I’ve been home for the past few days, taking time off for the holiday before heading back out of town. Before I came home, my wife called and asked if we should purchase one of those systems where you can turn your lights on and off no matter where you are in the country. Seems you buy those things from your cellphone carrier, and ours is Verizon. It sounded good to me, so she bought it before I came home.
As I talked about when I wrote about my Franklin Planner, I do well with lists. When I got home I put together a list of all the things I had to get done before I left town. This item wasn’t on my list, but luckily my wife had put it on her list. So, Monday night her alarm went off and it was time to load this sucker.
The first step involved deciding which 3 rooms we’d hook this thing up in. In 3 boxes were these big plug things (aren’t I descriptive?) that you put into the socket and then plugged a light into it. We decided to try 2 rooms first, since the other lamp she wanted to use needed a new bulb. That part went pretty smooth and the lights were turned on.
The next part involved downloading some software to our phones called WeMo by Belkin. The instructions in the box said to download the software, or app, and just follow the instructions.
The instructions were pretty simple. I downloaded the app, then went to my settings to see if each unit was showing under the WiFi area, and they were. All you do after that is open the app, put in your router password, and it would do the rest.
Unfortunately, the rest never came. My phone kept trying to find the server… actually that’s not quite accurate. It kept trying to load one of the things we’d plugged into the wall as the server. And it was failing miserably. I tried it on my wife’s phone; nothing doing. I thought maybe if I did one plug at a time that maybe it would work better, but not only didn’t that work, it still saw both units even after unplugging one.
And that’s not all. After trying to get this thing working for maybe 30 minutes I decided to take a break from it and, noticing that someone had sent me a message on Instagram, wanted to check that out. However, the phone was telling me I had no internet connection. When I went into my settings I saw that this WeMo thing had overridden my settings and made itself the primary router over my real primary router. When I tried to change it… I thought I heard an evil laugh as it refused to acquiesce to my demands.
Eventually I remembered how to get into all apps, find that bad boy, and disable it so it wouldn’t bother me the rest of the night. Tuesday afternoon my wife and I trouped up to the Verizon store to see if we did anything wrong. The guy we got said that it can be tricky and that it had taken him almost an hour to figure out how to get it working; really? He said he couldn’t do anything in the store because it had to be activated where the lights were, and to try it one more time. We left unsatisfied, but what can you do?
We got back home and I decided to start from scratch and uninstalled the program. Before reloading it however, I finally looked at the ratings, only to see that it averaged less than 2 1/2 stars; that’s not good. After reading a few of the reviews I called my wife into my office and read many of them to her. We both decided it wasn’t worth the grief, I uninstalled it from her phone, and we took those plugs back Tuesday late afternoon for a full refund; just to let you know, the plugs were $50 each.
Of course the recommendation is to always look at the stars and read through reviews of things before you download them to your smartphone, just like you should before you download programs to your computer. In this case, since it went through Verizon, my wife and I thought it had to be legitimate because, after all, they’re a large company.
As we left the store last evening I remembered that probably half the apps in both the Google Play store and Apple’s store are bad and haven’t been checked by anyone because of the volume. Had I been with my wife when she bought the thing I’d have hoped I would have asked questions beforehand and checked it out online so we could have made a better decision earlier; it certainly would have saved a lot of time.
How many of you have made purchases of things that you should have checked out before you did so? What about bad apps on your phones that gave you grief? I know I’m not alone; go ahead, admit it. 😉
Continuing on a theme I’ve been on for some of the last few posts, the last time I talked about Android applications I’m using that I liked was December 2011; man, I’m slow in getting back to stuff, but at least this time I’m not as far from the last time.
I know for sure that 4 of these I downloaded independently; the last one I’m not so sure about. I know I’ve written about #4 here, but it earns a second mention:
1. Dropbox I have to admit that I was really hesitant to add Dropbox. Sure I had added Evernote, but I wasn’t moving any large files or personal files to it, just some notes and such. But an organization I belong to wanted all of its directors to set it up, and I did and it’s been a godsend.
How? Most of you know I’m working out of town. Over the winter I’ve been staying out of town almost an entire month, then going home for a long weekend. I’ve always needed stuff, and finally I decided to move all my written files, all my web files, and a host of other files over. Then the other day my wife called me while I was leaving work for lunch and was frantic because she didn’t have a couple of files she needed. I had them in Dropbox so I pulled them up, and you can email files from Dropbox. She had them in a minute; catastrophe solved.
