Technology – Page 3 – MacYourMom.com

Review: Belkin Bluetooth Keyboard Folio for iPad 2

The Belkin Bluetooth Keyboard Folio for Apple iPad 2
is a useful addition to my repertoire of iPad accessories. If you have the need to type more than a handful of words on occasion, then a Bluetooth keyboard should be something you either have or are considering. But do you really want to lug along another item with your iPad. This case makes it easier.

I used to carry my Apple Bluetooth keyboard in a special case of its own, but it was bullky and I had to remember to turn off Bluetooth on my iPad or the jostling of the keyboard in my bag would turn the iPad on and kill the battery.

As for the Belkin case, on the plus side, the keyboard has an on/off switch to save its battery when you’re not using it and to prevent the problem I mention above. It also comes with a standard USB mini port and cable for recharging, which is better than having to fiddle with AA batteries. The case also allows the positioning of the iPad at several angles, although not at the extreme angles you see in other cases/stands. I’ve used the keyboard case for about a month now now and it’s worked well and is comfortable. Battery life has been very good as well. I just now had to plug it in for a recharge for the first time. Also the way the keyboard folds up out of the way when not in use is convenient.

On the other hand, the keyboard is a bit cramped. The keys are a bit smaller and closer together than a full-size keyboard so my typo rate is higher. The case is limited to displaying the iPad in landscape mode, unlike the Targus Versavu Keyboard and Case for iPad 2 which allows rotation of the iPad to portrait mode. I’d use that sometimes if I could. As you’d expect the case adds a lot of bulk to the sleek, svelte iPad, but I’m not sure that’s unavoidable with an integrated keyboard. With a separate keyboard, I was at least able to leave it behind when I wasn’t using it.

Unfortunately, the Belkin case’s cover doesn’t incorporate Apple’s Smart Cover magnets so it doesn’t turn the iPad on or off as you open or close it. That wouldn’t be so bad, but I find the ports and buttons sometimes difficult to access. Plugging in the dock connector cable requires a very deliberate effort, for example. I’m not sure why all the extra fabric hanging out around the edges is necessary except perhaps for ease of manufacture. I find it annoying. Also, unlike the Smart Cover, the Belkin’s cover doesn’t do anything for wiping skins oils or fingerprints off the screen. I never realized how much the Smart Cover does clean until I what happens when it isn’t there.

The bottom line: The Belkin iPad 2 keyboard case is a decent product, but given it’s $100 price and the fact that the Targus Versavu keyboard case is less expensive, yet has fewer of the Belkin’s limitations in a better-looking package, I’d spend my money on the Targus. But since I have the Belkin now, I’m going to keep using it and it will serve me just fine.

Disclosure: I received the Belkin iPad 2 case as part of Amazon.com’s Vine program, in which certain customers receive free products in exchange for reviews posted on the site. While I get to keep the products I review, there is no expectation or pressure given to make a positive review of any product. All opinions are my own and completely unbiased by external factors. Links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. I will receive a small percentage of purchases made as a result of clicking on one of them.

Web Apps I use: Evernote

Evernote

On the new social media website Google+, I’ve seen some conversation from people who are discovering Evernote and I thought I’d write about how I’ve come to use it. I’ve written about Evernote before:

But I’ve never done a writeup just on the service itself and how I use it.

Notice that I called Evernote a “service”. It’s not just a piece of software, but instead it’s a sort of ecosystem that becomes a backup for your brain. Here’s how Evernote describes itself:

I have Evernote on my personal Mac, my work Mac, the Mac in our kitchen, my iPhone, and my iPad. Plus Melanie has Evernote on her Mac and her iPhone. It’s everywhere. (And if you use Windows computers or have a BlackBerry or Android phone, you can get Evernote there too.) So how do I use it?

For one thing I clip webpages I want to keep into it. Every time I do a web search for something I think I might need to find again, I clip it into Evernote. They have extensions for all the major web browsers that make this easy. It’s especially nice in the Chrome browser because it will offer to save just the URL, grab the whole page, or intelligently clip just the relevant data. In addition, whenever I do a Google search, the extension also searches Evernote for the same words and lets me know if I’ve already got notes that match my search.

