Something's Awry…

Adulting: Step 211: Do not keep things that make you feel sad and/or bad in your house

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:56:38 +0100

Adulting: Step 211: Do not keep things that make you feel sad and/or bad in your house:

… or even things that you just don’t like, or aren’t useful/beautiful. The world is full of things that annoy and upset you; no need to have any of them in the one small place that you have control over.

Submitting a Springerlink/Elsvier Journal Using LaTeX and Editorial Manager

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:16:52 +0100

So I ran into various issues this morning in trying to submit a journal to the Springerlink journal, Fire Technology.

As recommended by the journal, I was trying to submit my paper in LaTeX form. After all, I spent the time learning it for my thesis, might as well write the paper in it as well right? Yeah, especially as the Word template they provide is terrible and is a complete pain in the ass to use on a Mac (or a newer version of Office than it was designed for – so probably anything after 2003 by looks!)

Anyhow, the issues arose come submission time. The LaTeX title page was submitted fine and the LaTeX blind manuscript got uploaded along with the .bibtex file for the paper. They built the PDF and I noticed the references weren’t there but approved it anyhow – after all, they wanted bibtex files (it makes it clear in the preferences in the template TeX file).

Rejection

As you might have guessed, the file got rejected before the end of the day – I was kindly asked to add the references.

As much as I tried, the document would not accept the Bibtex file I was uploading, so I resorted to internet searching. Yet Google and DuckDuckGo couldn’t really offer a solution (though a few decent submission tips appeared such as this site) That was until I came across the American Society of Civil Engineers guide to Editorial Manager submissions (used by both Springerlink and Elsevier) here. Tip 1 and Tip 3 make clear that you should be uploading the .bbl file, not the .bib file. Now why don’t Editorial Manager make this clear? And if they don’t why don’t the journals?!

Either way, an attempt to follow those guidelines failed as well. At this point I was pulling my hair out and potentially having to re-write all the bibtex entries as embedded LaTeX references. Which is pain with it all formatted nicely in Bibtex and not easily convert-able to embedded bibitems. Or so I thought.

Success!

So in desperation I opened the .bbl to see what it contained. Well, lo and behold, it’s a converted Bibtex database!

\bibitem{AssociationofBritishInsurers2009}
{Association of British Insurers}: {Tackling Fire: A Call For Action}.
\newblock Tech. rep., {Association of British Insurers} (2009)

\bibitem{BureauVeritas2011}
{Bureau Veritas}: {Assessing The Roles For Fire Sprinklers}.
\newblock Tech. rep., Business Sprinkler Alliance (2011)

It was then simply a case of copying and pasting the entire contents of the .bbl file into the bottom of the blind manuscript file and commenting out the bibtex entries.

Uploaded the file and lo and behold, it worked fine!

Conclusion

LaTeX is supposed to make it easier to focus less on the presentation and more on the content. Why then, cant the journals and Editorial Manager make it clearer how to upload LaTeX files? I know that LaTeX appears to be dying out (most of the grad students in my department are using Word and don’t want to learn LaTeX) but if they seem to push LaTeX, why not make it clearer to those using it how they want the paper uploaded?

Now my only concern now is the layout of the references – on one hand, the paper submission told me to use a certain bibliography style but compiling and using that style in my referencing meant that the referencing in the article used Surnames, not numbers as it wanted so I used a different Springerlink referencing link – this could prove to be a mistake as well as the references section appears to potentially be displaying more information that needed.

All I can do now is play the waiting game.

Anyhow, I hope this helps those trying to upload LaTeX documents to journals for peer review!

How did you transfer your data from gnu cash to moneywiz. I have used gnucashtogif and get no joy.

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:20:37 +0100

I’m afraid I did it manually. The new tax year in the UK started on April 6th - when I posted about Moneywiz, I was running both GNUCash and Moneywiz separately (i.e. putting data into both at once).

Come April 6th, all data just gets entered into Moneywiz (I always started a new GNUCash file for each new tax year).

Unfortunately that doesn’t help you much.

I assume you mean GNUCashtoQIF? If so, did you make sure it was saved as an XML file (GNUCash also has the option as saving to an SQL file) and made sure that compression was turned off? (from memory, it’s enabled by default).

Either way, hope you can get sorted!

