WanderNote Launches, Seeks Pioneers
January 8, 2010
Once I found Evernote on my Android to be an excellent notebook, I started thinking about publishing some of the notes and snapshots I take with it. Publishing made me think of WordPress.
WanderNote is a web service for publishing… you guessed it, content from Evernote. Here’s my WanderNote blog. And here’s the main WanderNote About page, with content also provided by me.
Some of that content is an invitation to contact me about becoming one of the elite band of WanderNote Pioneers. Take a look, have a think, let me know if you want to get in to this early beta.
Happy Nexus One Day
January 5, 2010
If you don’t already know that the Nexus One was launched today, you’re probably not interested in the new Android phone anyway. If you are interested, you may well have seen the 24 month cost of ownership comparison between the N1, the iPhone 3GS, and a couple of other smartphones. It makes the N1 look like a pretty reasonable deal.
Just three comments:
- The comparison was at BillShrink. It seems strange that readers of a blog styling itself a savings tool are interested in throwing thousands of dollars at a phone.
- A URL of intent: http://www.google.com/phone. Yes this is the Google phone – or at least, the first Google phone.
- By all means waste your time trying to get the N1 (emphasis on the singular) that TechCrunch is giving away. It is mine, my Precious, and I am willing to bite fingers off and fall into volcanoes for it.
Month in Montgomery County, MD
January 3, 2010
It was one month ago today that we closed on the house in Silver Spring, or, to be more specific, Wheaton. It’s been a good month, because we all like the house, those of us with jobs or schools like them, and there’s a lot of fun to be had locally.
For example, we’ve enjoyed Wheaton Regional Park. The conservatories have been provided particularly welcome refuge from the cold, and the model train exhibit has made the conservatories even more fun, especially for Max, our 3yo. By the way, both the train exhibit and the Garden of Lights have been extended until Jan 10 to make up for the days lost in the snowstorm.
There seem to be a lot of places to eat cheaply and well round here. Yelp has led us to several of them, most recently to New Kam Fong, where we had dim sum yesterday lunchtime.
I see that there are several interesting-looking local blogs, including Good Eatin’ in Wheaton (overdue for a visit to NKF) and Just Up the Pike. Dan Reed, author of the latter, provided a review of 2009 round here, which I read although/because I wasn’t here for most of the year.
Photo Prints, From Flickr and Elsewhere
January 3, 2010
Around the holidays, and a few other times I year, I want to have some photos on paper as well as on the web. On the web mainly means my Flickr photostream. I’ve used various services (Shutterfly, Snapfish, etc.) for printing, with no clear winner emerging.
More recently, I used the Order Prints button that I see above each of my photos at Flickr. I had no complaints about the quality, the price, or the few days wait before the prints arrived.
Then, just before the 2009 holiday season, Flickr partnered with Snapfish. It’s perhaps for that reason that square prints are no longer available. That’s bad news since, as you can see, I like to do the occasional crop to square. Another difference came from my need to get prints quickly.
The need for speed pushed me toward a Flickr/Snapfish/Walgreens print. Snapfish partners with retailers such as Walgreens on the output (prints) end, just as it partners with Flickr on the input (jpgs) end. So I could pick up prints at a reasonably close Walgreens.
The experience with Snapgreens wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. I was supposed to get an email when my prints were ready to pick up, but I never did. So I called the store to check, then went to get the prints, and they were fine. They ended up costing a few bucks, rather as if I’d had them mailed rather than driven myself to a store to get them, but that didn’t seem too bad.
On the other hand, I’m sure that there are better paths to printing than Flickr/Snapfish/Walgreens. For example, I drove past a CVS or three (or more) on my way to the Walgreens, and I could have just put the jpgs on a USB, stopped in at CVS, and printed the photos. The prints might well have turned out just as well – I didn’t do the experiment.
Next time I need photos printed, I think that Ritz Camera will get my business. They have a location a few miles away, and it shares a parking lot with the Trader Joe’s nearest me. I’ve had good service from other Ritz locations in the past. I also admire Ritz as a specialist amidst more generalist big-box (Best Buy) and big-URL (Amazon) competitors.
And Ritz do square prints. To be more specific, 6×6 prints, for which I already have some inexpensive frames from IKEA.
More when I actually travel the Ritz Road…
Platlication
January 2, 2010
Platlication is a new word, and a new blog. The word combines platform and application. Think Twitter as an example. It’s an application, in that you can go to Twitter.com, and tweet and follow away. Twitter is also a platform, in that applications can be built on it.
