Technology

Uber suck.

Clicky Steve, , 1 Comment

I love the idea of Uber. You can see where the cars are on your phone, exactly how long they will take to arrive, and pay without any cash. It’s brilliant, and as far as I’m concerned, the taxi companies are just raging because they rested on their laurels rather than getting their act together first.

That said, in practice things are somewhat different.

The criticisms surrounding its flaunting of regulation, and invasion of privacy are one thing, but at its core, their approach to business is just terrible at every turn.

I have used Uber everywhere from Denver to Dublin to London to Glasgow, and almost every single time there has been an issue.

From defaulting to an ‘Uber Black’ that was double the cost it should have been, to refusing to honour a free ride because the charge was in Euros instead of Pounds, to their patronising customer support, I am fed up.

Last night I paid just under £18 for a journey that I take regularly, that should have been £6 at most. Even in a black hack cab, the most expensive of all, it has never been more than £10.

Uber’s response is that you accept the ‘dynamic pricing structure’, as they reiterated over and over again in their customer support emails (signing off with ‘have a great weekend’, no less). For that (in Glasgow at least), you get faster access to a regular taxi that would have taken ages to pick you up if you had gone through the regular phone system.

There are plenty of arguments about how that’s the cost of choosing Uber. However, if Uber is some sort of premium taxi service, at least let’s be honest about that, rather than pretending it’s some sort of serious alternative. Paying £18 for a regular taxi masquerading as an Uber that should cost £5 is bullshit.

I have been burned many times by Uber, and I am fed up. Their service is misleading; their customer service is appalling; and if they don’t come back with some sort of refund, I will never use them again.

Yes, I do use ad-blockers, and No, I don’t feel bad about it

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Ad-blockers are small, self-explanatory bits of software that have been around for ages – preventing countless numbers of adverts from being displayed on the websites of those who make use of them every day.

In the past few weeks, a debate has been ignited over this practice, with the wildly successful ‘Peace’ app being pulled from download by its creator just days after its release – supposedly having undergone a change of heart.

Advertisers and publishers are understandably unhappy at the number of people who choose to block their adverts, even going as far as to call the act itself ‘immoral’ – equating the consumption of content for free with theft.

I was challenged by a colleague in a discussion about the issue when I said that I had been using ad-blocking software for years. It was something I’d never really stopped to consider in any sort of depth, and once I’d typed up my response I was encouraged to post it up here.

Before we go on, I should say that this isn’t really about the legitimacy or otherwise of ads themselves, but the use of ad-blockers specifically. You’ll probably note that there ads on this site, for example. As far as I’m concerned, ads have their place, and you can completely consistently choose to monetise content with them whilst also simultaneously respecting the decision of others to block them. With that disclaimer out of the way, here we go.

Why I use ad-blockers

  1. Adverts are intrusive – Online adverts dilute the experience of the website you are trying to visit, and often interfere with being able to view the content itself. When I want to read an article, I don’t want a giant flashing banner to distract me from what I’m doing – not to mention provide a massive headache.
  2. A dark history – Is it any wonder that people can’t stand adverts, and seek to block them where possible, when we’ve been subjected to pop-ups, pop-unders, scrolling flash adverts, and sneaky malware for the past decade plus? Adverts had their chance, and they screwed it up. The day that browsers implemented popup blocking was a wonderful day. Blocking ads completely is just the next natural step.
  3. Blocking online behavioural tracking – This is related to the above, but in a different way. Not only have ads interfered with the operation of our devices, but now we find out that they have been tracking our moves across the web, building up profiles that they can then sell on to third parties. Uhm, nope.

Why I don’t feel bad about it

  1. Ethics – Without going into some elongated discussion about moral relativism, the suggestion that somehow blocking ads is ‘unethical’ or ‘immoral’ is one that I find massively distasteful, and frankly ridiculous. It seems to me that if anybody is going to throw the first stone in an ethics discussion, then the advertising industry should remember the glass mansion that they’ve built for themselves.
  2. Information should be free – I am aware of the many and varied caveats, exceptions, and qualifications to this, but in principle I subscribe to the ideology that information and knowledge should be free.
  3. I’m not going to buy your stuff, however ‘relevant’ it is – One argument is that ‘if only ads were relevant, then this wouldn’t be an issue!’. To me, that misses the point. The issue isn’t about how relevant or otherwise the ads are; it’s about the fact that the ads exist in the first place. In order to actually get really ‘good’ ads (if there is such a thing) that people will click on, it requires a massive amount of profiling.
  4. I didn’t agree to pay for your content – I reject the idea that by simply visiting a website to read content that has been made publicly available, that somehow I have agreed to finance its operation. Just because advertisers and publishers have chosen to hang their existence on one specific kind of economic model, does not mean that I am obliged – either legally or morally – to support it.
  5. Public space – Fundamentally, I resent the increasing ingression into public, communal spaces by capitalist entities. On the web, at least I can control my exposure to the constant barrage of advertisements, and limit their effects. I will choose whether or not to block unsolicited adverts that are transmitted to my device, and I think that is my right.
  6. I will choose who and how I support financially – In years gone by, before publications moved online, people would refuse to support certain ones (such as the Daily Mail) by simply not purchasing their paper. Now, it can be almost impossible to tell the source of a link without clicking on it first. URL un-shortening services exist, but they are cumbersome and impractical. One of the big reasons I use ad-blockers is because I refuse to inadvertently finance publications with reprehensible editorial positions.