Valletta Ventures: The Sandbox : Banning LaTeX from the Mac App Store

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:40:57 +0100

Valletta Ventures: The Sandbox : Banning LaTeX from the Mac App Store:

vallettaventures:

Six months ago we released Texpad, an OS X LaTeX editor into the App Store, and we have been developing it ever since. We have had great fun reinventing the LaTeX front end and smoothing over LaTeX’s wrinkles for users, but our job is unfinished and unless Apple reverse their sandboxing policy,…

Sunday Stroll

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 19:40:07 +0100

So here’s how I spent most of my Sunday…

Scrivener - Writers Software

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 19:23:34 +0100

So I’ve been trying some new writing tools for the thesis. Possibly a bit late in the game now but I’m still writing other things for various reasons, for example the UKAPU newsletter editor and I’ve written a few magazine articles for the UK weekly computer magazine Micro Mart and not to mention I’m still writing academic papers.

So when I learnt of Scrivener , I thought I best give it a go. This app promised to be a great tool for those serious about writing so I thought I’d jump in. I won’t cover it in detail, others have mentioned it in other reviews online, I’ll just cover why it’s no good to me.

Impressions

Well I thought it looked good. Until I started playing with it and then quickly realised that it’s severely limited in terms of academic writing.

To write in LaTeX you need to either write it in LaTeX in the editor (and it’s not a great editor for doing that with I can assure you) and export the whole think as a text document or use Multi Markdown and then get that converted to LaTeX. Neither of which are done nicely in Scrivener (it lacks syntax highlighting, code completion etc).

it’s final nail is a lack of referencing software – referencing previous work is a cornerstone of academic research so this oversight is horrendous. It can be got around if you want to export your document to RTF format and use something like Zotero to reference your work (Zotero allows you to insert a reference citation field and then you can scan the compiled RTF document to add the references in).

Lastly, a lack of working Table of Contents system and ability to set headers/footers etc mean that for me, it’s a nice piece of software that goes wide of the mark. Perhaps for novelists it’ll be fine but for academic research, a few glaring omissions make it impractical.

Moneywiz - iOS Personal Finance

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:05:36 +0100

Is Moneywiz worth it? I’d say so. There we are, simple answer to a simple question.

However, those that don’t know what Moneywiz is might be scratching their heads at this point. What is it and why is it worth whatever it is?

Intro

Moneywiz is an iPad and iPhone app from Silverwiz . It’s a personal finance app designed to be powerful but yet easy to use. Since I’ve got my iPad (and Mac), I’ve played with various personal finance apps but never found one I liked until now. I’ve clung onto using GNUCash on the Mac until now. I’ve tried a few others, such as YNAB and Money but never found one that was as powerful or as flexible as GNUCash. Which is a shame because lets face it, GNUCash is ugly and at times, cumbersome. Data entry is a faff but to be fair, it gets the job done (yes, some of us still do manual data entry! – Though YNAB recommends this approach (as do I for the same reasons) because it keeps you keeping a closer eye on where you’re monies going.)

However, I thought I’d take a risk for the £2.99 that Moneywiz is on the app store and I’m impressed. Enough to probably say it will be my sole account method next tax year…

First Impressions

First impressions of the app are good. The interface is clearly laid out and responds well in portrait and landscape mode. The picture above shows the design in landscape mode which allows easy access to the Accounts, Budgets, Reports tabs etc. In portrait mode, these are nicely hidden away but easily access as dropdown (is that the correct phrase for the boxes that appear on iOS?) menus to allow you to change.

You’re first asked if you want to setup a syncing account – no dropbox syncing here unfortunately, a feature the developers won’t be adding. I had seen an explanation why somewhere but I cant seem to find it for you now! I believe it was for how the data is stored – as the screenshot above shows, date and times are added to each transaction. I therefore think that to avoid duplication or overwriting of the file, the files are merged, similar in style to using Git or another DVCS and which by having the time makes it a lot harder to duplicate transactions across different devices. (Dropbox would overwrite the file with the new version and if a conflict was detected, a new file would be created.) For those interested in reading about Dropbox and database syncing, the Silverwiz post I saw referred to this article for further reading. Anyhow, needless to say this isn’t to much of an issue as it still works fine and you don’t have to sync if you don’t want to.

Pros

The app is very nicely laid out, adding new transactions is quick and it records your payee’s so if you do a lot of payments to certain payee’s, it makes it much quicker to enter transactions (for example, I start typeing Sainsburys into the payee box and it gives a dropdown list of payees starting with S then Sa then Sai as I type. Selecting it also fills in the description of the transaction as well, which makes it ideal when I’m entering regular grocery shopping).

