JamieJakov Blog

Spotlight Search

June 19th, 2016

If you use keyboard shortcuts, macros and various other workflow automation techniques, then you might consider yourself a power user. However if you have never used Spotlight on macOS and iOS, you are missing out on a great productivity improvement. So what is Spotlight? It is the universal search implementation on Apple platforms. It can search your folders, files, information from within apps like contacts, mail, and even suggestions from the web. But I guess the most used function of Spotlight is to quickly open the application you need. So instead of looking of looking for that one app in Launchpad on your Mac, or numerous screens of your iPhone/iPad, you can just simply launch Spotlight search (cmd+space on macOS, swipe down on home screen on iOS) and start typing the name of the item you are looking for. This can greatly speed up your workflow and just help you find what you are looking for.

Now that you know the basics of Spotlight, here are some advanced tips and tricks (on macOS), which I learned from this article:

Cmd + D: View search term in the built in dictionary app (opens the app).
Cmd + L: Quickly view the term in the dictionary (via Spotlight UI).
Cmd + B: Do a web search in your default browser (opens browser window).
Cmd + R: Open the highlighted results folder in the app which it is in and reveal it in Preview.
Cmd + O: Open the highlighted result in the default program for that filetype.
Cmd + I: Show information about the highlighted result.
Hold Cmd: Show the full path to the highlighted result at the bottom of the spotlight window.

Hope these shortcuts help you improve your workflow and make your life just a bit more productive.

My Home Media Server – PLEX

April 8th, 2016

Continuing on from my previous post about building a home media server, this time, I’ll tell you about a brilliant piece of software called PLEX.

So what is Plex? Its a media player system that automatically organises your media in a very lovely and intuitive interface. So say you got a folder of all your media (iTunes for example) and its jumbled up all over the place. So you would like to easily watch episode 5 of season 4 of Game of Thrones? Good luck with that, you need to find the folder, then the subfolder wherever it was saved in, find the season, and then the episode. Now imagine that you are off at your mate’s place and you wanna watch the episode together with him, well then you are out of luck.

Not with Plex. Plex has a number of irreplaceable features:

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My Home Media Server – NAS

April 1st, 2016

Ever since I got my own computer and started watching movies, cartoons and anime, I’ve wanted to have a great collection, and back in the day the only way to do that was to save them on your computer hard drive and view them on that computer. Then I learned about the these really convenient little things called portable (external) HDDs, so I could store my media on that and then view it on a different device, and that worked great… at the time.

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The Apple vs FBI debate

March 16th, 2016

You have probably heard about this case, but for those that haven’t: the FBI have ordered Apple to create a version of iOS that would allow the FBI to access a terrorists smartphone in hopes of finding some valuable clues to the case and possible links to other terrorists. What they affectively want is for Apple to compromise their own security “for this one case” and then “un-compromise” it again. Let that sink in.

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WikiWand Extension

February 13th, 2016

Today I would like to introduce you to a browser extension you never knew you would need, but will not be able to live without. Its called WikiWand and it will change the way you interact with WikipediA forever!

Basically whenever you open a wikipedia.com article, it will automatically style it with high res images, body margination, a great navigation pane on the left, and just general improvements all over. There is a shortcut for searching (ctrl twice), settings for text size/serif font, favourite language options and more. These additions might sound like not that big of a deal, but when combined together, they make for a much more refined wikipedia browsing experience.

So if you use wikipedia a lot, or even once in a while, I would highly recommend you get yourself this extension and enjoy a new way of wiki-ing.

JamieJakov Blog 4.0 – りんごジュース

February 1st, 2016

There has been a lot of stuff happening in my life recently – got a new job, moving to a new place, last semester of uni soon, started playing Hearthstone seriously, etc. So I decided it would be a great time to update my blog.

The main thing you will notice is the new theme! I call it りんごジュース (Apple Juice) because its orange and orange juice is delicious (I know that made no sense, but cool things never do). The colour scheme is once again lighter, now with more white and less orange; images are more prominent on posts, cause I really want to show off my great photos; the pages have been renamed and sections moved to more appropriate locations. This opened up potential for a new page which I call Timeline. I have yet to finish coding that page, so bare with me, as it is gonna be completely different from everything else, and thus requires much more time to put together. Also the sidebar is gone, it’s been retired in favour of a fixed top navigation bar. Decided to use a different font as well – PT Sans. (Why this one? Cause its Russian! Also, if you are wondering, Ringo is still around you just need to find her.

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The WalkCar

August 9th, 2015

Portable electrical vehicles are all the rage these days. People are getting lazier and lazier, so they don’t want to walk from place to place, they want to ride something, something that will do the work for them. First came Segways now self balancing unicycles and boards. Well Japan has just one-upped us once again. They bring the world the WalkCar. Its a flat board, with 4 motor powered wheels. No need for stabilisation and is powerful enough to go up hills and push loads.

This device is without a doubt going to be very useful for a variety of tasks, however it raises an interesting question: when will convenience start making our life worse and not better. To iterate, sure it may be very convenient to ride this device up hills and when pushing loads, but what is stopping people from using it all the time everywhere. And if we do, won’t we slowly transform into those fat and lazy human blobs that we saw in WALL-E? There is no end to human laziness, and eventually our ingenuity and strive for convenience will be our downfall. Think about that before using one of these boards on a regular basis.

Das Upgrade

June 28th, 2015

DasKeyboard 4 Mac

Ever since coming back from Japan, I have been upgrading my life. I got a new apartment, a whole lot of great furniture, new job (upgraded version of old job), new clothes, a 5k iMac, and now some more shiny new things. For years now I have been longing for batter typing experience – a mechanical keyboard. But since I was going to Japan and then in Japan, I could never really get one, cause they are heavy and bulky. Fast track to the beginning of the month. My WoW Cataclysm gaming mouse, which served me well for 5 years, has started to show signs of death, it may not be dead yet, but definitely breathing its last breaths, so I started searching for a worthy replacement.

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Photos

April 9th, 2015

Today Apple released updates for both their desktop and mobile operating systems. Please welcome OSX 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3. These new updates bring a lot of bug fixes, new emoji and most importantly the new Photos app for OS X and iCloud Photo Library. Now all my photos will be in synch, but I will still keep Lightroom for all the DSLR pics that I snap.

To celebrate, here is a photo of the sunset over Rhodes from a day ago. I’m of to bed, as tomorrow the iWatch is up for display at the Apple stores around Sydney and I must take a look at this new piece of technology!

This is an unedited photo captured on my iPhone 5s at 6pm on the 8th of April.

iPhone 6 and the Watch

September 10th, 2014

iPhone6

Yesterday Apple announced the new generation iPhone and they had one more thing to say. The new iPhone comes in 2 models the iPhone6 and the 6+ with 4.7′ and 5.5′ screens respectively. They got a spec bump over the previous generation and a new slimmer design. Thats pretty much it. For features Apple introduced Pay, a service which will replace all your credit cards and allow you to pay with your iPhone using NFC. That’s awesome, but only available in the US for now.

Then came the big news, Apple announced their first wearable – the Watch. The smart watch field is something new to Apple and they decided that now would be the perfect time to try to make one. And they did, and its pretty. Read all about it on their website, they can describe it much better then I can.

Watch

Though I would like to say, I would like to buy both the phone and the watch, the iPhone 6 is not worth it without Pay and Australia doesn’t have it yet. And the watch is still in its first generation, coming out in Jan or Feb next year. Maybe its worth waiting for the iWatch 2, which will be thinner and better.