Evernote synchronizes my data between my local software and company’s servers so that it can then automatically send that data to all my copies of Evernote. They also add search data for any images in your notes. That’s right, Evernote doesn’t just search text, but also searches photos and PDFs. When I get business cards I take a picture of them either with my phone’s camera or my Mac’s webcam and save them to Evernote. When I need to find that person’s phone number later I just type their name in to Evernote’s search and up it comes.

I have a document scanner at home and often scan bills or other important correspondence that I need a record of, but don’t need to keep the physical copy, and then put that in Evernote. Then I shred the paper and keep from having an overflowing file cabinet.

Here are some other ways I use Evernote:

Evernotesite

I use the webclipper to save recipes I find online to a certain notebook.
We keep our grocery shopping list in an Evernote notebook that is shared between me and Melanie. We record items to buy on the kitchen Mac and then the list is always on on our phones. (At least theoretically: shared notebooks don’t work on Melanie’s iPhone 3GS, although apparently they’re working on a fix in the software to do it.)
We have a shared notebook called “Household ToDo & Wish List.” As we think of stuff we need to buy, projects that we’d like to do, and items that need to be fixed, we put them here.
I keep a “Takeout orders” notebook. Every time we order takeout I record what our order was. Very often Melanie or her sister will ask, “What did I get last time? That was so good.” Now we know.
Classic children’s stories are often in the public domain on various websites. So are the lyrics to many classic ditties and children’s songs. I’ve clipped them and now they’re always at the ready when I need to entertain a child.
Story ideas and blog posts in progress go into a notebook for that purpose.
Meeting notes from work get typed into a notebook.
When I travel I email my itinerary to a special secret email address that every Evernote user gets. I also clip information related to my destination, hotel reservations, etc.
Receipts from any online shopping and serials numbers for software purchased online get a notebook.
When I’m at a store, I often take photos of items that I’m thinking of buying, perhaps for a home improvement project, and save them in Evernote for later comparison shopping or planning.
I have a notebook full of magazine clippings from various camping and backpacking magazines that I’ve collected over several decades that I’ve scanned into Evernote.

The possible use cases go on and on. The best part is that Evernote is free, but not in the “free, but not useful until you pay” manner. The premium, paid version gives you even more awesome features, but the free version is completely usable. The difference is that for $5 per month, you get 1GB per month of uploads, instead of 60MB; You can put any kind of file in Evernote, whereas for the free version you can only attach images, audio, or PDFs; you can read and edit shared notebooks on the website instead of just read; The maximum note size if 50MB instead of 25MB; and your scanned PDFs are searchable.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of what Evernote can do. They have something called the “Evernote Trunk”, which is a program in which they’ve partnered with many third-parties to integrate Evernote into their hardware, software, or web-based products and services. The Evernote blog is also a great repository of tips, tricks, and use cases to inspire you.

Th whole point of Evernote is let you offload from your brain the stuff you need to remember, but have trouble keeping track of. It’s worth trying it out and seeing if it can fit in your life. I think you’ll find it can.

My first Kickstarter purchase: PadPivot

Today I received my first Kickstarter project to result in an actual product. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a unique way of providing seed funding for entrepreneurial projects that would otherwise never see the light of day. Let’s say you have a great idea for a new beer-fetching robot. You get together with an engineer friend and you come up with a design, you build a prototype, and you work out the kinks. You’re ready to build your new robot, but it costs tens of thousands of dollars to buy the raw materials and hire a factory. In the past, you would go to your friends and family to chip in, you’d mortgage your house, and if you were lucky you got a bank loan or venture capital investment.

But Kickstarter allows you to crowd-source your production costs. With Kickstarter, you put your project online and you tell the story. You set a dollar amount to raise and deadline to raise it by. Then you offer a return on investment. Say, for $50 you get a robot t-shirt; for $100 you get a robot; for $175 you get two robots; for for $500 you get your name engraved on the side of your robots, etc. If the project gets fully funded by the deadline, you go to production. If not, nobody gets charged any money and you move on.

