Something's Awry…

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!

Ifttt

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 22:30:00 +0000

Sometimes a web service comes along with a fantastic idea of how things can be improved on the internet. One of those services is Ifttt .

Currently a beta service, Ifttt allows you to create “flows” from web services to other web services. Essentially, you create a trigger action and then Ifttt does something with that action.

For example, this is one I’ve setup to test/use/

Any new post I make to this blog will be sent to my Evernote for archival. It’ll allow me to keep up to date with all my blog postings! The number of services and actions that Ifttt have as well is quite considerable and currently includes some of the big services such as:–

Facebook
Twitter
Evernote
Tumblr
Email
Dropbox
Read It Later
Youtube

Recipes, as they’re called, can be wide ranging from simple ones (such as linking Facebook and Twitter together so that when a Facebook profile picture is updated, it updates Twitter picture to the same (link )) to downloading new tracks on Soundcloud to Dropbox (link )

As it’s a growing company, it’ll be great to see it include more services as it grows. It’s a fantastic service that links together various different services that might not already be linked (Wordpress sends data to Twitter, but not Facebook. Now you can!)

Texpad - Revisited

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:25:37 +0000

I’ve reviewed Texpad once before here. I said it was a good, native, Mac LaTeX editor that had a lot going for it.

Well the version I reviewed was v1.0 and now it’s on v1.26 so I thought it was about time to review it again to see how it’s improved.

Improvements

The biggest one that the developers pushed was the code completion feature. This means it’ll complete any code that you start typing and will auto type the finish (for example, LaTeX codes are inserted as \begin{} and end with \end{} and Texpad will automatically create the \end command of whatever you inserted as the beginning command.)

Not only that, but if you’re using Bibtex for your referencing and have already added the Bibtex file location to the file, Texpad will automatically search it for the reference as you type. For example, if the Bibtex key for the item I want is Salter2011, I can type \cite{S and Texpad will display a dropdown list showing all the names in the Bibtex file with Bibtex key that begins with S. This easily allows me to then find the reference I need without opening my Bibtex manager.

Open to All

Texpad, unlike some other text editors for the Mac, doesn’t allow for any font to be used in the editor. It’s list of fonts, whilst decent, doesn’t allow the use of personal fonts. However, after emailing the developers and asking if this could be enabled (so I could use the fantastic Mono Dyslexic font ), they sent me the following email.

Hi Chris,

Texpad 1.2.6 is in the AppStore now. Among other fixes and new features, there’s a hidden feature being delivered on your request, which I’m sure will be useful to many other users. Texpad now searches for installed fonts with the string ‘dyslexic’ in their name and lists them in the menu. I do not have the font you mentioned on my machine, but have tested the functionality with other fonts. I’d appreciate if you gave it a quick try at some point and let us know if Texpad correctly lists the fonts you need in the menu.

Merry xmas.

Jawad

And indeed, Jawad is right. The changes appear perfectly.

As can be seen, the font list shows the font and selecting it works perfectly. So the editor is now in a much better position to allow anyone and everyone access to LaTeX.

Overall

Overall the improvements have added to Texpad immensely. It’s now a very functional LaTeX editor that is constantly being updated and works perfectly well, with an active development team that are rapidly adding features and improvements to the software. Hopefully, 2012 will see the software improve considerably on it’s already fantastic base.

Texpad can be found on the Mac App Store .

Year of Change

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:56:53 +0000

Ok so its the end of the year and so its probably time for a quick yearly round up. This year has been a year of change for me. Quite a successful one as well to be fair and some of the changes have been quite drastic and range over a multitude of different areas of my life.

Technology

First and foremost change has been my total embrace of Apple and the Mac. This time last year I hated Apple and all the they make. Now I own almost one of every product line Apple make! This change of heart came from getting my first mac in February.some messing about with my old Windows tower machine left me looking for a new machine that was small (to fit in my room) and more powerful than an Atom based desktop (typesetting LaTeX documents on an Atom is slow and painful!) The only system that seemed to fill these needs seemed to be the Mac mini. It was certainly small and powerful enough to play HD video and so with Apples 14 day return policy in mind, I ended up getting one. And was blown away. My own keyboard and mouse combo (I’m a bit of a Logitech fanboy when it comes to peripherals!) meant it was just like my Windows machine before but better. The 14 days passed and no way where Apple getting the machine back from me! From there I slowly expanded my Apple products line when I saw how good iTunes was on the Mac. The windows version had always annoyed me and I hated it and didn’t want an iPod as I’d have to use it. Now I had a mac, it worked pretty flawlessly and did what I thought was the holy grail – it would let me create playlists on the pc and then sync those to my device and work flawlessly, something Winamp promised for Android but whose promise fell short of it’s actual implementation. So with that in mine, the iPod appeared (though I did go for the classic as I have a lot of music and wanted it all without having to pay silly money for the 64GB touch). Then my phone upgrade rolled around an therefore an iPhone seemed right. Finally, the holy grail was bought and an iPad was added to the happy family. The iPad is a great device and I’m yet to see an android tablet approach it in terms of usability. It’s just so slick.