Accounts can be nested which works extremely well – I’m a fan of nested accounts as it means I can keep track of all car expenses in one main account etc.

As far as the reports go, I’ve not found another iPad app that offers the range and custimisation of reports. I’m able to set months, between two dates, this year, last year and more! It means I can easily keep track of my details as I go. It’s quick to calcualte as well, though this could depend entirely on the number of transactions.

Cons

Whilst Moneywiz is an excellent money tracking tool, it falls a bit short for those that also have shares, stocks or mutual funds (or non-UK equivalents). The available account options are as shown below.

As can be seen, there’s no shares option there. However, I got around this limitation by using Google Finance to check my portfolio. Using this, it gives me the value of each share and my index fund so I just correct my “shares” account with adjustments every time I update it, using the value from Google. Not ideal but it works.

Also, deleting an account deletes all transactions – GNUCash allows you to move them to a new account if you wanted. This might not be an issue for some people but I change bank accounts (normally savings) each year to get the best interest. In GNUCash it wasn’t an issue, I started a new file for each year but I can’t do that in Moneywiz. So I find that I’m unable to remove accounts without deleting it’s entire transaction history. There’s no option to hide accounts from view either (which I wouldn’t mind and could potentially be the best option).

Lastly, the app doesn’t allow exporting of the financial data – QIF and QFX files are able to be imported but currently you can’t export your own. Hopefully this might appear on the Mac app but in the meantime if you need to export the data, you’re stuck with it on the iPad in whatever form Silverwiz use for storing the data.

Overall

Overall Moneywiz is a fantastic app. If you want to use your iPad to track your personal finances, you can’t go wrong with it. For the money, it offers excellent usability and news of the Mac app being released in April is good news for those that use the Mac for finance tracking. It’ll be good to see how the program ports over but if it’s as good as the iPad app, it’ll be a very serious competitor for any of the current Mac apps.

It’s certainly worth looking at and at £2.99 is a bargain.

Finally broke it!

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:32:32 +0000

Now here’s something I never thought I’d ever be posting. Today I broke the 10Km barrier. Pushed it towards the end but managed to make it home in just over 10Km. A few aches and pains (I managed to get a blood blister on my toe and my shoes rubbed a little on the side of my right foot) but overall feeling pretty chuffed with that. Will have to try and carry it on but drop it to a sub 60 minute run if I can. Not sure I’ll continue to push the distance – an hour running is long enough for me and I prefer being on the bike for that sort of time – however, sometimes it’s just easier to pull on a pair of running shoes and head out!

Zombies, Run!

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 18:42:15 +0000

So I followed this app since I saw the Kickstarter page – I didn’t donate but I was quite happy to wait until the app arrived. I’m glad I did, it adds a bit of fun to my runs!

I tried it out today and got this as my first run.

Nothing fantastic but now I know how the app works, I’ll be turning on the Zombie Chases (basically HITT intervals!) just to mix up the runs a bit!

More details on Zombies, Run! can be found on their webpage

iPad Experiement - The Results

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 13:58:14 +0000

Early Morning

So the day didn’t get off to a good start really. Friday sees me paying some regular bills and moving some money around. Not an issue, I can easily check the payments using the Santander iPad/iPhone app. Easy. However, the problem comes in when I try and add it to my financial records. I keep these in GNUCash and with no iPad app, I’m stuck having to use the main desktop to enter the details in.

Easily done using the iSSH app which let me log into my home Mac, open up GNUCash and enter the details. I found the bluetooth keyboard to actually be a hinderace at this point – using the onboard keyboard was much easier. Once that was done, it was time to log off and head to work.

Work

So getting into work, it was pretty amazing to just get out the iPad, stand and keyboard – the whole affair was small and tidy, compared to my usual Macbook, mouse, hard drives, cables everywhere and paper and pen. This seemed much tidier than normal, possibly due to the fact the keyboard was the only accessory I had out and that’s wireless (bluetooth), compared to my mouse and charging cables.

Once that was all sorted, I started the Textastic app and got down to work. Textastic is a great app, with Dropbox and FTP functionality built in, meaning that I could easily connect to Dropbox, and download my LaTeX code to get working on my thesis. I prefer Textastc over other apps because it has this functionality built in and it support LaTeX syntax highlighting which is a great help (it also supports TextExpander snippets which I use on the Mac and therefore makes it fairly similar to working on my Mac). I found the ability to portrait layout the iPad to be a nice change from working widescreen across (which I’ve found to be a pain sometimes on the smaller laptop screen – certainly it’s not so nice for displaying PDF documents which tend to be portrait aligned).