The great part is that the inventor can gauge if he really has a market for the device and if demand is high he can raise a lot of money. Some projects have raised 10 or 100 times more money than the initial request.

I’ve backed several projects on Kickstarter. I’ve backed the recording of a new CD by jazz-folk singer Burke Ingraffia, who I went to Franciscan University with. For $10, I get digital downloads of the tracks on the date of the CD release. I’ve also backed coffee joulies, an ingenious product that immediately cools coffee to the right drinking temperature and then keeps it there for an extended time. I recently backed Red Pop, a gadget that attaches to an iPhone and works as a shutter button. It interacts with an iPhone app to make picture-taking better. And then there’s the one I got in the mail today.

The PadPivot works with my iPad or Kindle or even my iPhone to do several things. When I’m sitting on the couch, it’s has a nice curve so it fits right over my thigh, keeping the iPad secure and positioned so I can use it. The Pivot comes with an elastic cord to secure the Pivot to my leg if I want to be extra-safe. The PadPivot can also hold my iPad on the desktop in either portrait and landscape orientation. Yet it folds up into a small portable size. The PadPivot holds onto the back of the iPad with a non-slip dust cover, but if I want extra security, the dust cover peels off and there’s a sticky yet re-usable surface to grab it. I wouldn’t use in a car on a bumpy road without a hand holding the iPad, but for all normal use it’s great. On the couch, on the plane or a bus or train, in an auditorium, laying in bed—all great uses for the PadPivot.

So I’m excited not just to use the PadPivot, but also because I had a hand in bringing it to market and learned a little bit about what it takes to create such a product. It’s the great American story.

The PadPivot, folded up and upside down

iPad on the PadPivot

iPad on the PadPivot as a desk stand.

Bare PadPivot strapped to my leg

iPad on PadPivot strapped to my leg

(At this point, you may be asking where you can buy one. They’re now accepting pre-orders on the PadPivot website.)

The spam SMS conundrum and (sort-of) resolution

Last week, I wrote about my battle with the spam I was getting on my phone via SMS text and the new means that AT&T has given to let us block them. The particular spam I was getting all seemed to come from the same place and I’d been getting it forever. Later, I updated the post to say that I’d received an email from the company where the texts were originating apologizing and explaining that it wasn’t in fact spam, but were marketing emails being sent to someone else.

First of all, I would like to apologize. We do not, as policy, send SMS messages to any of our customers, but occasionally a customer will provide us with an email address that is actually an email for their cell phone ( for example:1112223333@txt.att.net) and that will cause our system to generate a SMS message. In most cases, we are able to catch these and reach out to the customer for a legitimate email address or another method of contact. We have a Dorothy Bettinelli listed in our database, but the only email associated with the account is a Gmail address. I’m not sure how these are being routed to your cell phone.

I replied with copies of the texts as well as my phone number and my own Gmail address. (They weren’t able to give me Dorothy’s email address in a laudable concern for their customer’s privacy.)

So here’s the weird thing: None of my information is in their database. Not my email address or phone number. If they are to be believed—and I have no reason to doubt them at this point—there is nothing in their servers that their IT people can find that should result in one of their marketing emails ending up on my phone as a text message. Somehow, the email they send to Dorothy is going through an email-to-SMS gateway and somehow her email and my phone number are associated in the gateway.

To make it even more strange, I don’t know Dorothy, despite us sharing the same unusual last name. There are essentially two groups of Bettinellis in the US, my family which is mainly clustered in the Boston area, and the other which is in the San Francisco and Pittsburgh areas. As far as I know, we aren’t closely related, at least as far back as 100 years or so.

It’s a real enigma, but as long as the messages stop, I’ll be satisfied. The marketing guy from Replacements, Ltd., tells me they scrubbed their database of Dorothy’s email and will only send materials to her by snail mail from now on. That should result in no more spam. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I will still wonder at how this all started in the first place.

Do you belong to a Foursquare church?

St. Joseph on Foursquare

Do you belong to a Foursquare church? No, not this kind of Foursquare Church. Thiskind of Foursquare church. The kind you find on the social networking site Foursquare.

