and you use 192.168.0.* ? Here’s an easy way to fix it: set up your machine to talk to both subnets at once. Here’s a little screencast to show how it’s done on the Mac.
A phenomenon that has transformed my life in recent years is the ready availability of audiobooks and podcasts. When I’m shaving, driving, or walking the dog, I’m usually also reading a book, learning something new, keeping up with technology news, or sometimes just being entertained. My iPhone/iPods are used for speech much more than for music, and my bluetooth headset and car hands-free kit are seldom used for actual phone calls! Travelling time, in particular, I no longer think of as ‘wasted time’.
On the audiobook front, the only way to do this is to subscribe to Audible.co.uk (or your country’s variant). Audiobooks can be fairly pricey if you buy them individually — longer ones, in particular, can run to £20–40 — but an £8 monthly subscription will get you a book each month. I ‘read’ many more books now while walking across fields than I used to get through by turning a page or two in the last few minutes before I fell asleep. I use the Audible iPhone app for downloading and listening to them.
For podcasts, my first recommendation is not to try and listen to them using iTunes or Apple’s Podcast apps. Far better is to get a third-party app designed for the purpose, (unless you have an old-style iPod which can only be managed in iTunes). My current favourite is Downcast, which will do things like keep your current listening progress in sync across multiple devices, and let you skip backwards and forwards (e.g. to jump advertisments) using easy swipe gestures. Instacast is also a worthy contender.
Anyway, the main reason for this post was to recommend two podcasts that I’ve found consistently interesting and of high quality.
The first is Mac Power Users. Now, you might assume from the title that this weekly programme is all about obscure command-line incantations and developer toolkits, but on the contrary, it’s for normal humans, by normal humans; David and Katie are practising lawyers who just have an interest in getting the most out of their technology, and talking to other guests about how they do the same. And while most of it is definitely for Mac users, some episodes, like this excellent discussions with Fraser Speirs about technology in education, are of more general interest. Sometimes they’ll dive deep into a favourite utility, like Hazel, or a topic, like ‘Geek Fitness’. And at other times, such as when interviewing Alex Lindsay, they end up talking more about efficient ways to get through airport security than about the Apple gear they’re carrying! Unlike many of the podcasts I subscribe to, this one is not primarily about technology news, and I like David and Katie’s relaxed but professional approach.
The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, known as ‘SGU’ to its numerous fans, is a discussion of recent and historical science news hosted by some very smart people — Steven Novella, for example, is a neurologist at Yale — who try to separate fact from fiction. They do a lot of background research on stuff that has recently made media headlines, and present the results in an interesting and entertaining way. Recommended if you want to keep your head when all around you are losing theirs.
Both of these should be easy to find using your podcatcher of choice – just search for the names.
A friend of a friend has recently had what must be one of the most life-changing experiences anyone can go through. While in hospital for an operation, she had an apparently very rare but not unknown reaction to the anaesthetic, and found herself, suddenly and unexpectedly, completely blind.
She’s a very smart and resourceful woman, though, and is making serious efforts to discover what technology can do to help in her situation. And it’s an interesting challenge. I have some friends who have major visual impairments but can still use computers if, for example, the fonts are large and high-contrast, and they sit very close to the screen. And others have been blind from birth and have developed a whole range of skills to cope with it.
But for someone who has had to make the transition suddenly and unexpectedly in later life, and doesn’t have, for example, the ability to read braille, what can we geeks do to help? Well, there are the obvious things like screen-reading and voice-dictation software, which are useful if the underlying operating system and apps make it easy to navigate the rest of the system. On the Mac, at least — I can’t speak for Windows — there is quite pervasive VoiceOver integration at a fairly low level, so you can do most things, but learning it is tedious, and the challenge is then to navigate things efficiently using a wide range of key combinations on a keyboard which she’s still getting used to not being able to see.
But one thing we should be able to do these days is take advantage of the power of mobile devices more. A surprise to me is that the iPhone, with its slab-like non-tactile surface, turns out to be remarkably good, mostly due, again, to Apple having thought about this stuff pretty early on. But I hope we’ll start to see more apps that do, say, OCR-to-speech with minimal button presses, to allow people to read road signs and restaurant menus.
