Innovate

Hey Evi

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:06:20 PST

I've just given the voice recognition search called Evi a go. It was very good at recognising my voiced questions - Better than google voice search and better than dragon dictation. Some think this will be a competitor to Siri. As I don't plan to update my phone and Apple doesn't see fit to release Siri for it, they just might be very right. There are a few features it will need before its a true alternative, but I was impressed.

Web search is targeted, local time queries came back with the answer and a unit conversion were all good.

I think it needs some more local information to enhance its responses.

And I'd like to have some email, Evernote and Send to other apps integrations.

99c in the app store.

I’ll read that later, on my Kindle app

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:06:05 PST

I recently saw a tweet from a friend wishing for a send-it-to-my-ipad” function on the desktop so that reading documents can be easily done on the ipad at a later time, or in a more convenient location (such as a comfy lounge chair, or under a shady tree).

A day or two later the Send it to Kindle for PC came into view in my RSS subscriptions, and then yesterday the Send it to Kindle bookmarklet for for Google Chrome appeared. It appears to work in Firefox too. There is also a Firefox extension called KindleIt which I haven’t tried yet. In effect these applications can send-it-to-my-ipad albeit via Amazon’s cloud services.

The bookmarklet is simple to install and requires authorisation at the Amazon end, and a setting at the browser end so it knows to which Amazon account to send the documents.

The Windows app was a little more problematic to get organised as I was doing this on my work laptop with all the complications of network configurations. The application has to be registered so that it knows which Amazon account to work with, but to register it required the proxy settings to be recorded in the options. But the application won’t launch (to adjust the proxy settings) until it has been registered. Catch-22! In the end I disconnected from the network, connected to my iPhone hotspot to register, then reconnected to the network and adjusted the proxy settings. It works – although one of my word documents was full of images and Word drawings and the personal documents processing at Amazon didn’t know what to do with that one. But, the other Word document I sent was readable even though it contained a table.

Send to Kindle for PC application offers some options to give the document a different title or author, whether to use Whispernet, or only Wi-Fi and which device to deliver it to. Also if you want it archived. It is a free download and works with Word and PDF files and others.

The application can be invoked from either the Print menu in the document application, or with a right-click from Windows explorer or on a document icon.

When a document is sent to Kindle an email notification is sent advising that the document is ready, or not processed.

The browser extension worked easily, sending a web page to my iPad – but for some reason I cannot authorise it to send to my iPhone.

Document appearing in my iPhone Kindle app.

Document appearing in my iPad Kindle app.

Once your documents have been sent to Kindle you manage them via your Amazon account which can hold up to 5GB of files.

Trying a new chair

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:29:31 PST

My kneelsit chair arrived the other day. I'm hoping that it might help with niggling discomfort in my back and ribs.

I was expecting it might take a bit of effort to assemble, but it was pretty quick and easy.

This video was made with an iPhone app called StopMotion.

Will update or write a new post when I have tried it for a few weeks.

Dailyimage2011 challenge is over

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:30:10 PST

I didn't even get to 200 photos, but I had reasons for little motivation in the last part of the year, and I never promised to stick faithfully to the daily part in any case. I liked @jobeaz idea to make them into a video so I too used pummelvision as suggested by @pollyalida I started this post days back and saved as a draft, but until I updated Blogpress just now I could not access drafts. It kept crashing. Next exploration for iPad is text to speech so that it will read PDFs to me.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:30:33 PST

ReadCube | Free Reference Manager - Academic Software For Research

tags: Research citations bibliographic reference management inn0vate

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:30:27 PST

Educational Technology Guy: Pancake.io - another way to host a website with Dropbox

tags: websites Dropbox inn0vate

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 14:30:38 PST

storytelling with data: how to do it in Excel

tags: Excel data visualisation! inn0vate

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:30:29 PDT

How to Insert Sum Formula in a Word Table | eHow.com

tags: how to formula MS Word tables inn0vate

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sparks in G+ has changed

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 17:47:05 PDT

I liked the sparks feature in Google+ but was clearly not as observant as a friend who asked for a fix to make his sparks reappear. It seems that sparks has now been integrated with the new search option and are not listed so prominently as they were before.