(In case you don’t know what Foursquare is, it’s a location-based social network that is used primarily with other social-networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. A user “checks in” to a venue, sometimes providing a pithy comment, a photo, or a tip at the same time. If you check-in to a location often enough, you can become its “mayor,” which usually only affords bragging rights, but in some cases can result in special “mayoral” benefits from an Internet-savvy retailer.)

Some have dismissed Foursquare as another example of the ability of social-networking addicts to share too much of the minutiae of their lives, which can be true. Just as no one needs to know every time you retire to the bathroom on Twitter, neither does everyone need to know every time you stop for gas at the service station or pick up a value meal at McDonald’s. for my part, I only use Foursquare when I actually have something pithy to say. (If you’d still like to check-in, say to maintain your mayorship, without having anything to say, you can check-in without sending the notice to your Twitter or Facebook stream.) In any case, it can be another fun way to get to know your social-media friends and to share a little bit of yourself with people who live far from you.

But Foursquare can also be an opportunity to live out your Christian witness. Using the tools that Foursquare gives you, you can let your check-ins speak to others. For example, I’m the “mayor” of my parish, St. Joseph in Holbrook, MA. If you look at the page for my parish on Foursquare, you will see that I’ve made sure that all of the parish’s contact information is correct, including the address. I’ve also used the tips feature to leave information about the parish’s men’s group. And when we have special occasions at the parish, like the recent May crowning, I include a photo in my check-in.

Similarly, I check in to my workplace daily at the Archdiocese of Boston’s Pastoral Center in Braintree. On that venue page, I’ve made sure the address and phone number are correct as well as putting our Twitter page there. My tip for the Pastoral Center lists the time for daily Mass in our Bethany Chapel, inviting the public to attend and stay for lunch afterward in our cafeteria. I could also leave a tip to check out the small religious goods shop run by the Sister Servants of the Divine Master off the lobby. Or to make an appointment to do genealogical research in the archdiocesan Archives. Or something similar.

The point is that just by checking in on Foursquare, you can provide an invitation for the casual user, someone who may just be in the area or who follows you on Twitter or Foursquare or Facebook. to experience the prompting of the Holy Spirt. It’s certainly not the entirety of Christian witness (we should all be doing a lot more than that in our daily lives to share the Gospel with others), but it’s just one small way to do your part to make Christ present in life. Even in the social networking world on Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter.

Blocking spam SMS texts

AT&T Mark the Spot iPhone app

One of the biggest annoyances of the modern age has got to be spam: Spam emails, spam faxes, spam tweets, spam blog comments, and spam SMS texts.

A few years ago, when Melanie and I were first married and I brought her onto my cell phone account, she started receiving spam SMS texts. What’s particularly annoying about spam SMS is that unless you are paying for unlimited texts, you’re paying to receive them. The only cost of the others is the time it takes to clean them up, except for the spam faxes, but at least those are illegal now.

Anyway, when we brought these spam SMS to the attention of AT&T Wireless, we were surprised to learn that there was nothing we could do about it. they told us that there was no way to block a particular SMS sender, even if you know the number of who it is that’s spamming you. The only solution, they said, was to remove SMS from your phone all together. No receiving, no sending at all. It wasn’t a big deal at the time since Melanie didn’t use the feature so we had it blocked and that was that.

When Melanie got her first iPhone last year, I elected to turn texting back on for her account to see if the problem got better. Since then, she’s only received one, but then you never now if she’ll start getting a dozen a day next week.

Now, as for my phone, I’ve been receiving a handful of spam messages every month from the same source—“Replacements, Ltd.”—addressed to the same person “Dorothy Bettinelli”. I don’t know Dorothy Bettinelli. I don’t know if she’s real. All I can assume is that these guys found our names and phone numbers in proximity on the Internet and now I’m getting spam addressed to her. There’s never been so many of them that they are in danger of using up my allotment of text messages each month, but it’s been a constant annoyance, like a mosquito flying around your head at night while you sleep.

