I’m posting today’s episode of Shawn Today here to make it available for everyone.

With Mavericks support for storing passwords and credit card info in Safari, combined with the iCloud keychain syncing of that info to our iOS devices, I wanted to share about how that impacts my favorite password manager, 1Password.

In short, I wanted to talk about why I still consider 1Password to be vitally important and useful.

On today’s podcast episode I share how I’ve been using the new iCloud keychain in both Mavericks and iOS, how I use 1Password, why the two make a good pair, and why 1Password is still important and useful.

Direct download link. (09:01)

Note: In the show is that I didn’t know if you could look up individual passwords from within iOS (to do things like fill in the UN/PW information for an app). It turns out you can look up password information if you go to the Settings app → Safari → Passwords & AutoFill → Saved Passwords. (You can also find your Saved Credit Card info here as well.)

One of the premier benefits to using 1Password is how it empowers you to use a unique password for every single one of your website logins.

Instead of having all your passwords memorized, you just install the 1Password extension in Safari or Chrome, and then when you are logging in to a website, you simply let 1Password log in for you. With 1Password, there’s no reason not to have unique and strong passwords for your bank, your weblog’s admin panel, your Flickr account, your Twitter, Facebook, Adobe, etc.

Then, when one of the websites or services you use gets hacked, and your username and password are both compromised, it’s far less of a risk to the rest of your logins because the hacker has a password of yours that was unique only to the website they hacked. Therefore they can’t take that username and password and use it to log in to your email account, bank account, or anything else.

In 1Password 4 there is a brilliant new section called Security Audit. In the sidebar it shows you tabs for finding weak passwords, duplicate passwords, and old passwords.

Clicking on the Duplicate Passwords tab gives you a list with every single login item that has a duplicate password. If you have any items here then you can begin working your way through each account, by logging in to the site and changing your password with a new unique one and saving that into 1Password.

(Side note: in 1Password 3 you can create smart folders that search for a common term. If you’ve got a few passwords that you know you use for most of your logins, then do create some smart folders for that password and boom, you’ve got a good list of all your duplicates.)

If you’ve been using 1Password for a while then it has no doubt collected most of your login details, making it easy to identify which accounts have duplicate passwords.

If you’re new to 1Password, it won’t yet know your various website login credentials until you enter them in. I’d suggest starting with the handful of websites you visit most often, your email address(es), and your bank’s website — changing your password in each of them to be something unique and saving that login info to 1Password. Then, over time, as you log in to the sites you visit less often, 1Password will automatically save your login credentials. And so, maybe in a month from now and then again in 6 months from now, re-check your duplicate passwords and update them.

On Friday, May 4, 2012, I signed up for Pinboard, a website that lets you bookmark URLs.

My move to Pinboard was prompted when Yojimbo, unfortunately, got too big for its britches. In Yojimbo I had more than 600 bookmarks, plus hundreds of other notes and files and things. Alas, because Yojimbo doesn’t weigh its search results by relevancy, it became increasingly difficult to find what I was looking for. In short, the more I was adding to Yojimbo, the harder it became to find what I was looking for.

A good filing system is one where you can find whatever you’re looking for in less than a minute. As of this sentence I have 2,334 bookmarks — I use Pinboard to collect any and every URL that is or was interesting to me — and I’ve never had trouble finding what I’m looking for when I go to search for a particular bookmark.

I wanted to share a few of the tools and services I am using with Pinboard. If you are wanting to get more out of Pinboard, then hopefully this will help you out.

Why Pinboard?

Pinboard is a great bookmarking service because it lives on the web, and so many of the apps and services I use every day can send bookmarks to my Pinboard.

For example: any article I “like” in Instapaper gets bookmarked to Pinboard; if a tweet that I “fave” has a URL in it, that URL gets bookmarked to Pinboard (you can configure this yourself in your Pinboard settings). And because Pinboard connects with IFTTT, you can set up a gazillion other ways to bookmark URLs.

In a nut, it’s very easy to add bookmarks into Pinboard. And it’s equally easy to find those URLs later by searching or by tag lists.

A Smarter bookmarklet

Beyond going to the Pinboard website itself and clicking the “Add URL” button, the most basic way to save a URL to Pinboard is through a bookmarklet.

I use Joel Carranza’s “Particular Pinboard” bookmarklet to save links when I am on a web page in Safari.

Joel’s bookmarklet is a bit more clever than the default ones found on the Pinboard website. It does some cleanup to the tile of the web page, populates the description field with selected text or else with the page’s description from the header, and will auto-add tags you use if they are relevant to the article based on keywords.

There is one thing I changed in Joel’s bookmarklet, and that is the height and width of the popup window. At the end of the javascript I changed the width from 610 to 700 and the height from 350 to 550. For some reason the default dimensions were causing the popup window to display without a status bar and without a window shadow. The slightly larger dimensions fixed that for me.

A Tag-Specific Quick Bookmark

Let’s say there is a tag you use often in Pinboard, and you want a way to save a URL using that tag with the least amount of fuss possible.

Then use this bookmarklet.

This will take your current Safari tab and save it to Pinboard using a pre-defined tag that you chose, all without showing you a pop-up dialog window or anything.

Tab collections

You know when you’re doing research on something and you end up with about 30 open tabs and then you don’t know what to do with them all?

Pinboard Tab collections are your friend.

This Safari extension will grab all of your open Safari tabs, organize them by windows (say you’ve got 3 windows with several tabs each) and then let you save them as a set.

Sometimes it’s nice to use this as nothing more than a placebo bookmark, when all you want to do is quit out of Safari and save your work for later (maybe).

Mac Apps

There are some Mac menubar and desktop apps, but I don’t use any of them. I think the Pinboard website is very easy to use and so Safari is my go-to place for accessing Pinboard from my Mac.

