After loosing my Kindle Paperwhite in London a couple of weeks ago I have been a bit lost. I did order another one, but when posts started popping up about a colour Kobo Libra I decided to return it and try something new. Granted I have only had it since Friday, but I am already in love with it.

I will no doubt write a longer post about it later, but there are not many downsides to this new device. It has a nice screen with colour, has a separately available stylus for note taking and highlighting which I love. However reporting those highlights is not a simple as with Kindle, but I found some ways to make use of them. The below works with the Kobo Libra Colour, Kobo Libra 2 and Kobo Clara Colour - so I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work with others.

In A Text File

1. Connect kobo to your device
2. Open a file browser and mount the device once connected
3. Allow your file browser to see hidden files ( CMD + Shift + . On Mac)
4. Go to the hidden folder .kobo/Kobo
5. In a text editor open eReader.conf
6. In the text file find (or if not present add [FeatureSettings]
7. Add a new line ExportHighlights=true
8. Save the file and unmount your device from the computer

To export the notes from a book, long press on the book and tap Export Annotations.

When you reconnect your Kobo there will be a new file called Exported Annotations with text files for the exported books. Bear in mind this does not update with new ones, so consider doing this only when they need to be exported.

There are some reports of truncated highlights where not all the content is exported in the text file. This has not happened to me, but please take this into consideration.

Using A Calibre Plugin

When it comes to self management and conversion of e-books, Calibre is king. I have been using it for a while to (cough) manage (cough) my Kindle e-books but it is even more invaluable when using a Kobo device. There is a wide range of plugins available and for this method we will add a new one - namely Annotations by David Forrester.

Head to the preferences panel and click Plugins.

Click Get new plugins and search for Annotations.

This will give you a couple of popups, one is a warning that plugins can contain malware - they are programmes after all. And once installed you will need to restart Calibre.

Once restarted, customise the plugin by clicking the big yellow highlighter in the top bar, and select Customise plugin.

In the next window click the wand icon next to the Comments dropdown and add in the Annotations option. Once done click ok.

Now connect your Kobo device, and once Calibre recognises it, click the highlighter again and select Fetch annotations from connected device. The popup window will allow you to select which books have them available.

These will show in the book details window for ease of viewing, or you can copy and paste them for use elsewhere.

Use Readwise

If you use Readwise, or want a seamless way to sync your highlights, these can be directly added using the standard options. They will sync to the Readwise service and also be accessible from any of your set up export options such as Notion or Obsidian.

However, this will only work for highlights made to Kobo purchased books. This will not work for manually added ePub books or PDFs. There is a solution for this pointed out by Readwise themselves, called October, that grabs these from a connected device - however I have not tested this out myself so cant speak for its usage.

In my work to recreate my 11ty blog on micro.blog I wanted a better search experience for readers, and also myself when searching for posts to link to. Manton did a great job with his search page plugin, so I adapted this to be able to appear on any page.

This plugin for micro.blog will allow you to add a search bar to any page you wish.

Set Up

This plugin is available from the micro.blog plugin page, or feel free to install it from Github by clicking design, edit theme, and then add new plugin.

Call the plugin anything you wish, copy in the URL from the Github page, and click Add Plugin.

Add Partial

Add the partial to the page you wish this to show on, for example, I have placed this on my home page but you could do this wherever you like.

Simply add {{ partial “search.html” . }} to your page and the search bar will show as 100% width of the element it is placed in.

When searching, an HTML element will appear and show the results, linking to pages that contain the searched for words.

Customise Search

You can customise the number of results shown on your page by heading into plugin options and changing the default from 5.

Styling

The styling of the search bar will be depend on your theme, I have added in some basic styling as follows.

.field {
        width: 100%;
        height: 34px;
        border: 2px solid #eee;
        padding-left: 10px;
        margin-top: 20px;
        margin-bottom: 20px;
        border-radius: 11px;
    }
    
    #list_results {
        padding: 2rem;
        border-radius: 11px;
        box-shadow: rgba(60, 64, 67, 0.3) 0px 1px 2px 0px, rgba(60, 64, 67, 0.15) 0px 1px 3px 1px;
    
    }

.field is the search box itself.

#list_results is the results box that only shows when search results are found.

Credits

The basis of this plugin came from Manton search page plugin.

Finally launching with iOS 17.2 Apple’s new journal app immediately received criticism. Whilst some of it was valid, most of this focused on features Apple did not promise. It delivered a very barebones app that gives me the impression it was for nothing more than showing off the new Journaling API. My thoughts are a lot more positive, and I thought I would run through how I use it.

I have been journalling on and off for a while, but only really got serious in January 2023. Adopting Day One to type out morning pages and other entries pretty religiously. Due to my short relationship to journalling apps, some may claim this restricts the validity of my opinions. I’m not on a two thousand day streak or anything, but I will leave the level of authority I write with up to you.

Powerfully Simple

The reality is, the iOS Journal app is absolutely fine. It’s not as complex as some on the market, but I think that is the biggest positive. As much as I like using Day One, Apples app is actually a much better option for most people. It removes all the things that power users may need, like tagging and multiple journals, but replaces it with a much simpler experience.

In many ways, it reflects Apple’s user interface design perfectly. Removing as much complexity as possible to “tap thing, do action”. There are some great prompts and selections to fuel the content of your entires, from the aforementioned API, but all you need to do is tap the plus sign and start writing.

This wonderfully simple interface makes me want to save more things. Record ideas, things I have done, and a lot more. There is no worrying about what journal to put it in, or styling to mess about with, just saving numerous things effortlessly. As you can see from my screenshots, I’ve taken to adding thoughts on how my training runs have gone, some podcast notes and even some blog post ideas — all in one place.

The app is not perfect, there’s no Mac or iPad app to start with. You could achieve the same result by simplifying Day One, as it also has access to the new Journalling suggestions, found by starting a new post and tapping the magic wand icon. I, personally, don’t need all the extra bits that Day One offers, so I can remove another cost from my subscriptions and still get all the benefits of journalling. If I can work out what to write!