One of the best apps I’ve come across in my brief investigations is one that I think I’ll also use myself. It’s called Fleksy, and it’s a soft keyboard that uses predictive text technology to allow you to type just the approximate shape of the word as it would appear on a QWERTY layout and then swipe to the right – it will guess the word for you, and speak it. This is vital for blind people, of course, but also makes it much harder for any of us to get those accidental word-substitutions that can cause so much misunderstanding. (A favourite was when an attractive female friend of mine, on a work trip and feeling in need of a drink, once texted her male colleague “Time for a quickie in the bar before we go?”. Except that a small slip caused her to send “Time for a quickie in the car before we go?”, which had a rather different interpretation…) Anyway, if Fleksy makes a mistake, you can just swipe up or down to pick another choice, or left to delete the whole word and do it again. I found I could type whole sentences immediately without looking at the keyboard. You can then send them to the clipboard, to email, etc.
This is not a new idea, of course – my friend Cliff developed the Swype system many years ago, for example – but I think it’s a very nice implementation. I often wear a bluetooth headset when walking the dog, because I listen to so many podcasts and audiobooks. Now I can use it to help me send messages and respond to emails while tramping through the mud.
Just as the original T9 predictive text system (of which Cliff was also a co-creator) grew out of work done to help disabled people, so apps like Fleksy can also benefit the rest of us.
And in the meantime, any other recommendations for my recently-blind friend would be greatly appreciated!
There’s an amazing thing I’ve just discovered after installing an SSD in my laptop: Microsoft Office products now start up at a reasonable speed!
I’ve only just realised that, because I open them so rarely. (It’s one of the joys of working for myself that I can largely pick the tools I use.) In fact, I realise, I probably download updates for Office components more frequently than I actually use them.
That’s an interesting phenomenon; there ought to be a word for it. I’m probably unusual in having Microsoft Word work that way, but there are many of my lesser-used iOS apps that will be updated several times between successive actual executions of their code.
This is a real cultural shift from a world where big corporations would debate for months before rolling out an update to a program. On the web, we’ve grown used to the idea that a piece of software might not look quite the same the next time you log into it. But it’s now true of many apps in my pocket: something will have changed in an app before I run it again. I could quite easily pull my phone out one day and discover that last night’s update had broken something and I could no longer access the boarding pass I need for that plane…
I guess it’s a tribute to progress in software development, or perhaps to the Apple software-approval process (a real pain for developers but in many ways a boon to customers) that this so rarely happens.
The best way to learn about car maintenance, I’ve always felt, is the way I did it in my youth: have cars cheap enough and elderly enough to need regular repairs… and not enough money to pay anyone else to fix them for you. My first three cars combined cost me less than my current phone, and, while it’s been a long time since I last stripped down a carburettor or replaced a leaf spring, it’s pleasing to know that, should the need arise again, I wouldn’t be completely unprepared. (Actually, now I come to think of it, the likelihood of either of those particular needs arising is becoming rather remote, but you get the idea.) These days, I tend to pay someone else to fix the car, but at least I can sometimes sound sufficiently knowledgable to dissuade them from ripping me off!
Often, that’s the pattern of growing up. You prove to yourself in your youth that yes, you can hang wallpaper or lay a patio, and you go to bed with a sense of achievement and the satisfaction of saving lots of money. As you get older, sometimes, the satisfaction comes from being able to afford a professional to do it, not, of course, because you are helpless or incompetent — you’ve proved twenty years ago that you aren’t — but just because you have more important things on your plate right now. And, actually, the professional did rather a good job, you have to admit…
When the job might be deemed to fall within your own profession, however, it’s more of a struggle. I have, for much of what might laughingly be called my career, earned my daily bread by writing software, or setting up companies in which other people can write software, and I greatly enjoy doing so.
So, while I have no desire even to attempt the creation of, say, another Photoshop or Excel — I have more important things on my plate, you understand — I have sometimes been reluctant to pay for simpler utilities because I feel that I really ought create the same functionality myself, just as soon as I get around to it.