Here’s the thing. It’s free, and the more things you add to it so you can access it, such as your computer, laptop, smartphone and, for me, my Nook, the more free space you get. You can also pay for 100 GB at a nominal rate. And if you get other people to download the software via your link, you earn 500MB per person, up to 16GB of space. I don’t know if that’s forever but hey, here’s my link if you want to download it or check it out; help a brotha out! 🙂
2. WatchESPN Y’all know I’m a Syracuse Orange sports fan. I’m also in the south right now. Because they’re a top flight team I’ve been able to watch many of their games on ESPN, but not all of them.
The WatchESPN app lets you watch any game for any sports that ESPN happens to cover for free online via their app. So the night Syracuse beat North Carolina State with a final steal and scoring with 9 seconds left, I was sitting at a desk in my hotel room watching it in high definition on the Nook; life doesn’t get better than that.
3. Flixster I hadn’t paid any attention to having a Flixster account previously. I knew I had an Ultraviolet account, but at some point they must have merged. Anyway, turns out that I have 2 digital movies that I can watch either on my smartphone or on the Nook, and I can add more via streaming from their site or purchasing the digital rights via Barnes & Noble. Here’s one more thing; if you purchase any movie anywhere and it offers you a digital copy, you can hook it up so you can watch it on your platforms without having to find someone to crack the software… not that I know anyone who knows how to do that anymore (cough).
4. Instagram I wrote about this in June 2012 once it was finally available for Android and I still love it. Not only can I share my pictures with others but if I don’t have it downloaded to my computer I can link my own pictures to my blog via a link. Also, it’s a great way to store pictures if you want to download them to your computer or other platforms later on. And now you can upload 6 second videos, although for the life of me I can’t seem to figure it out; oh well…
5. DU Speed Booster I was having problems getting a couple of apps to work on my phone one day and I happened to come across an article in PC World Magazine about this one. It runs optimization processes on your smartphone (they don’t have it for the Nook so I don’t know if it’ll work on the iPad) that not only helps to resolve conflicts, but clears out all those extra files for whenever you upload, download, or update programs and other apps. It’s fast and speeds up your smartphone at the same time.
There you go, a recommendations post and, funny enough, post #1,499 on this blog. I wonder what’s coming up next…
One of the biggest gripes I hear or read from people about Facebook is seeing all this stuff that they don’t want to see. Political arguments, religious arguments, lots of other weird stuff that they just don’t want popping up in their stream. The problem is that people are people, and you never know what type of thing someone is going to be putting up that’ll pop up out of nowhere and drive you crazy.
Do I have a solution? Of course I do, but I only know that it works for Firefox.
It’s called F.B. Purity, and what it allows you to do is customize what your Facebook page looks like and a lot of what you’ll see. If you click on the image a couple of times until it’s larger you’ll see what I’m talking about. Actually, look at the image as it is; that’s the color of my Facebook page on my laptop. On my home computer the background is red.
Yes, you can change colors, fonts and font size. You can eliminate right or left sidebars if you wish, or you can pick and choose which of those boxes you don’t want to see on either side. For instance, I’m blocking sponsored stories, gifts, chat and chat box, game & app stories, and a host of other things. Do you want to see when people aren’t connected with you anymore? You have that as a choice also.
If you see the big image you’ll see that you have choices on the left side of the program where you can customize things you’re going to get anyway, such as do you want to see your news feed in real time or in the way Facebook gives it to you, deciding what it feels is more important to you? Do you want to eliminate certain types of stories from showing up in your stream? You can modify that.
The big one for me is the box on the right where you can type in words you don’t want to show up in your stream. This works very well unless the words are in an image; nothing you can do about that unless you decide to type in the name of the site the person who shared it got it from. You can see some of the words I don’t want popping up in my stream; keeps me from getting mad and wanting to verbally attack people most of the time. lol My problem is that I don’t use bad language and that includes ever writing it, thus I haven’t been able to bring myself to type those words in so I won’t see them anymore. Maybe I should think about cutting and pasting. 🙂
As I said, it’s an add-on that works with Firefox, and it possibly works with Chrome as well, maybe even Opera; I don’t know. However, you have to add it independently, as you can’t go through the normal way of adding it. You can go to the F.B. Purity site and download it from there.
If you decide to download it, I want to tell you that they put the date in wrong for when the last update was. It was January 2014; they typed in 2013 by mistake. If you care take a look; I love it & highly recommend it.; oh yeah, it’s free! And Facebook hates that people use it because they feel we should just be subjected to a lot of nonsense; another good reason for using it. 😉
Mitchell Allen is a prolific writer, pretty good chess player, and all around technophile. He did a Q&A on the topic of online cloud storage with Sharon Hurley Hall and one of the programs he talked about was Evernote, which I use and love but know I don’t use all that well. After discussing whether this should be a guest post or a Q&A we decided on the Q&A. Don’t get confused with both of us being “Mitch” here; I asked the questions so I’m in bold; thus, Mitch gets the first word here. 🙂
Mitchell Allen
Mitch, thanks for inviting me to answer some questions about one of my favorite productivity tools. I’ll leave the techno-babble on the doorstep and bring in this little basket of basics.
