insurgia.com

Author: neil

  • ★ Importing Mavericks Tags to Evernote

    I have a Hazel-based workflow defined for scanned documents. With the release of Mavericks, I added tagging to that flow for things like the company that generated the document, a few tags about what the doc is about (cars, kids, etc). However, I like keeping the docs in Evernote. So, as I usually do, I […]

  • ★ Banking

    I’ve struggled with finding a good way to know my bank account balance on the go. Logging in to the bank’s app or website shows me what they know about, but future transactions don’t show up there, even if they’re in their own Bill Pay function. Mint has the same problem, but also gets flaky […]

  • ★ The new Grocery List process

    So now that I’m not using my Applescript and Numbers grocery list, how am I doing it?  Two key pieces – Drafts for content entry and Evernote for storage. I created a notebook in Evernote specifically for lists. In Drafts I have tow actions defined. One adds the current note to a predefined groceries note in Evernote. […]

  • ★ Catching up.

    Guess I should follow up with where I am with the projects from previous posts. Grocery lists (here and here): I’ve stopped adding them to the Numbers spreadsheet. Took too long and had some fragility issues around the script that processed the data on the Mac. Instead, I use Drafts to post things to the list […]

  • ★ Automating date collection in scanned documents.

    I was reading the other day on MacSparky about a set of Hazel rules to extract dates from the content of PDF files. The rules themselves can be found on Macorios.com and I have to say, they’re pretty brilliant. However, one of the items under the known issues made it not a feasible solution for me: […]

  • ★ Adding Items to the Grocery List

    So last week I mentioned my shopping list spreadsheet. However, there’s one flaw. My Mac isn’t in the kitchen, and adding things to the spreadsheet via Numbers on my phone is… awkward at best. But I can send a text with my phone. And I have Messages running on my Mac. And I read this. […]

  • ★ Grocery Lists & Data Collection

    I tend to be the one who does most of the grocery shopping for our family. I’ve always been curious about some of the data that could be collected – specifically, pricing data and how often we purchase certain items. So I built a spreadsheet. (You know how they say “To a child with a […]

  • ★ Off The Secret Weapon, Back to Remember The Milk

    That was fast.  Unfortunately, I pretty quickly remembered what I didn’t like about The Secret Weapon. Because it’s within Evernote, it was always multiple steps to add a task, multiple steps to see what’s on my list, and multiple steps to make sure I was only looking at my 1-Now list instead of everything. And […]

  • ★ Starting with The Secret Weapon and Evernote

    I decided it was time to go all-in with Evernote. I’ve been toying around with it here and there and trying to figure out how it would fit into my workflow. I had been using Remember The Milk, and while it worked, it never felt quite right. I had read about The Secret Weapon, a […]

  • ★ Using Automator to Get At Things Applescript Won’t Cooperate With

    One of the things that drew me to the Mac was Applescript – the idea of a scripting language that would work with most of the programs in the OS was… well, pretty freaking cool. However, “most of the programs” eventually means “not the program I was using.” Then I came across this article – […]