Obiter

The relationship we have with information, and the media/publishers has been completely transformed. It’s something I have seen first hand, with good friends losing their jobs as photographers due to the democratisation of that industry. It’s something I don’t actually have an issue with. Content doesn’t stop getting created just because the professionals of olden days are no longer getting the financials they were previously – we’ve seen that in the music industry. It just means that the kind of content, the source, and people’s ability to rely on it as a full time occupation changes. Ideologically this is something that I’m comfortable with.

To finish, here’s the question that sparked all of this thought-process off, and my tl;dr response:

Do you feel like you’re supporting the publishers whose content you’re consuming?

No, but I reject the premise that there’s any sort of obligation or moral requirement to. Infact, I purposefully choose not to support many publishers on purpose. If I want to support them financially, then I’ll do so in other ways.

SQA Higher Computing Revisited

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School. Apparently the ‘best years of your life’.

That definitely was not my experience of school, it has to be said.

One of the big frustrations I remember from my time at Kirkintilloch High was taking Computing – both at the Standard Grade level (third and fourth year, or aged 14-16 roughly), and Higher (aged 16-17).

Despite it being something that I had a pretty in-depth understanding of, I ultimately only got a B for the Higher exam. What I remember is that the questions were vague, allowing significant room for interpretation; the teachers lacked the knowledge or the common sense to make allowances, and you could be marked down for answers which were correct, but didn’t match up rigidly with what was on the marking scheme.

The example that sticks in my head was from a prelim exam we sat where the question was ‘Name three pieces of hardware required to watch a multimedia video’. I answered: ‘Processor, Monitor, Graphics card’, which seemed to me like the very basics of what you would need – discounting all the other bits and bobs that make up a functioning computer. Apparently, this was wrong. The correct answer was something akin to: “An input device, processor, video card, or graphics card.’ My teacher informed me that ‘monitor’ was not on the marking scheme, and therefore I lost points as a result. My desperate pleading for an explanation of how anybody could watch a video without a display fell on deaf ears, and the maddening insanity of this has forever stuck in my mind.

I decided to go back and have a look at some of the questions from around that period, to see what they were like with the benefit of hindsight. This proved to be a bit tougher than I had expected, as past papers from that era aren’t kept online by the SQA. I e-mailed them to request a copy, and received a rather puzzling response:

SQA Copyright Restrictions

Well, that’s weird. Surely the SQA own the copyright to their own past papers? I pressed them on this, and got – if anything – an even more puzzling reply:

SQA Past Papers

The SQA can’t keep past papers for more than 5 years due to ‘data storage’?! I almost wrote back to offer a donation of a hard drive. Hell, even a 1GB USB pen drive should have been enough to keep them ticking over for a few decades. It possibly goes some way to explaining the nonsensical Computing questions that they used to ask.

I searched high and low for PDFs from the relevant years, only to turn up a couple of prelim samples from schools that had seemingly uploaded them yonks ago and forgot. Finally, success! I tracked down this bad boy from a seller on Amazon:

SQA Past Papers 2002-2006

So let’s have a look shall we? The examples below are taken from a mix of the online PDFs that I found, and the book above.

Consider the following question, taken from the specimen question paper to be used from ‘2005 onwards’:

Higher Specimen Paper 2005The purpose of this question is to discuss ‘peripherals’, and the ‘advantages of solid state storage devices’. These are pretty important to understand, though the question here seems a bit bizarre.

  • What are the benefits of using a camera with a ‘flashcard’, compared to what? The question doesn’t give anything to compare flash storage against, so it seems impossible to know what the benefits would be.
  • There isn’t really any other storage option suitable for digital cameras. All of them use flash storage, so to use that device to illustrate the advantages seems weird. You can’t really have an advantage when that’s the only option. Asking: ‘Give two reasons why a flashcard is the most appropriate form of storage for the camera?’ would make far more sense.

This is backed up by the answers given:

Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.19.18

It’s worth noting that these two are the only two listed in the marking scheme. Personally, I think there should be far more. Here’s a couple of suggestions:

  • Flash based storage is much faster to access than other kinds.
  • Flashcards are more robust, and less sensitive to knocks – as required in a portable device.

Thankfully, things have improved a bit on this front. Here’s the question from the same subject, but in 2014:

Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.54.49

Much better!

