Multiple Monitors

Several months ago I got a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop to replace my overworked Dell Latitude D410.  Along with the laptop I got a new advanced E-dock which included two monitor outputs, so I recycled an old smaller monitor that had been relegated to the stores to have a dual monitor set-up.

I find the two monitor set-up really useful and I frequently have different applications in different windows as you might expect.  However I struggled with Excel as I would frequently want to copy data between large format spreadsheets and I would have loved to have one on each screen … but they simply opened as child windows and I Alt-Tab’d between them.

I guess I never really stopped to think about it, but one day my subconscious kicked in and I realised that if I chose not to open the files directly I could open multiple instances and then open a file in each.  Then each instance of the application can be dragged to a different monitor.  Hey presto a spreadsheet in each window.

Duplicate a Note in Evernote

Evernote is a great application for jotting down a quick note about something new, but occasionally I find that I want to jot a note that’s very similar to an existing note.  I predominantly use the Windows 3.1 version and whilst it looks as though copy and paste is enabled for notes it isn’t.  So how do you do it?

Well the quick way is to just (select all and) copy the content from the existing note into a new note.  At this point I’m guessing you’re not exactly bowled over by the simplicity of this technique.  However I sometimes have notes that contain a specific title, several tags an author and even a web link – i.e. several items of meta data.  These can also be copied and pasted, but I find this a little fiddly.

Whilst ENSCRIPT could be used to create a template style import I can’t always rely on having pre-scripted a note I might want to duplicate.  The alternate method is to use Evernote’s export and import option.  Once imported the note needs to be moved from the import notebook it generates and then that must be deleted.

There’s probably not much in it, but I sometimes find the Evernote for Windows 3.1 interface a little lacking in responsiveness when trying to select the meta data items against a note and so the export/import works just that little bit faster.

Hopefully a future release (maybe even the 3.5 beta) will include a simple duplicate option (e.g. through copy & paste of an entire note).

Quickly add a page to Evernote from iPhone Safari

I regularly make use of Evernote from my iPod touch (effectively an iPhone without the inbuilt communications) and I frequently look to add information from a web page in Safari to Evernote.  As I’ve written about before, the standard Evernote bookmarklet can be added to the iPod/iPhone Safari app and this will then provide an option to set a title for the note as well as providing an option to add tags.  I find this useful but invariably it is quite slow.

Another option has been to simply copy the page content, close Safari, open the mail app, select a new mail, set the recipient to be my Evernote e-mail address, then paste the information into it and press send.  This tends to be a little quicker than the other option to get the information into Evernote (the bookmarklet can be quite slow to load), but when you factor in going back into Safari, then there’s really nothing in it.

Overall the process of simply just wanting to get a page into Evernote as quickly and painlessly as possible has been elusive – until now that is.

I took a look at the limitations of the Safari app on the iPod/iPhone and quickly concluded that a bookmarklet was currently the only viable option to create any sort of action.  Looking at the efficiency of getting something into Evernote in as agnostic a way as possible seemed to lend itself to the use of the (account specific) Evernote e-mail address.  So if I could find a way of creating a bookmarklet to trigger the e-mail of a web page this would allow me to stay in the browser and not have to complete any additional information.

I found several services that would allow me to create a bookmarklet that would send the page URL into Evernote, but it was the page content I was looking to add to Evernote.  I finally managed to find the solution I was looking for with a service called toRead.  toRead is an e-mail based bookmarking service.  It is free to sign up and even though it is currently in beta I’d be very surprised if this free usage changed.

So here are five simple steps on how to set-up the option to quickly add a web page to Evernote from the Safari app…

1. Browse to toread.cc.
2. Enter the e-mail address for your Evernote account (this can be found in your account information) and click the start now button.
3. Open Evernote and find the e-mail from toRead which should now be a note in your default notebook.
4. Open the registration link it gives you in Safari on your iPod/iPhone.
5. The registration page provides two links on it specifically for iPod/iPhone users.  Select and hold to get the option to add each of these to your Safari bookmarks (taking care to edit them and remove everything before the word “javascript” on each bookmark as per the instructions on the registration page).

