Reader: A True Eye-Opener

WordPress Reader is fast becoming my daily read over-and-above other social and news services.

My introduction to WordPress was my first blog post Here. I knew nothing about it, had never blogged nor followed any blogs or feeds. So this past few months have been a voyage of discovery.

As my blog is not daily but more on a ‘this is how I use technology’ basis it didn’t take me long to realise that I’ll never be prolific. However it did remind me that I really am interested in science and technology even though I have no background in either, so I followed those subjects in the Reader. Mostly BGR and TechCrunch. I like the way I get the headline, the image and the first few lines to choose whether to pass on by or click to read. It is perfect for browsing on my phone and filling in waiting time.

As a writer it has also reminded me of the importance of a title, tag-line plus the first sentence to grab an audience. When I look back-at my posts to-date, I have not always kept that in mind.

This month I joined Blogging101 hoping to learn more about the technical side, not realising it is more about meeting other bloggers and marketing your own blog. Another eye-opener. Why on earth set my Reader only for other technology blogs when there is so much more I am interested in? So I have added some other interesting bloggers to my reader and as my first line suggested, it has become my daily pleasure.

So what have I found that has inspired this post?

Dr. Ash’s Science Mix Tape : A reminder on how much fun learning something can be as well as awe-inspiring videos and songs. My kids (now grown-ups) remember an enormous amount in lyrics, a skill I never managed myself.

BGRs ‘Why did Meryl Streep Write to Every Single Member of Congress?‘ : A reminder that equality for women in all spheres of life is still being fought for and just how brilliant Meryl Streep herself is.

BGR again and the most amazing Computer Chips I’ve ever read about. How magnificent is this? I am not against animal testing for medical purposes but if there was a way to avoid it, the world should choose it.  Or what about the 14-year-olds who invented the Smart Condom?

Susan Appleyard writes about Medieval History and I find her blog engaging and well-written. She has reminded me how much I enjoy history but does it in small pieces I can enjoy easily. I read a lot, but I tend towards escapism in fiction when I have time to read ‘properly’.

There are a lot of headlines I pass by, nobody has time to read it all. But as a catchall of blogs to visit, exciting happenings in the world and universe and items to make you smile, the WordPress Reader has overtaken anything else I used before (twitter, flipboard, google+ and such like).

Evernote in the Garden

After the major bi-annual job of cutting the ivy back,  we had some planting to do.

I am hopeless at gardening. I try and remember the names of plants, which is best where etc., but every year I am none the wiser. We often buy a few perennials to mix with the annuals, but each year I seem to have to fill all the pots again (bar a few hardy Fuschias which are my favourite flowers).

Last weekend we went shopping for this years selection of flowers and foliage. Being quite late in the year already (we’ve been very short on gardening opportunities in the last couple of months) we wanted some instant colour as well as the usual patio/bedding type plants. We spent our cash and carried home the goodies but with so much work to do to tidy up the garden, we didn’t manage to plant anything.

This week however I have managed to fill all the pots with colour and, I hope you agree, it is looking really lovely. The ‘tree’ is a pot containing three different Acers which we’ve had for about 8 years now. I trim the tops every Spring and Autumn to stop them growing too tall. As for the other pots, bearing in mind I’ve only just planted them, I doubt very much I could tell you the names of all the plants in them.

This is where Evernote comes in to play. I had my phone-camera at the ready, the pots positioned where I thought they would look best, the compost bags open for business, a table to put each plant on when I photographed it and my Evernote App. I started a new notebook called Planting (I’m so original) and then added my first note. I then took a photos of the plant, the name and information for the plant, followed by a photo of the pot I was planting in. Finally I tagged  ‘winter in shed’ for any plant which would not survive a frost.  I created a new note for each pot. Voila! I now have a reference for what is in each pot, can remind myself of the flowering/planting instructions in the future and best of all, I can check the tag in the autumn, and any plants which won’t survive the deep winter, I can identify the pots (if not the plants) and put them in my shed/office for the coldest months of the year. Finally add a reminder using Evernote itself or Handle which is my preferred option and you won’t forget to over-winter the plants in November/December.