Finally, it seems that AT&T may be doing something about. AT&T has had an app for the iPhone for a while now called “Mark the Spot”. Originally all it did was allow you to send a message to AT&T when you had a dropped call or bad connection to let them know exactly where it occurred so that they could (theoretically) fix it. Recently, the app has had an update, which allows you to report several errors:

Failed call attempt
No coverage
Data – can’t connect
Data – too slow
Report Spam SMS (!)

ATT spam SMS reply

That last one is the one that really got my attention. When you click on it, the app tells you to forward the spam SMS to SPAM (7726). When you do, you get a message back thanking you for letting them know and then asking to reply with the phone number of the spam’s sender.

The spam SMS I keep getting is not a working phone number, but is probably a computer connected to an Internet-to-SMS gateway server somewhere so after I send the number, AT&T replies that “it is likely that your message came from an email address.” They then tell me to reply to the original message with “BLOCK”. There’s no other instruction, but apparently, replaying BLOCK will block the originator from sending you texts anymore.

Handy!

Of course, it’s not perfect. It’s not difficult for the spammer to switch to another sending number, nevertheless at least there’s a limit to the numbers they can send from and I’d rather have the psychological comfort of being able to do something rather than remain powerless before the spammer.

So if you’re an AT&T iPhone user and you have the problem of spam SMS, get the app and start blocking it. It might make your life better, but at the least it will give you a little satisfaction.

Update (6/7/11): This morning I received an email from Replacements, Ltd., the company whose name is on the SMS texts I’ve been getting for several years.

Hello Mr. Bettinelli,

Our press clipping service picked up a link on your blog where you mentioned getting annoying spam texts from Replacements, Ltd. sent to Dorothy Bettinelli.

First of all, I would like to apologize. We do not, as policy, send SMS messages to any of our customers, but occasionally a customer will provide us with an email address that is actually an email for their cell phone ( for example:1112223333@txt.att.net) and that will cause our system to generate a SMS message. In most cases, we are able to catch these and reach out to the customer for a legitimate email address or another method of contact. We have a Dorothy Bettinelli listed in our database, but the only email associated with the account is a Gmail address. I’m not sure how these are being routed to your cell phone.

Are you still receiving these texts? I want to help correct this situation as quickly as possible.

Best regards,

Brad Newton
Email Program Specialist
REPLACEMENTS, LTD.
PO Box 26029
Greensboro, NC 27420-6029

I’ve responded to him with my thanks and I hope that we’ll finally be able to resolve this problem. I do sort-of recall trying to track down the company back in the day and coming up empty. I honestly did not consider that this was anything but spam. I’m still a little concerned that somehow my phone number got associated with their email list. Is Dorothy Bettinelli a real person? Did someone sign me up for a list to harass me, with Replacements, Ltd., as the innocent victim?

I’m hoping that Brad Newton will be able to resolve the situation. It should be as simple as searching through their database for my phone number. However, it could also be that there is something outside their system which is receiving their email and forwarding it to me. Time will tell.

My review of The Daily

When I first heard about The Daily, the iPad-only electronic daily newspaper, I raved about the idea even though I couldn’t buy it, not having an iPad yet. I concluded that a 99-cent per week subscription with all the possibilities that a tablet form factor and multimedia allow could save the newspaper industry. I still believe that, even after I heard others pan the newspaper as gimmicky, shallow, and difficult to use

I now have an iPad 2 and I have become a subscriber to The Daily. Whatever problems there had been with crashing and inability to download the latest issue are now gone apparently as I haven’t had any troubles, and in fact, I found the experience to be mostly smooth and crash-free.

I do have one quibble, which is that the app doesn’t do multi-tasking. If you quit for any reason, the paper reloads from scratch when you go back in, losing your place and forcing you to find it again. (You can set a bookmark if you remember it.) I also haven’t found a way to read back issues in case I wasn’t done with yesterday’s paper, for instance.