In terms of other technology changes, 2011 has seen me break free from Googles control of my data – on iCloud release, I moved all my contacts etc to Apples servers. It made more sense to stay native, as Google also collected all my search terms. Now they struggle with that as I now use DuckDuckGo for most of my searching needs.

Health

This year I’ve managed to cycle over a 1,000Km. Which might not seem like a lot to those that cycle, but considering that I only got my bike in the the year before last, to go from no cycling to 1,000Km in less than 2 years I feel is somewhat impressive. This, combined with a change of diet in the later half of the year saw me lose about 10Kgs. This weight loss will hopefully continue in the new year! In fact, I’ve even started running in the past few months which has been something I’ve never considered before! Again, this will hopefully continue onwards again in the new year and hopefully my feet will have toughened up and allow me to run the longer distances I’d once reached.

Work

This year has seen me travel to Sri Lanka to present work on the results of my PhD. I’ve also spoken to ISO insurance services in the US and London regarding the work that I’m currently doing and it seems that they are potentially interested in my work. Fingers crossed something will come out of it at the end as it would be nice to see my PhD being used in the real world, rather than just sat on the shelf in Loughborough library.

So there we have a fairly basic round up of this year. Onwards to 2012!

Transferring Preview Signatures

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:37:42 +0000

Transferring Preview Signatures:

An excellent guide on how to move the encrypted signatures from one Mac to another. Just came in useful. Thanks to the author!

Post Airsoft Run

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:04:41 +0000

Slowly increasing the distance again. Slight ache of the feet after this one but that could well be the full day of airsoft yesterday as well.

LAN 31 Ride

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:05:26 +0000

Well about time I got back on the bike for a ride and since my feet are still aching from running (I tried another yesterday as feet felt fine in the evening the day before but I got about 3 minutes in and stopped). Anyhow, nice day for a ride, bit chilly and moist but the new fenders/mud guards I have protected me extremely well so didn’t get wet at all really which is a bonus. Downside, my winter tights need replacing ideally – they fit but awkwardly. How did I wear them last year?!

Valletta Ventures: Valletta Ventures : our story so far

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:55:03 +0000

Valletta Ventures: Valletta Ventures : our story so far:

vallettaventures:

More than one sanctimonious acquantaince has tried to jolly me through a tough moment in life with the quote that “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. It never helps. When Jawad and I first sat down to start Valletta Ventures, a variant aphorism we did believe in was that “if life gives…

Well if anyone deserves to, it’s these guys. Texpad is awesome and is my editor of choice.

Top 19 things to see in Leicester

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:48:12 +0000

heythereladyface:

and Belgrave Road is the main attraction?! It’s just a road with big houses on!

Is Leicester really that boring?!

Yes, though could be worse, could be Loughborough!

To much to soon?

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 10:09:20 +0000

Been following the Inov8 guide to getting started with minimal shoes and last weekend I skipped a week out and went from 8 minute runs to 15 (due to an error in my route planning!). Anyhow, that passed fine and my run on Tuesday was fine at 15, so I thought I’d stick with the 15 minute run.

Seems like a mistake, I now have a pain across the left foot when walking. It’s fine with no weight on it but looks like I’ve become a casualty of the TMTS (To Much, To Soon) syndrome that Jason Robillard warns of . Looks like I’ll be dropping back until there’s no pain then ramping up again.

5 Online Services I Cant Live Without

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:16:59 +0000

Those that are members of UKAPU will know that one of newsletters monthly articles is a 5 Items You Cant Airsoft Without. I thought I’d add a similar feature to my site.

I toyed with what software but decided to make the first one an article on online services I cant live without. So without further ado, I give you my list of services in no particular order. You might be able to argue that some of these are software services as well, which may well be the case but I’ll class them as online services here!

So everyone should have heard of the excellent Dropbox service by now (if not, have you been hiding under a rock?!).