Once the work was done I rejigged the layout to the picture shown above and watered them all. If some of them grow better than expected, I can move them all around again. That is the benefit of pot planting, it is like gardening for idiots. So long as the plants survive, you can’t really get it wrong.

At this point, I was intending to post one of the notes for you, but a screenshot won’t show it all and exporting does not offer a jpg format which I could then upload here. I can’t seem to copy and paste it either. The best I can do is this… look here (fingers-crossed it works).

So there you have it. Evernote in the Garden. I have no excuse in the future to assume there are weeds in the pots and just sling them out. The three smallest pots I have used to plant seeds for chives, coriander and spinach. Evernote contains photos of the packets to remind me (and yes I just had to check what I had planted as I could only remember the chives without looking). I also have a note for the annuals we have planted so I can refer to that next year when we go shopping again.

All we need now is a little sunshine to help them along. Evernote cannot help with that, but perhaps I should search for UV light-boxes for gardeners?

My Garden Gadget of the Day

To be fair, it is a tool not a gadget. However it does make life easier!

After thirty+ years of marriage I have come to a very important conclusion; it is vital to have your own set of basic tools and gadgets. I am not a whizz at decorating or home improvements, the truth is I am heavy handed and even clumsy. Despite that I do have my own very small toolbox with a hammer, multi-head screwdriver, tape measure and such like for small jobs which need doing around the house. Trying to find anything in my husband’s domain is a journey I avoid at all costs.

A few years ago, one of my personal purchases was a Bosch Cordless Hedge Trimmer. We have a big electric trimmer which my husband uses however it was always such a chore to set everything up for trimming our boundary. Our fence line borders a public footpath and main road and is covered in ivy. We have to cut it all back at least twice a year so it doesn’t become too overgrown and unmanageable. To achieve this, we would take a bin, the big trimmer, a ladder and a compressor up our driveway, along the Close we live in, along the pavement  (now you know I’m English, right?) to our fence line to start cutting it back.

I could never do it on my own so would have to wait for a relatively quiet weekend and bully my husband into doing it. Until I bought myself a Bosch cordless hedge trimmer a couple of years ago from Homebase (in the sale too).

Today I toted a large garden bag holding my Bosch cordless trimmer, secateurs, gardening gloves and garden ‘hands’ (plastic scoops for tidying leaves) over one shoulder whilst carrying my ladder on the other side, to do the fence. A couple of hours later I had filled a large bin (kindly supplied by my neighbour as ours was already full) to the brim and was back sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea.

I do love anything that makes a job fast and easy. You also can’t beat the satisfaction of getting out on a sunny day and achieving something yourself which used to be such a chore.

A Tech Holiday

The blog has been very quiet because I have been on holiday for one, with little internet access, and my life has been very full of un-techy things. Hence very little to post about.

Today though I received an invitation to join the test programme for the Handle App. I have blogged about it a couple of times previously and why it works so well for me. It is still the App I use every single day.

This is the first time I’ve been asked to test anything, and I am looking forward to giving feedback and getting involved.

I also had a conversation with someone recently about the use of photographs in my blog posts. The ones I have used so far in my blog I have searched for on the net, downloaded and used with the assumption that if you are able to download it, you are allowed to use it.

However that may not be true. I only have a handful of readers, mostly my family, but I still wouldn’t like to step on any toes. So for the moment, unless I’ve taken a photo myself, I won’t be using one. If you know anything about the subject, feel free to comment!

Email Is So Easy, Isn’t it?

Sending an email is the easiest thing in the world to do, so long as you have an email address (and can type).

I have so many email addresses, I would find it difficult to list them all. On my phone I have three different Apps just for email. I would love to have just one, in fact I long to have just one, but life is never that simple even when it comes to ‘easy’.

I use Gmail to collect my mail and have done for years. It became my provider of choice because I could check it anywhere in the world as long as I had internet access. I have a gmail address of course, but I also use it to collect from other accounts.

Why have I got so many email addresses anyway? First was the one which came with our modem/broadband service. Then I had a hotmail account for years (now defunct) until we bought our own domain name. The next accounts were to do with work.

