tech tip
Tech Tip: Evernote – A World of Knowledge at your fingertips.
So you are sitting somewhere you don’t want to be, and waiting for some thing you’re sure you will not care about tomorrow. What to do? Thinking swiftly, You pull out you iPhone from your pocket (or purse) and randomly search the web.
I believe I can speak for all of us, when I say this happens all to often, in this so called “Modern Life” we all seem to be trapped in. But what if, you could turn those moment of mindless web surfing into actionable, productive, and dare I say “edifying” moments of discovery. I know. . . sound impossible right. Well, not exactly, the collective knowledge of all human kind can be yours, if you only have the right Apps.
I know. . . sound to good to be true. And well, I may be playing it up a bit, but I do have a few suggestions on how you can turn minutes (or hours, you know who you are) of mindless web browsing into not so mindless web browsing.
The first app, is the Wikipedia iPhone app. A must have for those of us who love the random verbal tidbit, or the slightly odd meme of the moment. The second is not any app in particular, it can be one (or more) of the many news app, or any of the other site readers (Diggnation comes to mind.) It could even be one of the many eBook you can find at the app store. The source is not really the focus, it’s the collection of the interesting snippets, that we are concerned with.
The final App, is Evernote: http://evernote.com/. This application is not only on your iPhone, but on your Mac (and PC) as well. And get this. . . they sync. Now that the iPhone 3.0 software has copy-paste, you can save the things you want to remember on your iPhone, and it will sync to your Evernote account on line, then sync back to the Evernote application on your Mac (or PC) the next time you launch the app. It even allows you to have several different “NoteBooks” so you can categorize the thing you collect. It is free, but you can upgrade to a pay account.
I don’t care who are, a student, a lawyer, or just someone love to argue, and win. This application set will save you brain space, help with any project, big our small. With all the things the life can shoot your way, a little mental outsourcing can’t hurt.
Well that my two cents for this week. See in a fortnight.
-Seth
Tech Tip: Using File Sharing Services
One of the most useful functions of OS X is it’s powerful built-in file sharing services. You can easily set up custom shared folders for Windows file sharing, OS X file sharing, and the tried and true FTP file sharing. Virtually any platform is supported in some way. Simply turning on file sharing will allow anyone to connect to your machine and put things in your Drop Box without risking the integrity of your machine. Follow these steps:
1. Open System Preferences by clicking on your ‘Apple’ menu and selecting ‘System Preferences’.
2. Click on the ‘Sharing’ preference pane. Make sure the lock on the bottom left hand corner of the window is unlocked.
3. Click on the check box next to ‘File Sharing’. This will do two things – enable OS X filesharing (AFP) and share your public folder located in your home folder. Note: Anyone will be able to connect to your machine and have read access to this folder. They will not be able to delete anything from this folder and will only be able to copy items into the Drop Box folder. Nobody is able to READ the contents of your Drop Box folder except for you.
4. Now that you have enabled sharing for OS X users, you can easily enable Windows Sharing (SMB) or FTP sharing by clicking on the ‘Options’ button. You may also choose other folders to share by clicking on the ‘+’ button to the left of the options button. I would recommend leaving the default shared folders to minimize security risks.
5. Test your setup! Go to another OS X machine on your network. Open a new Finder window (click on File -> New Windows) and notice that your computer name shows up in the side bar under the ‘Shared’ heading.
6. Congratulations. Now when you are trying to figure out how to transfer that pesky Word document to another machine, you have a quick, easy solution.