A user of my PHP2Bluesky package, Muzikals, raised an issue to say that Bluesky had increased the limits for both videos and images. Now you can upload larger-sized videos of up to 300MB and ten mi…

A while back I wrote a review of the Xteink X3 in which I said “Has NFC for, well, we’ll discuss that later”. Brian left a comment recently to ask “Will you still discuss the NFC …

Sometimes, something you think should be simple turns out not to be. I’d assumed that it would be simple to create a file with a URL in it and then when it was double clicked would open the b…

After I posted my review on the Xteink X3 someone left a comment about it and made an oblique reference to something that they were working on: I learned this working on my CrossPoint fork (hoping …

I wrote recently about using Ai to help Transcribing handwritten diary entries into Day One. On the whole this has been a great success but there have been one or two interesting hallucinations. A …

Late last year I wrote a script that took my Foursquare check-ins and created an entry for each of them in the Day One app. This continues to work well and you can read more about it here: I felt t…

Do you keep seeing this notification pop-up on your MacBook? Do you know what it means? Do you know what to do about it? If not read on to find out. What is Rosetta and why is it needed? Rosetta 2*…

I recently wrote a post about the ongoing project I have been doing to transcribe all my physical diaries and journals into the Day One app. In this post I lamented that when I had tried transcribi…

I’ve been away on holiday, on a cruise at it happens. I mention that only as it is important to this story. On board there is a dedicated website that you can access to check your account, se…

If, like me, you are still persisting with Evernote’s aging API (I have two projects that use it) you will have come across the Auth Token that is used to validate requests. In today’s …

In today’s fast changing AI world Apple is very much coming from behind with it’s products and services in this space. Apple now groups its on-device AI under the Apple Intelligence umb…

I’ve written about directly accessing the Day One database before along with a number of posts about getting data in from other services. This week I came across a niggle with the Day One Mac…

A while back I wrote about my experience of computer science education in the 1980s and, in particular, use of the CESIL language. You can read about that here: Since then I have been contacted bot…

I have a PHP application that I use to post to my X, Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. This works well but I noticed the last time I posted an image from my iPhone that while it was fine on X and Mast…

I’d decided that I was going to setup my MacBook Neo as a new machine, rather than burden it with all the bloat from my MacBook Pro backup. This gave me both the opportunity to start with a c…

I had an email from a php2Bluesky user who wanted to know how you could set the restrictions on who could reply to a post. This was something that php2Bluesky didn’t support, but I thought it…

I’ve learned a lot while developing my php2Bluesky package spurred on by my own desire to make a decent product and by suggestions from users. One such itch I needed to scratch was to take my…

The Xteink X4 was launched only a few months ago in December 2025 but already there is a rich third-party ecosystem building up around it. In this post I take a look at all the things that are crop…

I’ve been looking for the perfect device to take away with me when I’m travelling for as long as I can remember. My latest attempt was an iPad with a folding keyboard but this seemed to…

I’m always looking for ways to reduce the amount of technology I take away with me and have long wondered whether I could manage with just my iPad rather than taking along a laptop. When I saw this…

I don’t know who thought of this but I will forever be grateful. If you have an Apple Watch and iPhone for as long as I can remember you have been able to press a button on the watch and have the p…

I hate applying screen protectors, but I know that they are vital to protecting the somewhat fragile screens of modern devices. Maybe you have a device that has screen protectors that come in a box…

I posted recently a video of me unboxing the Xteink X4 reader and I said that I would post a longer review once I had a chance to use it. This is that review. How I read I’ve never really con…

Having already written routines to export WordPress posts and Foursquare check-ins to Day One, I hadn’t intended to do any more, but here I am, back with exporting Last.fm Scrobbles to Day On…

I’ve been having a bit of an e-reader renaissance recently with the purchase of an Xteink X4 reader, the tiny pocket reader. This is my first e-reader in about 16 years since my Sony Reader a…

The Xteink X4 is a brand new eReader with a difference – it is tiny, about the size of an iPhone. Designed for reading on the go, this nifty little device is small enough to shove in a pocket…

A while back I pushed an update to php2Bluesky that allows for multiple language posts and forgot to post the change so I am correcting that now! Setting the language By default the language of you…

For my February 12 Apps in 12 Months project I wrote a script to produce some simple statistics from a WordPress installation. Looking back at it I realised that it only produced stats for all time…

Late 2024, I decided that I was going to provide more focus for my development in 2025, and to that end, I would attempt one new project a month, and so 12 apps in 12 months was born. What did I do…

Helper library to post to Bluesky Social. Contribute to williamsdb/php2Bluesky development by creating an account on GitHub.

I’ve written a lot of code this year and the vast majority of it I did without too much help. However, I did turn to AI (mostly ChatGPT) when I needed either a specific function written or so…

On a recent trip to Washington DC we discovered the Metro’s smartcard “SmarTrip” which can be used to tap-in and tap-out at stations and on buses too. This was pretty convenient, …

I wrote a plugin for our local U3A group, but I didn’t want to add it to the official WordPress.org repository as it had no relevance to the general WordPress user base. However, I still want…

I’ve recently bought a new iPad A16 to use for watching films, reading magazines and for help with my family history research. My existing iPad, an M1 iPad Mini, has served me well and I will…

This is the project that I expected to do for my November 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge but, as you will see, that wasn’t actually possible. Don’t rely on someone else’s API I had two …

Sometimes there are simple solutions to life’s little problems. I had a need to get the thumbnail image associated with a YouTube video. I spent ages mucking around in the browser code inspec…

For this month’s “12 Apps in 12 Months” challenge I decided that I wanted to try and import my WordPress posts into the Day One app. Given that Day One is now owned by Automattic …

Over the last year I have been reevaluating how and were I store the data for my projects. Traditionally I have added a new database in MySQL for each but I thought that was a bit overkill for some…