Search via LaunchBar

If you use LaunchBar you can set up a custom Search Template for Pinboard that lets you enter your search query from within LaunchBar and then search the Pinboard site.

Bring up LaunchBar, click the “gear” icon that’s on the right-hand side, then go to Index → Show Index. Or hit OPT+CMD+I when LaunchBar is visible.

When the LaunchBar Index is up, click on the Search Templates label in the sidebar. Click “Add”. Name your Search Template something like “Pinboard”, and then place this code as the Details:

https://pinboard.in/search/?query=*+&mine=Search+Mine

Now, bring up LaunchBar, type “Pinboard”, hit Space Bar, type your search query, and hit Return.

iOS Apps

I actually have two favorite iOS apps for Pinboard.

• Pushpin: It has a clean interface, it’s a universal app which works on iPhone and iPad, it lets me browse through my list of bookmarks, tags, and notes, and it offers access to Pinboard’s Popular list and more.

• Pinbook: This app has a more narrow focus than Pushpin does — Pinbook excels at search. Searching your bookmarks in Pinbook is fast, and you can search by Title, Tag, or Description. So if there is a particular tag you want to pull up, just search by tag.

Both these apps have URL schemes, so you can send bookmarks to them from other apps. Here is the Javascript bookmarklet I use to add a URL from Mobile Safari to Pushpin. It’s based on the very same Particular Pinboard bookmarklet mentioned above.

I realize it’s a bit nerdy to have two Pinboard apps. If I had to pick just one, it would be Pushpin. If you don’t want to spend $10 on a Pinboard app, and you just want a nice way to add and find your bookmarks from your iPhone and iPad, get Pinbook. You won’t be disappointed with either.

Using Pinboard

Pinboard is like Birdhouse was — there are many like it, but each person’s is their own.

To get the most out of Pinboard it helps to have easy ways to save bookmarks, and then to know that you can search them when you need. Hopefully what I’ve shared above gives you some ideas for how you can use the service better.

When I was using Google to sync my RSS subscription list, my setup was NetNewsWire on my Mac and Reeder on my iPhone and iPad. As Google Reader was shutting down, I ported my subscription list to Feed Wrangler, Feedbin, and Digg. A little time with each and Feed Wrangler was the one I landed on. Two months later and I’m still using it.

For apps I use Mr. Reader on the iPad, ReadKit on the Mac, and Reeder on the iPhone.

Feed Wrangler

The backbone for my RSS subscriptions is my favorite of the whole bundle. I’ve been more than content with the service, and my original stance on Feed Wrangler still stands: it is the most “future-Shawn proof” of the feed reading syncing services out there.

Because of Feed Wranglers use of Smart Streams and filters, it’s the one that I expect to best accommodate my changing habits and interests over the years. The feeds I read today aren’t necessarily the feeds I’ll be reading tomorrow, and my interests today aren’t guaranteed to stay the same.

Feed Wrangler’s foundation is built on catering to flexibility and letting the service do as much of the heaving lifting of sorting your incoming news for you as it can.

When porting my feeds from Google over to Feed Wrangler, I didn’t keep my old folder structure. Instead I just sort of started over organically creating new folders and streams based on my needs.

I have 3 smart streams that show me all the unread items within a selection of feeds: my “Faves” stream has the handful of sites I enjoy reading every single day; my “Photo” stream has the handful of photography-based websites I follow; and my “Too much!” stream has all the high-volume tech-news sites I don’t pay attention to.

I also have some search-based smart streams. Currently one for the term “Mirrorless” and one for the term “iOS 7”.

After a few months of regular use, I’ve also come across some workflow pebbles I’d like to see improved in Feed Wrangler:

• For one, I’d love to see an easier way to add a new feed and pipe it into a smart stream immediately. Currently that workflow is a bit convoluted.

I pretty much only ever add feeds using the bookmarklet. Click that link from any site with a valid RSS feed and Feed Wrangler will add it to your master list. However, once you’ve added a new feed to your Feed Wrangler, you’re then put you then left at the “add new feeds” page.

You then need to click on the smart stream you want to place your new feed into. Then click “Edit” in the upper right corner, find the new feed, and check the box to the it to the stream.

• The second pebble is with marking a whole stream as read. It doesn’t actually mark all as read, but only the items currently in view. When viewing a smart stream on the Feed Wrangler website, it displays the 50 most recent unread items, and after clicking “Mark All Read” just those 50 get marked as read, but if there are more than 50 items in my smart stream then the page refreshes with the next batch.

Suppose I’ve got a smart stream with 2,000 unread items in it. To mark the whole thing as read requires 40 clicks of the “Mark All Read” button. This, however, is only a limitation of the website itself. When marking a stream as read from within one of the 3rd-party apps I use (such as Mr. Reader or ReadKit), then the whole stream is marked as read.

These pebbles, however, are just that. As a service, I continue to be impressed with Feed Wrangler’s reliability and speed. I have high hopes for what it could look like down the road.

ReadKit on Mac

ReadKit is a seriously feature-packed app. It’ll sync with Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Pinboard, Delicious, Feedly, NewsBlur, Fever, Feed Wrangler, Feedbin, your kitchen sink, and it can manage it’s own local copy of an OPML subscription list as well.

Currently, ReadKit has the monopoly on Mac apps that sync with Feed Wrangler. I mostly check my feeds from my Mac, and prefer using a native app instead of the Feed Wrangler website. ReadKit is a nice Mac app that’s been in very active development over the past several months.

For $5 on the Mac App Store, ReadKit is one heck of a bargain. But I don’t yet love it.