The fun little service omg.lol is the new hotness on micro.blog and seems to be seeping out into the wider internet. Not only is it ridiculously cheap for what you get, the developer Adam seems to be making constant updates and offering more and more value for money. For just £5 per year you get access to a landing page for your social media, mastodon instance, email forwarding and my favourite service — statuslog.

Statuslog allows you to post small updates containing whatever you wish, along with an emoji. Exactly the type of thing that allows you to share what you are up to without having to interact with a service. As with everything omg.lol creates, it’s brilliantly designed and easy to customise for your use.

Status On My Blog

I have embraced the set-up of micro.blog. It promotes using your blog for shorter posts as well as longer ones to keep hold of your content. There are just some posts that I don’t care about, and are what Twitter was really made for. Short, to the point life updates, that have no value — think “drinking coffee” and not tweet storms of information.

I put the status card right at the top of my blog home page, so should anyone land on it, they can see what I am currently up to. The level of usefulness is debatable, but I like it! For a full walk through of getting this set up see the help page here, but in short I put in the following code.

<script src="https://status.lol/[your-address].js?time&link&fluent&pretty"></script>

Styling

Thankfully, the styling of the status card looks great out the box, so it’s rare you will have to do anything. I wanted it to look more like part of my blog, so I styled a few elements. This took me a bit of trial and error to get this correct. When I first implemented by own changes, I used the &pretty on the end of the script and simply styled the areas I wanted. However, this now uses some !important styling and as such breaks any custom styling you want to override.

To style the status card, you will need to remove &pretty from the script above and style everything in CSS. The default CSS used at the time of writing is below, however this could change at any time.

.statuslol_container {
},
.statuslol {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
gap: 1em;
background: #e7ebf3;
color: #111;
border-radius: .5em;
padding: 1em;
}
.statuslol_emoji_container {
flex: 0 0 1em;
font-size: 3em;
padding-right: 0;
}
.statuslol_content {
flex-grow: 1;
flex-shrink: 1;
flex-basis: 0;
margin: -.5em 0 0 0;
text-align: left;
overflow-wrap: break-word;
overflow-wrap: anywhere;
color: #111 !important;
}
.statuslol_time {
opacity: .5; color: #111 !important;
}

You can then go for your life, change anything and everything you want to, and make it look to your taste. I love the stock gradient of the card, but implemented my own darker version I found on UI Gradients.

Posting Statuses

For a long time, I have wanted to be able to post tweets without actually opening the app. This used to be straightforward with Shortcuts (née Workflow) but the best you can do now is transfer text into the app to tweet from it. This is where the excellent statuslog service comes in. I use it to post a short update, which is posted to micro.blog, Twitter and Mastodon.

If you are a Drafts user, you can use a really nice action to update your status easily. However, I am not, so after some inspiration from micro.blog user and omg.lol unofficial ambassador Maique  I created a Shortcut to do this. You can grab the shortcut from here.

To use this Shortcut, you will need an API key for your OMG.LOL account, that can be found here, and also put your account username in the other box as outlined on importing the Shortcut. As you can see, I have added this to my Home Screen for easy access and made an icon, which is below.

Icon available here

If you then wish to then import the status into micro.blog the RSS feed you will need is http://[your-address].status.lol/feed replace your address with yours. If you do not use micro.blog there are automation services such as IFTTT that can Tweet whenever an RSS feed is updated.

I woke to an email about an ancient Shortcuts repo I had stored old backup files in. They were available as a place to save Shortcut files I had written about because the iCloud link sharing can be a bit flaky. They were so old it contained loads of .wflow files and I had forgotten it even existed, but they now need to be signed to work with iOS15.

Of course, I felt no need to update these, but thought it should be pretty simple, so tried to get them updated anyway. Unfortunately, I was wrong and the lack of detail in how to do this is pretty poor, but with a bit of trial and error I got them signed without issue – I hope.

Tools

You will need a Mac to do this. It is the only way I have found to reliably get everything signed using the command line. Some information online suggest that it can be done on iOS using SSH, but I couldn’t get this to work, and it felt very fiddly.

So to use this guide, you will need a Mac running macOS Monterey and be able to use the terminal app on your device.

How To Sign The Shortcut

Open terminal on your Mac, and cd into the folder containing the shortcut files. Use the following command to sign the shortcut file:

shortcuts sign -i a.wflow -o b.wflow

Where a.wflow is the name of the shortcuts file, and b.wflow is the name you want the signed Shortcuts file to be called. Due to the weirdness in names, I actually found it easier to rename my source file as ‘a’ and then rename ‘b’ to whatever I wanted it to become.

Who knows if Apple will change the requirement yet again, but for the time being, you will now be able to load the file into shortcuts on Mac or iOS without issue, as the new file is now signed.

Never one to be left behind, I am continually looking for a way to speed up my theme development. Call it desire to be cutting edge, or near of missing out, whatever it is I love to play around with it. One thing that gets loads of attention is Tailwind CSS, so naturally this was on my list to play around with.

They call it “A utility-first CSS framework” but what it actually means is you can style all of your classes right in the HTML. There are pros and cons with this, but here’s how to get it working on your Ghost Blog.

Before You start

Fair warning this requires a bit of command line work, and if you’re not comfortable with this back away now! You will need:

• A computer running a desktop OS (macOS, Linux, or Windows)
• A supported version of Node.js (at the time of writing this is 12.x, 14.x or 16.x)
• Yarn and npm installed
• A folder to do all your work in

Install Ghost Locally

First, start with Ghost CIL. In the command line:

npm install ghost-cli@latest -g

Now CD into your empty directory and run:

ghost install local

This will get ghost up and running locally on your machine, most errors are communicated daily well, but for extras do ghost help.

If everything looks OK you’ll have a site at http://localhost:2368/ghost. For more information on what this means, check out the Ghost docs.

