Technology

One of my many new year’s resolutions was to impose order on my Gmail inbox. Despite my best efforts, I have several gigabytes of emails - all of which makes it difficult to back up or migrate them. Many of those email are invoices, receipts, or statements. I need to keep them for my business records, but they’re seriously cluttering up my workspace. Although I could create a mail archive with an email client like Thunderbird, that’s not very accessible. To find a specific invoice, I’d need to reimport those thousands of emails. I suddenly wondered whether there was a way of systematically saving the PDF attachments to a folder. After all, I don’t need the email itself, just the file. Needless to say, there wasn’t an especially straightforward method, or one that didn’t involve paying a third-party and giving them access to my mailbox. Finally, I discovered that I could run a script on my Gmail. ...

Mindmapping software can often feel overly rigid and complicated for capturing ideas quickly. Scapple, from the makers of the brilliant Scrivener, is a free-form, non-linear application for capturing your thoughts. It’s the closest software can get to a piece of paper and a pen – but you never run out of space. Scapple is available for both Mac and Windows. I’m basing this post on the Mac version, but it works broadly the same on both platforms. ...

When it comes to notetaking tools, I’ve always struggled with monogamy. After the initial excitement has worn off, I’m easily distracted by a more alluring alternative. Although my head has occasionally been turned, I’ve now been using Obsidian solidly for over three years. What’s different this time? In this post, I’ll explain my six main reasons for using Obsidian, and why I’ve chosen it over some of the alternatives. Now, I’ve seen people expressing strong feelings in the notetaking world 🔥 I’m not saying the alternatives are bad or wrong, it’s just that Obsidian better serves my needs. At least for now. ...

One of my main concerns about moving from WordPress to Hugo was, “How on earth do I create a contact form on a static site?”. Fortunately, Netlify came my rescue. Netlify already provides an excellent free service for deploying smaller static sites. I discovered that it also handles forms without the need for any JavaScript or plugins. In this tutorial, I’ll explain my process for setting up a simple contact form. Submissions are both stored in Netlify and emailed to me. I’m using the Papermod theme for Hugo, so your setup might vary. ...

As your Zotero Library grows, it’s important to maintain quality. If it’s messy, it’ll be harder to find what you need and also you’ll spend a lot of time fixing citations. Here are some tips for keeping everything tidy. Find Unfiled Items Zotero can filter your Unfiled Items. This shows you anything that doesn’t yet belong to a Collection, such as random articles you saved without a specific project in mind. ...

I’ve been using WordPress for at least two decades. During that time, I’ve become intimately acquainted with its quirks, and mostly indulgent of them. A couple of years ago, though, I realised that I’d stopped blogging. The more significant WordPress updates - namely the block editor - had introduced a lot of friction. It was taking me 20 minutes to draft a post that should have taken only 10. Also, I noticed clients grumbling about WordPress a lot more. Although frameworks like Genesis and GeneratePress made it easier, they also added another layer (and learning curve) on top of WordPress. And keeping plugins up-to-date was a part-time job. ...

Although syncing your Zotero Library ensures you have a cloud-based backup, it’s also a good idea to schedule independent backups. Why am I giving you extra work to do? Well, if you accidentally delete a bunch of items in Zotero just before it syncs, your empty version is copied to the Zotero servers. This is a fairly unlikely scenario, but it’s not one you’d want to encounter. In this post, I’ll explain how to back up your Zotero Library, and then outline some methods for restoring your items in different scenarios. ...

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is whether it’s possible for EndNote users to switch easily to Zotero. Yes, it is! Many of the tutorials focus on exporting your library in RIS format. Although straightforward, this method doesn’t retain your PDF attachments, Groups, or formatting. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the XML method. XML is a more sophisticated file format that’s readable by many tools. You need to follow the instructions precisely, but you’ll get a much better result. ...

I often meet researchers who are unhappy with their bibliographic referencing tool, but are put off by the potential faff. They imagine it would be as much fun as changing banks. Well, if you’re thinking of moving from Mendeley to Zotero, I have good news: it’s very easy. There are two main methods. Let’s look at them in turn. Method 1 - Export a RIS file from Mendeley A RIS file is a format that allows citation tools to exchange data. ...

Google’s NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant that helps you analyse your own content in almost any format, including Google Docs, PDFs, videos, and audio files. You create virtual notebooks for each topic or research area, then upload relevant documents. NotebookLM creates a custom dataset (or searchable knowledge base) from those files that you can then query. Unlike other chatbots, the responses are based on the content that you provided. And those responses include citations to the original passages - you know exactly where that answer has come from. The other big advantage of NotebookLM is that it can handle up to fifty 500,000-word documents. That’s a total of 25m words! Even if you’re a prolific note-taker like me, you’d struggle to exceed its capacity. ...