Ideas from Mark Stout

This blog post was set to publish exactly as the day begins on Tuesday, July 31, 2018. That is ten years to the day after my first Evernote  post. With my second note, I was already getting down to business; recording the agreement I'd come to on the phone on a minor business matter. My affection for Evernote has not dimmed since that day ten years ago. Since then, I've accumulated about 7.8 new notes a day. Ironically, I have needed to pull up only a few notes a year. Yet, when I need them, I need them badly and am glad to have Evernote all over again. My philosophy of what to capture is simple : If you encounter something you might remotely want to see again, it goes into Evernote. from a blog post June 1, 2015 I've written here about Evernote than any other topic.  Even wrote a now horribly out-of-date book. Don't get me wrong. If something better comes along that imports my Evernote notes well, I can be enticed to move.  But in t...

Way back in August I asked readers to help build a list of note taking apps other than Evernote that had both phone clients and a web and/or PC clients.  I intended to write an in depth review of each. I still want to do this, but life... I can add one new one to the list that excited me at first. And, it has something I've always wanted: a self hosting option. True long term survivability of our notes requires self hosting. Otherwise, we are just betting on the solvency of a software company; one of the most fragile of institutions. With rushing excitement I signed up for Standard Notes . Only to discover it is notes only.  No attachments. A big use case for Evernote is as a digital filing cabinet of online receipts, copies of documents and such.  I was greatly disappointed. I did find they want to add the feature , but will not until at least 2019. I'll add it to this list, but can say right now unless the attachment feature is implemented when I ...

After trying loads of Task apps over the years, I have settled for now on a combination of Taskary and Google Tasks.  What they have in common is they both use Google Tasks to save the tasks. If a new task app catches my eye tomorrow, it likely will not receive room on my phone or desktop unless it too uses Google Tasks to store its tasks.  That way I do not need to re-enter my tasks for the new app. This is possible because Google has an API for Google Tasks .  An API or Application Programming Interface lets an app send tasks to Google, and get tasks from them. Google has a huge collection of APIs into their services.  I just wish they had one more. I wish for an API for a note taking application.  They may or may not let it be part of Google Keep.  Even if they did not have an app themselves using the API, it would be nice to have an API any programmer could use to develop their own image of what a note taking app looks like. The data would co...

Tonight I learned Harry Anderson, star of Night Court and Dave's World, passed away at age 65.  I met him once, and we talked geek for about 45 minutes.  It must have been sometime in 1985. I was working in the store-within-a-store that was Macys Computer Store in San Francisco. Back then, companies like IBM and Apple did not let just any store carry their products.  There were expectations of marketing and properly trained staff.  We were one of those stores. The year before, we'd been one of the few stores to have the Macintosh on its opening day.  I have written about how Steve Jobs came by that day to gauge public enthusiasm for his new baby. One afternoon -- it was a quiet weekday -- I saw a guy wander into the department. Tall, skinny, wearing a dark suit and a 1960s style men's businessman's hat.  "Who does this guy think he is," I thought, "Harry Anderson?" Then I realized it was. I approached him and he wasn't looking for an...

Audio version of this post One of the reasons for this blog was to share my absolute delight with technology.  Let me share my most recent delight. First, a little of my background is relevant here.  I earned a BA in Broadcast Journalism back in 1978 yet within two years embarked on the career of selling computers, other technology and enterprise software.  Broadcasting becanme a memory. About twelve years ago we bought a couple consumer grade video cameras and Adobe Premiere. I was astonished at the product I could put out. It was comparable to what I could in 1978 with access to a TV station.  I used the capability to shoot a couple of friend's weddings and make a couple of documentaries.  Some are at my YouTube Channel . Last night, I fooled around with a free software product called Open Broadcast Studio , or OBS for short. For those who know video production a bit, OBS is basically acts a video switcher.

One of the many things I could have seen myself doing was writing television screenplays. I even wrote a MASH script for a class in college. It's long lost, probably a good thing. One person who knows about writing good MASH scripts is Ken Levine .  He is a writer, producer and director on shows like MASH,  Cheers, Frasier and many more. His blog at kenlevine.blogspot.com is a daily read. He has a lot of insights on television and the entertainment business. And he has a great podcast too. I'd forgotten until recently that back in 2008 he even wrote an entire column answering a question I wrote.

When Amazon Cloud first came out, I was happy to sign up for $60 a year for unlimited storage. I knew there had been many unlimited cloud offers that later became limited (I'm looking at you Microsoft! among others), but I thought if anyone would keep their commitment it would be Amazon. After all, with AWS and their other services, they are as much a cloud services company as they are a retailer.  And they offer a lot of add-on benefits to Prime members like us.  I thought they stood the best chance of being truly unlimited. Or, if they did one day limit storage,to do so at a higher value than Microsoft or others.  That is, more than a terabyte. My primary responsibility as the Director of Family IT in my opinion is to make sure there is effective backup for our various computers.  Amazon Cloud would play nicely for that. I purchased licenses of ARQBackup and had it setup so my laptop and my wife's backed up to Amazon.  It worked wonderfully. I was even ...