My biggest quibble is that I can’t launch ReadKit without it sending my Mac’s fans into hyperdrive. Also, the app takes a fair amount of time to sync my 177 feeds (Mr. Reader on my iPad syncs in about one-third the time). And so I usually try to check my feeds as quickly as possible and then get out so I can reclaim some CPU cycles.

As I said, it’s a pretty good app, but it’s not yet amazing. I still think there is room for a few truly great desktop RSS apps that are fast, polished, feature-rich, and easy to use. An app like that takes time to build, but I believe the market will be found waiting.

Reeder on iPhone

Though this is one of my all time favorite iPhone apps, it is, ironically, the one I use the least now. Though Reeder for iPhone works with Feed Wrangler, it doesn’t support Smart Streams. Which means I only see a single list of all my individual feeds. This

Reeder also works with Feedbin, Feedly, and Fever, and it supports folders for these services.

Mr. Reader on iPad

This is the best 3rd-party Feed Wrangler app among my trio of Mac/iPhone/iPad apps. It’s fast, feature rich, and has native support for Feed Wrangler’s Smart Streams. Not only can you view the smart streams, you can add new ones and edit existing ones.

The Future of Feed Reading?

The transition away from Google Reader hasn’t been nearly as rocky as I thought it would be. As a reader I’ve experienced very little inconvenience — the biggest pain point has been learning and using new apps.

I’m hoping it doesn’t stop here though. Google’s retreat opened up the RSS syncing and news aggregation market all over again. And I hope this means we’ll see innovation and new services in this space.

There is so much great stuff being written and published every day. We’re subscribing to some of the sites and writers who are producing it, and we’re trying to read what we can, but a lot of great things to read fall through the cracks every day. And a lot of dumb stuff gets much more attention than it deserves.

When we ask our inboxes and communities what to read, usually the answer is whatever the newest or most popular item is at the moment. And how often are those the best two metrics for deciding that something is going to be interesting and worthwhile for me?

What if there was a different and deeper approach to “automated news aggregation/recommendation”?

Suppose I was willing to give a service access to a broad scope of data points related to my reading and consumption habits. Things like what articles are in my Instapaper queue, what articles I’ve “liked” in Instapaper, what URLs I’ve bookmarked in Pinboard, who I follow on Twitter and the URLs they link to, what RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, what books and gadgets I buy on Amazon, what apps I buy from Apple, what albums are in my Rdio collection, what movies I’ve liked on Netflix, etc.

This sounds like a lot, but it actually isn’t all that different from what I’m already doing. ReadKit has my login credentials for FeedWrangler (all my RSS feeds), Instapaper and Pinboard (so I can send items to there) and Twitter (so I can share articles). My Rdio listening habits are already public info for anyone who follows me there because that’s the nature of Rdio’s social network, and so the only bits left to share would be what books I buy from Amazon, what movies I like on Netflix, and what apps I’ve downloaded from the iOS and Mac App stores.

And so, could this hypothetical service take all that information, put it into a database, and then find and recommend things for me to read? I think yes. That’d be the easy part. The hard part is if the service could pick out articles for me as well as Pandora can at pick out songs, or as well as Netflix can pick out 4-star movies. Now, wouldn’t that be something?

Come Monday, Google Reader will be gone and you’ll have no access to your old data. Even if you’re not planning on moving to a Google Reader alternative, if you’ve ever had a Google Reader account and a list of feeds, I’d suggest downloading your list just so you’ve got it. And it only takes about a minute.

There is more than one way get your RSS feeds list from Google Reader. Here’s a few — feel free to pick whichever sounds the most exciting to you:

• Dave Winer points to this link which, will create an XML file listing all your subscriptions.

• Michael Schechter explains how to use the Google Takeout service. Exporting via Takeout gives you much more than just a list of your feeds. It also includes all the people you were following, the people who followed you, and all the items you’ve starred, shared, and liked.

I don’t really care about any of that extra info, except my starred items. But they’ve been auto-imported into Pinboard using IFTTT anyway.

• Which is why I went a different rout: I just opened up NetNewsWire 3.3.2 and clicked on File → Export Subscriptions. From there I selected to export all of my subscriptions as an OPML file with groups, and now I’ve got a nice backup of all the feeds I was subscribed to in Google Reader.

As the dust settles, my feed-reading service of choice continues to be Feed Wrangler.

Feed Wrangler has been out for a few months now, and I’ve been an advocate of the service on this site, on Twitter, ADN, and to just to anyone who asks.

There are two main reservations I’ve heard from people regarding Feed Wrangler, and they are: (1) that the iOS apps and website are ugly; and (2) that Feed Wrangler doesn’t support folders.

Well, I can’t argue with the first point. And I don’t think David Smith (the developer behind Feed Wrangler) would argue with you either. His goal with the apps was simply to have something that worked with the service. His primary goal with Feed Wrangler is to build a killer syncing service with a full-featured API and get the best-in-class 3rd-party apps to support it.

And so far, that’s exactly what’s happening. Just yesterday Mr. Reader for iPad was updated with support for Feed Wrangler. This morning, ReadKit for Mac was updated with Feed Wrangler support. And we know that an update for Reeder is in the works which will also bring support for Feed Wrangler.

So the concern about how Feed Wrangler looks has been, and is being, addressed.

As for the reservation about Feed Wrangler’s use of Smart Streams instead of folders, let me explain how I use these streams and how they can be set up to work like folders.

The Smart Stream

What sets Feed Wrangler apart from so many of the other RSS solutions is its Smart Streams.

As I’ve given accolades to Feed Wrangler over the past weeks since its launch a while back, I’ve received quite a few emails that people don’t fully grasp what all you can do with a Smart Stream.

I, too, had the same hurdle when I was initially beta testing Feed Wrangler, and it took some chatting with the developer behind it, David Smith, before I grasped just how awesome the Smart Streams can be.

