Simon Hammond Blog

I’ve been doing this thing for a while now where I take rough notes with my mobile camera.  Whiteboards, opening hours and witty notices are prime targets for my 5 megapixel N80.  I thought this was advanced but geeky.  I now realise I was a bumbling amateur.  Have the information doesn’t mean I get easily find it.

This changed when I got to try Evernote this morning.  It feels a bit like Picasa for notes, enabling you to enter in a stream of tagged notes which can also be sorted into notebooks.  The kicker is that it can search images for likely matches of search terms and it’s extremely reliable, even for low quality mobile pics and handwriting.

This makes it a (slightly clunky) photographic memory and threatens the loose scraps of paper littering my workspace. I don’t have to file my notes; Evernote will throw up likely matches as I type into the search box.

Check the video below to see it in action:

I hooked it up to ShoZu which can automatically mail photos to Evernote in the background straight after taking them (flat-rate data plan essential).   Snap, forget and search.

I have 20 invites if you want to give it a spin.

Tags: review by si
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Just doing my bit to highlight dumbass, blognorant dealings of a shady music festival, namely Surface Unsigned.  Check the backstory in you are interested.

In the bigger picture, still waiting the day when getting signed is not the defining moment of a band’s success…

Tags: unfiled by si
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I love Google Reader for managing and reading my feeds but public sharing leaves something to be desired. I use the share button because it’s right there and I know I’ll be able to find it later. But Google Clippings is kinda clunky. It truncates titles. It indents. Consequently, I could make it almost, but not quite, fit it with the rest of my front page.

I was hoping that latest extension to Reader might address this but it turns out to be a poor imitation of Tumblr, probably trying to ape Facebook sharing with three spoonfuls of cuteness.  The shared items page at the unsnappy http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12953360243211055664 comes in four flavours: ‘Default’, ‘Ice -cream’, ‘Ninjas’ or ‘Sea’. Its saving grace is that it includes an RSS feed.

Enter Yahoo! Pipes, herein referred to simply as Pipes.  I had another peep at Pipes the other day. It’s a seriously fun construction set for a web geek originally based on mashing up RSS feeds but has now expanded out a little more from the stereotypical superfeed usage.

The useful new feature of interest is serialized PHP output renderer. This means I can suck data through Pipes, process and filter it, then pull it into my own page and present it how I like, i.e. I can fix the problem of Google’s clunky presentation of shared items.

That’s my shared items displayed how I like on my site.

Right now, I’m just displaying headlines but I can see myself knocking up simonhammond.com/shared for my Reader-shared stuff at my very next recreational coding break.

Tags: hacking, review, self-referential by si
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