I’m a big music fan (if you head over to my Last.fm page linked in the sidebar to the left), you’ll see that I’m a big fan of music (and Last.fm!). However, I only have the 16GB iPad and most of the used space on my iPad is used for apps. I have plenty of space for some music but not all of it. That’s where Audiogalaxy comes in. Install the help application on your home PC, set it find music and it’ll find it and stream it to your iPad or iPhone with the free app. No faffing with portforwarding or anything like that. It also supports on the fly Last.fm streaming so I don’t have to worry about connecting the iPad to iTunes to upload my listens! The app performed fantastically and also has a iTunes Genius style feature (called Genie…) that works fairly well.

Browsing was done using either the Tapatalk app or using Mercury Browser which performs nicer than Safari and allows me to set the default search engine and looks more like Firefox or Safari on the Mac.

I have it setup to use the excellent Duck Duck Go web search, rather than the default Google client as I’m no longer a fan of Google’s privacy policy and ability to track everything, even when they shouldn’t .

Afternoon

The afternoon saw me take an early trip home to do some work from the comfort of my sofa. Easily down when the combined weight of the iPad and keyboard is under the weight of a Macbook Pro. (The keyboard and stand weigh more than the iPad! The iPad 2 is 601g according to Apple and the Logitech Keyboard is 771g!)

Setting up, I was easily able to use it for a Skype conference call for a LSU Airsoft committee meeting where it performed fantastically.

I also took some notes on a book, noting them down in Writing Kit so that they sync automatically to Dropbox, ready for me to use on the Mac. This point is somewhere where the iPad falls down. I take notes in Markdown and then I copy and paste the output Markdown into Evernote on the Mac. For some reason, Evernote doesn’t remember (and sync) the copy and paste formatting unless I copy and paste in from Chrome (and only Chrome). Also, I attach the Markdown file to the note in case I need to edit it at a later date – this I cant do on the iPad.

Last thing before bed was to update my Day One journal. The easy sync between the iPad, Dropbox and my Mac means that it’ll remain in sync when I move back to the Mac tomorrow.

Overall

Overall the day was fairly successful in using just the iPad. However, I should point out there were a few instances where I needed to VNC to my home PC to sort out some work – this demonstrates that the iPad isn’t suitable for replacing a laptop completely (as a researcher, I have to use data analysis tools as well which aren’t iPad compatible).

However, as far as today went, the experiment went pretty well. It’s something I’ll be doing more often I think as I move from less research and more writing in regards to my thesis.

The main problem I found was app switching – it would be nice to have an easy method of switching apps on the keyboard (such as ⌘ + Tab on the Mac). In the mean time, it was best to double press the home button the Logitech keyboard and select the app I wanted from the recently used apps bar along the bottom. A bit annoying as it means I have to take my hands off the keyboard to do so but not the end of the world.

As far as the iPad goes, it’s not just a content consumer, it’s also incredibly productive. The instant on programs were great – something that some of the Mac programs could learn from!

iPad Experiment

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:28:31 +0000

Ok, so I’ve had the iPad for a while now and it’s been a great help to me for work. Just being able to mark up PDF papers (I read a lot of academic papers and the ability to highlight corrections etc in my thesis drafts is fantastic), keep a copy of my notes beside my Macbook screen and be a small, easy to use, portable device I can easily carry around, easier than my MBP is terrific.

This past weekend I visited Leeds and managed to use the iPad as my main method of working/browsing the web/connecting to people and it performed pretty damn well.

However, tomorrow I’m going to try and last the day using only the iPad, based on an article I mentioned earlier last year (I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode ). So tomorrow, I’ll be attmepting to work solely from my iPad. Well, maybe note quite solely, I’ll be using the equipment below.

Equipment

iPad 2 (16GB wifi model)
Logitech Tablet Keyboard

Mac Mini (running at home – connectable via VNC)
Headphones and iPad Stylus

Based on that equipment, I should be covered for everything I need. I’ll be using iPad native apps where possible – ideally I’d like to minimise the use of the VNC connection as I know that isn’t an option if I don’t have a network connection (either where I am or if my home network craps out!)

Either way, I’ll be posting tomorrow (or Saturday) on how it goes!

Reasons Why I Hate Email

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Email is a daily fact of life for most people. Whether it’s just getting the updates from web stores about special deals or swapping files for work, email plays a big part of our lives. And I’ve begun to hate it on the Mac.