Going back to the 2005 specimen paper, here is question b) – along with the answers:

Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.30.00

In some respects, the aim of this is pretty good. Students should definitely understand the different types of file formats available for graphics, and their varying purposes. However, the question itself is stupid. It asks what file format would be ‘suitable for this application’ – i.e. for use in a digital camera, and then gives equal marks for explaining the pros and cons of whatever you choose. That means you’d get the same marks for answering GIF as you would JPEG. Completely ridiculous. A GIF would never be an appropriate file format for use in a digital camera, irrespective of the advantages and disadvantages. There’s too much of a disconnect between the question and the learning outcome.

This would be a more appropriate question:

‘Name a ‘standard file format’ used in modern digital cameras, and explain why it is most appropriate (one advantage and one disadvantage)

It makes clear that there are particular formats that are used, doesn’t award marks for inappropriate answers to real-world examples, and still requires the student to understand and analyse why the format is appropriate over and against others.

Here’s a similar question from the 2005 exam, with the acceptable answers underneath.

Screen Shot 2014-11-28 at 18.06.59

I think disallowing ‘bitmap’ here is pretty unfair given that it’s the name of the file format bmp. If they had asked for the extension of the standard file format, rather than ‘name a standard file format’, then restricting it in this way would make more sense. Boo, hiss.

Moving on, take a look at this question:

Higher Specimen Question 2 2005

I’d tell Helen to throw out her PCWorld Magazine and go buy a Macbook Pro.

roncomputer

Okay, I’m kidding, but only half.

This is the answer given:

Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.40.25The purpose here is to demonstrate ‘justification of the hardware selected in terms of appropriate characteristics’. Again, an important aim, but with an inappropriate question.

We’ll ignore the fact that floppy drives at this point were only ever used in PCs for when (inevitably) things went tits up and you had to do something to the BIOS (Apple had gotten rid of them years before this). We’ll also ignore that the question didn’t actually specify what sort of data Helen wants to back up, so it would be impossible to know whether a floppy drive was too small for purpose or not. (Maybe she just wanted to back up a few text files?).

Even back then, the most appropriate answer would be to use some sort of external USB storage. Helen would have been better off getting the cheaper system out of the two that let her also get an external device. Maybe that’s what’s meant to be covered under the vague description of: ‘Other suitable.’ However, it looks like they don’t really care what answer you give, so long as you pick the one with the DVD-ROM.

This sums up exactly what was wrong with much of the Computing Higher back then. Even if you gave a perfectly justifiable reason to pick the ‘Lynx 983’ device, you would be marked wrong – completely defeating the aim of the student justifying the hardware selected based. The questions were vague, allowed significant room for interpretation, and no common sense was used in the marking process. On top of that, the teachers often didn’t have the knowledge or leeway to do anything about it anyway.

One of the saving grace’s of the curriculum is that it included questions relating to ‘Computers and the Law’. Something that everybody should have an understanding of:
Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.14.10

Higher Paper Question 4 2005Nice.

Another of the problems with the Computing course was the disparity in difficulty levels of the questions within the space of one paper. On one hand, students are asked to explain what the benefit of using a DVD is over a CD (answer: more space), or to explain why a short domain name is better than a long, complex one… and how the Internet can help small businesses:

urlhighercomputing

and just a few pages later they are expected to know wtf ‘backchaining’ and ‘loop constructs’ are, and to be able to express things in pseudocode:

Pseudo Code Higher Computing

backwardchaining

and does anybody really need to know how to work out numbers in binary? I sure am glad I don’t have to do that sort of calculation any longer.

Higher Computing Binary

I get the importance of gaining holistic knowledge about computing and the technology industry, but the consistency in the questions was way off. One of the particular frustrations I remember from sitting these exams myself was being treated like an idiot on one hand: “Duhhrr give an example of a URL.” and then being expected to produce fairly beefy examples of scripts out of our heads on paper (that’s right, we ‘coded’ everything in our notebooks, rather than using the computers). It seems like half the course should have been at Standard Grade, rather than Higher level. Although it’s probably best we don’t go back to look at those particular questions, which involved explaining what a mouse and keyboard were used for.

Back then the Computing curriculum was a joke, doing a disservice both to those who taught it as well as those who sat it. The purpose of the whole thing seemed (and seems) pretty unclear. Whether it was to teach the basics of hardware, prepare future programmers for University, or just give a general overview of Computing it failed on all accounts. I really hope that things have changed since then.

Write Stuff Down: A Tale of a Locked Mobile

Clicky Steve, , 5 Comments

Yesterday I flew down to London to sit on a panel titled ‘Digital Dystopias: Civil Liberties In A Digital Age’, as part of the UK Liberty League’s ‘Freedom Forum’ of 2015.

The journey meant getting up at 5am, though really it was 4am as the result of clocks going forward… and heading back later on that day. I wasn’t able to get decently priced trains for the times that I needed to get there in time. I packed light, and didn’t bother to bring my laptop with me as I usually would for a trip like this.

