Eye Fi With My Little Eye

We have a problem in our house. We saved up money 2 years ago to by a nice DSLR camera. It was bottom of the line but still took really cool pictures. We were both interested in blogging at the time so we wanted a camera that could take good pictures. While we never started blogging, we would go on photo shoots and upload the pictures to our computer and share them on Facebook. Soon after that Kara got a new phone and Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were all super easy. When posting images to social media was that easy, getting pictures any other way was a hassle. Our camera began to gather dust as it sat being unused. We now both have new phones so I thought it would be time to see if we could get our SLR back into action!

I did some research and found the Eye-Fi Mobi. I ordered it on Amazon and have been waiting for it to come in the mail. I woke up this morning and stood in the cold while I waited for our office to open up so I could get my packages. The card came along with a wireless usb dongle for my Raspberry Pi (more on the later).

Happy Valentines Day to My DSLR!

What the Eye-Fi does is it creates a custom wifi link between the phone and the camera. I downloaded an app onto my phone (works on a tablet too) and it syncs with card in the camera. It takes about 30 sec from when I take the picture before it shows up on the phone. The pictures are available to all of the social media apps and I can even push them to my Google Drive and they are available for this blog. There is a version of the card that will work with a computer using the wifi as well if you dont have a smart phone. I didn't get that one because it was $100 and I really only needed it to work with mobile. I got mine for $44 on Amazon. At first I balked at the price since that is the price of a 64GB regular SD card. Then I realized that really this was saving me from having a really expensive shelf ornament/paper weight.

If you are using a newer DSLR there is a setting in the camera itself to enable to wifi on the card. Took me a few minutes to figure that out. --jb

3 Tools That Keep You Getting Things Done

As you may have gathered productivity is pretty high on my list. Because of my Make2014 initiative, I don't want to mess around with things that will get in the way of productivity. I removed all of the games on my phone because I am easily addicted they. I just have to beat everything I play and most mobile games are designed to be almost unbeatable without in app purchases and to me that is more of a challenge. So i waste away playing Temple Run trying to get enough gold to purchase something that most people pay the 5 bucks to get. However I have been experimenting with some new apps and tools.

I am not very good at writing things down but I am even worse about looking at what I wrote down. I do check my phone throughout the day as I get messages and things. Since I check my phone a lot, I have been using Google Keep on my home screen. I have a widget with today's todo list. It takes up a big chunk of my screen but I have found that I have been much more diligent about doing the things on my list. Google Keep has a limited feature set and that it on purpose. It is to keep you from spending too much time fiddling with your lists so you can have more time to do the things on them. I was turned off at first by the simplicity. I thought, this is Google they should have these exportable in a million different formats, be able to be shared between different people, and have tons of customization. They kept it simple and I am now content that simple is better.

If ADD is your problem then the Pomodoro app for you. Well, really there are dozens of apps that basically do the same thing. They set a timer for 25 minutes in which you are to focus on a single task and on that task only. If an interruption happens you write it down and deal with it later. After your 25 min are up you take 5 minutes to deal with distractions, go to the bathroom, or grab a snack and then you are back to 25 minutes of complete focus. You might think that working for 30 minutes casually would equal out to 25 minutes with a 5 minute break but it doesn't. The problem with allowing interruptions is that they cause a context switch in which we need to completely stop thinking about one thing and think about another. Then we have to switch back to the thing we were thinking about. For simple tasks this is not usually a problem. I can context switch when I am doing the dishes. But if you are working on anything that requires concentration minimizing context switches will make you much more productive. There is more to the Pomodoro Technique so check it out.

Often come across articles that I want to read but don't have the time to right away. I may be in the middle of a pomodoro and can't be interrupted.In the past I would bookmark things in Google Chrome and having my bookmarks sync across my Google accounts has been really nice. But recently I have been using pocket. Pocket is a bookmarking app that has the look and feel of Pinterest but without the hundreds of people looking at your stuff like guests snooping through your house while you are away. This list is just for you. It organizes them really well with a picture and and the start of the article. It is available on the web and as an app so you can have it at work and on the go. Give it a try.

Sorry for the title. I promised myself I would never use the ubiquitous enumerated list to grab people's attention. It is just too tempting.

Further reading

Scott Hanselman on Productivity

Agile Results