This seems like an odd statement and especially as its aimed at just OS X and Apple. Don’t get me wrong, I use email a lot. It’s de facto communication method at work and I use Gmail and iCloud like others but I’ve begun to dread sending emails for a variety of reasons which I’ll discuss.

Formatting

My first bug bear is formatting. Regardless of the email client I use on the Mac, I’ve not nailed this down right yet. It hadn’t been an issue until recently but now it really gets on my nerves. Mail.app seems to have a mind of its own with formatting. I set it to only send plain text emails, because then I can guarantee how it’ll appear in the other persons window (subject to whatever font they use). Simple. Until you start adding attachments and this is where Mail.app appears to go mental. Adding an image will instantly convert your message to HTML. Even if you select to put the file at the end of the message and have windows friendly attachments. Enable the settings to put the image in as an icon only and when sending you get icon sized images in Gmail and Outlook Online (I assume it’s the same in Outlook but I’m not opening it to try… Urgh!) Overall, Mail.app really sucks here.

I been sending HTML emails for years with no issues but would always get annoyed when emails would come back with writing to small to read due to a mess up in settings between different applications and settings. Sparrow seemed to reduce the number of emails I got like this and made it nice and simple to send emails and for a while I used it (until I moved my email to iCloud and then Sparrow initially had problems with it – all sorted now though) but its time had passed – it’s lack of various options annoyed me and it was never clear if I was sending plain text email, no support for mail certificates etc. Mail’s handling of converting any file with an attachment to HTML just made it worse – I never had problems with people reading emails in Outlook but when you viewed the emails in a webmail client, things looked ugly (what’s this ATT00001.htm file that got sent with it?) Things weren’t good so I tried Postbox and then Thunderbird which led to the next few niggles that I didn’t realise I had at the time!

The use of Postbox managed to get me around some of the formatting niggles – it seems to obey my commands in terms of sending text emails with attachments etc. however, it doesn’t seem to also obey my settings in displaying emails sent from others. I can overall this and force all emails to be displayed in plain text only but that’s a bit ugly for newsletters and emails with pictures. Say what you like about Facebook and Twitter but at least the styling is consistent and that your words and images will look the same on their screen as yours, providing they’ve not overwritten the default CSS layout of those sites (so non geeks probably won’t!).

Signatures

Signatures are a basic part of email. But why, oh why, will Mail and Sparrow continue to send them in replies? Often replies can be simple yes/no answer and I don’t want to manually remove an email signature that’s longer than the email body itself! The signature is helpful to those people you’re emailing who might not know your full details. If they’re emailing you, at least they know your email and have a point of contact! Thunderbird and Postbox seem to handle these well and let you turn signatures off in replies but I’ve no idea why Mail and Sparrow can’t do this.

I quite like having random signatures for my personal accounts. Mail manages this, the only app I’ve found that does! I assume Thunderbird might should I find a plugin for it but then I have to hope its a cross platform one.

OS X Integration

Mail and Sparrow manage this fairly well (Sparrow probably better than Mail!) Postbox makes a valiant attempt but Thunderbird falls flat. I know it’s cross platform but so is Postbox and they manage it quite well! I’m on about Growl notifications, contact pictures and contact emails etc etc. The latest version of Mail doesn’t work with the latest Growl (without a plugin) so gets somewhat annoying. Postbox is good but it wouldn’t hurt to display the senders image in the notification, rather than the Postbox icon. Thunderbird is just nasty – doesn’t even show the contact pictures in the app.

Ease of Setup

Sparrow and Mail win out here – incredibly easy to setup. Mail just worked, Sparrow I had to change a few folders for access when accessing an IMAP server but it was straight forward. Postbox and Thunderbird required some considerable effort to send deleted emails to the right trash folder, the right archived messages to the right archive – this being on IMAP, iCloud AND Gmail. Once done, it seems ok but it was just hassle. Sparrow, however is hit from a lack of settings. As a minimal email client, I can see why it does it but it’s a bit of a pain.

Overall

Overall at the minute, I seem to be enjoying using iOS for email! On the iPad the layout is quite nice, the fonts always seem to be the right size, it all seems to work incredibly nicely. iOS even supports S/MIME email certificates which makes it better than Sparrow (which doesn’t). I know certificates aren’t widely supported but I like to use a program that does so that they might become widely known about and used.

At the minute, Postbox has replaced my default email software of Mail. Mail works but it’s such a pain now in terms of formatting that I can’t attempt to use it – I don’t know how my emails are appearing on iOS devices (something I have to consider as my supervisor does a lot of work from his phone).

