At one point I called their tech support and suffered through their obviously BS advice (uninstall, reboot, reinstall) which didn’t work.

If you experience this, you really have to uninstall Kobo. Their tech support probably can’t help you. It may be an OS X Lion Issue.

Remove the app the usual way (dragging it to the trash). Remove Kobo related plist files in your ~/Library/preferences directory. If this is gobbledygook to you, enlist the help of your friend with a truck to help you move or family member who normally helps you with computer woes.

Next, move, but do not delete, the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Kobo. That is your database of books etc.

Download the latest OS X Desktop installer for Kobo.

That will get you up and running.

The behaviour of Kobo apps (desktop, handheld) when anything goes wrong is so bad users have little chance of fixing many of them, even with Kobo’s tech support. Woe to you if you mis-enter the date on your Kobo device and check a book out of the library. The error message is so bad you would waste a whole pile of time addressing something that is not the issue. And of course you wouldn’t want Kobo desktop to correct the time on the Kobo device when you plug it in.

Even if I follow the Golden rule. Even if I use Dragon’s Note Pad.

I would like to write some longer documents with it. I’m not sure yet that it is possible.

I will say that the overall recognition quality appears to be much better in Dragon Dictate than Dragon naturally speaking.

Except for editing (which is rather important), usability is much better than Dragon Naturally Speaking (which is terrible, and I would like to write a blog post on DNS usability). The command mechanism in Dragon Dictate is great too.

On Mac you would have no need for such a tool, Automator that ships with OS X can do the same thing.

DuckDuckGo Configured in QuickSilver

Using Quicksilver to search:

Simply add a bookmark command in Dragon Dictate called “Jump to DuckDuckGo” which navigates to https://www.duckduckgo.com .

Then say “Jump to DuckDuckGo” to search the web. You could rename the command “Search the web” if you prefer.

Here is a screen capture in Dragon Dictate

Uploaded with Skitch!

While I was saving the image for this blog post, all of a sudden, the option to install or cancel was presented.

Microsoft Auto Update - Working

Why no visual clues indicating I have to wait, if in fact I have to wait? And no cancel option available while I have to wait?

It is a little complicated to set up. I have set this up in both Safari and Atomic Browser on IOS. Unfortunately, I cannot remember exactly how I did this. The hard part is getting the Java Script for the bookmark, because the “Drag this link to your tool bar” makes it impossible for a typical user to even copy the Java script. The easiest way to get the Java Script I can think of is to add the bookmatlet to your web browser on your computer, copy the text of the bookmark link to an Evernote (I think this will work, I haven’t tried it) or email it to yourself, copy that text to a bookmark link on your IOS Browser. I named my bookmark “E”.

Then to clip, the user would just select what they want and launch the bookmark. I prefer atomic since I can set it up like a bookmartlet. In IOS Safari I just use a regular bookmark.

Evernote could make this a lot easier by making the Javascript available on their web page as plain text, so the user just has to copy that java script into a bookmark they create on their device. It would make the process of getting the web clipper set up go from a feat of near impossibility to a couple of nuisance steps they could show in 30s video.

Evernote could do a much better job here. It is a failure on Evernote’s part that every IOS user is not able to install the bookmarklet, for lack of instructions and placing the existing bookmartlet source where a mortal user could actually copy it. Not even a line of code has to be changed!

I was getting annoyed with Evernote, trying to clip resources URL in a web browser that are PDFs (it doesn’t work in Chrome right now on Windows - only the URL is clipped). So I tried “File/Attach Files” and pasted the URL to the PDF from the browser into Evernote. I didn’t expect it to work, but it did. A bit of a workaround - it would be better if the web clipper just worked, but still a great feature, and very usefil in many circumstances. Could be better named though.

Wouldn’t it be great if all programs, like our email programs (outlook, Mail.app) could attach files from your intranet or the web this way to an existing open document? On a daily basis I need to attach documents from my intranet to an email I am writing. Opening the document from the intranet and then clicking the icon to mail the document to someone just doesn’t work - it brings up a modal box for me to edit a new mail, when I already have an email drafted. Grrr.

On the Mac in Safari, I could not attach a PDF to a note using its URL, which is too bad. Probably the fault of the Mac common dialogs as opposed to Evernote design (and I love the dialogs on the mac are pretty common and work well with Quicksilver and any shortcuts I set up). However, at least for PDFs, you can print them and the Save to Evernote should appear in your menu as one of the options. If it doesn’t you will have to figure this out - I think if you download from App Store you may have trouble.

I pretty much have recovered from my Lotus Notes PTSD - there is one thing I miss that has little to do with email: The Lotus Notes Document Database which I wrote about once before.

Having looked at Evernote (which doesn’t have linking) and DevonThink (which does), I realize in a corporate lotusy environment you wouldn’t need a tool like these. You could create a lotus document database a hypertext document and share it around the organization. Good luck having multiple authors though :).

Unfortunately, it has been very hard to download the tracks the the file system or simply geotag photos in a typical mac workflow (i.e. upload the photos to IPhoto, geotag with houdahgeo , and rescan for location with iphoto). The Gisteq PhotoTrackr 2 software is in my view, crap, on both doing what a geotagging user would do on a mac, and for reliability. Open source programs can’t seem to easily be configured to read off the tracks. I haven’t used the device since I bought it since the Gisteq software is so painful to use it just wasn’t worth my time.

The good news is that if you have one of these, a less maddeningly way to get the tracks off the device onto your computer is with myTracks. It looks like it uses some open source to manipulate the tracks, and generates these commands to deal with or at least initialize the device, so you if you don’t want to spend the $10 on mytracks you can probably figure this out:


!cd $TMPDIR; stty 115200 cs8 raw < $DEVICE; "$APP_BUNDLE/iTU4l.pl" -m -d $DEVICE -o mytracks.sr; "$APP_BUNDLE/sr2x.pl" -i p -o $GPX_NO_EXT gpx mytracks.sr; cp $GPX_NO_EXT.gpx $GPX!DEL!stty 115200 cs8 raw < $DEVICE; "$APP_BUNDLE/iTU4l.pl" -m -d $DEVICE -e


I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I suspect it will be even easier to geotag photos in iphoto with myTracks rather than HoudahGeo.

The deer will be culled or suffer a natural population decline. Leaving the cougars to feed on whatever is left - pets and people.