Discogs Collection Clean-up

August 1, 2025 | Comment

As I continue my 12 apps in 12 months journey this month’s is, by my own admission, a low effort submission! That’s not to say it isn’t useful, it is to me at least, but let’s just say it’s not going to win any programming awards.

What is Discogs?

For those that aren’t aware Discogs is an online platform that allows you to record your media collection, mainly vinyl in my case, and it also has a marketplace allowing sales of the same. One part of the recording of items is that it allows you to record the grading of … Read the rest

Evernote Family Remembers

July 1, 2025 | 1 comment

On long car journeys one of the favourite games for my grandaughter to play is something she calls “family remembers”. What she wants is for us to tell her interesting stories from our family past and mainly from our son, her father, and her uncle. These stories are all taken from memory and made me wish that I had recorded them somewhere for future prosperity. This in turn led me to start collecting interesting stories about my grandchildren and recording them in Evernote.

I thought that it would be nice to be able to turn these little stories locked away … Read the rest

Adding labels to media with php2Bluesky

June 28, 2025 | Comment

Someone mentioned to me that you can add labels to posts in Bluesky and I have to admit that I had not idea what they were referring to. Looking at them I can understand why I’d not come across them – I’d not had any need for them but what are labels?

Bluesky Labels

A Bluesky label is a tag you can add to your own post to warn others (and moderation tools) that your content may include things like nudity, violence, sexual content, or graphic imagery. They:

  • Enable users to filter or blur posts based on content type.
  • Help
… Read the rest

bookISBN2Task

June 1, 2025 | Comment

In the UK, the average adult reads approximately three books per year, according to a recent poll by YouGov. However, 40% of Britons haven’t read a single book in the last 12 months. That I have read on average 19 books a year puts me very much in the upper echelons of readers in the UK. My wife, on the other hand, averages 126 a year (that’s one every three days) and very much puts me in the shade with her average!

Too Many Books

I suffer from a couple of problems where books are concerned. Firstly, books (that … Read the rest

Evernote Rules – an update

May 14, 2025 | Comment

Back at the beginning of April I released Evernote Rules, a play on Outlook Rules, where you can define actions that are carried out when a note is created or updated in an Evernote notebook. I have wanted this for almost as long as I have had Evernote and I finally got fed up of waiting for Evernote to implement it and wrote it myself.

As explained previously it works by receiving a webhook from Evernote every time that a note is created or updated and by reading the payload associated with that webhook you can see whether there … Read the rest

Uploading Videos with php2Bluesky

May 10, 2025 | Comment

Ever since I launched php2Bluesky a couple of years ago, I have wanted to add the ability to upload video as well as images. Initially, that wasn’t possible as Bluesky didn’t support videos, and then they did, but it wasn’t in the API. Now, however, it is all systems go, and so I have updated the library to support videos.

How to Upload a Video

First things first. In order to start uploading videos all you need to do is update the library. The way you call the library remains exactly the same, so you would do the following to … Read the rest

Decoding the Evernote Webhook

May 7, 2025 | Comment

Evernote doesn’t like you using the search functionality in the API to look for changes that occur to a note. Instead you are encouraged to get notification of changes using webhooks. This works by receiving an HTTP post from Evernote every time that a note is created or updated and by reading the payload associated with that webhook you can get some basic information on it.

What does the Webhook look like?

The very first thing to know about Evernote webhooks is that in order to receive them you need to have registered for an API key and also … Read the rest

Family History Database Searches

May 1, 2025 | Comment

Amongst all my many hobbies is researching my family history, which I have been doing on and off (well, more off actually) for the last 30 years. Over that time, how you research has changed enormously with so many records now being available online. Also, when I first started, the only way to record your information was on paper, but now there are numerous software packages that have largely replaced the need for paper.

Data Mining

The main issue with recording your family history information in a software package is that you are beholden to the developer’s choice of what … Read the rest

Adding your own resources to Scratch

April 16, 2025 | Comment

Scratch comes with a built-in library of resources that you can use in projects but they only go so far. Fortunately, it is possible to add your own backgrounds, sprites and sounds to your projects.

In this short guide we are going to be looking at how to search for and find resources such as images and sounds you or your child can use in your Scratch projects. 

You can do this with Google but we are going to be using DuckDuckGo.

What is DuckDuckGo?

DuckDuckGo is a simple and private search engine that helps you find information on … Read the rest

Evernote Rules

April 1, 2025 | 1 comment

I have been an avid user of Evernote since July 2008 and have amassed over 53,000 notes. Over those 16 years, I have seen many changes to both Evernote the company and the client itself. The recent purchase by Bending Spoons had the potential to make or break the company but has, in my opinion, been overwhelmingly positive for Evernote (despite what the naysayers on Reddit say!).

Introducing Evernote Rules

One feature I have wanted Evernote to have is some form of automation that manipulates notes based on rules – very similar to the rules available in Outlook. After … Read the rest