As far as I’m concerned, there currently isn’t a Mac email software that meets my needs exactly. Sparrow seems to be trying to bring iOS email to OS X but it’s lack of some of the more complex iOS bits means its lacking a bit where I’d like. However, both Sparrow and Postbox seem to be improving so it’ll be good to follow further developments on both.

5 Km is my Bitch

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:36:30 +0000

Finally broke the 5 Km out running. Just felt like carrying on running at the end of the first loop so ended up doing the next loop. A more mid foot strike means my calves aren’t hurting like that which stopped me getting past 20 minutes of running before.

5 Mac Apps I Can't Live Without

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:17:11 +0000

So for the second part of my 5 items I can’t live without, I’m focussing on Mac applications. I use a Mac at home and at work (I’m lucky – basically I bought my work laptop myself!) so I’ve a fair few apps that I’ve tried for various tasks, both at home and work. However, the best tools will be the ones that are used in both locations.

Alfred

Alfred is one of the most used apps on my Mac. Think of it as a supercharged version of Spotlight. Not only can it sort through your files, folders and web search, with the extra powerpack, you can expand it to run applescripts, shell scripts and hotkeys at will. It’s a fantastically useful tool. I’ve even designed a few extensions for it myself which you can find at my Github page.

The extensions and powerpack really make the tool worthwhile – otherwise it’s a slightly expanded Spotlight.

Total Finder

Total Finder is a plugin for Finder that lets you have a tabbed interface. When I first discovered this, I didn’t think it would be worthwhile but after testing for a while, I realised it made far more sense and worked very well. In fact, I miss it a lot if I have to use Windows for any length of time now (and Total Commander that it’s based on isn’t as good as this) It allows you to use one Finder window for two folders, ideal for comparing two folders of work or if you’re moving files around. Simple, unobtrusive and incredibly helpful.

TextExpander

TextExpander is a program that expands small text snippets into either full sentences, runs Applescripts or more. It’s incredibly handy to be able to type a small abbreviation and have it insert a full sentence for you. I use if for all sorts – I have it able to convert a few three letter acronyms into my email addresses for me (which are case sensitive), I use it to insert LaTeX code automatically (in a restricted number of programs – i.e. only those programs I use for LaTeX coding) and I use it for inserting dates from a simple two letter abbreviation using an Applescript. Other features mean you can have it expand a text clip and ask for an input as well (I use this in my Markdown codign for example, where I have a tag to insert a HTML centre tag pair but a pop up box asks me what I want to go between the start and end tags – saving me editing the expanded snippet when I’ve input it)

It’s incredibly powerful and get used daily. In fact, you can see how well it’s doing for me from the in built statistics it records.

As you can see, it’s saved a fair bit of time so far (that’s since I bought it last month!). It also syncs with Dropbox and can be used on the iPhone and iPad with the iOS version of TextExpander (on that, I use a mixture of the new iOS text replacement (as that works everywhere on the phone) and TexTExpaner for apps that have TextExpaander support).

Divvy

Divvy is a window management software that lets you move and rearrange your windows with hotkeys or via a pop up menu and grid. It’s fantastic for setting windows to use half the screen left and right so you can have two windows next to each other (better on larger screens like my 25” monitor at home) but is also helpful for making apps screen full screen (on my 13” MBP). Again, it sits out the way until it’s needed and does what it’s supposed to do and does it well.

Tracks

Tracks is a primarily an iTunes search program that sits in the menu bar and lets you search your iTunes library. However, the reason I paid the (small) program cost is that the software gives Growl desktop notifications of what’s playing in iTunes and scrobbles all played tracks to Last.fm. As an avid Last.fm, that was great news as it means I didn’t have to use the blaoted and annoying Last.fm software to do so! Whilst the Last.fm software also did Growl notifications, it annoyed me it didn’t have album art in them, which Tracks does show – it’s a small point but something I wanted.

Summary

So there we have it, a list of my daily used bits of software that cover a broad range of my day to day workflow. I think there are a few others I feel I could have added here but I’ll briefly mention them below – I don’t think I use them on a day to day basis to warrant their inclusion above but they’re worthy of a mention.

Type2Phone – It bugged me there wasn’t an app that let me send texts from my iPhone via my PC (Android has them and my old Motorola managed to do it). This fantastic app lets me use my computer as a bluetooth keyboard for the phone, letting me send texts quickly whilst I’m at my desk!
myTumblr – A fantastic Tumblr client for the Mac that lets me type up posts in Markdown and send them to Tumblr without an issue. Cheaper than MarsEdit as well!