Rather ironically, on my way to speak (partially) about the need to be aware where your data is being transferred online, I got an untimely reminder of my own over-reliance on my phone. Having switched it off for the flight, when it came back on I was prompted to type in the full password. This isn’t something I have to do too often, making use of the Touch ID facility, and it turned out I couldn’t remember what exactly it was. I had opted to avoid using the ‘simple’ code, which is really just a numerical pin number, as it was far too easy for people to read over my shoulder, then use it to ‘frape’ me or something equally uncouth. Back when I was in a band we used to punish each other for leaving our phones unlocked by sending multiple text messages containing the phrase ‘wanna see my weasel?’ to random numbers. This is something I wanted to avoid happening again.

The way things progress when you’ve forgotten your password, or at least, which variation will grant access, is this: You get a few chances, then you get locked out for 1 minute, then 2 minutes, then 6, then 15, then 60… then completely. Ouch.

This wouldn’t be too big a problem if I didn’t completely rely on the phone for uh, everything. The location of where I was meant to go for the conference? On the phone. The phone numbers of all the people who could help? On the phone. Since I like notebooks, I had luckily copied down some of my notes, as well as printed out my boarding pass – but I could just as easily have left the former in Evernote, and used the Easyjet app for the latter – and almost did.

I eventually persuaded somebody at an information desk in Victoria Station to Google the conference venue for me, and worked out where to go using the big ol’ printed maps. It didn’t help that the streets were closed off due to some huge stabbing incident the night before, so I had to wander around for a while before I got to the venue. But all was well.

Letting my wife know that I wasn’t dead was another matter. I couldn’t get in touch with her via any of the apps on my phone – obviously. I wondered about finding a good ol’ fashioned pay-as-you-go web machine (or a computer) to login to Facebook or something and drop her a message. However, that wasn’t the end of the complications. Even if I could find an Internet cafe (seriously, wtf do they call rental computers now?!), I couldn’t actually login to any of my services anyway. My passwords are all 30 odd characters long, randomly generated things that are stored in a secure database that is only available on my laptop or… my phone. Even if I could get into a backup of them somewhere, I would still need to verify my identify using two factor authentication. Also, on my phone.

In the end, I resorted to a payphone. Trying to locate one was amusing, with the people I asked for help looking at me as if I was mentally deranged, or a drug dealer, or both. To be fair, I’d probably have the same reaction in their position. The payphone was only slightly helpful though, as eh… I don’t know anybody’s numbers. Literally every single number of everybody I could get in touch with was stored in my phone. Mind when you used to remember them off by heart? Well, the only one that my memory would serve up was my gran and granda’s. Luckily, they were able to get a hold of my parents (in Amsterdam) via Skype, who then sent a message to Grace to let her know what had happened, and that I wasn’t lying in an alcoholic coma somewhere.

I did eventually find a computer in Gatwick airport, for what it’s worth – but it charged 10p for one minute of access to the Internet. I’m not sure exactly who they think will pay for that shit given there’s free WiFi everywhere – and WTFTENPEEPERMINUTE!? This isn’t the 90s when the web was a novelty.

So I had to suffer the injustice of a whole day with no Internet access, and no way to contact anybody. It was a weird experience, surrounded by thousands of people who were connected up to their eyeballs with a myriad of devices… yet unable to take advantage of any of it, even if I asked.

I think I’ll write things down more often.

Oh, as an obiter, I was told that I’d have to wipe my phone completely and restore from backup to get access back. This proved to be tricky as I had just gotten a new laptop, ergo… no backups. I discovered that if you go into Find My Phone online (if you have it enabled via the iCloud), that you can re-trigger the ability to insert your passcode again if you make the phone play a sound. Good to know for the future.

Blow Struck by WordPress.com Against Fraudulent DMCAs

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Abuse of the American online copyright takedown system (DMCA) is rife. People frequently submit fraudulent notifications to online service providers in order to censor views that they disagree with, curbing legitimate freedom of expression. Examples include those trying to stifle negative reviews about their businesses or products, preventing political satire, and even inappropriately targetting the normative use of a trademark.

All too often, OSPs simply shrug their shoulders when confronted with these scenarios, and process the notices anyway in order to avoid losing their safe harbor protections. Even when alerted to what’s going on in specific circumstances, many choose a policy of non-intervention, rather than to defend their users.

The result of one of two cases which were filed by Automattic in response to fraudulent takedown notifications submitted concerning material posted by WordPress.com was released a few days ago, Westlaw citation: 2014 WL 7894441. The judgement concerned a notice sent by a group called ‘Straight Pride UK’, who objected to the publication of an e-mail interview which a journalist Oliver Hotham had conducted. Under §512(f) of the DMCA, Automattic were awarded a total of just over $25,000 in damages – $960 of which was for Hotham’s time.