Streams as Folders

To set up a smart stream as a “folder” do this:

• Under the Smart Streams box on Feed Wrangler’s sidebar, click “Create”.
• Enter a name for your new stream.
• Leave the search filter blank.
• Check: “Only include unread”.
• Uncheck: “Stream should include all feeds?”.
• After unchecking that last option, you’ll get a list of every RSS feed that’s in Feed Wrangler. From there you can select exactly which feeds you want to be in this stream (a.k.a. folder).
• Once you’ve selected all the feeds you want in this stream, click the “Create Stream” button and now you’ve got a Smart Stream that acts like a folder. Showing you all the unread items from all those feeds.

I currently have three “folder” smart streams: One for my favorite sites which I read just about daily, one for photography related sites, and one for Apple news.

Though, in truth, these are not so much traditional folders as much as they are smart collections. Because the same feed can exist in multiple Smart Streams, and read status of items will persist across multiple streams if you have crossover.

Streams as Streams

You can also build a stream based around a topic or keyword. Create a new stream just like outlined above, but this time enter in one or more search terms and your stream will be populated with only articles that match your search criteria. You can set the scope of this stream to cover all your feeds, or, like above, you can pick only certain ones.

I create Smart Streams unreservedly. They are a great way to stay on top of certain hot topics (like iOS 7) as well as more narrow topics I’m interested in (like Mirrorless Cameras).

Leading up to, and then during WWDC, I had a “WWDC” Smart Stream. I used it to see all the sites I follow that were talking about the event. Then, when WWDC was winding down, I deleted the stream. I’ll likely do the same with my iOS 7 stream later this fall.

Filters

The brother to the Smart Stream is the filter. Filters will search your feeds for a keyword you specify, and if that term shows up then the item will be marked as read so you don’t ever have to see it.

In the Feed Wrangler sidebar there is an option to “Manage Filters”. From there you can create your filters. Note that Filters are global — you cannot select which feeds they apply to or don’t.

Some people, I suspect, would use a Filter for the same topics I used a Smart Stream for. Supposed you’d heard enough about WWDC or iOS 7. Just create a filter for it and those topics will, more or less, be muted from you RSS feeds for as long as you leave the filters active.

* * *

So far, most of the Google Reader alternatives I’ve seen and tried seem to be, more or less, a copy of how Google Reader worked.

As I wrote in my link to Feed Wrangler back in April, its Smart Stream versatility is exactly the sort of forward-thinking innovation I hope we’re going to see more of in a post-Google Reader world.

Anyone who has been subscribing to RSS feeds for longer than a few months will know your subscription list regularly needs pruning and adjusting. Well, I want my RSS reader to help me with that task.1 Smart Streams can help by making it easier to wrangle my feeds based on more than just which website they came from. I expect in the long run that they will prove very accommodating and useful as my interests change and as my attention ebbs and flows.

Last week I linked to the LaunchBar 5.5 update and commented about its new Snippets feature:

One great advantage of LaunchBar’s snippets is that you can access your whole list with a keystroke and then search for the one you want. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I forget what abbreviation I assigned to this or that TextExpander expansion (especially ones I use infrequently). And so, for some cases, I expect I’ll be using LaunchBar snippets instead.

After writing that, I received some feedback from folks about a preference in TextExpander that I’ve been ignorant to: you can set a global hotkey which will bring up a search box to search your TextExpander snippets.

Hitting the hotkey gets you this search box, which searches both the contents of the expansion as well as the shortcut:

Yes, some abbreviations are unforgettable, but not all of them. And so if, like me, you sometimes forget what abbreviation you’ve assigned to a TextExpander snippet, then this hotkey preference is for you.

There are 2 things I don’t like about using signatures in Mail on the Mac.

For one, if you don’t always write messages which are either bottom-posted replies or top-posted replies, then half the time Mail puts the signature in the wrong spot. In the Signature preference pane you can check a box telling Mail to place the signature above quoted text, but then it’s in the incorrect place when you want to do a bottom-posted email reply. And vice versa. If you don’t check that box then your email signature is at the very bottom of the email message whenever you want to do a top-posted reply. Ugh.

Secondly, email signatures which are generated by Mail are in rich text. If, like me, you compose your emails in plain text then your signature can stand out like a formatted sore thumb.

For a long time I’ve been using TextExpander to expand my email signature when I’m done typing my email.

Ideally, however, I’d love to even forgo TextExpander and have my email signatures there before I even begin typing. But, as stated above, using Mail’s built-in signatures doesn’t place the signature in the right spot. And I want the signature inserted in the proper place regardless of if I’m composing a new message, top-posting my reply, or bottom-posting my reply.

Using Keyboard Maestro I can do just that.

Since Keyboard Maestro sees keyboard shortcuts before OS X does, it’s easy to “replace” an app’s default keyboard shortcuts with a Keyboard Maestro macro that does what you actually want the app to do when you hit that hotkey.

I set up five macros to replace my five most common email actions:

• OPT+R: Bottom-posted, in-line reply (Since there is no default keyboard shortcut for bottom-posting a reply, I use Option+R. That way if I want to top-post my reply I use the default keyboard shortcut, or if I want to bottom post my reply then I use this alternate shortcut.)
• CMD+N: New message
• CMD+R: Top-posted Reply
• SHIFT+CMD+R: Reply all
• SHIFT+CMD+F: Forward

A few notes about these macros:

• These macros assume you use non-account-specific signatures. If you do use a different signature for different email accounts, you could work around that by duplicating each macro for each specific signature you use. Then, give those signature-specific macros the same hotkey and Keyboard Maestro will ask you which signature you want to use.