However, as for the other complaints, I don’t find the reporting to be shallow. Each of the articles tends to be just long enough for a daily newspaper. I subscribe to the Boston Herald, which is our local tabloid and I compare the articles to that paper. While newspapers like the Boston Globe or the New York Times offer longer, more in-depth coverage, I just don’t the luxury of the time to read them. The Daily offers the right mix of breadth and depth for me.

Some have also complained that the newspaper has a conservative bias, presumably because it’s a News Corp. property, but I don’t see it. Certainly, I don’t think the newspaper has a liberal bias and so in comparison to the mainstream media, perhaps it does seem conservative, but a scan of The Daily’s editorials shows plenty where the editors took a stance outside the conservative norm. The news coverage itself doesn’t seem to exhibit a general bias at all so far.

My favorite sections so far include the general news and business. I’ve also been happy with the opinion and apps & games. Opinion includes a feature called “The History Page,” which profiles a topic and/or moment in history. Usually quirky, it’s always interesting. The sports section is okay and seems quite comprehensive. I’m not a fan of the gossip or arts & life sections, but that’s not my thing anyway. I couldn’t care less about celebrities or fashion.

While there are ads, they are not obtrusive, with a handful scattered throughout each issue. They can slow down reading as they try to load the interactive elements, but you can often just side past them.

What I have found interesting is that I no longer feel the need to read my paper copy of the Boston Herald every day. Sure, I skim the local news and keep up with a few of my favorite weekly sections, but I find myself turning to The Daily first for the kind of news I used to go to the Herald for. I don’t think it’s because I’m no longer interested in local news, but rather that the form factor and experience of reading the news on my iPad is so much more convenient and compelling that it supersedes any quibbles over exact content.

As I said before, this is a wakeup call for local newspapers like the Herald. Either follow The Daily’s example or risk oblivion. I’m ready to question whether it still makes sense to pay $45 per month for a physical newspaper over $4 per month for a digital version. That should scare old school publishers to death.

How I sacrificed an iPad for Lent, and God wouldn’t let me forget

AppleOrderStatus

I’d been anticipating the release of Apple’s iPad 2 for months, even before they’d officially announced it. I’d see the launch of the first iPad last year and I’d even got to use some that belonged to others briefly and I’d known immediately how such a device could contribute to both my work and personal lives. The iPad fills a gap between my iPhone and my MacBook Pro perfectly.

I’d been talking about the iPad with Melanie non-stop about the iPad since last year about what a great tool it is. I also started hinting that I thought we should get one. She agreed on the awesomeness of the iPad, but was concerned whether we could afford it. I’ve been working the numbers ever since and had been waiting to see what our tax refund looked like and as of late January I knew we could afford it. So we talked about it.

So, you have to understand something of the way Melanie and I converse. Melanie is the silent thinker. I speak, she listens and then says something back. I speak again and she doesn’t say much. I make a definitive statement, like “So, we should get it.” She doesn’t say anything. My mistake here is thinking that silence is assent. (And I will concede there may be some willful blindness on my part.)

Fast forward to March 11, the first Friday of Lent and the day Apple is launching the iPad 2. There is huge demand and lines for the product as people wait outside stores for the launch at 5pm. I couldn’t be there because I was working on our new radio program, The Good Catholic Life, but as soon as I was done, about 6pm, I went straight to the Apple Store across the street. Madness. A huge line and the Apple employee told me all they had left was a model I didn’t want. I headed straight for Best Buy, which was also selling them that day. Score! They had models in stock and only a few people were ahead of me.

As I was waiting in line, I got a text from Melanie: “Coming home soon?” I text back, “Soon. In line for iPad.” Her reply: “Seriously? I didn’t know we’d agreed on that.” I may not be the swiftest guy on the block, but I knew what that meant. I got out of line, got in my car and headed straight home.

After dinner and after the kids were in bed, we sat down and had a conversation. It was a calm and rationale discussion that ended with me agreeing that we should save the funds for something else. I was disappointed, sure, but I agreed. I’d been thinking for weeks by that point that I was getting an iPad and suddenly that wasn’t going to happen. But you suck it up and move on. In the end, it’s just a gadget and there a lot of people getting by with a lot less than that.