The outcome was a ‘default judgement’, as the defendant’s (unsurprisingly) didn’t turn up to the hearing, despite being served properly through the standard international processes. It’s unlikely that either Automattic or Hotham will ever see any of the money, so it is largely a symbolic victory. However, it should not be dismissed too quickly, as the case highlights a number of important issues:

  • The DMCA is frequently abused, with few consequences for those who misrepresent their copyrights
  • Taking action against this abuse is expensive, and happens extremely infrequently
  • Enforcing damages against those from outside the US is difficult, and so there is a hole in the remedies available where those who abuse the system fall into this category
  • Even where organisations or individuals are resident in the US, major online service providers do nothing about the fraudulent notices they receive that could be actionable
  • In order for damages to be awarded, material must be removed as the result of a misrepresentation. There are no consequences for fraudulent notifications that are caught by diligent service providers first – at their own risk

The DMCA is a blunt tool that has an incredible power to silence dissenting voices without recourse. The only way in which this is going to change is if service providers begin to stand up against the abuses, using the considerable resources as their disposal – both to further the conversations in this area, and also to take legal action where possible.

Transparency: I am a Community Guardian for WordPress.com.

 

Productivity Apps: Alfred Remote

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Two weeks ago, the creators of one my favourite Mac apps – Alfred – released a second app: Alfred Remote.

alfredremote

What does it do?

Alfred Remote is an app for your smartphone (currently iOS only) that integrates with Alfred, and allows you to control your Mac from your phone. You can launch apps, interact with the system (to logout, dim the brightness, shut down the computer, etc), or run more complicated workflows.

What’s the point in that?

At first it isn’t quite clear what the point in some of the features of Alfred Remote are. They might be designed really nicely, and work well… but why bother launching an app on your computer from your phone if you then have to be at your keyboard to use the app anyway? It would be awesome if there was some way to input text into open apps, for example, but there currently isn’t – not easily anyway. I was a bit disappointed, as it seemed like a nice idea that didn’t have much use outside of controlling the screen when you were giving presentations.

However, as with Alfred itself, the ways in which it can become useful don’t come clear until you start to dwell on them a bit more. I realised there were more than a few things I would do on my laptop that would be great if I could control remotely – like when I was watching films on Netflix or VLC. As more and more people use computers as media centres, this app will prove more and more useful. It might be true that many of the issues that it can solve are very niche, but often they are the hardest ones to find a solution to.

On top of controlling your computer remotely, rather than thinking about it in terms of something that would be used instead of the keyboard or mouse, we need to consider the benefits of using it to augment them. As one fellow Alfred forum members put it, think of it as ‘Alfred Sidekick’ rather than Alfred Remote.

What do YOU use it for then?

The ways in which Alfred Remote will be useful will differ depending on your own needs and expectations. The beauty of the app is having the framework there, ready for you to create your own custom solutions to your individual problems.

For me, the first thing I did was to create a workflow for the media player VLC.

We don’t have a TV at home – as I don’t think the licence fee is worth the cost. As a result, we watch a lot of DVDs and other media files on a big LCD external monitor. Not having a remote control can be a bummer, so… I created one!

alfred remote vlc

The basics are there – play/pause, and buttons to change the volume – but there’s also a few that I added in specific to issues we came across, like to turn subtitles on or off, to fullscreen the window, and to increase or decrease the audio delay to compensate for lip synching issues. Simple, rough, but works great. Download VLC Remote Control here.

Next was Flux. Flux is an app that gradually changes the colour temperature of your screen throughout the day, in order to prevent eye strain. I hated it at first, but now I love it. Along with Alfred, it’s one of the first apps I’d install on a new computer.

The one problem with Flux is that it can interfere with the colour rendition for when you’re playing movies, or working on photos. There are ways to make up for this, but often it can be a pain if you’re sitting on your couch to go into the settings and find what you want. So…

Flux Alfred Remote

Here is my Flux Remote app. I can disable it for an hour, until sunrise, for the current app, access the preferences, enable movie or darkroom mode, and even quit the app completely. Download it here.

Third came Flickr. I love Flickr, particularly browsing through other people’s photostreams and seeing their work. Problem is, I’d really love to do it sitting with a glass of whisky, with the pictures in high resolution glory on my big screen rather than on my laptop. Luckily, Flickr’s interface has some keyboard shortcuts built in. I used these to create…

Flickr Alfred Remote Control

Flickr Theatre. This is really simple at the minute, but it lets me load up a big stream of pictures, browse between them, zoom in on them if I want, view them in lightbox mode, and then add the ones I like as a favourite. Pretty basic, but in the future there are a whole load of other things that could be possible. Download it here.

Now on to something that is more along the lines of the ‘Alfred sidekick’ mindset that I mentioned above. I edit a lot of pictures, and I am terrible at remembering the shortcuts to open common things like Curves, Contrast, etc. No matter how often I use them, they just don’t stick. So I had an idea… why not create a dedicated Alfred remote page to control these?

