HerringLaw: Civil Rights & Discrimination Law in Iowa

Mac|Life Article ref. NoteTaking on iDevices

Helpful and excellent list:  Mac|Life App Showdown

[You'll find a link to an article I wrote on Note-Taking apps for the Mac at my Publications page.

How to get PDFs into your iPhone or iPad w/o iTunes

If you're at your computer with the 'home' iTunes library for your iPad/iPhone you won't have a problem: Open iTunes, go to File:  Add to Library, select on the computer the PDF you want in iBooks [on both iPad and iPhone or either] and it will be added to the device's iBooks library when you next sync.  

If you are not at your home iTunes Library, though, that's a problem [if you try to sync your non-home iTunes Library with your device, it'll overwrite what is on your device, so you probably don't want to do that].  But I figured it out and wanted to share the process:  

Get Dropbox [or SugarSync/Evernote etc. - some program that allows you to sync between your computers and iDevice, and install and use that [each program gives you several Gigs free space with mobile apps. from iTunes Store].  Put the PDF in the online 'folder' as you would normally, open the app on your mobile device and click on the item and it downloads to your device.  Then up in the top right corner of the mobile app [this is true for DB] you see an icon with an arrow, click that and it allows you to open in:  iBooks, EasyPDF and other PDF viewers/players on your device.   If you select iBooks it will save it in your iBooks PDF library to read later.  And you can email or print from iBooks.

This worked perfectly when I found an article online I liked, did a Print to PDF on my computer, put it in the DropBox then opened the DB app on my iPad and clicked on the PDF and it opened and by clicking on the icon, it saved to iBooks and opened in that for reading, emailing or printing.

Great Alternatives in Gift Giving

I did some tangible gifts of course but was thinking of some others that might be meaningful, both for me and the recipient [though the recipient much more I hope].  

One that I recently read about is TisBest which allows people to provide a gift to someone which lets them pick out which charity to give to.  TisBest has all sorts of charities, for animals, arts & culture, children faithbased, women's issues = loads of national and local categories.  I really do not like to have someone choose the charity to give to in my name and this seems to fill the desire to give and let the person who gets the gift truly enjoy it.

[there are other such organizations;  one excellent one which also helps research charities is 

CharityNavigator

Another which I am really high on is Kiva.org - it lets you lend to people all over the world and in all sorts of categories in $25 increments.  I started just a few years ago at $25 a crack and am up to a total loan amount so far of $875.  Of that all has been repaid or is in repayment.  I have a 0.00% default or delinquency rate!  Of course, my first rule is to lend to women.  Then I read about the project and the partner in the loan process.  It's amazing how even a little loan means so much to people and how far the US dollar can go in other countries.

Comedy Central Scoops News Organizations

It's pretty sickening when the 4th Estate is so incapable of raising a ruckus over important legislation that a comedic show of faux-news has to deal with the issue.  Fortunately, there is The Daily Show which can provide more news and wisdom in its 30 minutes than the major channels do in a full day [I've stopped watching ABC, CBS and NBC entirely].

In this case it was the 9/11 Responders bill and in two segments Daily Show presented the facts and demonstrated the hypocrisy of Republicans [who kept using procedural tactics and filibusters to stop an up-or-down majority vote from happening].  Those links are set forth below and well worth watching:

December 13th Daily Show

And the particularly devastating interview Jon Steward did with 4 of those Responders, with cancer, heart and other types of health issues none of us would wish on our worst enemy:  December 15th Daily Show

 

Kudos to The Daily Show and Shame on the filibustering Republicans and the News Media which abets them.

Research into Online/Cloud Storage Options [Mac]

I'm finalizing my research into cloud/online storage and thought I'd share some resources I found.  Thinking about it a bit, I've realized I want to be able to access information on my iPhone/iPad as well as laptop and that mainly limits the reviews to Dropbox, SugarSync and Evernote.  There are of course other options but I've already spent loads of time researching and not actually pulling the trigger, so I'm just going to make a decision as best possible.  The following links are some of the helpful bits of information. [ You can find them & more by ‘googling’ ‘comparison’ and then the names of the services you are interested in]

First, www.toptenreviews.com has loads of comparisons of the 'top ten' in numerous categories, including online backups, online storage etc.  Worth checking there for comparison charts.

Another review list that is pretty good and is certainly exhaustive is the tomuse.com list

I have been using Dropbox's 2G free and SugarSync 5GB free and have JungleDisk for some laptop backups and Evernote [but just haven't gotten into that].   As I did the comparison research I realized that one thing I do like about SugarSync over DropBox is that it syncs the information without changing the file structure on the computer.  DB puts the items inside a DB folder in your user folder;  SS allows you to select and pull in what you want to sync.  For the purpose of ease of syncing without messing with the underlying organization structure of my computer, I’ll probably keep the free DB for ease of use and transferring items to others and get SugarSync paid to sync/online backup those files I want access to no matter where I am.

[I also use Sharetool to ‘burrow back’ to my office computer if I’m away, which means I don’t need everything to sync, just those items I want easy access to regardless of how i do it.]

 

Cutting down on some of the clutter in our lives

The end of a year is a good time to take stock and my project this month is to cut down on as much of the 'stuff' that comes to me that I really don't need or want.  For instance. a year or two ago I signed up with Catalog Choice .  It allowed me to dramatically reduce the number of catalogs I get, which was helpful also for the senders since I rarely bought anything from them anyway.

This week I'm going through my email inboxes and where I can 'unsubscribe' from email missives, lists or whatever, I'm doing that.  I think of it as a way to cut down on one of the stressors of our lives these days, constant incoming missiles.  If I want to restart later, fine, but it'll be because I want or need the message.  I'm feeling better already.