• The macro for bottom-posting a reply is based on this age-old AppleScript of John Gruber’s which I’ve been using for years. It essentially creates a better-formatted bottom-posted email reply by simulating some keystrokes and inserting the cursor in the proper place.

• For creating a New Message, an AppleScript is used because when composing a new email you want the cursor to be in the “To:” field while the new message’s body already contains your signature. Running a simple inline AppleScript does the trick just fine for this:

    tell application "Mail"
        set theMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true, content:"

    — Shawn"}
    end tell
    

• The macros for Top-Posted Reply, Forward, or Reply All, include two additional Return strokes underneath my name to give some breathing space below my signature and above the rest of the email message.

If you don’t use Keyboard Maestro that’s unfortunate. But you can still reap the rewards of this Mail hackery by whipping up some AppleScripts and using a hotkey launcher such as FastScripts or Alfred.

You can download the Keyboard Maestro macros here.

Repurposing an old Mac into a home media server is a great idea. A nerdy, tedious, somewhat overrated, great idea.

For years I was wanting to convert all my DVDs (where by “all” I mean a whopping 35) into digital versions which could be accessible via my Apple TV. I’m glad I never bit the bullet and bought a Mac mini, because about a month ago the video card on my wife’s MacBook Pro started going out. The screen shows random red lines and flickers — it’s just bad enough that she can’t use it on a daily basis, but still good enough that I could repurpose it into our new file and media server.

All in all, the tasks I’ve assigned to my Mac Media server include:

• Run Printopia to enable AirPrinting on our non-AirPrint printer (Nerd score: 4/10)
• Let Mail.app run 24/7 so that certain sorting and filing rules are executed at all times, not just when my MacBook Air is on. This helps keep emails out of my iPhone’s inbox that shouldn’t be there in the first place. (Nerd score: 4/10)
• Host video and audio files so we can put our box of DVDs in the attic, and access the movies directly from the Apple TV. (Nerd score: 6/10)
• Run Dropbox and Hazel so I can do things like upload audio to my Amazon S3 server from my iPhone, rename and move pictures of receipts, and more. (Nerd score: 9/10)

Printopia and Mail.app are pretty self explanatory. Below are more details on how I went about ripping my DVD collection into iTunes and how I’m using Hazel and Dropbox to enable some workflows on my iOS devices.

Ripping DVDs

First things first, I backed up the MacBook Pro, updated it to Mountain Lion, and then did a clean install.

The whole process of downloading and installing, and then erasing and installing again took about 3 hours. I then changed the name of the Mac from “Shawn Blanc’s MacBook Pro” to “Media Server”, and installed HandBrake, Hazel, LaunchBar, 1Password, and Dropbox in order to start getting around.

I set the MacBook Pro up on the edge of my desk, and began ripping DVDs with HandBrake. It took about 90 minutes to convert the DVD into an .m4v file. After which I had to add the file to iTunes, go online and find artwork, add the artwork, then tell iTunes the movie’s media kind was “Movie” and not “Home Video”. The whole process was slow and tedious.

Setting up the Media Server was a topic of one or two Shawn Today episodes, and I received a lot of feedback from folks who’ve been down this road before. In short, I was doing it all wrong.

If you’ve ever set up your own media server, you know there is more than one way to go about it. You can set up cron jobs and hazel rules to automate the whole process from DVD to iTunes, you can do everything manually, or somewhere in between. Since I was only converting 30-some-odd DVDs, I chose not to go crazy with the automation scripts.

Here’s the workflow I finally landed with (thanks to several awesome readers who sent suggestions in):

• Rip movies using RipIt. This app copies over the whole disk in under 30 minutes as a .dvdmedia file. I plugged in an external hard drive and ripped the DVDs to there.
• Since HandBrake takes nearly 90 minutes to encode a movie into an .m4v file I could basically rip 3 DVDs to disk while HandBrake was encoding one.
• This meant I could just load up the Handbrake queue with all the ripped .dvdmedia files, and let it encode a batch of movies (into m4v using the Apple TV 3 setting) while I’m sleeping.
• In the HandBrake settings you can choose to have files sent to a metadata filling app once they’ve been ripped. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of ripping your DVD collection to digital, you really want an app that will fill in the movie’s metadata for you so when you browse the movies in your library you see all the relevant and important info (movie description, actors, director, rating, artwork, etc.).
• I used iDentify which worked alright. There were a handful of movies that iDentify thought were something else, or that it couldn’t find data for at all. Fortunately it was an easy fix. For those few movies, I simply looked up the film on IMDb and entered the IMDb code (you can see it right in the IMDb URL) into iDentify.
• From there, iDentify requires that you hit “Save” before the metadata is written to the .m4v files. Which is unfortunate because it meant I couldn’t use Hazel to toss the files into iTunes once they were all done because who knows when I would get around to saving all the metadata of the batch-processed movies.
• Thus I would manually drop the m4v files into the “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder.

The whole process took me about 10 days. I could have done it in 4 had it not taken me a few days to figure out a faster workflow using RipIt and HandBrake’s queue, and had I not gotten tired of babysitting the Mac and ejecting a disk and putting in a new one every half-hour. I understand why some folks tell me they’ve slowly been ripping their DVD library for years.

Video Quality: Ripped vs Original

A ripped DVD, streamed over WiFi to my Apple TV is of a noticeably less quality than a DVD played in my player. But, it’s not that bad.

I watched and compared scenes from a handful of different films — including Hero, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Dead Man’s Chest (don’t judge) — to see how the quality of the digital version compared to the DVD disc.

Hero and Pirates both looked good. The digital version close to the same quality, but not quite equal — almost on par with an HD movie that’s streamed over Netflix. The Count of Monte Cristo was much better on DVD than digital — especially the darker scenes. It was about on par with an SD-quality film streamed on Netflix.