In 2006 I decided to start afresh with Gmail. By then I was being bombarded with junk mail and Gmail offered better systems for dealing with it and, as time and technology progressed, it offered me the chance to collect mail from other accounts. In 2008 I bought my first iMac and an Apple account sign-in, then an me.com email and now an iCloud one. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t use them all, but it does show how confusing all these accounts can be, not to mention the passwords.

Today’s blog post has been inspired by a new business venture and yet another email account. We bought a domain name but didn’t want hosting (for the moment) as we don’t need an online presence. A business email is polished and professional, enough for our purposes at this time. I have a partner in this business venture, so ideally we required two users and the ability to send and receive.

Gmail offers a package that would do this for us costing around £80 for the year for two. As mentioned earlier, I have my own private domain name and other than the annual renewal fee, I don’t pay anything to send and receive those emails. So I didn’t see why I needed to pay £80 a year for this one either. However when I tried to set the new email up the same way, it didn’t work.

We contacted the hosting company asking what the problem was. They informed us that we could use mail forwarding without any packages in place, however if we wanted to reply to emails using our business email address we would have to subscribe to a basic hosting package. In this case £28.80 for the year (which still made better financial sense than the gmail option). My personal domain still doesn’t cost me anything to use, but I set it up so long ago, I no longer remember how I did it.

My Gmail is now a multiple-mail account. I have four addresses I can compose and send ’email as’; Gmail, iMac, personal domain and work domain. I can also choose any one of the four as my default. By collecting all my mail in my gmail account I can use Handle (integrated mail, to-do list and calendar as featured in previous blog posts) which is fantastic. However I can’t send from the multiple accounts from within Handle so I have to use Gmail’s App to do that. Until writing this post I had to use the integrated IOS mail App for iCloud mail, but this whole process has reminded me I can use Gmail for everything.

In my case, to make email easy once again, I need an independent App to work like Gmail does, or for Gmail to work like Handle does. Is it too much to ask?

The Future of Television Displays

is here now.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/20/8628861/wallpaper-oled-lg-display

My love of Sonos

A few years ago now I convinced my husband we should buy ourselves a Sonos Play5 speaker for Christmas. At the time we had pretty much stopped listening to music as we hadn’t had a decent music system for some years. Mostly because nothing on the market seemed to fit what we wanted. The big brand name was Bose but I didn’t want my iPhone sitting in a dock playing music when I needed to use the phone for other things, like phone calls and texts.

Then I read about the Sonos Play5. It sounded like everything I wanted. Our extensive music collection was already on my computer and with the Play5 I could play it all. I could import my playlists from iTunes. I could listen to radio from all over the world. I could control the system via an App on my phone and all the feedback suggested the sound quality was as good or better than anything else on the market.

A really easy decision to make, one would think. Yet it took me months of research and thinking about it, nearly buying one then not, before I convinced my husband that we might treat ourselves for Christmas. Why? The cost. This was 2009 and the Play5 with a Bridge (required at the time to plug into the modem but not needed now) came to £600.00. If you wanted a separate controller (not the App on your phone) it was another £250.00. What is more, I had never heard one playing.

I can’t quite remember what prompted it finally, but one night we just made the decision there and then to treat ourselves to a single Play5 speaker with bridge and bought it on Amazon before we could change our minds. It was the first week of December and our present to each other was sorted.

Two days later it was delivered and I put the package away with other items waiting to be wrapped. When my other half arrived home he asked about it. I was surprised as he isn’t a great music lover and if I’m being honest, I’ll admit it was more a gift for me than for us. I said I’d put it away but he convinced me we should test it and then re-pack it. I didn’t need much convincing.

We unpacked the boxes. We plugged the bridge in and set the speaker up in the lounge. I downloaded the App on my computer and went through the set up. We managed it okay as I remember although these things are never quite as simple as you think they will be. It took us a little while to get it working.

The first item we listened to was a New Zealand radio station that my kiwi husband remembered from his youth. We were in awe when it actually played. Next we tried an Australian talk-radio station and spent a great ten minutes hearing someone complain about a tree in the back-garden and the advice they were given. Then finally once Sonos had indexed all my music files we started listening to music. And we danced. The entire evening we did not turn the television on once, we listened to music instead. The same thing happened a few times that first week and we were enjoying it so much we ordered a second speaker (for the kitchen). One empty box ended up being wrapped and placed under the tree for the big day.