Your Theme

This next part is up to you, either install a theme you want to use Tailwind with, or start developing your own using the Ghost Starter. You will need to put your theme files into your Ghost local install folder, content/themes. If you want to clone a theme from GitHub, or your theme is stored on GitHub (you should be!) CD into this folder and use:

git clone git@github.com:<your-github-username/.git name-of-theme

Install Dependencies

Your theme more than likely will use Yarn, the Ghost Starter linked above is the best example. Use Arm to install everything needed by Tailwind. In your theme folder, use yarn add tailwindcss and then add in the necessarily files npx tailwindcss init.

Gitignor File

Unless you want more than 5,00 new files committing to your repo, you’ll need a robust gitignor file. Most themes have these set up already to no commit files such as DS_Store on Mac, so make sure you add in node_modules to your file.

Import CSS

In /assets/css/screen.css add in:

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

This imports the tailwind classes to your main CSS. This may partly replace some of your CSS to the Tailwind classes, so something such as typography may change on your theme.

Gulpfile.js

Add in the following to your gulpfile.js.

1 - Under // gulp plugins and utils put in const tailwind = require(‘tailwindcss’)

Under function css(done) there will be a section for postcss( add in tailwind(), so it will look something like the following.

function css(done) {
 pump([
 src(‘assets/css/screen.css’, {sourcemaps: true}),
 postcss([
 easyimport,
 autoprefixer(),
 cssnano(),
 tailwind(),
 ]),
 dest(‘assets/built/’, {sourcemaps: ‘.’}),
 livereload()
 ], handleError(done));
}

Restart All The Things

Now that everything is completed, restart Ghost with ghost restart to make sure everything is being cached correctly. You should be good to go now and can get cracking with adding in new styling. When doing this, you will need to CD into your theme folder and run yarn dev to build the correct CSS.

You can also try out some themes that already have Tailwind built into them such as Ghostwind or Origin but I am enjoying working new classes into my website. For more information on using Tailwind, see their documentation.

Since first trying Ghost, one of the best things about editing my theme is the ability to host on Github. Through a simple integration I can easily edit my theme to make changes from almost anywhere. If you want to do this too, this guide should help you out.

Ghost Integration

First set up the Github integration on your Ghost install, this provides you with an API Key that you will need when using Github. Head to the settings cog at the bottom of you control panel and click on Integrations.

Create a new integration and give it a name. On the next screen make a note of the Admin API URL and the Admin API Key. Please keep these private as these allow access to your blog content.

Github Set Up

Secondly you will need to host all of your themes files on Github. Make a private repo, give it a name that represents your theme and head to settings > secrets. Click ‘New repository secret’ and set up GHOST_ADMIN_API_URL and GHOST_ADMIN_API_KEY with the integration details you set up earlier.

Once you have done this upload all of your theme files to the repo and commit them. The last step is to create a new file in your repo .github/workflows/main.yml. This file needs to contain the following.

name: Deploy Theme
on:
 push:
 branches:
 - master
 - main
jobs:
 deploy:
 runs-on: ubuntu–18.04
 steps:
 - uses: actions/checkout@master
 - uses: TryGhost/action-deploy-theme@v1.4.1
 with:
 api-key: ${{ secrets.GHOST_ADMIN_API_KEY }}

This theme will now show up in your design settings, however you will need to make a change to you theme to trigger this. Adding in some text to your readme file is the easiest way.

You can now make changes to your theme through whatever way is easiest for you. I use Visual Studio Code, but on iPad I found the best app is Working Copy. Every time you push a change GitHub will build your site and them push these to your live site, this usually takes less than a minute.

My blog is currently hosted on the excellent micro.blog service. I could go on about why I chose this place to host, but my thoughts are summed up on my post here. It suits me perfectly because I publish everything to one place, from short ‘tweets’ to photos and also all of my writing. Due to this ease of posting I do most of it mobile from iOS with the help of some Shortcuts.

Images

Pictures are pretty easy to handle on micro.blog. If you want to post one image with some accompanying text there are a range of apps to use, including the very Instragram-esc Sunlit. Meaning you can post whatever you want wherever you want.

If you are writing a longer post and want to put some accompanying images in it, this simple Shortcut has you covered. It will upload the image to your micro.blog uploads section and then copy the link to the image directly to your clipboard ready to paste into your writing.

Get It Here

All you will need to do is attain a app token by going to Account settings and scrolling to the bottom and clicking App Tokens or clicking here.

Text

No good posting something without any text. For Shorter ‘tweets’ a range of apps are available to making posting easier, however if you really want to speed things up this simple Shortcut for iOS will ask for your post and then…post it.

For longer posts with a title this simple shortcut will help you out. Simply highlight the text you want to post and share it it the Shortcut, it presumes you are writing in markdown and will remove Title formatting for you and use this as the post Title.

Get It Here

All you will need to do is attain a app token by going to Account settings and scrolling to the bottom and clicking App Tokens or clicking here. This posting really is one touch. There is no facility to add in categories (I may work on this later) but I use filters very heavily so these are well worth looking into.

Note: These currently do not work on iOS15!

Despite it being a standard feature in many Android phones it took Apple until the iPhone XS to implement a dual sim of sorts. Even then you need to have one as an eSim and that limits the networks that can support it. Thankfully EE were one of the first, so for the last few years I have been using two sims in my iPhone, one for work and one for personal.

One major pain is dealing with moving phones. I do that quite a bit, so ordering a paper EE eSim each time became a pain, not to mention an expense at £1.50 a time. Preplanning helps a little, but there has still been times I’ve been without service because I’ve broken my phone and can’t just pop my sim in another.

Thankfully EE have a solution, and you can now download an EE eSim for your iPhone in seconds! Here’s how to do a digital EE eSim swop.

You will need your current sim to be working to receive a text message, and also have already set up your new handset and downloaded the My EE app.

Once you’ve done that on your new phone in the My EE app, open the menu and go to Settings > Device and SIM > Replace my SIM > and select your number.

You will then have two options on supporting devices, SIM card — Post (2 to 4 days) at a cost of £1.50. Or eSim — instant download at a cost of 50p.

Tap on eSim, then select this device, and you’ll be on your way to transferring your number.