But you don’t rip DVDs to your computer for the image quality. You do it for convenience and for the sake of simplifying. Our DVD library is filled with films we rarely, if ever, watch. It’s worth the tradeoff in order to have all our movies in one spot, accessible through the Apple TV, while also being able to get the physical DVDs put into storage somewhere. (I’d give them away, but I think that’d be illegal.)

Dropbox, Hazel, and additional Nerdery

Now, so long as you’ve got a Mac that’s running and connected to the Internet 24/7, there’s no reason not to use it for some nerdy fun.

Thanks to some fantastic 3rd-party apps, the iPad is a fully-capable work machine for me. It’s my new laptop, while my MacBook Air has, more or less, become my desktop.

There has been, however, one particular area that the iPad could not replace my MacBook Air. And that was in the uploading and posting of the audio files for my daily Shawn Today podcast. Last summer at WWDC, I traveled only with my iPad. For all my writing, reading, and email needs the iPad performs fantastically. But I had no way of posting Shawn Today while on the road.

However, thanks to this Python script from my pal Gabe Weatherhead, I just add a little bit of Dropbox and Hazel magic to take an audio recording from my phone and upload it to my Amazon S3 bucket for publishing to the podcast.

Here’s how it works: First, I use the iPhone app DropVox, which records a voice memo and uploads it to a Dropbox folder.

Next, Hazel grabs any new audio files that appear in that folder and renames them to something proper. Then, using Gabe’s script, the file is uploaded to my S3 bucket and the uploaded file’s URL is copied and pasted into a Simplenote note. Hazel then moves the original file into an “Uploaded” folder, and finally emails me a text message letting me know the file is up.

My Hazel rule looks like this. And the emailing of the text message is through a simple Applescript:

tell application "Mail"
    set theNewMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:"Shawn Today", content:"Successfully Uploaded", visible:true}
    tell theNewMessage
        make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:"5555555555@txt.att.net"}
        send
    end tell
end tell

Once I get the text message notifying me of the completed upload, I launch Simplenote on my iPhone or iPad to find the audio file’s URL. I then copy that URL, launch Poster, and publish the latest episode of my podcast.

See? For some of us, all we need for an iOS-only workflow is a Mac at home doing the heavy lifting.

My history with iOS notes apps is briefly recounted. I used Apple’s own Notes app until 2009, which is when I learned of Simplenote. And I’ve been using the latter ever since.

To say I’m a fan of Simplenote would be like saying I kinda like coffee. Aside from Apple’s Messages and Phone apps, I don’t think any single app has been on my first Home screen for longer. And it’s the app I rely on the most because it’s where my “digital brain” lives. Notes, ideas, information — just about anything relevant or important to me right now — is stored inside Simplenote.

This, of course, isn’t the sort of thing that only Simplenote can handle. There are many options for those of us who have important bits of information we want to write down and have available to us regardless of if we’re with our iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Some folks live and breath in Evernote, others with a different notes app which syncs via Dropbox. If you’ve got a repository for where all your “stuff” lives, then you know what I mean when I say if I had to pare the apps on my iPhone down to just one, Simplenote would be the app left standing.

It’s not just about the app, of course. It’s about the data inside the app. Simplenote is invaluable to me because of the notes it holds. But a great app encourages regular use the same way a crummy app discourages it. And I can think of no higher priority for finding a great app than when looking for the one which will hold my digital brain.

* * *

The initial appeal of Simplenote over Apple’s Notes app was two-fold: (a) Helvetica; and (b) cloud sync. At first, the only non-iPhone access to our Simplenote notes was via the Web app. It may sound rough compared to what we are used to today, but compared to what it was like back when our notes were drowning in skeuomorphic legal pads and Marker Felt, Simplenote was a glorious, cutting-edge breath of fresh air. (And it has come a long way since those early days of an icon that pictured a high-school locker with a yellow sticky note.)

The first Mac client for Simplenote I used was a Dashboard widget called Dashnote. I used it for a few months until, in January 2010, Notational Velocity added Simplenote sync. And my iPhone, Mac, and iPad have had shared notes ever since.

Today, thanks to The Cloud, a huge part of my personal and professional workflow is underpinned by the syncing of my everyday data like documents, bookmarks, notes, and tasks.1

The broad strokes of my job here at shawnblanc.net include reading, writing, and publishing. If I had to, I could do those things from any of my 3 devices — iPhone, iPad, or Mac — at any given moment because everything important is pretty much in sync and accessible at all times.

To give a brief overview of my writing workflow, most articles start out as ideas and/or collections of information. And that always starts out in Simplenote (on iOS) or nvALT (on OS X).

(Of course, my database of notes is comprised of much more than just ideas and reference material for pending articles. They are made up of just about any tidbit of information which is relevant or important right now, or which I may want to access when on the go. For example: flight and hotel information for an upcoming trip; my shirt size for fitted, button-up shirts; some recipes; lists and references for random things (such as some favorite Supply Decks in Dominion); and more.)

Once I’m ready to turn my reference note into an article, I paste the note into a new Byword document and save that document to a Dropbox folder named “Writing”. All the articles I’m writing right now are in that folder.

On my iPad I have Byword, iA Writer, and Writing Kit all pointed to my “Writing” folder. These are all awesome apps and I use them on my iPad for long-form writing. Which one I use often depends on the weather or what type of coffee I made that morning, but these days it seems to usually be Writing Kit.

Now, some people keep both their notes and their articles-in-progress within their Notes folder. I, however, like having a separate place and separate apps for my Notes and Articles. Notes are notes, which for me means they are small, tidbity, random, and many. I don’t organize them by tags or folders, I just search for what I’m looking for. Simplenote and nvALT are fantastic apps for quickly jotting down or finding a note, but they are not the best apps for writing and editing big chunks of text in.

