Technology Thursday
After a long lull, I seem to be ready to experiment again with some new gadgets. I think its a combination of feeling overwhelmed and unorganized, while at the same time having a tiny bit more energy now and then. Maybe the gadgets will help with the organization! Or maybe, more likely, they're just a procrastination tool. Whatever the reason, I thought I'd jot down a few notes about a couple of the tools I've been trying out recently.
Evernote: I don't recall where I came across this, but I've since learned that it was voted one of the five best note-taking tools at Lifehacker. Its creators pitch it as a backup brain:
Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Did we mention that it's free?
I created an account and have been trying it through the browser on my PC, my iPodtouch, and using the Evernote client on my Mac. I also set up a Twitter account for it, so I can send it tweets that will then be accessible to me everywhere. It's a cool concept and seems to have been implemented very well. However, it's still just a toy for me. It's not yet clear to me how best I can integrate it into my workflow.
VMWare Fusion: This has been a long time coming. I use a Mac as my primary computer at home -- I have both an iMac and a Macbook. But my work is very much a PC-focused place. So I have a PC as well to handle work stuff. The Intel-based Macs, however, can run Windows. That's been true for awhile, but I finally got around to setting up my Mac to be a dual-platform machine. I installed VMWare. Then I installed Windows and MS Office, hooked up to my work's VPN, and voila! It was about as easy I could reasonably expect it to be and I now have access to everything I need on Windows and all the elegance and loveliness of my Mac as well. Apart from work stuff there were only a couple of applications that I needed Windows for - it will be nice to be able to access them from my laptop going forward. As an aside, while I have long intellectually understood "virtualization", it is quite something to see it in action, I must say.
Garmin Nuvi: I don't actually have this one yet. We have a long car trip coming up and I decided it was finally time to get ourselves a GPS device. We usually do just fine between the two of us -- one of us checks our AAA maps and our printed google maps while the other one drives. But I've been in cars of friends who have modern GPS devices and seem pretty spiffy. A far cry from 5 years ago or so when I first took a gander at them. I asked my Twitter feed which one to get. People there, half-jokingly, told me to just get an iPhone. My Twitter feed is piped to Facebook, and my Facebook buddies recommended the Garmin. Since the iPhone incurs a rather steep monthly fee and the Garmin does not, the choice was easy. It should arrive early next week from Amazon Prime and we'll put it through its paces later in June on our trip. Perhaps I'll try to do a review after the trip.
I'm currently in love with Microsoft notepad. It's now my spare brain. All my working notes, ideas, to-do lists are finally in one place. But for you Mac-lovers that wouldn't work, I suppose...
Posted by: Katherine | Monday, June 01, 2009 at 12:02 PM