Dropbox is an excellent, simple syncing tool and it just works. No hassle, no problems. In all the time I’ve been using it (probably nigh on over a year), I’ve not had an issue. Conflict with syncing files? It creates a conflicted copy and tells you and lets you choose the conflict. No internet connection? No problem, Dropbox will reconnect when it can and upload the work.

Built into a lot of mobile applications (such as the excellent Writing Kit and Day One now as well, mean that’s it’s use is firmly set in my daily work flow.

I’ve briefly paid for a 50GB account but currently I’ve dropped down to the free account. The price is worth it but at the minute, my referrals and extra space mean I have an account that is currently 8GB and I don’t need to sync my music so much that I’m willing to pay (though if they brought in a smaller service or started charging for the space I’m currently using, I’d happily pay as the software is invaluable)

Spideroak is another online hosting/syncing/backup service (well, mainly backup when compared to Dropbox). Initially I tried to run one service or the other but came to the conclusion that I couldn’t. Why? Various reasons.

Dropbox is primarily syncing – it does it well. However, to keep changes to files for more than 30 days, you need to pay extra. Spideroak does that in it’s price.
Spideroak’s syncing is a bit hit and miss. It’s difficult to see what has finished syncing and stay on top of what’s been uploaded etc.
Spideroak gives a lot more space for the money, double what Dropbox offers.

So after trialling Dropbox and Spideroak together, I came to the conclusion that I’d use Spideroak for the excellent and cheap offsite backup – I backup all my documents and my music, as well as some odds and ends, such as my eBooks that I purchase from the Black Library and my GPS tracks recorded when cycling and running.

The lack of being built into mobile applications isn’t really a concern thanks to Dropbox but it’s nice to know that this is constantly updating my offsite backup of my files. Teamed with Dropbox, I’ve got a tool that will sync all my important documents to all my devices and then back them up to the cloud safely.

Evernote is a note taking program. Any notes added to it are synced to the Evernote servers and then to all your devices, be it PC, Mac or phone so you can have access to the notes anywhere, anytime. You can also add images, files and other items to it (if you have a premium account) and can store items for offline use on your phone.

Very quickly I paid for a premium subscription to this. $5 a month is a small price for the indexing, searching mind space that is Evernote. Dropping a thought into Evernote means I can pick it up at a later date and time. It’s a massive help to my PhD and all my notes are stored within it on the papers I’ve read, my thesis plans and ideas and my research notes. Extremely helpful.

iCloud is a new addition to the list and replaces the Google services. As a Mac user, with iPhone, it made sense to move to Apple’s offering, rather than Googles, especially as the new Google themes and updates have basically killed the service for me (the new theme is utter terrible and trying to use Google Reader without the use of desktop software like Reeder is a painful process). As such, it seemed to easy to move over to iCloud.

Since doing so, I’ve had no issues (other than my documented attempt to try and use Sparrow with iCloud here which is still occurring). Being able to sync all my calendars, contacts, reminders, bookmarks and emails to all my devices is a great help and fits nicely into my workflow.

I’ve yet to pay for the service as the current 5GB seems plenty for my current use (I don’t use photostream or the Pages/Numbers/Keynote storage).

Last.fm may seem like an odd one but over the past year, it’s been a fantastic source of insightful information on the music I listen to (I guess I like VNV Nation a lot!! ) and for finding new music based on what music I already like.

This ability to find more of what I’m interested in is great and the ability to listen to a radio station based on similar artists to what I’ve already scrobbled is great for times I don’t have access to my music but do have access to my Last.fm account.

That rounds up the 5 best online services I cant live without. However, there are a few that probably deserve a mention here that didn’t make the top 5 for some reason.

Imgur

This service is a great phot sharing service. I spent ages considering how I could spend money on some hosting to get a Imgur style site for personal use and decided I’d just pay the Imgur hosting price for the benefits it gives me as it’s so easy to use that I couldn’t replicate it elsewhere. It’s how I host images for this blog!

Tumblr

The host for this blog, Tumblr has been an excellent online service, allowing me to write this drivel and share images of cats. The ease of customisation and the ability to add your own domain name for free is a nice touch. Thanks Tumblr and keep up the awesome work!

Wordpress

Ok, so a competitor to Tumblr that I left for this site. However, it’s main use to me now is that Wordpress acts as my OpenID identifying service. Which I use on a fair few sites (normally, all that allow OpenID!) so I have to give a shout out for that.

So there we go, my top 5 online services. Hopefully that’s given people an idea of what’s out there and of the different services.

Longest Run to Date

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 09:50:58 +0000