It is now 2015. We still have our two Play5s and have added a Playbar (soundbar) for the TV. I listen to music every day. Mostly radio stations but with the advent of music streaming the need for a large library of music has disappeared entirely. Now if you hear about the release of a new album, or something you like plays on your car radio, all you have to do is add it to your system and it becomes part of your every day music. We are talking music providers like Spotify, Google Play All Access, Deezer and many more, all of which can be played wirelessly through your Sonos system.

The sound quality from the speakers is deep, rich and mellifluous and fills a large area. Full volume (other than deafening) does not vibrate or distort. If you have more than one speaker you can choose to play different music on each unit or group them so they all play the same thing (party mode). This also includes the Playbar for the television. For compact homes they have added two smaller-scale speakers to the range which helps bring the cost down considerably (especially now that it runs on your existing wi-fi). My daughter has the Play1. The quality of sound is still outstanding and fills the downstairs of their three-bed semi.

My Sonos system is a part of my life and I love it. I love its flexibility, its sound, and its simplicity. Five years on it is not only as good as the day we bought it, but better, as technology changes the way we listen to and enjoy the music choice the world has to offer.

A quick Update on Handle

In February I posted about Handle (previous post here) an IOS-Only App which combines Email, To-Do Lists and Calendar appointments. This has become a daily part of my life and I wouldn’t be without it.

There have been a couple of updates since my last post, so I thought I would mention them as they are very good improvements.

The first is Siri/Reminder Integration. I no longer have to add my to-dos manually. I can get Siri to add them for me and it works very well indeed. Speaking yourself a note is a very useful feature. They have also added Repeating To-Dos which I noticed the lack of right from the beginning and am pleased to see resolved. I use reminders for work and personal items and often rely on them. Reminders, part of IOS, did it very well. However for me the important part of what Handle offers is integration. The less Apps I need for the daily essentials, the better.

The Cons remain the same. The App only works with Gmail and I do have non-gmail accounts I wish I could integrate, and it is still only for IOS. The other major con for me is being unable to search my email. Which means I still have to use another email App on occasion. The support team at Handle do say that a search facility is on its way but I don’t know when.

The Elliptic Keyboard for IOS

Reading some of the articles on WordPress yesterday I came across one giving links to paid IOS Apps which are currently free to download. One of these was the Elliptic Keyboard App which makes it easier to type one handed and you can choose left or right.

A wonderful idea, so I downloaded it to give it a try. As with any new keyboard it takes a while to get used to and I was making a lot of mistakes but for the most part I could, as promised, manage it all with one hand.

Two days later I have had to uninstall the keyboard. Two or three times my messaging Apps have frozen and the only way to unfreeze them is to close and start them again. Then this morning, whilst using WhatsApp I had no keyboard at all.

So, sadly, a nice idea which did not work for me. Would be good  to know if anyone else has had problems as the App itself has only had one review (mine will make two).

As an aside, when I first received my iPhone 6 I downloaded the SwiftKey keyboard which I used for a while because I liked the idea of swiping. A few months later, after having problems with my phone, I had to go back to factory settings but I didn’t bother to re-install SwiftKey. I am now wondering if it was the extra keyboard which caused the problems because they were very similar to the problems I just experienced above.

Moral of this story. Only download one new App at a time and keep any eye out for any changes to your mobile’s behaviour. It can save you a lot of head scratching and re-installing.

The Prints

My prints arrived today, and I am thrilled with them. (See previous post ‘Photographic Prints’).

There is something wonderful about holding a pack of photographs again. I have not held so many prints in my hand for quite some time (perhaps two years or more). It is a very familiar sensation to look through them and one I had not realised how much I missed.

The paper used is of a decent weight and the quality is good. I chose to have this batch in a matt finish as they will be behind glass. Perhaps if I was putting them in an album, I would go for gloss. The best surprise is that at least half of these photographs were taken with my iPhone 6 camera and they look really good.

Decent packaging also gives me confidence to use FreePrints again in the future. The paper-flap-fold envelope held the prints inside a sturdy cardboard outer casing. No signs of damage or bending in the mail.

All in all a good experience and I am happy to recommend them.