Transcribing handwritten diary entries into Day One

July 8, 2026 | Comment

I recently wrote a post about the ongoing project I have been doing to transcribe all my physical diaries and journals into the Day One app. In this post I lamented that when I had tried transcribing my handwritten entries using AI the results had been less than perfect with too many changes and some pretty bizarre hallucinations.

Transcribing Old Diaries

Given the speed with which technology moves and AI even quicker I decided that it was time to give the project another go. Previously I’d used ChatGPT but this time I used Gemini to transcribe a couple of sample … Read the rest

Xteink X3 Review

July 1, 2026 | 1 comment

I’ve made no secret of my love for the Xteink X4, the tiny ereader that you can take with you wherever you go (and I do). So why did I also buy the X4’s little sibling? Read on to find out…

Xteink X4 Review

What is the X3?

Xteink is a Chinese company that manufactures and sells small, basic and, importantly, cheap e-readers (they also sell a Tong card but not internationally).

They started with the X4, which I have written about a number of times before, and quickly followed it up with the X3.

Major differences are:

  • The X3
… Read the rest

Google has made us Stupid

June 19, 2026 | Comment

I’ve been away on holiday, on a cruise at it happens. I mention that only as it is important to this story. On board there is a dedicated website that you can access to check your account, see what’s on today, book restaurants etc. The web address for this site is:

http://myholiday.pocruises.com/

Now, I know and you probably know too, that this is a local website running on a server somewhere on the boat. Unless you pay a heafty fee you don’t get access to the internet just this local website.

Don’t Search

I have an iPhone but others in … Read the rest

Decoding the Evernote Auth Token

June 3, 2026 | Comment

If, like me, you are still persisting with Evernote’s aging API (I have two projects that use it) you will have come across the Auth Token that is used to validate requests. In today’s post we are going to try and unpack that.

What does it contain?

The raw Auth Token looks like this:

S=s3:U=13d80:E=1a4b63e2798:C=19d5e8cfb98:P=185:A=application-id:V=2:H=a3b92abc123567d7a6ec10b23cad2dfc

Which breaks down into eight parts as follows:

S=s3
U=13d80
E=1a4b63e2798
C=19d5e8cfb98
P=185
A=application-id
V=2
H=a3b92abc123567d7a6ec10b23cad2dfc

What each part means

S=s3

  • Shard ID – Tells Evernote which backend cluster your account lives on.

U=13d80

  • User ID (in hex) – Internal Evernote user identifier

E=1a4b63e2798

  • Expiry
… Read the rest

apfel for Alfred Workflow

May 27, 2026 | Comment

In today’s fast changing AI world Apple is very much coming from behind with it’s products and services in this space. Apple now groups its on-device AI under the Apple Intelligence umbrella and includes things like Siri.

What is Apple Intelligence

Launched At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024, Apple officially unveiled Apple Intelligence. This marked a shift toward “personal intelligence” – AI that (supposedly) understands your personal context (emails, calendar, messages) while maintaining strict privacy. This included:

  • Privacy-First Architecture: Apple introduced Private Cloud Compute, a system that uses Apple silicon servers to handle complex requests without storing user
… Read the rest

Go to a Specific Date in DayOne

May 20, 2026 | Comment

I’ve written about directly accessing the Day One database before along with a number of posts about getting data in from other services.

This week I came across a niggle with the Day One Mac app in that you cannot go directly to a specific dated post just by typing the date you want. You can scroll through the calendar and you can filter by year but that’s about it.

Rolling Your Own

As usual, I wasn’t willing to accept this deficiency, so I decided to build something to get around it.

The app consists of three files:

  • a
… Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s (Revisited)

May 13, 2026 | Comment

A while back I wrote about my experience of computer science education in the 1980s and, in particular, use of the CESIL language. You can read about that here:

Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s

Since then I have been contacted both by the daughter of the pupil that wrote the CESIL interpreter and someone that is writing a book about the ICL Computer Education in Schools programme. This led me down a rabbit hole when I was asked to look and see what my ‘O’ Level project was. This required a trip to the loft and a root … Read the rest

Automatically Rotating Images with php2Bluesky

May 9, 2026 | Comment

I have a PHP application that I use to post to my X, Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. This works well but I noticed the last time I posted an image from my iPhone that while it was fine on X and Mastodon on Bluesky the image was upside down (see above and here)!

Interestingly this only happens when posting via the Bluesky API, if you upload the same from the web interface, for example, it works fine.

Enter EXIF

When you take a picture with a modern digital camera, such as an iPhone, it embeds into that … Read the rest

What I Install First on a New MacBook

May 6, 2026 | Comment

I’d decided that I was going to setup my MacBook Neo as a new machine, rather than burden it with all the bloat from my MacBook Pro backup. This gave me both the opportunity to start with a clean machine but also to make a list of my essential software to install.

The List

Here are all the apps I consider to be essential enough to install as soon as I get a new machine. Other apps come and go, but these I use daily. Presented here in no particular order.

AppPaid/FreeDescription
1PasswordPaid (~£65, family plan)An,
… Read the rest

What’s Wrong with Vibe Coding?

April 29, 2026 | Comment

TL;DR Nothing*

You are the last of your kind

When I started work as a very junior developer in 1988, one of the first languages I used was ICL’s Application Master. This was what was known as a fourth-generation language (4GL). I was confidently told I would be one of the last developers before the next generation of language allowed anyone to create their own programs. Somewhat later than I think that commentator had envisioned, 40 years later in fact, I think we might be getting close to that democratisation of development.

For those interested, this is what Application … Read the rest