Although it was the third day of Lent by that Friday, I hadn’t yet decided what I was giving up for the season. I decided to offer up the iPad as a sacrifice for Lent, turning my disappointment into prayer for the needs of my family. It’s not curing world hunger, but it was something.

But then something wonderful happened on Saturday. Melanie pulled me aside and told me she’d been thinking and, if I was really sure that we had the funds available, I could get the iPad. The skies parted, angels sang, and the sun shone down.

Of course, I forgot my Lenten sacrifice.

I ran to the computer to see if I could order one online. Ack, backorders were listed at 3 to 4 weeks. On Monday, I went to the Apple Store. Sold out, no idea when more would come in. I went back a few times, even first thing in the morning and finally learned that people were lining up at 5am every day and getting the few iPads coming in each day. I resigned myself to ordering online finally, having lost a week in the process.

The other day as I was checking my order status for the umpteenth time, I suddenly remembered my Lenten promise to God to offer up my disappointment at not having an iPad. With a sneaking suspicion, I checked again the expected date of shipment that Apple gave me: April 21. Holy Thursday. Delivery date: April 26. Easter Tuesday.

I had to laugh. Even if I’d forgotten my Lenten promise, it seems God had not. I really was giving up my new iPad for Lent.

So now, I’m waiting every day for the end of Lent to come, awaiting in anticipation of Easter glory for more than one reason. And as I start to see friends get their iPads, I feel that pang of envy. I have not yet mastered my feelings, but this is good practice.

I’m so glad God has a sense of humor. And I’m glad I have a patient, understanding and wonderful wife who puts up with my nonsense. I couldn’t be more blessed.

Update: I just received an email notifying me that my iPad has shipped early from Shenzen, China! And when will it arrive? Yep, at the end of Lent.

Making del.icio.us bookmarks useful with Evernote

I’ve been saving bookmarks using the Delicious bookmark service (now owned by Yahoo) for about 6 years now. If you’re not familiar with it, Delicious (which was originally at the unusual URL of del.icio.us), it is a web site that saves your bookmarks, which you can tag and comment on. One of the benefits of the site is that all users’ bookmarks are aggregated and you can find some good content there using various tags. Another benefit is that it makes the bookmarks universally available so that you can find them even when you’re at another computer other than your own.

The downside is the same as many online services: After you’ve laboriously entered your data you have to remember to go back and find it there later. How many times have I saved a link only to forget about it, Google it again later, and then try to save it to Delicious, only to be told that I’ve already saved it.

Another downside to Delicious is that it’s only a bookmark. Unlike Evernote, it does not save any portion of the page’s content, except what test you may put in the comments field. Evernote, on the other hand, will save a portion or the entirety of a webpage if you wish and it indexes all the words from the webpages, including any word in any image that’s also captured.

Even better, if you use the Chrome web browser and the Evernote extension for the browser, when you do a search in Google, it can also search your Evernote database for the same search terms and let you know if there are matching notes. This feature handily answers that downside I mentioned above about remembering to look in your database for what you’ve saved.

Google search with Evernote links

The final downside to Delicious is that various Internet sites have been reporting that Yahoo is either going to shutdown or sell Delicious, which means that 6 years worth of bookmarks could disappear at any time.

So now, I don’t save web pages to Delicious, but instead save them to Evernote. But what about all those old Delicious bookmarks, of which I have about 800 now? Delicious does provide a mechanism for exporting your bookmarks (Click on “Settings” and then “Export/Download Your Delicious Bookmarks”), which creates an HTML (i.e. web) page that it saves to your computer. Still, it’s not the most convenient format.

But what if you could import those bookmarks into Evernote, saving all your tags and the dates you created then and then adding images of the pages, taking advantage of Evernote’s capabilities. I got the following tip from the excellent online video series Screencasts Online in their Evernote episode. The tutorial about importing Delicious bookmarks into Evernote is in the members-only version of the show, but they do provide a free link to the Applescript used for importing at Veritrope.com. There are several options and ways to do this, but the simplest is to click the link at Veritrope to open the script in Script Editor on your Mac—this is a Mac-only tip, unfortunately for Windows users—and then click on “Run”. The script will ask you to locate the Delicious export file and then it will create a new notebook in Evernote called Delicious imports. For any site that it can’t load—because the site is down or the page doesn’t exist any more—it will add the link to an Evernote note called “List of URLS Returning Errors”. (I found that I could manually open some of those links later, but many of the older links were dead. This is the reason it’s better to save the pages in Evernote.)