* * *

Over the past several months, I’ve encountered occasional syncing hiccups. Posts like Michael’s and Brett’s led me to believe it has something to do with the combination of Simplenote and nvALT that I use. These hiccups slowly eroded my trust in the Simplenote syncing engine to handle my data. That is a bad place to be with an app you use so regularly. Therefore, a few weeks ago I reluctantly began looking into alternatives to Simplenote.

My options were:
1. Keep using my Simplenote/nvALT setup and hope the syncing issues resolve.
2. Find an alternative to nvALT and continue using Simplenote on iOS.
3. Find an alternative to Simplenote on iOS and begin syncing all my notes via Dropbox, whilst continuing to use nvALT.

Friends shouldn’t let friends look for a new iOS note-taking app that syncs with Dropbox.

There are a lot of great notes apps out there, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Once you start looking around it’s easy to get sucked in, never to be heard from again. If you’ve ever been in a similar boat then you feel my pain (maybe you still haven’t yet found land).

This entire article is the results of my rummaging around in search of answers. Is there a fix to the syncing hiccups? Is there a good alternative to nvALT? Is there a good alternative to Simplenote? Can someone please bring me a fresh cup of coffee?

The Root of the Simplenote / nvALT Syncing Hiccups

Early on in my quest, I found the root cause of the syncing hiccups I’ve been encountering. While my suspicions were correct that it had to do with the combination of Simplenote and nvALT, the problem is not as serious as I thought.

The syncing hiccup happens when creating a new note from within Simplenote’s iOS app. If it’s an extended note, the text will sometimes get cut-off as I’m in the middle of writing and a few sentences worth of text just disappear. Fortunately, a look into the note’s version history will reveal the text as it was just before getting cut off — thus, I haven’t actually lost any data. But having the ever-looming prospect of losing text is worrying to say the least.

The cause of this syncing hiccup is, however, not within Simplenote’s servers. Rather, it’s a bug in nvALT, and it only has to do with the first time a new note syncs into nvALT that was created via the Simplenote iOS/Web apps.

Knowing that there’s no real threat to losing my notes, and knowing the cause of the bug, gave me some fresh trust in my Simplenote/nvALT system. I could continue on and wait for a bug fix, look for a different Simplenote app on the Mac, or flat out move to Dropbox syncing.

Simplenote’s Dropbox Sync

Since my original plan all along was to use Simplenote’s Dropbox syncing service, I decided to keep using nvALT and move to Dropbox. Except, you can’t do that.

At first, I had assumed Simplenote’s option to enable Dropbox syncing meant my Simplenote iOS apps would use a Dropbox folder of text files to sync my notes instead of their proprietary Simperium syncing API. That is not the case at all.

What Simplenote’s Dropbox syncing actually means is that all your notes get pushed to a Dropbox folder and the Simplenote sync engine checks that folder ever 5-10 minutes and syncs any changes between it and your Simplenote database.

Though the Simplenote Dropbox syncing is not what I thought it would be, it still makes a great way to easily migrate my notes into Dropbox as individual text files. Also, it makes a great backup of all my notes. If you’re using Simplenote and are a premium subscriber, I highly recommend enabling the Dropbox syncing.

Savvy readers may know there is another way to get your Simplenote notes into Dropbox as individual text files. You can do so via nvALT. And it’s been outlined here in great detail by Michael Schechter.

I will add that something I like about the Simplenote export is that each note created uses the first line as the text file’s title, but also keeps the first line within the note’s body. nvALT’s creation of plain text files places the first line within the text file’s title and that is it. Thus, if you’re not somewhat careful about making sure the first line of your notes in nvALT are title-worthy, you’ll end up with some weird note titles and body text that begins by missing the first half of your sentence.

All this to say, if you are having trouble with nvALT and Simplenote but want to keep using Simplenote, there is but one good alternative: Justnotes.2

Justnotes

Justnotes is a great app with reliable syncing that works with Dropbox, Simplenote, or both. I’ve been using the app for the past couple weeks and I like it (though not quite as much as nvALT).

For the keyboard-committed among us, Justnotes is not as powerful or robust as nvALT. Also, Justnotes’ window has a bigger minimum footprint than nvALT. But I like that you can manually force a sync. And I’ve talked to the developer via Twitter and learned he is working on updating Justnotes to use Simplenote’s new API (which is faster, more robust, and handles conflict resolution better) and is also making some UI improvements.

Cody Fink and Ben Brooks both wrote reviews of Justnotes when it launched last Spring.

Dropbox Text Editors

After discovering that I wouldn’t be able to point my Simplenote apps to Dropbox instead of the Simperium sync servers, I began looking into other apps that I knew did sync with Dropbox.

There is a cornucopia of Dropbox enabled text editors and notes apps for iOS. So on Twitter I asked what people are using these days, and the overwhelming response was for either Notesy or Byword.

In addition to these two apps (the latter I already know well) I spent time with these two apps, as well as Elements, Nebulous Notes, WriteUp, and PlainText.

If I was to make the switch away from Simplenote, I’m looking for an app that has a clean interface, high-contrast, fast scrolling, syncing, and searching, and powerful search. Surprise, surprise — that description pretty much sums up Simplenote. Well, I don’t mind gushing about Simplenote. It’s an app I’ve relied on for years and it works exactly as I’d like it to.

For one, I love Simplenote’s searching. When you search for a term, not only does the list of notes shorten based on notes that contain that term, but then when you tap into a note, you’re taken to the first instance of that term, which is highlighted, and two arrows at the bottom of the screen help you navigate to all the other instances of that term in your note. So, say you’ve got a note with 100 quotes in it. If you search for “Franklin” the quote note would appear in the list and then when tapping on that note you’d start at the first instance of “Franklin” in the note. Simplenote makes it extremely easy to find exactly what you’re looking for quickly.