Well, a couple of recent purchases for my Mac have convinced me that this is often a foolish attitude. If someone has gone to the trouble of creating a nicely polished utility that does just what you need, it may be worth a few bob to tide you over until you get around to building your own string-and-sealing-wax version. Who knows, you might find the (other) professionals did rather a good job…
The first of these is Hazel, a utility that monitors folders in the background and performs actions on the files in them, based on certain rules. It’s the sort of thing any decent programmer might dismiss as being for those poor sods who can’t throw together a cron job, folder action and a bit of Perl when they need it. And actually, the idea of monitoring a filesystem as a way of initiating tasks is not, perhaps, a natural one for computer scientists, who would generally think of more efficient ways of kicking off a process. But it can be incredibly handy, starting with simple things like making sure your desktop or your downloads folder doesn’t become too cluttered: Hazel can file stuff away in neat subfolders (or the Trash) if it’s been hanging around there too long.
Then you listen to podcasts like this one and this one, and you realise that when you scan a document into whichever folder your software cares to dump it, Hazel rules can pick it up, send it to your OCR program if needed, rename it to include today’s date, and then, if the OCRed content includes the words ‘HSBC’ and ‘statement’, file it away in the appropriate folder where you keep your financial records. It’s like putting a bit of paper in your out-tray and having a secretary pick it up, classify it appropriately and file it away in your filing cabinet for you. Nice.
Hazel becomes especially powerful when combined with Dropbox, where things you drop in a folder on your laptop while away can be handled by Hazel on your desktop back at home. You need to get into the mindset, so go and find out what other people are doing with it, and you’ll start to realise what it can do for you.
Arq is an off-site backup program. There are plenty of those around – Carbonite, Crashplan, Backblaze, etc. But this has a couple of key differences. Firstly, it’s not a service, it’s an app purchase. You buy it once, and you use your own Amazon S3 account for the storage. The format in which it’s stored is fully documented. You can specify your backup budget — “I want my home directory on this machine not to cost me more than $8/month” — and Arq adjusts the amount of history it stores to keep within that figure. And if you have several machines, or if you provide IT support for your family and they’re all happy to backup to the same Amazon S3 account, you can check up from one machine on the backup status of the others. Finally, it’s just been updated to allow use of the new Amazon ‘Glacier’ storage. If you’re willing to put your data here (where it may take a few hours to get it back), it’s an incredibly cheap backup. If you have on-site backup as well and this is just for real emergencies, Glacier may be a good option. Either way, Arq handles it nicely.
For the last six years or so, I’ve been keeping a ‘journal’. (For younger readers, a journal, or diary, is like a Facebook or Twitter account but without any followers. Huh?) Mine’s not really a diary, so much as a cross between a lab notebook and a set of Post-It notes stuck on the screen: odd notes jotted down, URLs, booking references, phone numbers, snippets of code… but it’s very valuable and I search it regularly to jog my memory. I used to do this in a big folder full of text files, named according to the day concerned, and a set of keyboard macros and editor configurations to make it quick, easy and relatively nice looking. Then I discovered Day One, a journalling app for the Mac, iPhone and iPad (it keeps them all in sync), which makes it even quicker, easier and much nicer looking than my system. Its format is also reasonably straightforward, so I was able to import my six years of past notes, and can be pretty confident of getting everything out again if needed. It has a feature which I thought would be irritating but am surprised to find I rather like: it can pop up a little box in which you type your current activities or thoughts and then just hit Cmd-Enter to save. You can set it to do this a given number of times per day – three, in my case – and it’s a very low-overhead way to keep a track of what you were doing and when.
All of the above come highly recommended – and, for the record, I have no connection with any of them other than being a happy customer. Feel free to comment with thoughts on any of these, or indeed tales of any other ways in which you are becoming a skilled ANDIY practitioner…
Dickon’s comment on my last post reminded me of another post from four years ago.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say, but it can also be the most expensive.
Dear Apple, a billion dollars would be nice, but I think the Broadband Phone team would probably settle for some nice new MacBook Pros…
🙂
John posted this lovely image from CultOfMac, showing phone designs before and after the iPhone.
As he says, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…
Mac tip of the week…
The Spotlight search engine is a really useful feature of Mac OS X, providing an easy way to open your files, email messages etc. But suppose you want to do something other than open them: how do you find out where they actually are? Is it showing you the copy on your internal drive, or your external drive? What other things are in the same folder? Can I copy it onto a flash drive?
A quick note for new Mac users: the ‘Option’ key is labelled ‘Alt’ on some keyboards.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
RSS feed
Recent Comments