If you search for terms in Google+ you will get a list of results that can then be refined to:

Everything
People
Google+Posts
Sparks

So the sparks haven’t completely disappeared.

There is also a save search option. Clicking this adds the search terms to the left side navigation in Google+

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:30:27 PDT

The Millions : Good-bye to e-Book Pioneer Michael Hart (and Thanks for Those 36,000+ Freebies)

Vinton Cerf and colleagues gave us the Internet, with Al Gore cheering them on. But it was Michael Stern Hart of Project Gutenberg who popularized the Net as a book library. He died September 6 at age 64 at his home in Urbana, Illinois, after a long series of health woes, with more than 36,000 free Gutenberg books on the Web, in 60 languages, as his legacy

tags: e-Book Pioneer inn0vate
- Vinton Cerf and colleagues gave us the Internet, with Al Gore cheering them on. But it was Michael Stern Hart of Project Gutenberg who popularized the Net as a book library. He died September 6 at age 64 at his home in Urbana, Illinois, after a long series of health woes, with more than 36,000 free Gutenberg books on the Web, in 60 languages, as his legacy.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Video calls now in Fring

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:57:43 PDT

Fring is an iPhone app that let's you consolidate a number of buddy lists for chatting and voice calls. The latest update includes video calls and group calls.

Buy credit to enable dialing regular phone numbers at cheap rates.

Good for traveling when you have reasonable access to wifi.

Blogger iPhone app

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 02:48:34 PDT

Google has released an iPhone app for Blogger. It's very simple, just for posting while on the go.

It includes upload of images and I think location services. Will try that another time. This post creTed with Blogger iPhone app.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 15:30:24 PDT

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

New Facebook privacy options

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:23:18 PDT

Just found these new privacy options in Facebook this morning

Reminiscent of Google+ sharing options, but this is not so sophisticated.It would be useful to be able to choose from my lists of friends or my groups to share selectively.

In addition, FB has also added options to record location for any status update from the desktop web version of the site. You can choose to add a location at city level.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:30:31 PDT

Create Your Own eBooks - Richard Byrne

tags: ebooks publishing emagazine inn0vate

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What is Google+

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:42:21 PDT

I’m a bit behind getting this post up. On Wednesday evening I gave a fairly informal presentation at the Social Media Club Gold Coast meeting on Google+. My intention was for this to be a conversation starter as I don’t consider myself an expert by any means and wanted to learn from other attendees based on their experience with this latest offering from Google.

We used a huddle (group chat feature of the smartphone apps) during the day and after the presentation we set up a hangout to explore the features a bit further.

What is Google Plus

View more presentations from Peta Hopkins

I posted the slide deck on Slideshare yesterday and it has got a bit of traction with over 150 views already. I really should have blogged it here first!

Michael Rees has already posted his takeaways from the presentation at his blog.

Useful links:

Google Plus – Scoop It - http://www.scoop.it/t/all-google-plusAxel Aigret’s collection of articles
Peta’s Diigo links tagged google+ - http ://www.diigo.com/user/petahopkins/google%2B
Google+ topic on Quora - http://www.quora.com/Google+
Questions and answers

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:30:22 PDT

30+ Cool Content Curation Tools for Personal & Professional Use

tags: inn0vate curation
Page2RSS - Create an RSS feed for any web page

"Page2RSS is a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS reader. "

tags: RSS inn0vate tools website feeds
FeedDude - Create RSS feeds from any web site

"FeedDude lets you create an RSS feed from any web site on the Internet. If your favorite web site doesn't provide an RSS feed, you can generate one here for free. The service is easy to use and free for non commercial use."

tags: RSS inn0vate tools website feeds

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 15:30:31 PDT

Ajaxload - Ajax loading gif generator

Create your own loading/progress bar animated gifs

tags: gif images inn0vate ajax generator icons webdesign tools

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:30:21 PDT

How To Download/Backup Your Gmail, Google+, Calendar, and Docs Data - How-To Geek

tags: google+ gmail backups data inn0vate
- Google has a tremendous number of free services they offer which many of your probably take advantage of. But have you ever considered what you might lose if all of a sudden you lost access to your account? Just like all important data on your hard drive, your critical data in “the cloud” should also have backup consideration.
Google+ - Quora

Questions and anaswers about Google+

tags: google+ smcgc questions inn0vate

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Infographics–get your own

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:31:38 PDT

Michael suggested I take a look at Visual.ly for useful infographics. So I made one for myself. It is possible to do a comparison with another Tweeter.