You will then get a notification that the eSim is ready to download, and then you can go through the normal set up options. This gives you the facility to choose labels for the numbers, which iMessage number is used and lots of others. Once completed you will need to activate the new sim by receiving a text to your old phone, put the supplied code into the app on your new phone, and you’re ready to go.

This is usually instant but can take up to  an hour, turn your new phone off and on again to refresh everything, and you’re good to go on your new handset with a new EE eSim.

Head into Settings > Mobile data to change any of the options you’re selected on set up. If in any doubt call 150 from a working EE phone.

As with everything I get invested in I like to go in deep and see what it can really do. One of the easiest ways to start to mould Roam Research to your will and make it unique for your use case is to add in CSS or JS. These are two official supported ways that are easy to implement and can also be removes at your will.

Roam/css

You can easily change the look and feel of Roam by tweaking the CSS of the pages. This can go from a little light modding, to in-depth changes on how the layout looks.

To start create a page called roam/css and simply add in a code block that specifies css. There are a huge range of options available already created and shared on the help pages. I am currently using ‘Better Roam Research’ to add in dark mode.

Don’t forget to change the code block to specify css, it defaults to Clojure.

Roam/js

If you want to go further into Roam and really start building things that customise it to your usage then roam/js is the place to be. There are a huge number of scripts available that do everything from add more buttons, to change the way Roam works in the browser.

To add in this capability create a page call roam/js or just a block with this as its only contents. Nested under this write the following. {{[[roam/js]]}}, this will give you the following warning.

It is worth paying attention to this, and only run scripts you are familiar with as there are security and safety issues to bear in mind with javascript. If you are completely sure, click “Yes, I know what I am doing” once you have nested the script you wish to use underneath. You can stop the js from running at any point by clicking “stop this”.

This particular script I am running allows me to clear out empty Daily Notes pages and can be found here.

I am currently experimenting with moving all of my social things to micro.blog. I know I have tried this before (twice) but this time I don’t want it to be my blog I just want a place to hang out and post everything to. This will mainly be an Instagram replacement, posting checkins as most importantly books and films I have watched.

I can’t quite work out Goodreads yet, but by using Letterboxed I can post watched film easily using Micropub. You can of course use this with micro.blog but also with any service that support Micropub, so also applies to WordPress and other more mainstream services.

Choose your way

There are two relatively easy ways to do this, one free and one paid, both with pros and cons. They both rely on singing up to Letterboxed, and using your profile RSS feed to post updates. So, whichever you choose, you will need to sign up and then copy your feed address from your profile page. Once logged in, on the menu bar furthest to the right you will notice an RSS icon. Right click and copy this first.

IFTTT

This method is completely free so is a win straight off the bat, but as a caveat is a little more complex to set up and I found a little limited to work with. This is personal preference, of course, but IFTTT is still very straight forward to set up.

Click on Create and chose RSS as your IF (the trigger), choose new item in feed and paste in your RSS feed from Letterboxed. The Then (action) part is a Webhook to allow you to post to micropub services. For this example, I am going to run through a micro.blog, but they will all be pretty much the same.

Make a web request, and then put in the URL of your service, in this case it is https://micro.blog/micropub. Method is POST and content type is usually application/x-form-url-encoded. In the body you need two bits of information, an access code and what you want the post to display. This will be dependent on your device but in my micro.blog case I use the following.

access_token=ABCDEF&content={{EntryContent}}&name={{ItemTitle}}

With the access token generated in my setting of my micro.blog.

You can customise the body content to whatever you want to display in the post. If you leave this as is, then it will display the raw content of the RSS feed.

Zapier

This is a much more rounded service that makes it much easier to customise the post content, but at a cost of £20 per month. For this cost, you get the ability to automate many more things, so it might be worth considering but please bear this in mind.

Start by creating a new Zap, the trigger is RSS and the event is a new item in the feed, Past in the Letterboxed RSS feed you have saved and that is all you need to do on this step as you don’t need any information to access this feed. On the next step Zapier will find the data — so make sure you’ve at least recorded one watched film, and then pull everything into Zapier.

The action is Webhooks, and the action event needs to be POST to tell micropub to post information. By customising the request you can go as deep as you like, this is where Zapier makes it so easy to post images, ratings and everything the feed contains effortlessly and understandably. To do this put the Micropub url into the first box, in my case this is https://micro.blog/micropub and leave the Payload type and Form.

Click the plus sign under Data, and type content into the first box, and then you can customise the post until your heart is content. Click the plus button again and type access_token into the first box and in the second one copy in an access code from micro.blog. Your service may not require this, but will usually require some kind of authentication.

All the other topics can remain as they are by default, by clicking continue you are given the option to test the post. Do this and check that everything appears correctly — you can always go back and change things before re-testing. This is another option that makes Zapier a great service to work with. Once you’re happy, finish everything off and now every time you review a film it will post to Micropub.

I would hope that no body starts morning that I am not writing about enough technology lately, but I’m finding it hard to write about anything at all. Never mind getting motivated to write about the very little news going around. I have been spending my time riding my bike when weather allows, but when the bad weather comes I have to take it inside to the virtual playground of Zwift.

Writing recently in my newsletter I covered my love of the cycling (and running) platform and trying to gamify my cycling as much as possible. I’m still in the very early stages but having just crossed into level 11, my aim is to complete as many of the available routes as possible. Unfortunately Zwift is not great at this, and although the information is obtainable, it’s not easy to work with. So I spent some time building a way to track it.

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There are loads of posts discussing several online and offline manual methods plotting out distances, XP points and the dreaded hilly bits. Thankfully a huge amount of data exists about each route, because so many people have ridden them. While looking for ways to automate this I stumbled on some spreadsheet methods on Reddit, and put together my own version combining several of them.

It’s dead easy to use, most routes link to information about the route you will take and the world used. The spreadsheet itself outlines distance covered (KM) and distance claimed (M) during the route, as well as the XP you will be rewarded for completing it. After a few weeks I am only at 12 % due to better weather currently, but I have done some of the worst – Road to Sky up Alpe Du Zwift, and Mountain 8 up the Epic KOM I particularly hated.

