It is always a pain clicking on a link to a journal article only to hit a paywall. It’s doubly painful when I know I have institutional access via my library’s proxy server, but have to jump through hoops to get it: go to the library website, log in, copy and paste the article name or PMID into its PubMed search box, and finally download the PDF. Arduous, and—turns out—unnecessary.

Enter Alfred 2 workflows. Here’s a nice article I found on Twitter today. The NEJM link in the top right corner leads to an abstract, but I need a special archive subscription for the full PDF. No matter—I can just highlight the PMID and hit my special Alfred 2 keyboard combo:

Since I’m not already logged into the Welch library proxy, I hit a login wall. It’s nothing 1Password can’t solve, but you can also just type in your username and password yourself, like an animal.

And Bam! The ugly but magic button is where it should be. Your institution might have a prettier one.

To make it clear—this simple workflow will do a PubMed search of any selected text anywhere in OS X, all through your institutional proxy server. Finding an interesting reference while reading an article, highlighting its title, and hitting ^⎇⌘P to get to the PDF always feels like magic.

You can download the workflow here.

If you have a Google+ account—and you might not be aware that you do—anyone using Gmail can now email you without knowing your address. You can disable this “feature” in the settings, but having it be opt-out shows yet again how little Google cares about privacy.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that—privacy is a relatively modern invention that younger generations might not care for as much as we do. But you should understand the implications of patients and random strangers being able to leave messages in your personal inbox. Suing P.,,,,,,kmmmmmqmmmdoctors is not a modern invention.

This is why I stopped using all Google services—search included—years ago. The company has become so large, with so many users, that it doesn’t need to cater to fringe interests. And for a business with billions of users, doctors are a fringe group—one that hates change-for-change’s-sake, having to [re-learn an interface][ n. Nnjm interface] “just because”, and not being the true customer¹.

Also, the number of people at Google who may access my data is huge. FastMail², my email provider of choice, has fewer than 10 employees. Gmail alone has hundreds. Not that anyone would be interested in me in particular, but if I ever inadvertently send or receive private patient information through my personal account, I’d rather as few people as possible see it.

Email is fine, but why abandon search? First, I have googled enough ailments and substances, common and obscure, that the add network thought I was an elderly female recovering heroin addict with more than one paraphilia. The adds I would get were in that sense appropriate. Second, because of SEO the only valuable page-one results I would get were Wikipedia entries. Everything else was a hodgepodge of useless Livestrong, Huffington post and five-pages-per-500-word-article-AND-behind-a-login-wall Medscape links. Duckduckgo and, yes, Bing at least help with the first problem while not making the second one any worse.

Google calendar is the only service I would consider using. It is fast, reliable, omnipresent and easy to use. There is, however, that constant nagging fear that they will find some way to integrate it with Google+ and yet again sacrifice functionality to force people into its circle³. This is why I use Apple’s iCloud calendar, its horrendous web interface and all.

Also: Reader. I use FeedWrangler now, but man.

Doctors’ concerns aside, Google is all set to become the network TV⁴ of the internet—large, bland, and largely not relevant to the people who are. It is already two-thirds of the way there.

January 1st seemed to be a good day to install Brett Terpstra’s Slogger. Every night, its army of gnomes will go over my tweets, blog posts, completed to-dos, etc. and record them in a Day One journal entry. Not a replacement for a real journal, true, but better than anything I could do on my own.

It’s a Mac-only app that runs from the command line—not user friendly at all. Even so, the installation instructions are straightforward, with some caveats for the not-too-bright, like me:

• Plugin configuration is done in each individual plugin.rb file, not slogger_config.
• All config strings (URLs, file paths, usernames…) should be in quotes (“…”), even when in an array (i.e. in square brackets). The Twitter plugin instructions wrongly give an example without quotes.
• The Instapaper plugin doesn’t work since RSS feeds for folders are no longer supported. I’m still not switching to Pocket.
• You will need an IFTTT account to log your Facebook posts, using this recipe.
• Instructions for logging RunKeeper activity are convoluted, but work.

Slogger’s default time for sucking in your data is 11:50pm, when my laptop is usually in sleep mode. The scheduler should still be smart enough to start the app on wake-up. Nevertheless, it’s one more reason for me to get a used Mac Mini. In 2015, perhaps.