Have you ever had a YouTube video or audio segment you wanted to transcribe but didn’t have the patience to sit and manually type out what the speaker/s said? I ran into just such a situation yesterday and, instead of it taking hours for me to listen, pause, type, listen, pause, type etc I was able to transcribe the two YouTube videos I needed in under ten minutes. Here’s how…… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
I hate bills. I also hate paying for things I can get for free. I was at Thomas’ house last year just hanging out. We were watching a movie on his Roku box, and I realized that the little box was giving him everything that I watch on TV except for local channels. That was the beginning of my quest to get rid of my cable bill.
At first I searched the web and found that all you need is an antenna to pick up local television stations. I could remember back to my childhood, and how we had an antenna that was pointed toward Indianapolis so we would get about 10 channels; that is… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
As much as I “harshed” on Evernote last week after they released two ridiculous iPhone apps the service remains a key part of every aspect of my life. I’ve also turned countless people onto Evernote, and many find it invaluable as well. Others however, underutilize the service and, as a result, don’t see what the big deal is. That’s where Evernote Essentials: The Definitive Getting Started Guide for Evernote by Brett Kelly comes in. As Brett explains:
The amount of information we want and need to keep track of today is, frankly, ridiculous. Not long ago, my desk was covered with piles of financial statements, medical records, automotive service receipts — and that didn’t even
If you have been using Google to search for a while, chances are you have picked up a few tricks along the way such as putting quotes to specify phrases to find, or adding a ‘+’ or ‘-’ to specify things that must be included or excluded. But now the folks at HackCollege have come up with a great new infographic to help you see even more possibilities for searching.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
One of the coolest features in iOS 5 WiFi syncing, which I now use far more often than USB syncing. Being able to hit “Sync” on my MacBook for my iPad while it’s still in my bag (it only needs charging every few days) makes me giggle every time I do it. It’s just so simple, and works so effectively every time. With it, new music, an updated playlist, and a few new apps are just a click away.
Obviously this functionality is normally used over a WiFi connection at home or the office, but it turns out you can actually use WiFi sync when you’re mobile too.
As a regular user of the Personal… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
The other day I was speaking to someone who had just gotten a new iPhone 4S. They love the phone but were complaining that Siri doesn’t seem to work very well. We spent a few minutes going over some of the Siri ins and outs and, would you believe, he now loves Siri. Because of that, I thought I would circle back and share a few more tips that can make Siri a more effective productivity tool.
Talk to Me: As is the case with all voice recognition, you need to speak in a particular manner if you want Siri to transcribe text accurately. In fact, if others hear me talking to Siri they give… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Let’s just go ahead and get it out of the way: UGGs are ugly. They make your feet look huge, and they are sloppy. I’ve been told that there is nothing worse than seeing a woman wearing a pair of UGGs with a skirt or a pair of shorts; Kev grew up in the San Diego area, and he has issues with those combos, evidently. So there are plenty of reasons to dislike them, but I think the biggest reason boils down to the fact that they are ugly.
Now that I have gone ahead and said it for all of the UGG haters out there, I’ll also take this opportunity to confess that I have a pair… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Perhaps it was because I was using the Sony Vaio S-series laptop with its 15-hour battery, but I never really looked critically at the battery life on my 2011 15″ Macbook Pro. But recently I have been using it almost exclusively and have felt that I should be getting more hours between charges.
My assumption – particularly how the fans would spin up even when I was doing nothing particularly challenging – was that there was something related to the graphics card. So I looked around and found that the dynamic switching on the graphics cards will often leave the system stuck using the discrete card when the integrated is more than enough (for… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
The Notes app that is built into iOS has always struck me as a bit anemic. That’s hard for me to write, considering that my cousin works for Apple and is one of the key people involved in its development. Unfortunately… it’s kind of true.
Sure, Notes is great for jotting down quick memos, but that is about it. There is very little you can actually do with it other than, well, take notes. Documents can’t be formatted. You can’t add pictures. The app doesn’t even have folders, so you can’t organize your notes. The message Apple is sending with it is simple, “This is the most basic of notes apps. If you want something… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Siri is a lot of fun to play with, but it is time to get down to business. After all, with a little bit of patience and a few (many?) tweaks, Siri can become an amazingly useful productivity service. Truth be told, for the first few hours I was trying Siri I thought it was a big fat fail. After making some of the changes I want to share with all of you however, I already can’t see having to go without it. So let’s jump right on in.
Home Button? You don’t need no stinkin’ Home Button
UPDATE (With apologies): Turns out this is only in the current Lion Beta, something I never would have imagined. Thanks to Rodney for pointing it out. We’ll let you know when it makes its way into a full release since it is quite useful!
The more I use OS X Lion the more I like the features it brought to the Mac and, although it can be a bit inconsistent, I am really learning to appreciate fullscreen apps. I’m liking Mission Control more and more too. The only issue I have had has been the fact that when I have a lot of applications in fullscreen mode it can take a good bit… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
It had become a running joke in the family.
“Dan, did you FourSquare here?”
“Dan, still one day away from being mayor?”
“Dan, when you can’t even become mayor of your own house what does that tell you?”
“Dan, you know the ‘no fly’ list? I think FourSquare has you on the ‘no mayor’ list.”
Yes, I was one day away from becoming the FourSquare mayor at well over a dozen venues. Despite this I had only actually become major once and then it was only for one day. And to add insult to injury THAT location was a tram stop in Vegas during CES 2010.
Yes, it seemed I was a FourSquare pariah.
Turns out… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
I have been a GMail user since their early beta days, but three times this week I was reminded of how dead simple and useful their archiving and saving functions can be!
First, a bit of background. My best friend is getting married next week, and so I have been wracking my brain putting together a toast for her and her fiancée. I had some fun anecdotes about her, as well as stories from when the two of them started dating, but I was looking for something more to add. Thinking maybe old emails would help, I typed her name into GMail, and discovered (or, really, re-discovered) that GMail helpfully saves all chat conversations along with email. Within… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Several months ago, Gear Diary’s email switched to Google Apps. As a result, I learned about a pretty neat Google trick — multiple account sign-in. Effectively, it lets me be logged in at my primary email address on one tab and have my Gear Diary email opened and signed in on a separate tab. Helpful, but not earth shattering.
However, in the last few weeks, I’ve had two different people flip out with excitement when I taught them this trick, mainly because their schools and businesses have switched to Google Apps. Both of them thought they were stuck signing in and out of accounts, or giving up their Gmail accounts. One of them thanked me on Facebook, and… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Sometimes it is the little features in a program that can make the biggest differences. iPhoto’s facial recognition is one example of this. I knew the feature was there in the ’11 version of the software but never used it.
Last week Elana’s grandma Pearl died. It was and is sad, but at 87 she had led a long, good life and is remembered fondly by many. We should all be lucky enough to have the same said about us when we are gone. I wanted to put together a montage of pictures to share with Elana and her family, but my iPhoto library was an absolute chaotic mess. That’s when iPhoto Faces came to… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