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Don’t forget some worlds are only open on certain days so plan accordingly. Grab the spreadsheet from here and start Zwifting!

So. No apologies here, but I ripped off this idea directly from Matt Birchler’s write-up on his Things set up. Even though he is a strong believer in the ability of Things, and also everyone in the repliesseems to think the Todoist design is trash, I think very much that we have the same outlook on GTD. The basis of this revolves around “offloading your brain” so you can focus on other things.

I never set levels of tasks that I HAVE to get done each day, but I DO aim to get 3 main things ticked off each working day. This set up has been how I get everything done daily and also why I forget loads of meaningless stuff. I would love you all to give Todoist a try here. This isn’t a GTD set up, but it’s my set up and it all starts with the Inbox.

Inbox

More or less everything starts life in here. All my tasks from heavy-duty projects to simple reminders start life as a string of text in my inbox. Having tried almost all the major task managers, I am sure most people would agree that Todoist does it best for just dumping everything in and this is the reason why I struggle to take to any other app.

Whenever any tasks arise I use the Mac shortcut or the widget on iOS to quickly add it to my inbox. If the task can be done straight away and within 5 minutes this is the only time it doesn’t get added because I will complete that task straight away. If I know when it needs to be done I can allocate the due date then in natural language and forget about it.

The power of being able to just type out something like “follow up with Geoff in 2 months #work” and never have to think about it again is the biggest thing that improves my productivity and also my mental health.

Moving And Tagging

I have a recurring task to sort my Inbox at 7:30 every morning which is usually the time I am sitting down at my desk. I tried doing this as my last thing each day but it didn’t stick. My habits dictate I never leave work without having completed everything or moved things to the following day so this became the best way for me to pick anything up that has been missed or cropped up later.

The next stage of my to-dos life begins when this notification goes off. I then go through all of my tasks, allocating them due dates and times and moving them to projects. As with the Inbox, if I can do this straight away and within 5–10 minutes I will do this task and cross it off. So, not every task lives a long life or makes it any further than my inbox.

Projects

I don’t use Projects as Todoist intend, or indeed how any task manager apps think you will use it. This is simply because I never really have many large scale projects to complete. I have just a few that I use more like areas that my task relates to. These are:

• One-Off tasks – anything that I need to get done and that’s the end of it. Most home things end up here.
• Work – most of my stuff ends up here, small or large tasks to get done. Going forward my team will move to a shared Task managing platform, so we can allocate things, but at the moment this is just me.
• Routines – Anything that is reoccurring such as put the bin out, read my meters, set my Strava goals for the week.
• Creative – any writing tasks or newsletter projects I want to complete. These usually contain a link to the relevant Ulysses Sheet.

The Upcoming Screen

This is where I spend most of my time, with the upcoming screen (previously next 7 days) of the Mac app open. This gives me an overview of the next few days, and allows me to put in times if I need to and arrange my day fully. There is never a time that a task doesn’t have a due date, so this screen gives me everything.

I am not afraid to push something if other things crop up so from this screen I can just drag a task to another day, but also add tasks for other days effortlessly. Before the upcoming screen I found myself switching between areas depending on what I was doing, so now things are much more streamlined. I have a calendar subscription set up for an overview if I am not sat at my desk, this works really well with the Stock iOS app.

Little Tricks

I have picked up some little things over the few years I have been using Todoist that really help me. These don’t fit into any area but are worth sharing anyway.

• Event Tickets – if I am going anywhere I save a PDF of the tickets (either the email or the web conformation) attach this to a reminder that pops up and the event start time. That way I am not searching my emails when I get there.
• Morning Tag – This is a new one stolen from Matt, but is working very well. Instead of trying to guess times, anything that I want to do first thing I allocate a Morning tag to.
• Drag in Emails – If you use Apple Mail on Mac or iPadOS you can drag in an email as a Todoist itemand it will link straight to it. Mind Blown.
• Browser extension – Get this to save any Safari links you need to refer to.
• Due dates based on last completed date – If you want to set a reoccurring reminder for a length of time after that last one use a ! After the every. For example, “task every! week” will create a task one week after you complete the last one.

Improvements

There are a few things that I do desire from Things. None of these are critical, I wouldn’t say I miss them, but would help for my specific use case.

• Create Project – There are times when I create items that then turn into a much larger project. I currently have to copy these into a new project, but in Things the option exists to create one from an item.
• Someday – I long for this to be an option in Todoist. I just like to dump longer term things into here and leave them to plan later. I have tried to do something similar with tags but it just never really stuck.
• Start Dates – oh boy this is a big one. I want to be able to set a start date for some tasks that take a while or are easier done slowly over time such as writing my newsletter. Currently, I have to set a “start newsletter” task and then another “finish newsletter” task. I would love to set it as a current task or ongoing task in Upcoming.
• Calendar Items – Another big one I would love is to see upcoming calendar events in the Upcoming screen, so I can work my tasks around meetings.

The End

There are a ridiculous number of apps and services I have tried, and I still get suckered into new ones all the time. However, Todoist works well for me, and has done for years. My set up has gone through so many changes that it doesn’t resemble anything like what I started with and will probably change in the future. The great thing is that Todoist is available everywhere, and is improving all the time.

Check out Todoist and share your set up with me.

After switching from recording my cycling on the Apple Watch to a Wahoo Element Bolt my activity levels seemed to suck. After previously smashing my move goals I was left short on some days even after a reasonable ride. Simply because Strava wasn’t calculating my calories and it took me ages to find out why.

After a few days of Googling around and finding all sorts of weird information I eventually discovered a fix. I tracked the issue down to a really simple one, but something that isn’t immediately obvious — you need to make sure that Strava has your weight and your bikes weight recorded.

You can only do all of this on the website and not the mobile app, so make sure you can log in on the web. Your weight is changeable in the app to your profile, but you can’t add or customise your gear for some reason. You will need to log in online, create your bike, and make sure you also give it a weight. A rough guess is fine but you can usually track down the correct weight with a quick search of the manufactures website.