Screen Shot 2015-02-12 at 16.12.29

This is still a work in progress, so not online to download yet – but essentially I can keep my iPhone open at the side of the keyboard whilst editing pictures, and call up the tools I use frequently without having to worry about remembering their keyboard shortcut. Awesome.

These are just a few examples, and there are plenty more coming out all the time. I also use the built in iTunes control, and some others – but have chosen just to focus on the ones I’ve created specifically, as there is documentation out there on the rest. The Alfred community is alive and well, and the possibilities available by using workflows are pretty powerful. There have already been hints that future versions will contain more advanced features based on the feedback that has been received so far, so it’ll be interesting to see how things develop.

Where do I get it?

Currently the app is only available for iOS, but that should hopefully change in the future. It’s available for $4.99 on the App Store, or £3.99 in the UK.

To find out more, visit the Alfred Remote page.

Productivity Apps: Bookmarking with Shiori

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Shiori

Bookmarking

Bookmarking. It’s something I’ve always struggled to find a good solution to. The in-browser features don’t really make it easy to quickly find common URLs, and I’ve tried to use other websites in the past, but they just didn’t seem to stick in my mind.

What I’ve Tried Before

The closest I’ve come to finding an answer is in Alfred, which I’ve blogged about before. There are a few different ways you can bookmark with Alfred, but I didn’t quite find that any of them matched what I was looking for.

First, I tried using the ‘web search’ feature to associate bookmarks with particular keywords. The problem with doing this though, is that you need to remember the exact keyword to call up the site you want. As as a result, it isn’t all that great for keeping track of lots of different locations.

Another solution was to use the Alfred Snippet Manager. This could be a really good solution, as you would be able to search by the title and description that you enter, as well as the content of the actual URL itself. However, if you already use the Snippet Manager for predefined replies – more like a clipboard manager – then having a large number of bookmarks in there could pollute the results, increasing the time it takes to find the things you need effectively.

I set out to find an alternative, and made use of my old Delicious account to create a workflow that could search through my bookmarks by making use of the private RSS feed. It worked, but was a bit clunky, and not as intuitive as I’d have liked. That meant that I didn’t ever really make use of it.

The real solution came in the form of a different app altogether…

Shiori

I stumbled upon Shiori completely by chance, and was surprised I hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere before.

Both the website and the app itself are beautifully simple, and easy to use. You simply set it up to connect to a Delicious (free), Pinboard ($11 annually) account, or both. Personally, I use the latter – as Delicious keeps making changes to their service which break things. The $11 is worth the money. Call up the interface with a hotkey, and you can search through all of your bookmarks in an interface that is awfully similar in feel and operation to Alfred.

shiori_main

The similarity isn’t a criticism, as Alfred is amazing. You can search via tag, words, or even abbreviation. Like Alfred, the more you use the app, the smarter it gets – picking up on the type of searches you use most commonly to find particular bookmarks. Because it uses your login details (and doesn’t just pull it from the RSS like my hacky method above), it’s really fast too.

There’s also a hotkey that can be set to bookmark new websites quickly from the browser. If you have Keyboard Maestro installed, Joseph Schmitt has created a pretty sweet workflow which you can assign to an additional hotkey. It takes the highlighted text and automatically adds it into the ‘notes’ field. More on Keyboard Maestro in a later post.

This type of bookmarking is often called ‘social bookmarking’, as they are largely designed to be public, to share with friends etc. I’m not really into that, and prefer to keep my URLs private. Shiori makes it easy to automatically tag new bookmarks as private, to avoid having to do it manually yourself every time.

You can add in certain domains (if you want to keep particular – ahem – websites – private), but if you stick in an asterix, it will capture them all.

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In summary, I love Shiori. The design is as nice as Alfred (and it works just as well), it arguably works better for bookmarks, and it helps keep things compartmentalised. Snippets are now assigned to one hotkey, Alfred another, and Bookmarks another.

Where can I get it?

You can download Shiori for free (yes, completely free) here.

Productivity Apps: Hazel

Clicky Steve, , , , , , , 3 Comments

Time for another look at one of the tools I’ve found that has come to be invaluable in staying productive whilst working online. That is ‘Hazel’: a personal maid for your computer.

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CC Picture by ‘Robert Wade’

No, not that kind…

This kind:

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Hazel is the most wonderful sort of productivity app, because you just set it up, and let it go. It carries on quietly in the background making sure that your Mac is kept clean and organised without you having to worry about anything. It’s so good in fact, that I had forgotten most of the tasks I had designated Hazel to look after, and so had to go back in and check for writing this article.

So what is it for?

I used to always get criticised by colleagues for having a desktop cluttered with all sorts of files – the tech equivalent of having a messy bedroom. The reality was that the desktop was the first place to pop up in the save dialogue, and it was handy to drop things there for quick access. I tried everything to get it under control, including monthly clear outs, and apps like desk drawer… eventually I just hid the icons on the desktop completely, so at least nobody else would know that they were there. The shame.