The two bookmarks you now have can be used to send the content of any page you are browsing (including an option to comment on the content) Safari on your iPod/iPhone.  The content isn’t perfectly reproduced and a bit of extraneous information is prefixed to the content by toRead to note when it was captured and what the URL was.

It would be great if Evernote could team up with toRead or even provide a similar service themselves that would allow the prefixed information to be populated into the “correct” parts of the note meta data (e.g. the URL of the page into the URL field, the page title into the note title).  After all there’s always room for improvement.

The Google Earth Compass

Polar Spin

If you’ve used Google Earth on the iPhone or iPod Touch have you ever visited one of the poles?  If you do be sure to check out the compass in the top right corner of the screen.  If for example you zoom in on a point roughly 90°N & 135°W you will see the compass rotate and spin freely.

Obviously the Google Earth compass is not magnetic but I thought it was interesting to note this curious feature and that it is not repeated on the Windows desktop application.

Chrome OS as Laptop Fast Boot Option

We have a number of E-series Dell laptops in my organisation and whilst we don’t configure it many have Dell’s Latitude On installed.  This is a small Linux install that gives quick read only access to things such as recent mail, calendar and even a web browser.

With the advent of Chrome OS and after reading a recent article on LifeHacker by Gina Trapani it struck me that as well as dedicated Chrome OS devices there may be an option to boot from an onboard chip (like Latitude On) to effectively allow an alternative quick boot for a machine.  Now whilst the supported hardware list is not currently extensive hardware manufacturers can use the fact that Chrome OS is open source to create appropriate drivers.

Whereas Latitude On allows access to stored mailboxes, using Chrome OS would obviously relate to accessing content located on Google servers with regards to things such as mail or documents.  So would this be a step forwards or backwards?

Well for me I think it will be a progression.  There’s maybe another year or so of development to get to this point and by then the cloud, Google and Chrome OS will no doubt have progressed.  I think the maturity of the Chrome browser a year down the line and the fact that it will be ‘geared’ to working with Google services could be a big selling point for the Chrome OS in this sort of deployment.  I expect it will be faster and perhaps prettier (in GUI terms) to other quick alternative boot options.

I wonder how quick Chrome OS would be on a dedicated chip on a fast laptop as opposed to a netbook?  Hopefully I’ll get the chance to find out.

iPhone/iPod Delete and Backspace

Backspace only

I’ve had an iPod touch for a few months now and I’m a little frustrated by one of the keyboard elements.  The keyboard has a backspace key but has no delete key -  i.e. you can delete characters to the left of the cursor,  but not to the right.

It would be nice to get a tweak in the firmware to convert the backspace key to a delete key.  Whilst initially pressing shift and backspace might seem like the obvious choice this would mean two key presses every time you wanted to delete a character.  Instead of that it would be better to ‘change the mode’ and so perhaps using caps lock to change the backspace key into a delete key would be a more viable option?

So come on Apple … just one little tweak.

Adobe Product Code Problem

Recently one of my colleagues was having issues in registering a piece of Adobe CS4 software on one of our user’s PCs. The product code was numeric and it was being refused each time he entered it. It even got to the point where he had another colleague check he was entering it correctly. After some frustration and a bit of research he discovered a suprising fact….

The reason the registration was failing was because he was keying in the numeric code using the numeric keypad on the keyboard rather than the top line of numbers on the qwerty keyboard. Once he swapped to entering the product code on the top row the product code was accepted and he could install the product.

Why have Adobe done this? We’ve no idea, but hopefully now you won’t get caught out next time you’re installing an Adobe product.

 

Starbucks Card Registration

I recently got a Starbucks card.  As well as getting a free shot in my latte when I pay by card I can get free WiFi access with my mug of coffee.  However all was not straight forward for me because of one mis-communication when I got my card which caused a bit of a problem.

I went to register online and discovered I fist of all needed to put some money on the card.  It seemed a little counter intuitive, but you can actually have a card with a cash value without registering it – just like a gift card.  So I went to put some money on it and I ended up in a loop where I couldn’t add any money to it – I just kept looping back to the first page in the process each time.

I contacted the web site support and they were really helpful and I found the customer service excellent … which was a good job after the number of attempts I made and the amount of frustration I felt.  The problem was apparently that before you can do anything online with your card you have to put some money on it in-store.  This primes and activates the card after which it appears on the online system.

