Monthly Archives: October 2011

In the interest of full disclosure…

Since I did a post where I said that one should not be concerned about how many apps they can use on their phone, I thought I might mention how many apps I DO happen to use these days.

Here’s what my two home screens look like. I found the wallpaper at Poolga . It seems to suit me and I think it works well with the icons. I’ve tried to restrict how much stuff I have installed, so that I can minimize the number of screens I use. It’s working so far but it’s still a relatively new phone for me. I upgraded to iOS 5 last weekend. It seems solid, although I have a small bit of lagging on some screens.
iphone home screen
Second screen:

2nd iphone screen

Stuff I use regularly:
Life Balance: This is my old standby and part of the reason I went with an iphone. They talked me into a Mac at one point too. It’s been several years since I used this on a regular basis. I used to be a heavy Palm user and it was my main planning application.

screenshot of Life Balance To Do list

YNAB: I’ve followed this budgeting software since they first started out. I finally decided to buy it, since it will run on Linux. The iphone app is just great. I’m still struggling with my budgeting, but it’s so easy to keep track of my transactions with this.

Wonderful Days: Okay, so it’s sort of goofy but fun. It’s a journaling app that lets you add pictures and sync with your Evernote account. You can email an entry, post to Facebook or save as a .pdf file. I prefer to write a daily journal, but it’s been hard to find the time the last few years. I’ve been able to make a daily entry with this, since I bought it. It’s not as detailed as my regular morning pages were, but it’s definitely better than nothing at all. I like to post pictures taken with Hipstamatic, to give it that moody feel.

screenshot of Wonderful Days app

I just found this! It’s like a window shade that pulls down from the top bar. Must be something new with ios5, since it’s integrated with the new Reminders app. Anyway, thought I’d post a screenshot of my latest discovery.
screenshot of the windowshade app

Hoot Suite: Just started using this recently. It pulls together Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter streams. Now, I do have a Twitter account but I’m not a big user. I also am on LinkedIn. I use Facebook mainly to see what my friends have to say. I also have the separate iphone apps for those sites, but I do like the looks of this one.

screenshot of Hoot Suite

Here’s the Facebook stream:

Hipstamatic: This is a fun app. It puts filters on your camera, to take pictures like the old point and click cameras. (There’s a touching story behind the name Hipstamatic, which you can read at the website.) The app starts out like this:
screenshot for Hipstamatic

Here are a couple of pictures I’ve taken with it, just to give you a feel for how weird and wonderful it can be.
Hipstamatic shot 1
Hipstamatic shot 2
Hipstamatic shot 3

Beautiful Tarot: This is a recent addition. I used to play around with this back in the 70s and I’ve always loved the imagery of the Rider Waite deck. This is an excellent tarot app and really seems to be close to doing a traditional reading. You tap on the cards to read the meaning.
screenshot of Beautiful Tarot

Fuji Leaves: It’s hard to describe this. It’s a music app. You arrange the leaves and drop the stones onto them. It makes a sound. You can also load “songs” that other people have created. It can be very hypnotic. This is the daytime side but there’s also a nighttime side. Fun and mindless.
screenshot of Fuji Leaves

Many apps are basically just the company websites. I have several of these. A couple are for banking. There’s Ebay and Craigslist. I have the Dominos app so I can order pizza from my phone. I use Pandora a lot but it’s not interesting enough to do a screen shot of it. Right now, I have 53 apps installed, and that doesn’t include the built in apps. I may thin this down again. Most are free but I do buy apps if I like them. It’s cheap enough that I can afford to buy something that doesn’t get used (like Egretlist. Love the looks of it, but still don’t use it.) I definitely have not spent as much on these apps as I did on Palm software. This has been a fun post and I hope it hasn’t been too boring for those of you that aren’t into iphones.

the latest Ubuntu

I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu version. I think this is 11.10? Anyway they still use the Unity desktop. They have a version that works on low end computers like mine. And I do really like it! The upgrade was very smooth. It resolved some of the issues I have with the remote session to my work computer. (Typing used to lag really, really badly and letters would get transposed all the time.) My network card works, the sound works, and I can even sync to my iphone. This works so well that it will probably be at least two upgrades before I upgrade again. The only thing I have problems with is Firefox, which seems to crash too often. I have problems with Firefox on the Win XP machine too, so I think that is just a Firefox issue.

And my web hosting company finally sorted out the issue with this blog so I can post again.

Tech stuff

I was thinking about technology, brought on by Steve Jobs’s death. I have this sort of love/hate thing with Apple. I really love the hardware. I love Macs, even old Macs. I hate the Apple cult, who feel that all Mac operating systems are perfect, until the next one comes out. Reading the articles about Jobs, it reminds you of the impressive amount of technology that he helped create in his lifetime. What a vision! When you think of the technology that Microsoft created, there’s no comparison. I’d rather live in the world of Apple products.

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from tubes to transistors, rotary phones to computer-like phones, black and white tvs to 3-D. It’s an incredible transition and one that has affected our society and our world in so many ways. I watched “Pirates of Silicon Valley” last night for the first time. When Bill Gates goes into the Apple office and is looking at the artwork, my first thought was for him to take out his cell phone and take a picture of it. It’s what we would do now. Isn’t it an amazing thing, to walk around with a tiny device that you can make calls on, take pictures from and connect to the internet with? It truly seems like magic. The downside is the distance it can make between people, where we spend more time interacting with devices than we do with other people. People are the part of life that really matters. Let’s not forget that.

Time for pictures!

I used to always post a self potrait of myself. Haven’t done that for awhile. So here are some recent pictures.

First there’s me:

20111001-163749.jpg

Here’s Lon from Tacoma last week:

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Here’s Quinn with Lennon and Lon’s sister, Davey:

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