1. For folks that don’t know (because they didn’t read my Evernote for Android post), tell folks what Evernote is.
Evernote is a tool for saving just about anything. Notes, pictures, music clips, videos and files. Once you have saved your stuff, Evernote helps you find it later. It is like having your own little World Wide Web.
Like the real web, you can access your stuff on many different devices. That’s because Evernote automatically syncs your devices with your online account.
Finally, you can share your stuff. I will talk about that in a moment.
2. At a very high level, can you tell folks how you personally use it?
Here are the top five things I do every day:
• Save web pages
• Jot down ideas for stories
• Update to-do lists
• Hunt for references (stuff I said a long time ago, links to resources)
• Manage my disaster recovery plan
The web pages are better than bookmarking because the text is right there. Sometimes it looks awful, but most pages are legible.
I have dozens of notebooks, each of which could be the next Great American Novel. LOL Most of the time, I’m just feeling creative and I like to jot down the ideas while they’re fresh in my mind.
Evernote has a very simple keyboard shortcut for creating a checkbox in a note (Ctrl+Shift+C). I create lists and try to check them off as soon as I can.
Hunting for references is probably the most frequent activity. I am always looking up stuff about Microsoft Excel, for example. I also spend a lot of time tracking down web addresses to include in my email correspondence.
Because of my freelance software business, I am always looking for the best ways to safeguard my stuff. Evernote is the perfect tool for me to keep track of my progress, as well as my thoughts about different backup strategies.
3. You pay for Evernote; what extra benefits does that get you and is it worth the expense for most people?
The limits on a free account are very generous: 100 notebooks, 60MB upload per month, 25MB per note and 25MB per attachment (actually, the attachment plus the note together cannot exceed 25MB). I was pushing up against the 60MB limit, so I don’t mind paying 5.00 a month for a premium account. I get 250 notebooks, 1GB upload per month, 100MB per note and 100MB per attachment (same restriction on combined size of note and attachment.) I am always editing my notes and all that syncing counts toward my quota!
Folks who only occasionally hit the limit on uploads can pony up the cash for just the months when they need it.
4. I just discovered that I can keep a journal or log by using Notebooks on Evernote. Can you explain Notebooks better and how people can really use them to their advantage?
Well, I promised not to get too technical, so think of a notebook as a steno pad. For a journal, you add a new note each day, similar to starting on a fresh page in your steno pad. You know those colorful sticky tabs that folks use to bookmark different sections of a report? Well, that’s your tags. Only, with Evernote, you kind of have to remember what tags you use. Otherwise, there is no point – you won’t be able to search for them later!
Actually, you don’t have to use tags, because Evernote will let you search for phrases, just like a Google search. Here is a useful link from the Evernote blog.
5. Is there a way to set up Evernote as a task manager?
As recently as February, 2013, the CEO of Evernote stated that the tool wasn’t all that great for to-do lists. But, if you Google task manager +evernote, you’ll find a bunch of people who seem to manage it.
Personally, I stopped using Evernote for task management. Gmail, Basecamp and my own custom-built tools are more suitable for the types of tasks I need to manage. I use Evernote to keep to-do lists for personal stuff, if I don’t need a reminder.
6. We actually share a notebook; can you compare the differences between sharing notebooks as opposed to using Dropbox for sharing?
This is one feature I don’t care for. It clutters up my space. I have joined a few shared notebooks and I have to wade past their tags. Ugh. I prefer to use Dropbox to transfer files and Google Docs for, well, documents!
7. I’ve never understood how to use the Shortcuts area; can you talk about that?
The new version of Evernote shortcuts took some getting used to. Instead of bookmarks across the top, the shortcuts now appear on the left side, along with the tags, notebooks and everything else. The trick is to drag the note from the preview area onto the Shortcuts title or within the section itself.
I discovered that, if you drag a note onto a tag, that tag is added to the note, which was not what I expected! As a further experiment, I dragged a note onto the title Notebooks and it moved the note from its old notebook into my default notebook.
8. What’s that Atlas thing all about?
I never paid the Atlas any attention. From the Evernote website and forums, I learned that it uses geotagging to establish where the note originated. So, if you take a lot of pictures, this might be useful. Of course, that brings up the issue of privacy and security surrounding geotagged images. If the notes are private, that should be no problem. But if you link to them or share them, be careful about the information you are sending along with the image!
9. I tend to mainly use it for saving URLs to look at later on when I’m either on the Nook or my phone, and I have my grocery list there as well. You know me a bit better than most; how better could I use it?