Hazel takes repetitive tasks like clearing up your desktop, and does it for you automatically. Ever since I hired in her help, my laptop has been more organised than ever before.

How does it work?

Setting Hazel up couldn’t be much simpler. There’s no intrusive menu bar icon (unless you want there to be), and the app runs as from a straightforward preferences pane. Here’s what mine looks like:

Screen Shot 2015-02-04 at 11.22.18

You choose the folder or location on your computer where you want Hazel’s actions to take effect on the left hand side, and then in the right hand side you set up the sort of things you want Hazel to do.

What sort of things can you do?

Let’s take the top example from the above image for a closer look: ‘Move Screenshots to Pics > Screenshots’.

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I take a lot of screenshots throughout the day. Some of them are useless, and should be thrown away eventually, but others are quick notes, or things I want to hang on to for later reference. The default OSX behaviour is to place them on the desktop, which is convenient… at first. It can be a real pain to go through and move them all manually into a different folder. In the above image, you can see that I’ve set up different criteria. Basically if Hazel finds an image on the desktop that contains the words ‘Screen Shot’, it moves that file into a dedicated Screenshots folder under Pictures. That way I know where they all are, and periodically can go through them to see which ones I want to keep. The important thing is, they aren’t cluttering up my desktop, mixed in with all sorts of other guff.

Let’s say you don’t want to keep any of them indefinitely though. All you’re interested in is keeping the screenshots for the amount of time it takes to upload them online somewhere. No problem. Head on back to the main Hazel screen, create a folder grouping on the left for the Screenshots folder, and then create a new action to tell Hazel what to do with them:

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There’s all sorts of things we can have Hazel do here. In this case, if the screenshots have been added more than a week ago, we can get Hazel to Move them to the trash, or maybe Sort them into a subfolder named ‘old’, or archive them… or add tags to remind us to go back and clear them out. There’s all sorts of possibilities.

What’s even cooler is the level of gradation you can get in the timescales:

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You can get pretty specific about when, to make sure you target exactly the files you want.

What do YOU use it for?

Here’s an idea of the things that Hazel does for me:

  • Launches downloaded torrent files, and throws them away afterwards
  • Moves all downloaded, compressed files (zip/rars) into a single folder after 1 day has passed
  • Moves all downloaded RTF, DOC, DOCX, and TXT files into a ‘Misc Documents’ folder in ‘Documents’ after 1 day has passed
  • Moves all downloaded DMG files into a dedicated folder after one day has passed, and then deletes them from there once they get over a month old
  • Moves all downloaded app files into the ‘Applications’ folder (something I always forget!)
  • Moves all downloaded PDF files into a dedicated ‘Misc PDF’ folder under ‘Documents’ after 1 day has passed
  • Organises GIF, JPG, PNG, and PDF files into appropriate folders away from the Desktop
  • Deletes incomplete downloads that are aged from before this quarter

I also make use of the handy Trash settings:

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The above is pretty self explanatory, but essentially it means that I hardly ever have to look at the Trash again.Oh, and the secure deletion option is pretty sweet. Not just restricted to Trash, Hazel can also keep an eye out for when I delete Apps, and offer to clean up the residual files that get left behind. If you later change your mind, and reinstate the application after deleting it, Hazel will offer to reinstall all of the associated preferences files for you!

Hazel keeps things ticking over, without me needing to worry about the little details in life.

But wait, there’s more…

Up until now I’ve really only scraped the tip of the iceberg with what Hazel can do. What I haven’t mentioned is that one of the actions that can be performed is to run an AppleScript or Automator workflow. This means that there are plenty of fairly complicated ways you can make use of Hazel if you sit down and take the time to work out the sort of tasks that would be helpful to your specific workflows. You are only really limited to your imagination (or the extent of AppleScript, anyway).

Here are some examples:

  • Set up a dedicated ‘resizing’ folder, where any images that get dropped in will be resized by Hazel and spat out to a subfolder.
  • Get Hazel to organise different files into different places based on coloured ‘flags’, like learning to ignore certain files from deletion if they are flagged ‘green’.
  • Organise PDFs saved from specific websites into dedicated folders. For example, if you download your payslips every month, Hazel can analyse the source and make sure they get put automatically into the right place.
  • Look out for e-mails from designated people, and send them to a particular Evernote project.

If you come up with any cool workflows, I want to hear from you.

How much and where!?

I know, I know. You want to employ Hazel right now. It’s understandable. You can get a free 14 day trial, or dive right in for a cost of $29 from Noodlesoft here.

Productivity Apps: PopClip

Clicky Steve, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

If you work online, there a whole load of tasks that can be a pain in the ass to have to do. Even if work itself is great, nobody likes having to do certain things… like copying and pasting different URLs into new browser tabs, or re-formatting garbled text.

