Category Archives: academia

I presume that everyone in academia, the corporate world and in many other walks of life regularly receives e-mails like this; a request to comment on an attached file which is commonly a Microsoft Word document but could be a PDF, a Pages document or indeed anything else.

As I receive this sort of request daily, I became frustrated with the processing needed on such a file.  It needs moving from the e-mail into somewhere sensible like the Desktop, probably having some sort of personalisation (e.g. adding initials and perhaps a date to the file name), before opening and editing.  (Admittedly, this is very much a First World Problem).

On a Mac, it’s easy to prepare a small application to process this request for you.  If you open Automator on your Mac from the Applications folder and opt to create an Application when asked, you can simply pull in three steps into the workflow like this:

In the middle step, you can add your initials (as I have done) or the date, or various other terms, to the file name.

This workflow can be saved as an Application with a name of our choice onto your hard drive and then I suggest you place it as a permanent icon in your Dock – it needs to be somewhere which is easily accessible.  Then, when you get a please review e-mail, just drag the attachment icon onto this new application.  Almost immediately, a copy with your initials (date, whatever) will be saved onto the Desktop and then opened in the appropriate program for you to edit.  Thereafter, your edits and comments will be saved to this new file on the Desktop, ready to go back to your colleague.

If this sounds a bit geeky, I’ve recorded a short video here to outline how this is done step-by-step in Automator.

Something that may not be immediately apparent about accessing the various cloud-type services which have proliferated in recent years is that they can be equally accessed from any Internet-capable computer, phone or tablet in the world (and not just yours).  As there are now more mobile phones than people on the planet, this means that (allowing a little poetic licence), everyone has potentially ready access into your Dropbox, Google, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter et al. accounts.  This includes all manner of ne’er-do-wells.

In the olden days (i.e. pre-2010), I recall that many services required you to select a username as well as a password.  This was an inherently more secure approach than the current norm which is to use an e-mail address in lieu of a username because now, the bad guys only need to work out one mystery term rather than two.

The bad news here is that by their very nature, e-mail addresses are somewhat publicly available and easy to find.  We put them on websites, on articles, in our Facebook accounts.  Pick a university department anywhere in the world and you could probably find out the e-mail address of the Head of Department within a few minutes.  That HoD probably has a Dropbox account with his/her e-mail address as its ‘username’.  You could go to the standard Dropbox web site, input that e-mail address and you are a password away from full access into potentially juicy morsels. 

(As an aside here, Dropbox seems especially vulnerable to me because there is something of a need to use your best known e-mail address as your username because others want to share folders with you and they will automatically assume you use your ‘official’ e-mail account.)

The point here is that bad stuff can be done to your accounts from any computer or phone in the world.

Early in 2015, all this was beginning to trouble me and I decided to enable Two Factor Authentication (‘2FA’) for all my web accounts offering this service.  Essentially, this reduces the number of devices which can get into my accounts from perhaps 10 billion to a handful.  After switching this on, the first time I visited Dropbox, Evernote and all the rest, the ‘system’ sent me a numeric code to my phone via SMS which needed to be entered into the site before access was allowed.  The sites then ‘remember’ the device (presumably via its MAC address or somesuch) and future access is allowed unhindered.

The text message in this example is the second factor in 2FA, the first being the usual username/password combo.  Other approaches can and are used. Google will call you up on the phone.  Other systems use USB dongles and the like. For this WordPress site, I use a fancy app on my iPhone.  But the SMS message is the most commonly used approach.

Like most people, 99% of the time I am accessing my sites via one of a couple of devices; in my case, all my computing is done on a MacBook Air and I am a heavy iPhone user too.  Because 2FA is usually a once-only process, I don’t need any of the SMS set-up business on a day-to-day basis.  

Of course, setting this up in the comfort of your own office is easy.  The challenge is always the later situation when you find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings and you need access to your stuff, now (e.g. you’re at a conference and you need that presentation in your Dropbox folder and you are at at someone else’s laptop).  Here’s a recent example of how this worked for me.

Earlier this month, I attended an excellent course on MatLab hosted by our IT Research group.  I took along my laptop and phone but the course required use of one of the PCs in the lab where it was hosted.  I wanted to record relevant notes, links, files and images in my Evernote account and the easiest method was to use Evernote’s web-based access on the lab computer.  After entering my username and password into the site, I was immediately sent to a further page where I needed to enter the numeric code which was sent to my phone.  This arrived in seconds and I was up and running.  Of course, this process adds a little extra inconvenience on the rare occasion when I am using a device for the first time, but I am greatly reassured that my own little working world is more secure that it might be.

When might this fall down?  I think the only realistic situation is if you find yourself without signal to your mobile phone, and if you are in such a place, you are probably not in work mode in any case.  Most of the services also provide a final level of access by issuing recovery codes which you can save offline (e.g. somewhere safe on your phone) so you have a get-out even then.  In practice, I find that the numeric codes arrive almost immediately and it works internationally.

All-in-all, it’s a big win.  Give it a go.

Site-specific instructions:

Dropbox

Evernote

Google

Facebook

Twitter

Apple ID

WordPress

Like millions of people, I receive millions of e-mails. Actually, this is getting to be almost literally true. My e-mail folders contain more than 275,000 messages. Like everyone, keeping on top of this is a priority in my daily workflow.

In essence, I try to maintain a Inbox Zero approach to managing this daily beating around the head. I don’t quite make it usually, but I generally have fewer than 15 messages in my Inbox by the time I go to bed.

An important change I made in my daily routine some years ago was to abandon the rigmarole of pulling each e-mail message into an appropriate folder after dealing with it, on the basis that I could go back and find it later on. At some stage, the search power of my mail client (Apple Mail) became so good, that it was possible to very quickly and accurately find that message from six months ago from that person. That was all well-and-good, but the other big piece of the jigsaw was to reduce the mouse usage required to put each dealt-with message into my shiny new, all encompassing, Archive folder.

I think minimisation of mouse usage is key to an efficient daily workflow for keyboard warriors such as myself which is why I think launcher applications (such as the brilliant Launchbar) are critical. So, I needed to be able to get my selected e-mail message(s) into my Archive folder using the keyboard only. This is simply done with an add-on program for Apple Mail, Mail Act-On.

This extends the versatility of Mail’s rules system and means that selected messages can be routed into an Archive folder (or indeed, many other actions) can be achieved with a selected keystroke; in my case this is control-A. I must use this more than a hundred times each day to the point where it is now an involuntary action for carefully storing old e-mails. It’s great.