I don’t subscribe to a best practices philosophy for productivity tools. Each of us has his own way of viewing the world and how things should work in it. If the two uses you just mentioned make your life easier in some way, then Evernote has done its job.
What I will say is that you should play with it as much as you can. As you get comfortable with the features and annoyances, you will come up with more ideas.
The beauty of Evernote is that you don’t have to commit to anything. I used to save my freelance proposals on Evernote. It was a hassle, so I stopped.
10. I know you use a lot of things. Is Evernote the easiest, the best, or is there something better or easier?
The only thing easier than Evernote is pencil and paper. There may be better-designed alternatives but I am satisfied with 90% of Evernote. The lone 10% annoyance is that it freezes temporarily while I am typing. Not always, but enough to get on my nerves if I’m trying to get some ideas down. I have a lot of software running on my laptop, so it may not even be Evernote!
The best thing about Evernote is that it does not force you into a specific way of working. As I work with it more and more, I continually refine my interactions. Yet, like most productivity software, it just sits in my taskbar until I need it.
Some years ago I went to a Syracuse University football game with my friend Josh when they were playing a team they had better have beaten, which they did. There was one guy who pretty much lost his mind on every play, whether the team was playing offense or defense, and at one point Josh decided to take the guy’s picture on his phone and upload it… somewhere. I thought “how cool is that”, and wanted to do that sort of thing one day, but I didn’t have a smart phone.
One of my Instagram pictures lol
Last May, I finally got my first smartphone, but found the transition from a regular cellphone for more than 15 years to a smartphone kind of daunting, so I decided to take my time before figuring out which image service I was going to use. It took me a long time, probably 9 months, before I finally decided which way to go.
I decided to go with Instagram for Android, since it had just come out, because there were so many iPhone users that were talking it up so much that I figured it had to be relatively easy to use. I found that it was easy enough, but that there were also some things associated with its use that, if you don’t know about them, will throw you off.
For instance, it probably took me 3 or 4 days to figure out how to take a picture with it. I thought it would work like Barcode Scanner where you just opened the program and it would open up the camera so you could take your picture. Instead, it opens up and you see this little toolbar at the bottom with 5 things on it, and the one in the middle activates the camera.
The second thing I learned is that you’re going to end up cropping your image in some fashion, which pretty much means you have to adjust your image on the fly to the proper size if you want to get it all into the picture. That is, unless you want to take the time to take lots of pictures of the same thing or start adjusting, realize it’s not right, and start over again. I’ve figured this one out; don’t get too close to your subject and you’re probably going to be good to go.
Cropping is pretty much one-dimensional; you’re going to end up with a square and that’s that. You can move your square around, but that’s the best you’re going to get.
The thing I’d read about that a lot of photographers didn’t like were these filters that you’re offered once you’ve cropped your picture. I tested them, as there’s your normal picture then 3 other choices, and frankly I can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to use the filters because they all make your picture look surreal; well, maybe that’s why you’d do it, but what’s the point of doing it on your phone?
The last thing you get to is what your picture is going to look like and where you want to send it. I send my pictures to Twitter, Facebook or both, and that’s pretty much it. There’s this GeoTag thing you can select if you want to let the camera tell people where you are, but I have that setting off by default; I don’t like being tracked, as you know. You also have an space above where you can type in your message; is has to be somewhat short if it’s going to Twitter to get your entire message in but if it’s going to Facebook only I guess you could probably write a book.
You’d think that would be that, but it’s not. Turns out that instagram.com is only a site promoting the app; you can’t see your pictures there, which threw me off. A quick question on Twitter brought a response saying to go to Webstagram (make sure you look at the link; you can’t type in what you think) and set up an account there, which is what I did, and then I could see all my uploads, which works great because now if I so choose I can download my images from there to use in blog posts later on instead of having to keep everything on my phone.
Now you’d think that was all there is but once again I turned out to be wrong. Just last week I found out that people can, and will, subscribe to your picture page. I started noticing the Instagram icon at the top of my smartphone, in the area where it’s usually showing things that are running, and I wondered why. I clicked on it and it told me I had messages and likes; really? I went to check it out and indeed, I not only had messages but there’s more than 40 people following me; wild! I decided to follow one person so far and we’ve talked about a couple of her pictures here and there. That’s an interesting social media benefit that I have absolutely no idea how to really use, and I’m going to have to think about this one some more.
If you’re predisposed to want to check out some of my images, you can go to my Webstagram link, and you can even follow. One of the people, someone I know locally, said I seem to post a lot of pictures of food. Hey, it’s what I like to comment on! 😉
Now you know what I know about it; if you have any tips you’d like to tell people, please go ahead.
Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Motivation and General Stuff