One of the benefits of working at Automattic is being surrounded by friendly, smart geeks who have tried all sorts of different things to get the most out of their computers, and to tailor them to fit how they work. When you hit the sweet spot, your laptop really seems to sing; doing exactly what you want to straight away without having to footer about and get bogged down in the drudgery; it becomes almost like an extension of your fingers or brain. That sort of harmony can be a really great feeling, and let you enjoy working rather than it becoming a chore. I’ve written before about how great Alfred is for this.

One of the other tools that helps achieve this sort of inter-relationship for me was recommended by my friend and colleague Mark: PopClip for Mac.

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PopClip is a small helper application for Mac and iOS that pops up a control panel when you select text. You can then quickly access a whole variety of different options, from the standard Bold/Italic formatting options, to looking up the text in the dictionary, Google translate, or whatever else you might fancy.

This is what my PopClip bar looks like:

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Usefulness, and Integration with Alfred

At first, I wasn’t too convinced about this app. It seemed like one of those cool ideas that didn’t really play out properly in execution. The prospect of having the PopClip bar appear whenever I highlighted text seemed like it would become a real pain real quickly, and it did.

However, there were lots of cool features in there that I was sure would be useful at somepoint. I realised that rather than have the bar pop up every single time text was highlighted, Alfred could be used to control the behaviour through the use of Hotkeys.

As a result I created an Alfred workflow specifically for this purpose. You can download that here.

Once installed, you can toggle PopClip ‘On’ or ‘Off’ by using the keyword popclip from the Alfred launch bar. Alternatively, you can leave PopClip off, and trigger its menu when needed by the use of a hotkey – currently set to ⌘ + P. The latter is what I find myself using more often than not.

As soon as I realised that I could do this, PopClip seemed a lot more powerful than before.

Features

There are a whole bunch of things you can use PopClip for, so it’s just a matter of finding what is useful for your own particular workflow.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the extensions I have installed:

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The ones I use the most are:

Instant Translate

This is a great extension. Highlight a sentence, call up PopClip and hit Instant Translate to get a translation into the ‘Destination Language’ that you set in the preferences. Saves the time and hassle of going to the Google translate page, instead bringing up the translation in a bubble:

Screen Shot 2015-01-26 at 15.46.24

That’s Greek, by the way.

Download Instant Translate here.

Google Translate

Of course, sometimes there’s just too much text to display in one little popup. The Google Translate extension grabs the selected text and passes it through to the full booner.

Shorten URL (bit.ly)

Pretty self explanatory. Grabs the selected URL and shortens it using the Bit.ly service. Download it here.

CopyURLs

This is one of my favourites. Often I need to deal with long e-mails that have various URLs in them. Going through these, copying and pasting the URLs out separately was always a real fiddly, and boring task. The CopyURLs extension did away with all of that in one quick swoop. Simply highlight any text, invoke the extension, and just the URLs from that text will be copied to the clipboard. Fantastic.

This beauty was authored by Brett, and is available to download as part of a bundle here. If you just want CopyURLs though, you can grab it here.

OpenURLs

Just like CopyURLs, but this time it takes the URLs in the selected text and opens each of them in a new browser tab. Pretty swish. Grab it here.

Abbreviation Lookup

Not sure what an abbreviation means? WTF TLDR? Highlight and invoke this extension to get taken straight to the meaning. I ended up writing my own extension for this purpose, as the existing one on the PopClip page wasn’t producting great results. Get it here.

Send to SimpleNote

I had been looking about for an extension that integrated with SimpleNote, but couldn’t find any. So, I wrote one. This will grab the select text and send it over to a new note in SimpleNote. Great for capturing quick thoughts you want to come back to later. Download it here.

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Image owned by Pilot Moon.

Custom Searches

Can’t find what you are looking for on the list of 100+ free extensions on the PopClip page? No sweat. You can easily set up your own. There’s a good tutorial here if you want to get down and dirty with AppleScript, but if you’re not ready for that yet, Brett again has created a fantastic wee tool to help you on your way. Simply plug in the site you want to search with the highlighted text, and this will spit out a PopClip ready extension for you to use.

Personally, I’ve created a whole bunch of quick extensions for things I need to search for at work regularly – like usernames, domain names, and e-mail addresses. Not dis-similar to Alfred’s Custom Searches function, using PopClip in this way makes the process even quicker for particular tasks, saving the need to copy the text, call up Alfred, paste it in then search. Instead, just highlight, call up PopClip, and hit the relevant search button. Easy!

Summary and Price

It can be hard at first to get into the habit of using PopClip, but there are real rewards to be reaped once you do. Certain tasks are made so much quicker than they would be otherwise, and it’s just a matter of finding out what will be of most use to you personally.

PopClip costs $4.99 from the App Store, but also has a free trial available on the Pilot Moon website. For all the hours it’s saved me copying URLs from lawyer’s emails, it’s been well worth it. Give it a bash and see what you think.