Once this is competed your new runs and bike rides will contain calorie information that will be passed to Apple Health. If you want to get this for older rides, just tap edit activity and then save it again. This will pass the last few days worth of activity back to Apple Health but not all of it, and it’s temperamental at best with syncing.

This should mean you are getting all of the credit for your rides going forward. It’s surprising how addictive filling your rings on your Apple Watch is, and Apple Health makes it easy to share your activity data if a medical issue requires it. Strava is great for keeping all your rides logged, but keep it in other places too just in case you want to switch at a later date.

Updated: Added in non-jQuery code snippet

This problem is a reasonably simple one if you know what you are doing with writing Javascript. Unfortunately, I am not, and this feels like an issue that shouldn’t need some script, but here we are.

After loads of Googling, looking at Github Gist, and trial and error, I finally found a solution to opening new links in a new tab thanks to InsidersByte.

As they point out you can do this with markdown or adding in target=_blank to the end of each Url, but who has time for that? So add this into the footer of your site.

With jQuery

var links = document.links;

for (var i = 0, linksLength = links.length; i < linksLength; i++) { if (links[i].hostname != window.location.hostname) { links[i].target = '_blank'; } }

non-jQuery

 var links = document.querySelectorAll(‘a’);
 links.forEach((link) => {
 var a = new RegExp(‘/’ + window.location.host + ‘/’);
 if(!a.test(link.href)) {
 link.addEventListener(‘click’, (event) => {
 event.preventDefault();
 event.stopPropagation();
 window.open(link.href, ‘_blank’);
 });
 }
 });

You could do this in your theme template if you like, but the easiest way is to head to your dashboard, and then Settings > Code Injection. Copy and paste in the code and remember to save!

Reload your site, and you should be sorted.

To motivate myself to write more, I’ve been reading more. Not just online posts but magazines and books. Looking to subscriptions service and news aggregators, despite my initial hate – Apple News won me over.

It turns out I didn’t need to use it more; I didn’t need to ‘train the algorithm’, I just needed to turn off the news part! You see, I hate viewing or reading the news – it is that simple. It is full of twisted and corrupted stores that are either designed or portrayed in such a way to manipulate your emotions.

There is a way to do this, but it’s hidden away in the settings titled “Restrict Stories in Today”. Not a great label for a toggle that should be much easier to find, but I would presume Apple doesn’t want you to turn it on. Go to Settings > News and toggle this to on.

Now all you will see are channels you have subscribed to in the Today tab. No more depressing politics, no more news you don’t want to see, just what you want.

There are downsides to this, the discovery of new channels can be more difficult, and you might not be kept as upto date with current affairs as you once were. Be a little more mindful of not creating an echo chamber, and you should get on much better. I am now much more open to subscribing to Apple News+, and many of the channels I am now following are News+ channels. So there is a benefit to Apple in the long run – subscription all the things!

I still blame Matt Birchler for putting the idea in my head, I was quite happy on WordPress (not completely but pretty happy) and then he comes in and introduces Ghost to me, and I moved within a few days. On first look it seems like a ridiculously expensive option, and more suited to larger companies, but if you don’t want to splash out the $29/per month there are other options.

If you want to get a Ghost blog set up, its pretty easy to host it ‘yourself’,  here is a short guide on doing it on a Digital Ocean droplet.

Create A Droplet

Signing up for a Digital Ocean account and creating a droplet is really straight forward. Most blogs will only need a $5 a month droplet unless you are getting serious traffic.

Click on Market place under ‘Choose an image’, this does allow you to choose loads of different options – but if you’re reading this guide you’ll find Ghost under ‘blogs and forums’. Once selected you will see a guide underneath detailing your requirements after your droplet is set up. On this page you will also find all information about the version being installed.

It won’t matter too much where your data centre is, so choose your preference – if things like GDPR and also government monitoring are important to you, then choose wisely. Give your droplet and name and then let it do its thing.

After Creation

Once completed, you will receive an email from Digital Ocean with your Droplet IP address and SSH password. Keep this information extremely safe and do not share with anyone.

Point Your Domain

On your Digital Ocean Project page, add your domain. This will populate the NS records and give you your name severs. This is more than likely going to be ns1.digitalocean.com., ns2.digitalocean.com. and ns3.digitalocean.com. – add these to your domain settings.

Also add in an A record in Digital Ocean, with a host name of @ and direct it to your IP address of the droplet. It is vitally important you wait for all changes to propagate before continuing otherwise you may have issues with setting up Ghost. I would advise you to wait 24 hours.

Once you are happy the domain information has properly propagated, continue to setting up the blog.

SSH Into Your Droplet

Nothing will be live until you SSH into your droplet and set up Ghost. You should see a page telling you as mush if your domain has propagated correctly. Open your terminal and type in:
ssh root@your-ip-address

The sever will ask for your password, copy and paste this in, and then immediately make you change it. You will need to put your current one in again, and then choose a new one – Keep this safe!

Once this is done Ghost will download updates and set itself up. Press Enter.

You won’t need to put in any details about SQL databases or directories, you will have to put in your blog URL. Do this with the https:// on and Ghost will set up your Let Encrypt certificate for you. This is where the installation will fall down if your domain is not properly propagated.

Ghost will be installed and set up at /var/www/ghost

If everything goes ok, you will be given a url of https://your-url/ghost. Head to this address and set up your profile and blog title. If you want to migrate from WordPress, here’s some points to consider.

First off – this is no guarantee, but it should help.

The secret sauce to finding you iPhone after you’ve looked in the obvious places is Apples trusty ‘Find My’ App. Previously called find my iPhone, it will also track your Apple Watch, iPad, Mac’s and even AirPods. To do this is need location access and many people don’t give it enough access to be able to do the best job it can.

Privacy is a huge deal, and this is understandable, but should the worst happen you really want to track down your device as quickly and easily as possible. I have spent 20 mins rooting through my car, only to then trace my AirPods to being back at home on my desk – this tip may help recover your device and calm you down.