Garmin Run

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:03:45 +0000

First run with my Garmin strap for my Garmin 500. Uses the Garmin mounting kit for the Forerunner 201 and 301 (but actually fits the Gamrin 500 as well). Note that with the 500, the device runs down your arm, not perpendicular like a watch. Nothing major but something to consider.

Blown Away by OS X Again

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:34:18 +0000

So the Mac has managed to blow me away again today, almost as much as when I first started using it, about this time last year. How you might ask?

Well I found out today that you can create custom keyboard shortcuts.

As a self confessed keyboard lover (I love shortcuts and desktop launchers, like Alfred ), I really missed some of the keyboard shortcuts in Mail that others such as Sparrow and Postbox have, such as the ⌘ + Enter shortcut key to send email. This was a complete pain to me (turns out the default Mail one is Shift + ⌘ + D which to me doesn’t seem right). Anyhow, it appears that with Mac, you can create shortcut keys for any application or remap them to whatever you want!

It’s all done in System Preferences, using the Keyboard option. On opening, select the Keyboard Shortcuts option and select Application Shortcuts. Clicking the + sign lets you choose what you want to add as shown below.

This lets you add whatever you want just by putting in the name of the menu item you want to change/add a shortcut for, so I added the ⌘ + Enter key that I wanted and when I restarted Mail.app, it was there ready for me to use (it looks like if the application was running, the application needs to be restarted for it to be picked up properly).

The fact that you can do this for any app blows me away somewhat – I don’t think Windows has anything like this (or at least, not so eaisly accessed and changed) which means that this is another of those features that Mac has that make it better for the user than Windows!

Garmin Going a Bit Mental...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:24:34 +0000

Seems my Garmin is going a bit mental – those altitudes are very much out and that heart rate, whilst it looks reasonable, I’m not sure I hit 242 bpm!!

Time to sort out my bike and get back on that!

iTunes Match

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:37:19 +0000

So I took the plunge this week and purchased iTunes Match. After using it for a bit, I thought I’d make a quick post about it.

Background

iTunes Match is a cloud based music system built into iTunes and iOS devices that allow you to upload your music to iTunes servers and lets you download it to up to 10 iOS and OS X devices. It’s primarily a music storage service, rather than a streaming service like Spotify as when you listen to the song on an iOS device, it downloads the music to the device, whilst playing it as it downloads (streaming would then wipe it from the device to clear space, this doesn’t). It also only lets you access music you already own, not letting you stream different music from a catalogue, so it’s useful for those with an already large library. In the UK, the services costs £21.99 a year and you get unlimited use over that period. Note, iTunes automatically sets itself up as recurring, yearly, payment.

How it works

As mentioned above, it only works with music you already own and have in your iTunes library. If you don’t use iTunes, iTunes Match isn’t for you. When you sign up, iTunes match analyses your library and matches all the songs you own to those in iTunes database. These songs are then instantly “uploaded” to your account (in theory, they’re already in the cloud, iTunes just let your AppleID access them). Those tracks that aren’t in the iTunes library (I have some obscure Russian rock in my collection for example…), iTunes then uploads them to it’s servers to allow you download them to your other devices.

Overall, the system is fairly quick – I did have to leave it going over night but then with 7,532 songs to analyse, it’ll take a while. iTunes managed to find ~5,000 of my songs in it’s database so I did have to upload 2,000 but it seemed to go quite quickly and when I woke, it was all complete. Enabling Match on my iPad was a simple case of enabling it in the Settings > Music. It then deletes all music off the device and lets you see all the stored music in the cloud (though you can set the device to only display local songs if you don’t want to browse your entire library all the time).

Advantages

I must admit, the main reason for me upgrading to Match was not the fact I could have instant access to my music wherever I was (though it’s nice to see the iPad being even less reliant on syncing with a PC) but the fact I now have a cloud backup of my music. If I delete it off my hard drive or I have a hard drive failure, I load up iTunes and redownload. Boom. Simple. And for £22 a year (for upto 25,000 non iTunes songs!) It sort of blows the cloud backup services out of the water (in terms of pricing and ease of use.) Considering I was only paying for backup space to backup my music, it no longer makes sense for me to keep paying for a cloud backup solution for my media files.

