Tools and Technology for Adults
Declaring that I’m a fanboy for Gretchen Rubin and her Happiness Project is no new ground here, but watch this to see Gretchen on the CBS News giving “prosaic” steps you can take to make yourself happier. She mentions:
Gretchen has promised me an interview for this site after her up-coming book is released in December. I’m looking forward to it.
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I use the Google Chrome browser because it’s fast, clean and light. Unfortunately because it is fast, clean, light and new it still lacks features you might expect in a browser. Chrome’s bookmark management is especially lacking.
When I read news, I’m a compulsive ctrl-clicker on links that look interesting and that I want to read and write about later. By the the time I’m finished, I have a very full window of tabs. In Firefox I would choose to “Bookmark All Tabs”. To save the tabs, my only choice in native Chrome is to bookmark each tab separately. That still won’t make them available to other browsers or other computers.
Evernote, the very powerful multi-platform free information storage and retrieval app comes to the rescue. I just open a new note in Evernote and drag the contents of the URL bar from Chrome into the Evernote note. It becomes a clickable link in Evernote. When I’m finished, I can reorganize the links and annotate as to why they’re interesting and what I plan to do with them. When I’m finished I have a workplan for the day that can be synced via Evernote to other computers or used with any browser.
If would be nice if this also worked for creating links with Firefox, unfortunately when the contents of the URL bar from Firefox is dragged into Evernote, it’s not clickable.
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It seems people don’t tend to peel bananas in the most efficient way. If you want to get to your banana quickly you should be peeling from the bottom the way monkeys do it, not from the top.
This tip was revealed today on lifehacker.com, thanks guys.
Mother, you didn't peel that banana efficiently!
Google Reader, Google’s free online RSS reader is how I keep up with hundreds of websites and Evernote, my “ubiquitous capture” has become the repository of everything I want to do, read and have done.
I use them both every day, but I’ve never been happy about how I get articles I want to save from Google Reader into Evernote. My solutions have been either pulling up the actual web page from Google reader and then clipping either text or the entire article from the page or trying to highlight text within the reader and clipping it directly to Evernote, both seemed awkward.
The answer is simple. While in Google Reader you can send articles via email and every Evernote account has it’s own email address that allows Evernote to capture emails that you wish to keep. So I’ve started happily reading article in Google Reader and then emailing them to my Evernote account. Very simple and very cool. The command for emailing from Google Reader is letter “e”.
Me? Kind of slow, but eventually I figured it out.
Your Evernote email address found on Settings Tab of Evernote website
Entering “E” while reading articles in Google Reader opens an email form, just enter your Evernote email address and send.
Oh, yeah and if the term “Ubiquitous Capture “ sounds overly pompous, it’s from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology for the place where you can trust that you can put everything important that needs to get done — it can be a notebook.
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Aviary, the folks that already have a powerful free suite of online graphic tools, has added very fast screen capture and online image markup tools.
The new tools are Falcon and Talon – Talon is a Firefox browser plugin for capturing images, and Falcon is the image markup tool that lets you add shapes, lines, arrows and crop, resize and flip images. If you’re not using Firefox, you can open Talon by either using an image from your computer or take one from the web. If you want to capture an entire web page just put aviary.com before the web page’s URL and the entire web page is scraped into Falcon.
Aviary’s claim of being fast was well justified in our testing. After clipping an image with the Talon extension, it immediately opened in Falcon for editing. You can also store the image directly on your desktop or host it on their servers.
It’s a very slick tool and can be useful if you want to capture images from the web and then either scale the image or markup it up for clarification. I normally use and like Snagit, a $49.95 screen capture and manipulation tool, but for simple captures in the future, I expect to be using Falcon. The plugin for capture is especially useful if Firefox is one of the browsers you use.
The other tools in the Aviary suite include an image editor, a color editor, an effects editor and a vector editor.
Visit aviary.com to try it out.
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