by cameronreilly | May 12, 2015 | Apple, Evernote, Hazel, iPhone, Lifehacks, Mac, technology
I do most of my best thinking behind the steering wheel after meetings and I’m always looking for ways to capture those ideas before I forget them.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago about using Siri to transcribe voice-to-text into an email that it would send to Evernote. That’s worked well for me but it has some limitations – mostly that if you’re trying to write a long note and you pause to think, Siri will assume you are finished and cut you off mid-sentence.
So I have a new system that I find works even better.
Dropvox is an iPhone app that will a) record your voice and b) automatically save the recording to Dropbox. There are other apps that will do a similar thing, but I like Dropvox for two reasons.
1) It has a HUGE RED BUTTON making it easy to press while driving.
2) It has a setting that will start recording as soon as the app opens, which means you don’t even have to press the button!
Of course you can record notes into Evernote directly but it takes a few clicks and the in-app record button is the size of ant’s balls. This is more like an elephant.
So while driving I can activate Siri and simply say “Open Dropvox” (making sure I over-emphasise the “VOX” so it doesn’t open DropBOX by mistake) and, when it opens, I start recording my note. When I hit the huge red elephant-sized STOP button, Dropvox will automatically upload the file to Dropbox.
Now – here’s the magic.
On my Macbook I have a Hazel rule setup to grab new notes in the Dropvox folder under my main Dropbox folder, and open them in Evernote! So when I get back to the office after my meeting and open my Macbook, I’ll magically get my audio note open in Evernote a minute later (once Dropbox has synched).
Voilà!
by cameronreilly | Apr 1, 2015 | Apple, Hazel, Mac, technology
I finally bit the bullet yesterday and bought a new Macbook Pro (13″). My 2009 17″ had been on life support for the best part of 18 months and the cost of keeping it running was delivering diminishing returns.
The problem I have now is: how do I live with only 256 GB internal storage?
Here’s what I’ve set up so far but I’d be happy for suggestions on how to improve it.
1. Previously I had my DOCUMENTS folder sitting inside GOOGLE DRIVE. It was pretty large (>65GB). So I’ve set up HAZEL to automatically grab files that either a) haven’t been modified in the last six months or b) are larger than 50MB and haven’t been modified in the last week, and move them into a Dropbox folder which sits on a portable USB drive, maintaining the same folder structure. So I still have access to those files in the cloud, but they are off my local drive.
2. For redundancy purposes, I’ve got SYNC FOLDER PRO set up to automatically keep the portable drive in sync with an old 4TB drive I have on my desk. So when I’m traveling, I can take my 1TB drive with me – if it gets lost, stolen or fries, I have a backup. My photos and videos are all on the 1TB drive too, so they are always being backed up in case of disaster.
3. Of course I have TIME MACHINE backing up my internal drive.
4. And I’m keeping all of the documents that are less than six months old in GOOGLE DRIVE.
Any suggestions on better ways of living with a small hard drive?
by cameronreilly | Jan 30, 2015 | Mac, Podcasting, technology
If you have ever wanted to feed your system audio into a Skype call – for example, you’re recording a podcast and you want to play a clip from a song or a movie or a voicemail from a listener and you want the other person on your call to hear it and you also want it to come through cleanly on your recording – then this might help (assuming you’re on a Mac).
I’ve wanted to do this for ages and just figured it out. As it turns out, it wasn’t difficult at all and I should have taken the time to work it out ages ago. So I’m writing this for anyone else who might go searching for a solution.
Here are the apps you’ll need to install:
1. Audio Hijack
2. Soundflower
Steps.
1. Set up a new Audio Hijack session we below. So what you’ll end up with is two audio inputs – your mic and your system audio (or you could make the second one an app, like iTunes or Chrome, etc) feeding into your headphones and then through to Soundflower.
2. Once you’ve done that, open up your Skype settings and set “input” to Soundflower.
Once you’ve done that – you’re set.
Turn on Audio Hijack my clicking the round button in the lower left corner.
When you want to feed your secondary audio source into Skype, just click the secondary source node in Audio Hijack and set its status to “on”.
When you have finished with that piece of audio, turn its status back to “off”.
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Using Audio Hijack and Soundflower to feed System Audio into Skype
by cameronreilly | Nov 26, 2014 | advertising, Apple, Australian media, iPhone, media 2.0, TPN
Today is the tenth anniversary of my first podcast – G’Day World #1 in 2004.
It wasn’t only MY first podcast, it was a milestone in a number of ways:
- It was the first podcast ever produced in Australia (AFAIK)
- It was the first podcast produced over Skype (AFAIK)
- It was the first podcast to include live guests (AFAIK – but that didn’t happen until a couple of weeks later when I interviewed my mate Buzz Bruggeman)
- It was the first podcast on The Podcast Network, the world’s first podcast production business that I co-founded in Feb 2005.
Podcasting has come a long way since 2004. Back then I was predicting that it would become mainstream within a decade. Has it? I’m not sure how you measure “mainstream” – or even it that’s a worthy metric at all. It certainly hasn’t taken over the world. And I still meet people who have never listened to one and don’t really know what a podcast is.
But here are my thoughts on the matter.
- The most recent stats I’ve seen suggest there are about 225,000 active podcasts being produced (but I’ve no idea how they arrived at that number or how credible it is). That probably means there are millions of listeners at least.
- The advertising industry still isn’t on board. I produce one of the top podcasts in the world and I don’t have potential advertisers beating down my door. We did sell quite a bit of advertising in the early years, 2006 – 2008, but the GFC hit and that all disappeared – and hasn’t returned.