Since my foray into other apps was not due to a fault with the Simplenote app itself, each other option left me unsatisfied. Of all the other notes apps I spent time with, none were quite the right combination of design and functionality that I was looking for. Either too much or not enough…

Which Combo?

In the end, I’ve come back full circle and am sticking with Simplenote and nvALT. Though the syncing can hiccup at times, I still consider it to be the best. And, of course, now that I know more about the cause behind the syncing hiccups I no longer fear losing my data.

But, what’s best for me may not be what’s best for you. Through this process I came across additional note-syncing setups which I heartily recommend. The two best notes apps on Mac are nvALT and Justnotes. The two best notes apps on iOS are Notesy and Byword. Pick two, sync them up, and happy note keeping.

A few months ago I was given a Doxie Go scanner. I’ve been using it semi-regularly to scan in certain documents and receipts that I want digitized.

At my fingertips were all the tools I needed to set up a clever and usable workflow for a “paperless office,” but it was like having all the pieces to the puzzle without a picture of what the overall end product should look like. I knew that a scanner, an image-to-PDF converter, an OCR app, and some clever folder hierarchy was all necessary, but it all seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Therefore, the majority of the paper documents that came through my home office still get filed away in my physical filing cabinet.

It wasn’t until recently when a comment from David Sparks got me re-motivated to research a better and more consistent way. I had bought David’s ebook, Paperless, back when it first came out in July and I’d read through the first half. But I never made it through to the end which is where he lays out how he actually uses all his tools for his own paperless office. About a month ago I sat down and finished the rest of the book, and upon reading how David actually does things, it all finally clicked for me and I had a clear picture of how to put the puzzle pieces together.

After finishing the book, I spent the better part of my Sunday creating a folder structure on my Mac that mirrored my physical filing cabinet, setting up a few dozen rules in Hazel, and scanning important personal documents as well as all my tax-related documents for this current fiscal year.

Below is an outline of what I’ve set up in hopes that it gives you an idea of how you too can set something like this up. I’m assuming you’re nerdy enough to recognize the tools you may need and you’re clever enough to know how to use them.

• QuickShot iPhone App: I use this iPhone app for saving all my business-related tax-deductible receipts into a folder on my Mac. Since I use my bank statements to manage and balance my books, the receipts themselves only need to stick around in case I get audited or confused about a particular charge.

QuickShot takes a picture and then uploads it to a Dropbox folder of your choosing. I use it to snap a picture of a receipt which then gets saved into my Receipts folder. I can then toss the physical receipt.

Any and all digital receipts I get via email also get saved as PDFs into this same Receipts folder.

• Doxie Go Scanner: This is the scanner I have, and since going paperless it’s proven well for me so far.

For a Paperless Office the Doxie Go has a few downsides: it can only scan one page at a time, it doesn’t scan duplex, and it’s not super fast. For me, this hasn’t been a deal breaker because I’m only dealing with about a dozen documents a week. It takes me just a few minutes to scan them in.

If I was dealing with a multitude of pages on a regular basis, or if I get motivated enough to convert years worth of past documents, then David Sparks recommends the NeatDesk scanner which can handle 50 pages at once, does duplex scanning, and scans documents much quicker than the Doxie Go. (Of course, on the other hand, the NeatDesk is about twice the price of a Doxie Go.)

• Doxie Software: The document importing software that comes with the Doxie Go has proven to be fantastic. Once I’ve scan my documents I import them to my Mac using the Doxie application.

Once imported, I can “staple” multiple scans into a single PDF file (for documents that have front and back sides, and/or are multiple pages), and then save all the scans to my Mac. I use the “Export as B&W PDF with OCR” option — this saves my scans as black and white PDFs with optical character recognition.

Saving the scans as black and white is an easy way to greatly reduce the file size, and I’ve found Doxie’s OCR to be great. All in all I’m very happy with the quality, file size, and searchability of a document once it’s traversed the path from its original physical state to its new digital state.

• Hazel: This was the missing piece for me and this is where the magic happens.

I save all the PDFs from the Doxie into an “Incoming Scans” folder. Against this folder I have about two dozen Hazel rules watching for specific types of documents. These are documents that I commonly deal with, such as:

• Gas, water, electric, and internet utility bills.
• Health insurance notices of benefits received.
• Tax deductible receipts from certain organizations we support regularly.
• Auto and home insurance statements.
• Financial statements.
• Property tax receipts.
• Etc.

What I realized was that each of the above types of documents could easily be identified by my unique account number with each company. And so I set up rules in Hazel to look at the contents of a document, and depending on which criteria that document matches Hazel renames the PDF accordingly and then files it into the proper folder on my Mac.

For example: if the contents of a document contain the words “Gas” and the numbers “555555” then Hazel renames the document to “Gas Utility Bill – 2012-09” and moves it to my “Utility Bills” folder.

To sum up, once I’ve scanned in all my paper documents, I simply save them to my computer and then Hazel takes care of the rest.
For the few documents that don’t match any pre-defined criteria, or for which the OCR wasn’t properly rendered, they simply are left in the “Incoming Scans” folder and I can manually deal with them. I then shred what I don’t need, or if it’s a physical document that’s important to have a physical copy of, I file it away.

This new process makes it far easier to file away documents than my previous way. It’s now a task which can be done almost mindlessly instead of having to remember where each type of document goes in my physical filing cabinet, looking for that file folder, and then stuffing the sheet of paper in.

I wish I would have taken the time to set this up a long time ago. But better late than never. Needless to say, I highly recommend paperlessness.