Ideas from Mark Stout

My favorite product was featured in a great write-up over the weekend in the New York Times. In an article about Freemium, the concept of giving your service away for free but charging for premium content, Evernote was one of the success stories. I enjoyed this Tweet from an about to be married man. At least he didn't tweet again for sixteen hours. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but Google Voice enthusiasts like myself now have a PHP library to play with for their own projects. I have to go fix a broken lawn mower. Why can't you just download a fix?

Funny how some things go. I started this blog last November to document for myself mostly, but anyone who might be interested, some efforts I was making to refine my families technical life. And also to hold musings I was having about how technology was changing our society. I was slowly building the audience, mostly by looking over Twitter questions ever night on products I was interested in (Evernote, Google Voice, Dropbox etc.) and answering them in the blog. August 24th I noticed my visitors went over a certain milestone for the week for the first time. Three days later, after noticing the traffic the day before had been good, keeping me on track for the week to set another record, I saw a Twit come in from Lifehacker.com about a new post . "Dang", I thought, "they posted about a topic I wrote about a couple weeks ago." I clicked the link, and realized they were talking about my post, and had linked to it. That day I had 100 times more visitors then I'...

Buried deep in the documentation for Evernote's API , is some advanced search syntax useful when you want to create a Saved Search for searches within a specific notebook. In the API we learn that typing : notebook:"Public Bookmarks" tag:"evernote tips" finds all notes with that tag, in that notebook. Once I have located those notes, I can right-click on Saved Search and Create a New Saved Search. One of the many good things about Evernote, is creating a Saved Search on one client, makes that search available on all the clients you use. The API has a lot more searches you can do in its Section C. Evernote Search Grammar. It is found about 60% through the HTML one page version of the API's documentation. Be sure to check other Evernote posts and my best : " Your First Day with Evernote" Update 11/19/2009 :  This post was mentioned in  Ten Mov.es post  "How to Search Evernote"

Note :   April 2016:  Frankly I don't know if this works anymore.  It is 7 years old. I stopped using this when Google Now became useful on my phone, and I could dictate reminders using it. I found a way a while ago to use Google Voice to record a personal note, transcribe it, and email it to me. A recent Lifehacker post "Five Things We'd Like to See in Google Voice" lists that need as their #5 request, so I realized what I'd figured out is not common knowledge. In GV's Contacts, create a Group "Special Transcription" To avoid listening to my standard voice mail when I call, I recorded a short voice mail greeting for this group simply saying "Record note now" I added a contact with my own cell phone number as the only number, and made it the sole member of this group. In GV's phone settings, I edited the settings for my cell phone. In the section "Direct access to voicemail when calling your Google number from th...

This year we have not one, but two young scholars heading back to classrooms. And by young, I mean older--18 and 19. One is finishing high school and the other is in college. This has made me think about the technology available to students and how they might make use of it in their education. I've put this post together by researching what others have thought of, some brainstorming on my own part, and talking with a few students and teachers. If I get any of this wrong, or you have additional ideas, please share them in the comments. Here are the tools I've equipped our scholars with : Hardware : Wi-Fi Enabled Laptop : Preferable to a desktop. Takes up less room in a tiny dorm room, and easily carried to classes and library. Scanner : We have a small portable one from the Neat Company . Evernote is partnered with Fujitsu and promotes their ScanSnap . They both are powered from the USB drive so taking one with you is easy. Smart Phone – doesn...

A few days ago, Google Reader announced a new Sendto feature. You could choose an item in Google Reader and by clicking Sendto, send it out to your blog in Blogger, or to your Facebook page or as a Twitter Tweet. My first thought was to send an item to Evernote . Currently, I am emailing them from Google Reader to Evernote, but would like to stream line the process. I spent some time yesterday exploring how to do it, but didn't have much time. I put a query on Evernote's Forum asking if anyone had an idea. So far no one has responded. This morning, via a Tweet from Steve Rubel , I saw where Glenn Slaven's " The Development on a Showstring " blog had a solution. It works, at least in my initial test. Now, TweetDeck needs a Sendto feature! Updated 8/14/2009 9:39 PM: Evernote announced in their blog this afternoon there own SendTo solution. If you already set it from the description above, change the URL to "http://s.evernote.com/grclip?url=${url}...

I realized today from a question I saw on Twitter, not everyone knows about one of the coolest things about Google Voice . You can not only make free calls to and from your landline or you cell phone, but also via your computer. The person asking the question was afraid they'd have to pay for Skype In minutes to use Google Voice from their computer. They didn't know about the free Gizmo Voice Over IP (VoIP) client interacting with Google Voice. Some calls just need the kind of hands free I get from computer headphones and the ability to look up information or make notes I do best at the computer. Google Voice Help tells you all about it. See my other posts about Google Voice.

Once upon a time, I was trained as a journalist. While I've never actively worked in the field, I do follow the profession and have used the tools I was taught in many ways. As I've integrated Google Voice into my life, I have considered how it could be valuable to a journalist. I was planning to research this more and write a blog post for it. Today on Poynter Online , Etan Horowitz covers all I might have, and more in his post " How Journalists Can Use Google Voice to Improve Their Reporting ". Check it out.

In an earlier post , I talked about how Dropbox ( all Dropbox posts here ) had all but eliminated USB drives from our home. That is only one of the huge benefits of Dropbox. I've been using it to collaborate with a few people. I coordinate the Audio-Visual team at our church. We need three sets of slides each week, one each for the two services and a set of Announcement slides. The musical directors create the slides with the song lyrics, the church secretary does the announcement slides and the minister decides the Order of Service. I'll go in and add non-musical slides to the service slides (title, scripture lesson, offertory music etc.). At first, this was a bear of an effort as everyone tried to email slides around. For a while, we tried the Documentation collaboration software OpenDocMan setup on my website, but that was over-engineered for our needs with document security and permission levels. It was hard for casual users to remember all the settings they needed ...

Lifehacker just had a great idea. Use Windows Sendto to send files to Evernote. I updated my previous Evernote tips post with this idea. Today's Lifehacker post is here .

I've extolled the virtues and power of Google Voice many times before on this blog. What the Heck is Google Voice? Google Voice, a Game Changer? Google Voice Implemented Google Voice is not yet open to the public at large. More and more invites are going out, but so far demand is greater then supply. Today, Google announced almost immediate availability of Google Voice to anyone with a dot MIL email account. From the Official Google Blog : When you deploy, your life is put on hold. While you live and work in a different world, everyone else moves on with life back home. Your family and friends keep moving, and this sometimes means it's just not possible for them to stay awake until 2 a.m. to receive a phone call. Calling Iraq or Afghanistan is seldom an option. Google Voice provides a solution to some of these problems. Service members can set up an account before they deploy. Or if they're already deployed, families can now set up an account for their service member. Lov...

Note:  This post was updated in June 2017.   Please go to that post and ignore this one. Evernote is one of those applications with a lot more power then is immediately evident. For example, Podcast #9 debuted yesterday, and they talk about Saved Searches. As part of that, they talk about their rich search vocabulary and how they have hidden that ability in the API documentation . Another wonderful ability not obvious until you search around on their website, is Evernote's scripting capabilities. They have one for Windows they built called ENScript , and another for the Macintosh . Of course, they have their full fledged API as well, but for a hobbyist programmer like myself, the scripting was intriguing. I've been playing around with the scripting and thought I'd share an example script showing the kind of power it gives an Evernote user with just a little bit of programming ability. Before we all began using Evernote, we all had data in a variety of fi...