There are also heaps of other infographics that others have created and shared on the site on all sorts of topics.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 15:30:29 PDT

Top Trends of 2011: HTML5

tags: inn0vate HTML5 html web

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

How Google+ made Evernote even more useful

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:38:32 PDT

When I started using Google+ a few weeks back I created an empty circle for notes to myself. When there are only a few posts shared with this circle it is OK but there is no search available across those notes.

I'm currently collecting resources for the next Social Media Club Gold Coast meeting for a presentation on Google+. I found this Post by Paul Allen about
Google+ making LinkedIn even more useful and wanted to save it to my Evernote account where I'm collecting the resources. I shared it to my Evernote email address that is in my gmail contacts list, but the next time I tried it (on iPad) the address would not appear.

I finally realized that I could add my Evernote email as a person in my Notes to Self circle. That should make it easier to share to Evernote and of course I'll then be able to search across all those notes to myself. Now if I could add some tags and specify a notebook would be great.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:30:22 PDT

What Dell can teach your company about social media ROI

"It’s not only one number because it isn’t only about sales; it’s also about increasing business value, he said.Organizations shouldn’t be asking how social media are making them money; they should be asking how social media make an organization better. That means social media shouldn’t be run by any one division; they need to be part of every aspect of an organization"

tags: inn0vate social media ROI
Google+ Facebook Twitter & Blogs - When and Why to Use Each

From @MoodleMcKean

tags: inn0vate tweets social networks

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:30:44 PDT

5 Best Chrome Extensions for Google+ Power Users

tags: inn0vate google+ chrome

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Technology and Wellness

noreply@blogger.com (Peta) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 04:55:32 PDT

Some of my personal learning network friends are planning a challenge for August to be extra mindful of their health by focussing on some wellness goals.

The idea is to set 3 goals for the month and tweet each day about achievements and activities they/we have undertaken.

It made me start thinking about the apps I have used on my iPhone that contribute to my mindfulness about wellness.

Runkeeper – Since I started using Runkeeper I have been able to maintain a far more regular exercise regime. I started using it just for walks, but now also track running (more like jogging) and cycling. I have tracked 330 activities to date in which I covered 1660km. I plan to keep using this indefinitely.
Diet Tracker – Keep yourself honest by taking a picture of everything you eat. This app has a field to record the calories of each meal, but even if you don’t use that it gives you a visual reminder of the quality of the fuel you are consuming. One little complaint I have about this app is that when I have to manually add an entry and adjust the time backwards, the selection of date goes back to a date months ago. Will keep using this for the time being. Since I started using it about 2 months ago I’m finding a few old favourites in the wardrobe are wearable again.
Couch to 5k podcast by Iestyn Lloyd – Although I was not couch-bound when I started using this, I was not doing any running – just plenty of walking. I was ready to bump up the intensity of my exercise and this was perfect. It is a 9 week course that uses audio cues to mix up walking with running intervals building up to a 30 minute run. The great thing about this program is that I never felt like I’d been pushed so hard that I couldn’t keep going with it. The first time I used this was immediately prior to a long overseas trip. The second was when I got back from the trip and had to get back up to my previous fitness level.
BP+Pulse – This is a fairly simple app that can be used to record and track blood pressure and heart rates. I had to use this at one period to record daily checks, but now only once a month. Of course at such an infrequent rate it is easy to forget. Of course you will need a blood pressure monitor to actually do the test.
MyMeditation Lite – This one I plan to start using regularly next month as part of my #augustwellness. I have used this in the past, but not for quite a while. It lets me choose the length of time and uses a bell sound to change modes between a mindful breathing pattern and then resting the mind as completely as possible.
GPS Motion X – I used this in the past to track walks, but it is more complex to use than Runkeeper, and does not have the exercise focus that RK has.

Would love to hear what other apps you find useful in this area. Maybe I’ll try a new one for #augustwellness.