Posts

September was an usually exciting month, as I actually left the country. I’m very much an indoor pet, so my partner has to do a lot of coaxing for me to go on holiday. We agreed on Amsterdam, a city we both love and one reachable from London by train in just 4 hours. Byway Travel, who specialise in journeys by rail and sea, handled all the bookings and found us an eco-conscious hotel a short tram ride from the station. Eurostar was very smooth, quiet, and comfortable. Unlike Thameslink, their designers actually have the human bottom in mind. Astonishingly, Thameslink delivered us to St Pancras with plenty of time to spare. We had a backup plan, though. You can buy a special Euro High Saver Return ticket at your local station that entitles you to travel on the next available Eurostar if your train is delayed. ...

Tagging is an easy method of categorising or labelling your Zotero items by adding keywords. These tags allow you to filter your items in a variety of ways through the Tag Selector in the bottom left-hand corner of Zotero. A good way of identifying and easily locating your most important tags is to colour-code them. For instance, I have an orange tbr tag, which means ’to be read’ and a green borrow tag for books I need to retrieve from the library. ...

One of the early obstacles in a research project is getting overwhelmed by the literature. Even if you’ve limited your scope, there’s still a lot of material to interrogate. It’s easy to fall into a trap of reading everything from cover to cover, making sure you haven’t missed anything. But if you want to finish before you’re 95, you need to read strategically. Without a clear strategy, you can disappear down a research rabbit hole. Although it’s fun hanging out with the bunnies, they won’t help you get your writing done. ...

Although I use a lot of tech, I’m becoming increasingly concerned about how much of my data is stored in the cloud and how it’s used. Sometimes I’m prepared to make a trade-off because an app is especially convenient. AudioPen, for example, is brilliant at capturing thoughts very quickly on my phone before they pop out of my head. But when I’m sat at my desk, I don’t need to use the cloud at all. I was very excited to hear about a new app called Ratschn. This is a local speech-to-text app for Mac and Windows. You configure and press a hotkey, speak, and then Ratschn transcribes the audio recording and pastes it wherever you’re working, whether that’s an email client or a note-taking app. ...

As researchers, we usually have far too much going on in our heads. What should I be working on today? Where did I get to with that paper? What shall I have for lunch? 🤯 Although writing it all down definitely helps, some of us need a more visual system. In my workshops, we often have a good rant about terrible software. But there’s one app that’s almost universally loved: Trello. ...

As someone who has around 500 ideas a day, I needed a way of assessing those ideas more systematically. Most of them seem exciting, but pursing dozens of projects is a shortcut to burnout. How on earth do I choose one? Well, the answer turned out to be “sequential elimination”. Best known as a voting system, the sequential elimination method works by repeatedly eliminating the losing candidate until a single winner remains. Instead of asking myself, “Am I excited by this idea?” I subject the potential project to rigorous questioning, rating my responses on a scale of 1-10. ...

On my other website, I frequently download photos from Unsplash for the header images. As the originals are enormous and high resolution, I needed a way to easily convert them to the correct format. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create an automated workflow with Hazel and ImageMagick that monitors a folder for images from Unsplash, optimises and resizes them, then archives the original file. If you’re unfamiliar with ImageMagick, you might find my previous blog post useful. ...

As you’ve no doubt discovered, writing is much easier when you have all your notes and research material to hand. This is one of the many reasons I love Scrivener, as the Research folder helps me keep everything together and display it alongside my writing. The split screen feature means I can easily refer to a journal article as I work, and also quickly copy across the quotes that I’m discussing. ...

Music 🎵 It was a quiet month music-wise. Partly because there are fewer concerts, but mostly because it was too hot to be beetling about in the afternoons. I gave up on Pride: too hot, too busy, too commercial. I did enjoy the concert from the comfort of my armchair, though. Thanks to their mighty sound system, I could hear most of the Saturday line up, including Raye and Holly Johnson. I was amused by the irony that Self-Esteem appeared third on the billing. ...

Now that software has become so bloated, it can take 20 minutes just to resize an image. Most of that time is spent rebuffing pointless AI features that are also bumping up the subscription 😩 Increasingly, I’m using ImageMagick for my image manipulation. ImageMagick is a free, open-source CLI tool for creating, editing and converting bitmap images. As it only runs on the command line, it takes some geting used to. But once you’ve grasped a few techniques, it’ll save you heaps of time. You can also combine it with other tools to automate routine tasks. ...