If you have a lot of Delicious bookmarks, like I did, this process could take some time. It also requires some manual intervention at times, clicking buttons in dialog boxes. And Evernote spontaneously quit once or twice, but it re-opened on its own as the script moved on to the next bookmark.

So now, my bookmarks are saved, they’ve been pruned of defunct links, they’ve had the webpages added to the link, and now when I do a Google search, I’ll also be searching all my saved webpages in Evernote. Excellent.

My Must-Have iPhone Apps for New iPhone Owners

For my Catholic, Verizon-using friends who are just getting iPhones and wondering which apps to get, I have my list of must-have apps.

This list is by-no-means comprehensive. In fact, in the 3 years I’ve had, first, an iPod touch and then iPhones, iTunes tells me I’ve download about 200 300 apps, both free and paid. (Mostly free, I hope.) But these are many of the apps on my iPhone today. (Again, not all of them.)

The other point of note is that some of these apps are related to how *I* work and may or may not relate to how you work. Some of them also sync with applications on my Mac and/or interface with cloud-based web services.

All those disclaimers aside, here is my list of must-have iPhone apps with little, if any added commentary.

* Google Voice

* Calvetica (awesome and beautiful iCal replacement)

* Accuweather (best of the weather apps I’ve tried)

* Shazam (always be able to answer the question: What song is that?)

* Evernote (your second-brain; connects to web service)

* 1Password (awesomest Mac/PC/iOs password storage)

* Facebook

* Yelp

* Twitter (the official app)

* Foursquare

* Dropbox (Should be standard on every computer and smartphone)

* Dragon Dictation

* LogMeIn (expensive app, but great remote desktop access)

* Elements (text editor; stores files on Dropbox)

* Goodreader (move all kinds of files on and off iPhone and around iOs apps)

* Glympse (let people know where you are right now and keep them updated)

* Apple Remote (control iTunes on your Mac; the real AppleTV remote)

* Pandora

* CatholicTV (Daily Mass and more)

* iCatholic (monthly magazine)

* PilotParishFinder (for Boston folks)

* The Boston Pilot (Catholic news)

* Motion X GPS Drive (GPS navigation)

* CNN

* Boston.com

* AP Mobile

* Pro HDR (better high dynamic range photos than iPhone’s built-in HDR)

* AutoStitch (Easiest way to make panoramic photos)

* Photoshop Express (edit your photos)

* Flickr

* Camera + (Apple should buy the app and make it the default camera app)

* Angry Birds (buy it; see you in 6 months)

* Skee Ball (surprisingly fun arcade action)

* Flight Control (touch-based game)

* Game Center (Apple’s gaming social network)

* Words with Friends (Scrabble online)

* Kindle (you *can* read books on the iPhone)

* iBooks (prettier than Kindle, not as many books)

* iMDb (when you have to know who that actor is)

* Amazon.com (when you’re at Target and need to know if Amazon has it cheaper; the answer is always Yes)

* BofA (if you’re a Bank of America customer; very handy)

* Fandango (movie times and tickets)

* Banner (for sending messages to friends across the bar)

* Deliveries by JuneCloud (track your packages; works with Mac Dashboard widget)

* Kayak (get great deals on flights)

* Flightview (when is your Uncle Sal’s flight coming in?)

* Tripit (keep track of your and your friends’ trips)

* NetFlix (for watching streaming movies)

* QueueUp (a better interface for adding Netflix movies to your queue than Netflix)

* Skype (video calling with your backwards friends who can’t Facetime with their iPhone 4s)

That’s it. It could have been longer. It probably should have been shorter. And if you asked me to make the list next week, it would be different. But this list should help any new iPhone user get started. Have fun!

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