Posts

If you’ve been merrily saving ebooks, journal articles, and web snapshots to Zotero, you might run out of storage space. There’s a limit to how much you can sync for free. In this post, I’ll explain how to check your storage limit, how to save storage space, and how to increase the space. The current limit is 300Mb, which usually equates to a few hundred PDFs. Once you’ve reached this threshold, you need to pay an annual subscription before you can sync any more data. You’ll see an exclamation mark next to your sync icon. ...

If there’s one word that encapsulates the prevailing mood right now, it’s “uncertainty”. Not that life was ever certain (only its end), but it’s much harder to grasp even fleeting moments of stability. As William Gibson expressed it in his novel Pattern Recognition, “For us … things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ’now’ to stand on.” We aren’t living in “times of unprecedented change,” as people are fond of claiming. What’s unprecedented is the pace of that change. When I worked in the world of software engineering, whatever I learned in the morning was often obsolete by tea time. It feels as though that dizziness has engulfed everything. No doubt this is because tech companies are largely driving that pace of change. What we need, I think, are ways of expanding that sense of “now”. ...

We’ve all attended meetings where there’s been a lot of noise, but very little to show for it at the end. The discussion is dominated by a member with one terrible idea that they’re determined to force upon everyone. The quieter colleagues who actually have something valuable to say slump in defeat and start wondering what they’re going to have for dinner. The only outcome is agreement on the date for the next exhausting meeting. ...

As a technical writer, I often work with different operating systems and environments to test applications. It would be a nuisance if I needed a separate machine for every test case. Happily, it’s possible to run multiple operating systems on a single machine. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to create a Linux virtual machine (VM) on an Apple Silicon Mac using UTM (which stands for Universal Turing Machine). UTM is free, open-source virtualisation software that’s specifically designed for macOS. ...

“Bad fiction provides nuggets of social history unobtainable elsewhere,” writes Victorian Glendinning in her magisterial biography Trollope.1 That’s not to say that The Three Clerks (1858) is a bad novel, but I think its value lies more in what it tells us about the 1850s, rather than its ability to keep us away from Netflix. Although Glendinning was referring to another Trollope novel, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, those title characters make a couple of oblique appearances here, too. Indeed, The Three Clerks is an odd concoction of autobiography, other Trollope novels, and Dickensian pastiche. ...

I’m a huge Zotero fangirl, but there’s one feature that really annoys me: automatic tags. You’re merrily adding articles, only to find that your Tag Selector is bulging with weird descriptors from databases and catalogues. It’s then hard to find the tags you carefully created for yourself. The good news is there’s a simple fix to remove those automatic tags and to prevent them from reappearing. Step 1 - Delete or hide the existing tags In the bottom right-hand corner of your Tag Selector, click the tiny funnel icon. In the pop-up window, uncheck Show Automatic. This hides all those database tags, displaying just those you created yourself. To remove them completely, click Delete Automatic Tags in This Library. Much better! 😅 ...

I’ve used a few different MacBooks over the last couple of years. Although the M2 offered a big performance boost over the M1, I noticed a couple of downsides. Firstly, the way the M2 handles external drives; secondly, my network connectivity repeatedly slowing down and dropping. These problems disappeared when I briefly had an M3 through work, but returned when I switched back to an M2. My network connection would suddenly drop for no apparent reason. The internet connection itself was fine, but my Mac hadn’t got the memo. It turns out, my MacBook was connecting to the slower, more congested 2.4GHz network instead of the faster 5GHz band. ...

Around 10 years ago, I wrote a tutorial on using Zotero with Scrivener through the RTF/ODF plugin. This method was fiddly, but ultimately produced live Zotero citations in a Word or LibreOffice document. Unfortunately, since the launch of Zotero 7, this method no longer works. In my previous post, I described a simple Zotero-Scrivener workflow, using the RTF Scan tool. Here, I’ll explain why the more complicated method is no longer working and outline some other alternatives. ...

Although being a 21st-century researcher has its challenges, we are at least blessed with some excellent tools. Scrivener and Zotero are two of the best. This dream team makes it much easier to plan and draft your writing, then add citations and bibliographies in the right format. Unfortunately, the two tools aren’t directly integrated. This means finding workarounds and making compromises. In a pair of blog posts, I’ll explain two approaches - one simple, one more complicated - so you can decide what’s right for you. ...

One of my most memorable moments in academia was when two PhD researchers lost all their work just before submission. In one case, it was a house fire; in the other, a laptop stolen with the backup drive attached. This was devastating. In both cases, they’d created backups. Unfortunately, though, those backups were in the same physical location as the original files. Devising a proper backup strategy is something we’re always planning to do next month, when it’s a bit quieter. We’re far too busy right now. But it’s precisely when we’re frantically busy that we’re most likely to hit the wrong button, and also when a data loss would be most inconvenient. ...