Kiva micro-lending

I'm getting weirdly addicted to the Kiva micro-lending website - think one of those 'buy someone a goat' gifts, except you get to choose who gets the goat (or solar panel, or water filters) and they pay you back again so you can lend the money to someone else afterwards.

I've got a few active loans on there and an auto payment jobbie of a few dollars a month so that my credit will build up enough to make new loans after a while, esp as the current ones are starting to do repayments - loans are done in lots of US$25 spread across a lot of lenders and repaid in instalments over a period. Trouble is I've got $16 credit just sitting there now! Must... not... add... credit......

IFTTT - taking the social out of social media

I've been playing with IFTTT (If This Then That - an Internet gizmo which does basic tasks when particular things happen). It features some great efficiency things such as automatically posting Happy Birthday messages on FB or messages of congratulations to LinkedIn connections when they get a new job.

I can imagine a whole world of awkward when you actually see someone and don't know about their birthday or new job, but I think everyone knows I'm vague enough to post something and forget about it immediately anyway. :-)

Last time I looked at it, I got as far as thinking "hey, that's cool" but it kinda looked too hard. There are a lot of preset "recipes" available now, including ones which will run little jobs on your phone like texting when you leave somewhere. I'm currently running a couple of things to collate data from my Misfit Shine and save it to Evernote (I hope) and also email me a weekly summary (probably).

And goodbye Hello

Evernote Hello has ceased to be. If it wasn't nailed to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies! It is an ex-Evernote application.

I had an email this week that Evernote Hello is no longer going to be supported. From the 7th of February 2015 it will stop syncing to Evernote and some things will stop working (as against working in a dodgy way like it does now).

Shame, but at least I never wasted time reporting the glitches that annoyed me. :-) I can easily start using the Evernote app to scan the few business cards which come my way but it really was such a lovely idea.

MyFitnessPal

I've been using MyFitnessPal to track what I'm eating vs calories used (steps from my pedometer app) lately. Not every day, just now and then to get general trends.

One of its useful features is the helpful way it suggests other foods usually consumed at the same time as the one you've just entered. Apparently I often have cheapo Icypole knockoffs at the same time as eating huge amounts of Nutella. Seems legit.*

* It actually does. Those would be days when The Possum hasn't been sleeping much.

Tech lust: Tile

I saw Tile on Kickstarter sometime last year (or whenever it went live). Yesterday I came across it again, now in production but with a big delay on orders, and REALLY wanted one, and today I'm going through the 'search the Internet and try to see how badly I'd get buyers remorse' stage of tech lust.

Beesy - track meetings and actions

I horrified myself the other day by accepting a rather strong hint that I might enjoy being the Team Coordinator for my prospective Sweet Adelines barbershop chorus, Canberra Harmony. There's really not much work involved, she says, it's just making sure that other people are getting things done, she says...

So I got voted in, suspiciously unopposed.

I do have copious free time at the moment, but most of it is taken up by a small 10 month old who ricochets off the walls, and most of my concentration is taken up by wondering what he's eating right now.

For my own project management stuff, like lists of household maintenance that needs to happen at some point or birthday party prep, I use the free website/app Trello, but I figured that in this case I was going to need a bigger boat.

Beesy is a great product which marries incredible usefulness with being wildly awkward until you figure it out (thus giving the user extra enjoyment once they 'get' it). You can sign up for an account for free which gives you limited stuff, but I wasn't quite sure what that stuff was. You can get unlimited stuff (again, blurry) by subscribing. I opted to buy the iPad app which seemed quite adequate to my needs.

Basically, as you take notes in a meeting you also assign tasks to people (whose profiles you've added earlier) and set the topic, urgency and when they are due with a few taps. You can then view the tasks by person (and crossly email them all to that person) or by project. Meeting notes can be created from the iPad calendars, which will grab the date, time and location, and you can create the agenda list by copying previous meetings.

After the meeting, you can instantly generate (slightly weird looking) minutes and email them out to everyone who attended. I send them to myself to fix up instead.

The cool:

• Keeping track of all the tasks that you and your team need to get onto
• Easy to refer back to meetings
• When you create a meeting based on a previous one, it copies any uncompleted action items to the new meeting
• The dashboard shows your iPad calendar and your tasks which are due soon, and you can toggle the screen to see pie charts about the actions, like who has most of them and what topics they relate to
• Straightforward controls, once you've learned them
• Impress people with how pretentious you are.

The uncool:

• It does take time to figure out and set up
• All the help is included on the iPad as really annoying tasks and comments against the Default Project
• Not sure how I'd go using it for work as well as my Chorus stuff. It might overlap awkwardly
• No mobile phone support ATM, though the forum says they were working on getting that last year.

There are extra in-app purchases. Fortunately they aren't terribly appealing: 

Send minutes as PDF

Push your actions to your iPad reminders

Save documents in the app (actually I wouldn't mind that one, but I'm already using so many document management thingies).

Hello Evernote Hello

Back before I went on maternity leave, I was having some pretty severe baby brain. Like, I could have a brief chat with someone up one end of the room, and if I didn't write down what we'd discussed I'd have forgotten most of it by the time I was back to my seat.

(Baby brain is a real thing - it's partly that you spend months without enough sleep before and after the birth, but also your brain is bathed in hormone soup and shrinks a bit.)

I normally have a bit of a problem remembering people by their names or faces, but usually no issue recalling them by what we talked about months or years later, so I was starting to worry that I'd get back to work after a year away and not have any memory of who various library vendor reps, people on campus, or workmates were...

Enter Evernote Hello, an app which records who you've had meetings with, including their contact info, a photo (very important!), and notes about them so you can remember to ask about their child/cat/new house. It can capture info straight from LinkedIn, finally a use for that website! Unfortunately the professional photos that people put up on things like LinkedIn tend towards the rather intense sort (shown below) or a blurry picture of their cat because they don't like photos of themselves.



Benefits:

• Free app for iPhone, works OK on iPad
• Grab details straight from your calendar on the day of the meeting 
• Capture info from their LinkedIn profile or Facebook account (though I'm not sure of the benefit of recording info about your Facebook friends)
• If you ever have a meeting with someone else who uses Hello, you can get their information magically through the ether.
• Remember when and where you met people
• All the details save to Evernote as notes. I now have a searchable Evernote notebook called 'people' which is full of folk who I've met once or twice, including tradesmen who I've had in to fix the plumbing.

Issues:

• It isn't happy with you putting in information about someone unless you've had a meeting with them, this is a philosophical choice they've made. I have a lot of meetings called 'email' which occurred at my house because I want to be able to remember something about genealogists who've written to me. 
• When you add someone, it automatically sets a meeting location of where you are right now. I guess you're meant to be tapping on your phone while in the actual meeting. You can move the location, but it's annoying and also 'powered by Foursquare' which can be rather flakey.
• Don't have a meeting with anyone who has an apostrophe in their name, it renders as &amp... (Guess I should report that to them)
• You may end up spending some time hunting for photos of people after each meeting, unless people mind you taking their photo.