Send Last Location

The secret is allowing your device to update its location when it is used. This is stored by Apple and no one else – but it’s understandable if you don’t want to do this.

When you open the ‘Find my’ app for the first time you will be prompted to allow this. If you’ve missed it or now want to turn it on head to Settings > Tap Your Name at the top > Find My > Find My Device > and toggle on Send Last Location.

There is also an option to allow offline location. This will allow a location even if the device hasn’t got a data connection by pinging other Apple devices around it. This is similar to how Tile works and is linked to the much rumour Apple version.

You could also consider sharing your location with friends of family members so they can also track down devices for you, however this has its own pitfalls!

For the last few weeks, I have been throwing my life into Agenda, I’ve played around with it previously, but this time it seems to have stuck. I’m one of those people that like to try out an app or service just because people are using it, and this is what I did in 2018 when Agenda won the apple design award. I think I had signed up previously to use it on Mac but didn’t hang around very long.

The only issue is this is a completely different approach to note taking. It ditches the somewhat traditional approach of a list of notes, in folders and turns it on its head. Everything is based around your calendar and dates. You can of course make notes without this, but its main power stems from tying into events in your life. For years I have been living out of my calendar and task management app (or apps), and I’ve been searching for a service that does it all for me. I feel like I have tried everything, from Todoist to Notion, to more recently Apple Notes. My life is split into to distinct area and Agenda is already benefiting me in both.

Work

I am a development and engagement manager for a UK based insurance company. In essence, this entails a massive balancing act involving loads of meeting, emails and tasks to be completed. I work from an iMac at my desk, an iPad in conferences and an iPhone at every other time, so having a cross-platform app with great sync is required.

Meetings

These are exchange meetings set up in Outlook, the only thing that stops me using Agenda for calendar management is the missing option to add invitees. This is not a massive issue for me, as I’m in Outlook for email anyway. From these events, I create all of my meeting preparation in Agenda, including all my written notes, clipped images some times also documents.

The benefit of being able to add in documents that I can refer too quickly in meetings is a godsend. The fact I don’t need to go into a room armed with loads of paperwork any more is a huge benefit. I also won’t lose any following it; if anything is handed to me, I can insert a scan of the document using my phone with a single click.

Granted this looks a little weird depending on who your meeting is with, thankfully my sessions are usually in tech or design people, and everyone else has just gotten used to my weirdness. Mainly because I can email a meeting review, including all documents, or print out a version within minutes of leaving the room. Exporting from Agenda is a massive benefit over something like Evernote or Apple Notes; it is powerful and flexible to fit into most situations.

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Collecting Info

The second part of my job is producing content through various channels. For this, I have a section for work ‘in progress’ and create a project for putting things together. Mainly containing video scripts and outlines for blog posts, but some other random info I want to store. As much as Agenda is date focused, it works ok with saving some general info, but shouldn’t be seen as a note app replacement if you need to store loads of info. Because Agenda is date focused, I can collect all this together and make reminders right up to the ‘due date’.

Home

The second part of my life revolves around my family. I am the parent of two children, one of whom is disabled, so date focused note-taking is more or less a given. Our calendar is filled full of hospital appointments, school events and other things that I need information on.

Hospitals

My agenda home section has a general project for my daughter’s hospital appointments, filled full of notes that refer to older appointments. No longer am I searching for information, or trying to remember what we discussed at the last appointment. Much like my work meetings, if I need to scan a medication label, or snap a picture of recommended equipment, I can put it right into the Agenda note. I also like to send my wife and parents a text with the notes in, which Agenda lets me do with a couple of taps.

Technology

I love writing and talking about technology, I’ve tried for more than seven years to stop, but something about it gets me excited. I take notes for upcoming episodes of my podcast, Bring Your Own Device, linked to the calendar event I share with my co-host. I would love to have collaboration, this would cut out our show notes Apple Note, but these notes are for my talking points only.

I also outline and write every blog post I publish in an Agenda Note. Taking the same form as with my work life, what I love is that I can drag in images and text from other sources as reference.

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Features I would Like

There aren’t many features that I feel are missing from Agenda, and I would be concerned if they tried to add in too much. Agenda is not a publishing platform, and in many ways isn’t a note-taking app. However, each feature is thought out so it can be adapted to many use cases. There are a couple I have mentioned already, being able to create calendar events with invites; however, I don’t even know if this is possible due to the many different calendars available. Collaboration would also be perfect, and in which case this may even become an option for teams, but just being able to write some show notes for my podcast would be great.

I would also like to see a focus mode, where I can write in one note. At the moment I am writing in a note that is inside the today view, or on the Agenda. It would be great to be able to open a note and no other information. With all this said, the app is pretty perfect for mine, and many other peoples use case, all the features implemented are well thought out, and the developer support is brilliant. I’m an active member of the Agenda community, so you can always come say hi!

I’m new to drones, but decided to try one out to get some more interesting video and I’m glad I did. However because it is so new to me I didn’t really want to spend loads of cash on one if I wasn’t going to use it, so I decided to pick up a used DJI Spark and DJI Spark controller one.

I managed to get a fly more kit with a few extras for a bargain price, but when it turned up I had issues connecting and paring. There wasn’t a whole load of information out there other than forum posts, but I managed to piece everything together and get it working again. Hopefully the guide will help you as well.

1. Hold down the power button on the DJI Spark for 9 seconds until you hear three beeps. Then do the same on the controller.
2. Power off both the DJI Spark and the DJI Spark controller.
3. Power on the DJI Spark controller and then hold down the pause, Fn and bottom right shoulder button (underneath the camera button) until you hear continuous beeping.
4. Power on the DJI Spark, then press and hold the power button until you hear one beep. Make sure your DJI Spark controller isn’t too far away from the DJI Spark. You will see the DJI Spark controller connect to the Spark and its lights turn green.

Dont forget you need to WiFi connect to the controller (password is 12341234 for all remotes) and then open the DJI app. Hopefully you’ll be up and flying in no time.

Sharing previews are yet another thing missing from WordPress which should really be included by now. It’s dead easy to install a plugin and have it all done for you, but why bother with slowing down your site with needless plugins when you can add a tiny bit of code to your functions file.

