Ai Transcription Gone Rouge

August 19, 2026 | 1 comment

I wrote recently about using Ai to help Transcribing handwritten diary entries into Day One. On the whole this has been a great success but there have been one or two interesting hallucinations.

A Blank Page

Not every page in my diary has a written entry but I have been scanning and transcribing them all for completeness. This is the prompt that I have been giving Google Gemini:

You are an expert palaeographer and archivist. Transcribe the handwritten text from this image.
Crucial: Do not insert a line break at the end of every handwritten line. Instead, join the

… Read the rest

Foursquare Check-in Stats

August 12, 2026 | Comment

Late last year I wrote a script that took my Foursquare check-ins and created an entry for each of them in the Day One app. This continues to work well and you can read more about it here:

Exporting Foursquare check-ins to Day One

I felt that there was more that could be done with the information held in Foursquare and set about extracting it.

Into the Dataverse

I decided that the best way to get the data in a usable form would be to extract it and store it in a database, choosing SQLite as the repository (Read … Read the rest

Checking which macOS apps rely on Rosetta

August 8, 2026 | 3 comments

Do you keep seeing this notification pop-up on your MacBook? Do you know what it means? Do you know what to do about it? If not read on to find out.

What is Rosetta and why is it needed?

Rosetta 2* is Apple’s translation technology that lets Intel Mac applications run on Apple Silicon Macs — Macs with the M1, M2, M3, M4, M5 etc. chips.

Apple changed the processor architecture of the Mac in 2020:

  • Before 2020: Macs used Intel processors, based on the x86-64 instruction set.
  • Since 2020: Macs use Apple’s own ARM-based Apple Silicon processors.

The … Read the rest

Transcribing handwritten diary entries into Day One

July 8, 2026 | 1 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