So if you get a new Starbucks card, make sure that you put some money on it in store before you try and manage it online.

Simple Template Workaround for Evernote

I really like Evernote and the more I use it the more I like it.  For anyone who hasn’t used it, Evernote is a free piece of software that allows you to capture notes in a variety of formats and synchronise the electronic notebooks it creates with other machines via ‘the cloud’.  It has lots of other features, but one thing it doesn’t do is templates.

I subscribe to the Evernote group on FriendFeed and a post from Jim Adams highlighted that “I would love to see some basic templates to use for notes. Could the functionality be added or the possibility to create my own?“.  This seemed like a really good idea and whilst I’m sure the Evernote development team will implement a templating system in at least the desktop clients at some point I realised that there is a way to create new notes based on a simple template already.

Okay it isn’t the most elegant of solutions, but I figured that ENScript could be used to insert a text file into Evernote and the text file could effectively be the template.  I posted the details of the ENScript syntax a while ago and so I referred back to this to put together a suitable command.  A simple batch file made a good proof of concept:

@echo off
enscript createnote /s "C:\Data\Evernote\Templates\template1.txt" /d "C:\Data\Evernote\Databases3\EvernoteDatabasel.exb"

This batch file assumes that the enscript.exe file is in the same folder as the batch file or is included in the Windows PATH environment variable.  The /s parameter is the location of a template file (in this case one called ‘template1.txt’).  The /d parameter identifies the location of the Evernote database file.  Additional parameters can also be added for a default title and tags as well as for which notebook the new note should be created in.  When run the batch file inserts the content of the template file into Evernote.  You can then edit the exact content of the new note.

If you wanted to expand this you could produce a batch file and template file for each template or a menu system (using your favourite scripting or programming language) that allows you to select which template file you want to insert.  You could even add a keyboard shortcut to kick the template creation off to make it a more seamless experience … but at the end of the day this is a crude workaround so keep that in mind.

If you’re not a Windows user there’s also an option to automate Evernote using AppleScript on the Mac, but I don’t run Evernote on a Mac so I’ll let someone with a bit more Mac experience set that one out

iPods, iPhones, Safari and Evernote

The default browser on the iPhone and iPod is Safari which is a built in application.  As it currently stands inbuilt applications on Apple’s hand held device operating system doesn’t give much to developers who would like to be able to add extra functionality (at least not without jail breaking).  The option to send page content to EverNote from Safari is something I had hoped would be easily available, but found myself having to manually copy content from Safari to EverNote.

After a little investigation I discovered that it is possible to add an EverNote bookmarklet into Safari’s bookmarks, making things a little easier.  The downside is that this bookmarklet only works for adding the whole page and not just a portion of the page (as it does in browsers on more  fully fledged computer platforms).  If you want a page fragment, copy and paste is still the only option.

So here’s the 10 simple steps to add your EverNote bookmarklet…

1. Bookmark this page in Safari on your iPod or iPhone.
2. Copy the text in the bookmarklet section below this list of instructions.
3. Select your bookmarks list.
4. Select “Edit”.
5. Select the bookmark you just made.
6. Rename the bookmark to something relevant – e.g. “Send to EverNote”.
7. Delete the URL.
8. Paste the text you copied from the bookmarklet section below into the URL.
9. Select “Done”.
10. Select “Done” and you should return to the browser window.

Bookmarklet

javascript:(function(){EN_CLIP_HOST='http://www.evernote.com';try{var%20x=document.createElement('SCRIPT');x.type='text/javascript';x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/public/bookmarkClipper.js?'+(new%20Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/clip.action?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}})();

When you want to add a page to EverNote, just select this newly created bookmark. An in place window will appear which will then allow you to login to your EverNote account. Once logged in (and you can set it to remember your details), you can then add the page directly into an EverNote notebook, tag the page, etc.

Please note that the bookmarklet content above was created by EverNote and not by me.  I’m displaying it here as plain text as it was the only way I found to be able to get it into Safari on my iPod.  If EverNote update their system, the bookmarklet presented here may no longer work.  If this does occur try taking a look at the (new) original EverNote bookmarklet URL (available from EverNote’s web clipper page) in your desktop browser.