Another benefit it that some of music is 192kbps MP3 (or less) files. iTunes lets you download the better sounding 256kbps versions to replace them. Macworld have a fantastic guide on how to accomplish that here . It may take me some time though as iTunes finds over 4,000 songs under 256kbps! This does replace your MP3 files with Apple .aac files. However, these are DRM free and should play in most desktop players and non Apple portable music players, even if you decide to not continue with iTunes match next year.

Disadvantages

Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages to iTunes Match – the big one I’ve found is that some songs wont upload because they’re under 96kbps which is what iTunes limit to be uploaded to it’s servers. I think the most annoying thing about this is that some albums I have are VBR encodings and one or two tracks won’t upload from that album. However, according to my install, I have 35 songs that either aren’t eligible or there are errors uploading to iCloud in some way (it turns out the main reason for this was that the files were no longer on my computer but iTunes hadn’t detected them as missing). I found this by creating a smart playlist using the criteria in the image below.

That’s less than 1% of my songs so I must admit, I’m pretty impressed overall. And to be fair, most of the songs that are below the threshold bitrate are songs I’ve ripped from Youtube videos (or acquired from disreputable means, which thanks to an eMusic subscription, no longer occurs) in the past so it’s a good way for me to either delete them or go back and purchase the songs.

For those that use non Apple phones or tablets, you’re out of luck – you can’t use iCloud on it (though if you use iTunes on different computers, you can use it in iTunes). This obviously restricts the users to those of Apple’s products but this is a very much a business move that Apple are used to taking so should come as no surprise.

Overall

Overall, the iTunes Match experience is pretty damn good. The ease at which it searches through your library and finds the tracks you already have and then matches these to the iTunes catalogue is amazing. As I said, the amount of songs I have which were picked up was staggering – a 99.5% success rate. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a resounding success.

I know it’s not marketed as a music backup service (as Apple reserve the right to remove any items from the iTunes store at any time), but it it makes a really cheap service that’ll allow you to redownload your music, should a disaster occur and your hard drive die/wiped/eaten.

If you are fully entrenched in the Apple eco system (like I am), then the £22 for the year is an easy choice to make – it’s reduced my offsite backup cost by 50% this year as I no longer have to spend so much on space for my music collection – I’m trusting it to Apple’s servers and my ability to store it on a portable drive at work. The ability to change the tracks on my iPad without being near my PC is also a good point (as you can now delete tracks from iPod and iPads in iOS 5). £22 for these benefits, to me is a price worth paying. And don’t forget, I can update those old sounding tracks upto the newer, better 256kbps tracks. Which is worth £22 alone!

LaTeX to RTF

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:14:21 +0000

So for a while, I’ve been using LaTeX to write up my work but every now and then someone wants a copy of my work in Word so they can edit it or mark it up and they cant use a PDF editor. This means converting my PDF into a Word document or my LaTeX file into a RTF document.

The PDF route was probably the easiest as everything was nicely laid out already and set out as it should be and various services on the web manage to convert PDF’s relatively well to Word documents such as Zamzar

However, the LaTeX to RTF option is also a possibility using the linux2rtf program however, that seems to be awkward at the best of times and annoyingly problematic at times. And it won’t run on OS X Lion because of the lack of Rosetta support (unless you build it in Macports but that requires a full LaTeX install via Macports as well!)

it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the answer was staring me in the face all this time. I’d blogged about Pandoc before here and it’s ability to turn Markdown into LaTeX code. Well, it does that and more. Turns out it can output to RTF as well (that’ll teach me to RTFM!) so a simple command of:

pandoc -s LaTeX.tex -o Output.rtf

gives me a very well formatted RTF document that matches the LaTeX document style pretty well.

For example, in the document in question, I was making use of the url package and the verbatim package quite regularly – Pandoc understands these and formatted them as described in the RTF! Excellent! I don’t know how well it would come with Tables, References and floats but that’s to try another day but considering it handled verbatim and url fine, I have high hopes. latex2rtf is dead, long live LaTeX to RTF!

So once again, top marks to Pandoc for it’s fantastic ability to read and convert documents!

DuckDuckGo Stickers

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:45:24 +0000

So I blogged about Duck Duck Go earlier last year. See it here. I’m still using it as it’s a great search engine and I want others to know about it – it doesn’t have to be all about Google! So far I’ve only posted online but it’ll be easier to get more people interested now as they’ve just announced a Stickermule store here . My favourites probably have to be the Tesla and the John McCarthy ones.

Shipping is free to the US (though I cant seem to find international postage options for those outside the US). I’ll be ordering some soon!