//Add Twitter Cards Meta Info
function add_twitter_card_info() {
 global $post;
 if ( !is_singular())
 return;
 echo ‘’;
 echo ‘’;
 echo ‘’;
 echo ‘’;
 echo ‘’; //optional: username of website
 echo ‘’; //optional: username of content creator
 if(!has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID )) { //use a default image if no featured image set
 $default_image=“http://example.com/image.jpg”; //replace this with a default image
 echo ‘’;
 }
 else{
 $thumbnail_src = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), ‘medium’ );
 echo ‘’;
 }
 echo “n”;
}
add_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘add_twitter_card_info’);

Simply paste in the above code to the functions.php file in your WordPress theme and validate all has gone correctly using the Card Validator.

In my journey back to WordPress, there are lots of little modifications I need to make the website my own. One of which is the addition of micro and link posts.

I do not like all posts showing in the main RSS feed nor on the main index page of my blog. Many options and guides tell you to install plugins or add in code to your functions to exclude categories to all feeds. If you can avoid a plugin, then I would advise it, to prevent any unnecessary loading of your blog.

I did stumble on a solution to my requirements on Stack Overflow (where else), and this is detailed below.

add_action(‘pre_get_posts’, ‘exclude_category’ );
function exclude_category( &$wp_query )
// Exclude from loop, archive and feed but not from category page/feed
{ if( is_home() || ( is_feed() && !is_category() ) || ( is_archive() && !is_category() )) { // Exclude from home, feed, but not from category page/feed
set_query_var(‘category__not_in’, array(120)); // Exclude category with ID 120
}
}

Add this to your themes functions.php file and remember to change the (‘category__not_in’, array(120)

to your desired category ID , if you need help finding that, check out this guide.

It has only been a few days since Rode updated its Rodecaster Pro to utilise Muti track but it has already proved to be a brilliant upgrade. The ability to output upto 14 tracks simultaneously for post editing is quite frankly a ridiculous feat, but may take a little time to get your head around.

Here’s how to take advantage of the update and record using Audio Hijack – which is my podcast recording software of choice.

Understand The Update

The 1.1.0 update is pretty easy to install, but might take a little while to understand what exactly has been changed. Once the update is completed, disconnect and reconnect the USB-C cable to allow your computer to recognise a new connected device. Your Mac will now register two devices instead of one. RodeCaster Pro Stereo and also RodeCaster Pro Multitrack.

The connected USB-C cable now outputs 14 separate audio tracks to your Mac which apps such as Audio Hijack can record individually or mix together. The below image shows you the channel numbers for each output.

Set Up Audio Hijack

To get started and understand what is going on the best way may be to start with a blank session, just to make sure you don’t alter any bespoke sessions you already have set up. Drag in an input device block, double click on the block and you will notice the RodeCaster Pro Multitrack device in the menu. Once you select this, more options will appear when you uncover the advanced tab underneath.

These are numbered 1 to 14 according to the layout detailed above. You keep a stereo output of the ‘master track’ (1&2) but also mono outputs for Mic 1 (3), 2 (4), 3 (5) and 4 (6), as well as stereo for the USB input (7&8), TRRS phone connector (9&10), Bluetooth input (11&12), and also the sound pads (13&14).

A drop down menu under the left and right channels will unveil all of the available tracks, which you can select to your desired outcome. In my set up underneath I record over Skype with just one other person, meaning my set up is pretty straight forward. However now that 14 tracks are available you can create something really unique to your podcast.

Create Your Set Up

Your usecase will vary, but in my session for BYOD shown below I have my microphone connected to input 1 (track 3) and also the Skype audio (track 7) going into one input block. This then splits into two duplicate blocks, so I can record two separate mp3 files of just my audio and just Nati separately.

In between the duplicate block and the recorder I also have a meter block, just so I can check audio is being recorded correctly, and then into my audio recorder I also have the sound board (track 13) recored to grab any sound I play into the episode.

I could of course make this much more complicated, and record each individual block, or turn things on and off as I wish, however I like a much more simple set up that can be added onto if desired. This software update has already made my editing much easier and allows me to spend much less time worrying about recording.

After a few days of false information, forum posts that have half truths in them and a couple of telephone calls – I have managed to set up my iPhone XS with dual sims and here is how to do it.

Preparation

If you want to go dual sim on your iPhone XS there are a few ways, but one of your sims is going to have to become an eSim. This technology isn’t new but Apple are the first to do it mass market and in the UK it is only supported by EE at the moment. Unfortunately this is only currently available for pay monthly personal tariffs but they claim to be expanding the roll out in the coming months. So you won’t have the option on pay as you go, flex or business accounts.

Get An eSim

If you are in the market for a new contract, then one from EE might be the best way forward, simply ask them for an eSim instead of a regular sim and you’re all set. Keep in mind that if the second sim you wish to use is for a different network then you will need to wait 6 months and request your phone to be unlocked. If both accounts are on EE, simply put your physical sim in and go through the set up options to assign a primary and secondary number.

Transfer To An eSim

If you have an unlocked phone (like me) or choose to get your iPhone XS unlocked after 6 months, you will need to transfer your EE regular sim to an eSim. To do this you will need an eSim pack, with a QR code to scan. You can get these in stores, or the easiest way is to call 150 and request one. You should get this in the post the next day so you wont have to wait too long, the people on the phone I spoke to are very knowledgeable and will guide you through the process as in-depth as you wish.

Make sure you request a replacement eSim pack as this will be either sent with your number attached or without a number at all. Once this arrives head into the settings on iOS 12.1 and go to Mobile Data > Add data plan. This is where you scan your QR code and are guided through the set up process, your phone might get a bit confused once finished, so pop out your standard sim and reboot your phone. EE state up to 24hours for activating the eSIm, but in reality you should be set up in a few minutes.

Hopefully this helps you out a little as most info online is very generalised. If you need help in setting up the primary and secondary options in iOS head over to Apple support pages for a great explainer.