- The technology has improved a great deal. Back then it was pretty hard to FIND and SUBSCRIBE to podcasts. Even after Steve Jobs announced in May 2005 that the next version of iTunes would have a podcast directory (and sent me an email about it), it was still a clunky process to find a podcast, subscribe to it and get it onto your iPod. These days of course there are a bunch of iPhone and Android apps that make it simple and quick.
- The business model for podcasting is emerging as listener donations. On my Life Of Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte podcasts, we get regular listener donations. Nowhere near enough yet to make a living out of it, but we hope to change that with our new series that starts in a couple of weeks. I prefer the donation or subscriber model to advertising as it gives us greater independence. We aren’t relying on sponsors to continue their support. If we get them, they will be cream. I know a couple of guys who make a living out of their podcasts, so I know it can be done. This wouldn’t have been possible 10 or even 5 years ago.
- While the models for listening and monetizing podcasts has evolved, the technical side of setting up and running a premium podcast hasn’t. There are certain services like LibSyn and Blubrry that provide some options, but their premium services are out of the price range for the average podcaster. If the small podcaster has a chance to get up and running and making money out of their show, we need better tools and guides. I’m currently writing such a guide that is based on my experience over the last year building the Caesar show. I hope to get it finished in the next month or so and think it will help a lot of podcaster take their shows to the next level. Disappointingly, ten years later, iTunes still doesn’t allow podcasters to charge for their shows, meaning we have to jump through way too many hoops to do that ourselves.
- In terms of marketing and delivering a podcast, iTunes is still the kingmaker. It accounts of about 90% of our downloads and I’m sure that pretty true for most podcasts. Why haven’t Google, Microsoft or Yahoo done more to promote podcasts? I don’t know.
- Has my decade of podcasting been a good thing? Yes. Not financially – but certainly it has in other ways. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have met my beautiful wife Chrissy if it wasn’t for podcasting (we met at Napoleon conference in Corsica in 2008) and we wouldn’t have our baby Fox. I’ve made many wonderful friends around the world who came from listening to my podcasts. I’ve made friends with other podcasters who did a show on TPN back in the day, including David Markham and my current co-host Ray Harris. I’ve interviewed guests from Noam Chomsky to Ray Kurzweil, from Leo Sayer to Jeffrey Katzenberg. It’s been a wonderful adventure.
I maintain today, as I did in this SMH article in 2008, that radio is boring. Every now and again I turn it on in the car and it bores me to tears. It’s still the homogenous shit it was ten years ago and that inspired me to create intelligent content. Yes, there are exceptions – the ABC in Australia, NPR in the United States, etc – but commercial radio is a wasteland of nonsense. Radio listenership in metro Australian cities are in decline but not by much (about 1% per year over the last five years). Will that change when podcasts are available built-in to cars, as Stitcher is promising? Perhaps. We’ll have to wait and see what the second decade of podcasting delivers.
by cameron | Mar 25, 2014 | Apple, Evernote, Hazel, Mac, technology
I’ve got an old scanner (Canon MP250) and I wanted a way of automating the process of scanning documents and getting them into Evernote.
There’s probably a way of doing this all in
Keyboard Maestro, but I couldn’t work it out quickly enough. It’s my first time using KM and I’m still a little confused by it. But I know my way around
Hazel and I used
this Applescript from Macworld as a cheat.
So, when I hit my hot key, KM opens up Image Capture, scans the document and puts it on my desktop where Hazel picks it up and imports it into my “!Inbox” notebook in Evernote where I can process it later, and then deletes the file from my desktop. KM then waits a minute and kills the Image Capture app.
Keyboard Maestro
Hazel
Hazel AppleScript
tell application “Evernote”
activate
create note from file theFile notebook {“!Inbox”} tags {“scan”}
end tell
by cameron | Oct 22, 2013 | Mac, technology
For the six years I’ve been using a Mac, I’ve often wanted to learn how to use AppleScript to automate processes I repeat. Today I finally did.
As part of my routine for keeping my Mac running efficiently, I like to re-boot it every couple of days. And to make sure it continues to boot quickly, I’ve made sure I’ve deleted everything that wants to auto-startup at boot. That way, I get a nice, clean, quick boot if I need it.
However, there are also a number of sites and apps that I use all day that I need to run. So instead of opening them all up individually after a new boot, I’ve written an AppleScript to do it for me.
Now if you’re an old AppleScript hand, this is probably stupidly simple. But I know lots of friends and family who have moved to a Mac in recent years and who aren’t programmers, so this is for them.
The Steps.
1. Open AppleScript. It comes pre-installed on your Mac. Find it by searching Spotlight.
2. Start a new script.
3. Cut & Paste my code from below. Change the URLs you want to open and the App you want to run according to your tastes.
4. Click “Compile” on the AppleScript toolbar.
5. Flie > Save. Save it to your Applications folder. Make sure the “File Format” is “Application”. Call it whatever you want – mine is just called ‘Startup’.
6. Lastly, open up the Applications folder and drage the icon for the new app to your dock. Close AppleScript.
Now, when you boot, after the dock loads, just run the new app and it will open all of your sites and apps for you.
open location “http://gmail.com”
open location “http://facebook.com”
tell application “TextExpander”
activate
end tell
tell application “Alfred 2”
activate
end tell
tell application “CrashPlan”
activate
end tell
tell application “PopClip”
activate
end tell
tell application “Bartender”
activate
end tell
tell application “Fantastical”
activate
end tell
tell application “Moom”
activate
end tell
tell application “Skype”
activate
end tell
tell application “TweetDeck”
activate
end tell
tell application “Evernote”
activate
end tell
tell application “Spotify”
activate
end tell
