Ideas from Mark Stout

  I have always found using IFTTT to send things into Evernote useful.  I currently have all Starred Gmail's, Saved Reddit posts, Archived posts in Pocket, and more all flow into Evernote, thanks to IFTTT.com    When my wife showed me Trello, I found Evernote and IFTTT didn't work together quite as well as I hoped. If you haven't checked out Trello,it is a more visual version kind of Evernote.  It is great for doing some kinds of project management.  I do not actually use it, but I could see myself using it for a future project. One drawback when I looked at Trello was it didn't have a Web Clipper.  You couldn't just save a web page to Trello. I had the bright idea of capturing the web page to Evernote, and then have IFTTT to move the post from Evernote to Trello. Alas, I had never looked at the Triggers IFTTT supported for Evernote.  It didn't have one to take a new note and copy it to another service. Now good news.  T...

Everyone has a compelling story. Just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked to a retired Marine about his service in Vietnam. And another told me about being a young bride in Germany and her move to the U.S. with her GI husband. The next several weeks brings family together for Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is an opportunity to ask family members to tell their stories. StoryCorps, an organization that has made an educational project for adults and children, is holding “The Great Thanksgiving Listen” project. The nonprofit has long gathered individuals stories on video in kiosks in New York’s Grand Central Station, and other cities. It also has an app for iPhones and Androids that videos an interview, and if you choose, uploads it to its site as well as to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. A man at a Woodbridge continuing-care facility recorded interviews with residents about their World War II memories. The interviews were submitted to the Library of Congre...

I glanced over at my son playing on our gaming PC. He was speaking into his headset, talking to other players. They were from all over the world of various ages and backgrounds. I was struck yet again with a sense: we live in the future. The video games are not the only trigger for me. I have a new app on my phone, FlightRadar 24, which amazes me. It shows all airplanes overhead. Select one and it tells you its type, airline, flight number, origin, destination and route. If a plane declares an emergency, it alerts me if I want to follow its story. What’s really cool is if I aim my phone at a plane overhead, it identifies it for me. All this is done using a database of aircraft under Air Traffic Control, but also the GPS sensor in my phone telling it where it is, plus the other sensors that tell the software where the phone is pointing to and how it is oriented. There are also devices like Microsoft’s Kenect 2 for the XBox. It has a series of cameras and microphones that cou...

The telephone is often the bane of our existence, yet it is the necessary enabler of business and personal interactions. If you sell things online, have a home or family-run business, or if you are a single wanting to talk to someone you met online, you need the telephone.  Yet there are risks to giving out your own phone number you should avoid. For example, you sell a bicycle online. You don’t want to give the person your phone number to avoid the possibility of them calling you a year later telling you the bike has broken and they feel you sold them a defective item. Or you want your one- or two-person family-run business to look like a bigger company but don’t want to hire a receptionist, what can you do? There’s an app for the iPhone and Android called Burner that lets you purchase a phone number that is good for a time period you choose. That way, you can list that phone number in your online ad. Any calls coming into the app from that phone number, come into the app where yo...

Google has two new phones, the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P. The chief advantage of a Nexus device is that it is first to get new operating systems. These phones come with the latest Marshmallow version of Android, announced a few months ago. When the next version of Android comes out, these phones will be first in line for them. And the upgrades come direct from Google. Other Android phones have to wait until the phone’s manufacturer releases a version of Android for the phone, and your carrier approves and transmits it out to you. Some current phones won’t get Marshmallow for months; some older phones not at all. The 5X is made by South Korea’s LG and sports a 5.2 inch display. The 6P, made by Chinese maker Huawei, sports a bigger 5.7 inch screen. Read the rest at FamilyTechOnline.com

Evernote's new CEO Chris O'Neill is hitting the ground running .  Evernote has announced they are laying off 13% of their staff world wide.  And the spin off product, Evernote Food is gone. The emphasis seems to be a needed re-focus on the core product.  They have recently released a new Android version with an  updated widget . Its number one feature is the ability to quickly enter a note without having to bring up the full product.  That is a time saver.  You can easily forget what you wanted to note in the several seconds it took for Evernote to load. Or maybe that's an age thing. And there is a new by invitation beta out for the core Windows client featuring a more robust editor inside of the product.  That has been a well requested feature for years now from users.s Anyone in the beta?  My application hasn't been accepted yet. I'm feeling a bit more confident, but I'm still worried, as I'll talk about in a future post.  I'd fe...

All hard drives fail eventually. Yours will, too. I’ve come to the realization we should not to be trusted to back up our own computers. Backing up is planning for an unpleasant future and insurance agents will tell you how hard it is to get us to do that. We need to make backup automatic and let our computers do the drudgery of protecting themselves. Think about what’s on your computer – family photos, important documents, financial information, contacts phone numbers and addresses and more. All kinds of things you would not want to do without. Until recently, I might have suggested services such as Crashplan, Carbonite or others that back up your computer to their cloud service. Most had drawbacks such as a high annual cost. And some of the plans only backed up the internal drive in your PC and none of the external ones. Read the rest at FamilyTechOnline.com