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

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.

App	Paid/Free	Description
1Password	Paid (~£65, family plan)	An,

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👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months

January 28, 2025 | Comment

It seems to be en vouge at the moment to challenge yourself to develop an application a month and do so in public. These apps tend to be AI driven, very slick, with their own landing pages etc. I wanted to stretch myself this year and increase the cadence of my development and so a 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge sounded like a good idea.

But not like that!

While a challenge seemed like a good idea, I didn’t want to be producing apps just for the sake of it. I felt that for it to be worthwhile, I … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Ten – Adding ALT tags to Images

November 18, 2024 | Comment

NOTE: This post is mainly about how I developed the php2Bluesky library. If you are looking for information on using the library in your own code please see here: https://github.com/williamsdb/php2Bluesky/

I have to admit that I didn’t think I’d be back with another post on my php2Bluesky library quite so soon but Dr Paul Lee on Bluesky pointed out that while you can post images from the library you can’t also send ALT text to go with them.

But what is ALT text?

Alt text is descriptions of images added to the HTML or metadata of a post on social … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Nine – Handling Hashtags

November 17, 2024 | Comment

Bluesky has gone from a very niche platform to one that is getting more coverage and seeing explosive growth thanks in part to the actions of the overlord at Twitter. The following was the count of users when I wrote this post.

Expanding functionality

At the same time as the user growth, the platform itself has been growing features to bring it more in line with what its competitors are offering. This includes hashtags, which are now fully supported both in the app and API. What this also means is that I can now add support for … Read the rest

Using Cursor to Generate Code

October 25, 2024 | Comment

I have written about the use of AI in programming previously but I recently came across Cursor which is Visual Studio Code with AI built in so I thought I would give it a go but what to do?

Road Trip

I have recently returned from a driving holiday around the East Coast of the US and was, as ever, amazed at the price of petrol (“gas”) compared to the UK but how much cheaper was it? I decided that this would make a simple test for Cursor.

As always, what is important is the prompt you give the AI … Read the rest

A Minor Update to my Bluesky Library

February 26, 2024 | Comment

A quick post to say that my Bluesky library has had a small update. This is to take into account that from version two of Clark’s library that handles the calls to Bluesky the connection method has changed. Therefore, if you have updated to version two then remember also to update the PHP2Bluesky code which can be found here.

You can read all the posts on the PHP2Bluesky library here and get in touch if you find any issues or have an enhancement suggestion.… Read the rest

Automatically Restarting Unresponsive MySQL Service

October 29, 2023 | Comment

This blog and others that I run are all hosted on a cloud server with MySQL installed locally. Occasionally MySQL becomes unresponsive and I have to login to the server to kick it back into life by restarting msqld.

The most likely reason for MySQL becoming unresponsive is lack of resources so the best solution would be to increase the size of the server – however, that requires money that I don’t want to spend. Therefore, the next best option was to write a script to detect when MySQL was unavailable. Enter mysqladmin.

mysqladmin — A MySQL Server Administration Program

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Working out my credit card statement date in Excel

September 7, 2023 | Comment

This might be the most niche post I have ever done but I hope that it might prove useful to someone.

My credit card bill gets made up on or around the tenth of each month but, for reasons I won’t go into here, I needed to much more accurately predict when it was actually going to be created. Through a combination of searching and testing, I discovered that in my case it is always made up on the sixth working day of the month. Turns out that there is an Excel (and Google Sheets) function that can help with … Read the rest