Skip to main content

Favorite Things: May 2018 Edition

New series of monthly (my intentions at least) things I'm really enjoying...

Ride Report

Ride Report is an app which uses your phone's location data to automatically keep track of your bike rides.  For each ride it asks you a simple survey "How was your ride."  After collecting enough survey data from rides Ride Report can generate a map showing the worst and best rides for a city.  Some cities are even using this data to make better transportation decisions.  

I'm not sure if this app will work at a smaller scale for a city like The Dalles, but the idea is very cool.  The more people the use it the more helpful it will be.  At this point I've only ever said my rides were great and being the only user in town this is very unscientific. I highly recommend using this app for fun and better city planning or at least better informed fellow cyclists.

Libby

Libby is an app which allows you to borrow ebooks through your local library.  For some reason it is much easier for me to get through a book quickly if I have it as an ebook on my phone.  Libby combines the convenience of ebooks with the price of the public library (AKA free).  The ereader itself has a different interface but is pretty comparable to Google Play Books and Kindle in my opinion.  

 There are a few drawbacks to getting your books this way however.  Popular new books have very long wait times.  If you place a hold on a hot new piece of fiction you might have to wait for six months plus.  Also, the duration of the loan is shorter than a normal book from the library.  Only 2 weeks.  So if you're like me and it takes you a while to work your way through a novel this might not always work for you or you'll have to be interrupted in the middle of your story (this happened to me while reading Carrie).  

 If you use a public library (or at least The Wasco County Library) and have a device to read ebooks Libby is wealth worth trying out.

Good Fruit Grower

This article and video interview of my cousin Nick Anderson reminds me of how blessed I was to grow up on a farm.  Having a family life that requires you to learn how to work and parents who teach you how to have fun doing it is one of the greatest gifts a child can have in my mind.  I can't really take my kids to work with me so this one of those virtues I'll have to pass on to my kids some other way.  



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If you write a blog and never post it to Facebook will anybody read it?

My guess is no...  Let's test the hypothesis! Facebook and similar "social" feeds feel so bad to my soul.  I find them as a total waste of time and it's time to really really delete these things once and for all.  I've been hanging onto Instagram as I find it much less toxic.  Pictures often give off a more positive vibe than your aunts reshare of politically slanted news or your neighbor's cousin's wall of text complaining about how there is not Olive Garden within 100 miles of their house.  However, that doesn't change the fact that I am the product being sold on this Instagram.  Algorithms are being worked out to find just the right number of post to leave in between advertisements for me to feel most engaged and most likely to click.  Which news parody sites or webcomics I should like next are also constantly being updated and reconfigured based on my behaviour.  Facebook and its subsidiaries are not the only companies with this massive ...
2 comments
Read more

Writing Goals

  Recently I came to the conclusion that I should write more often.  That is, I believe, I should start to consider myself a "writer."  That's the main reason there's been a bit of an increase in publishing to this blog (going from zero over the past few years to a couple times a month is a pretty huge jump).     I, like most humans, have thoughts and opinions which are a product of the times and places in which I live.  I figure I can do my part for future historians and write a few of them down.  I also just might have enough creative juice to pump out a story or two. This blog   I'd like to post to this blog at least once a week from now on, or at a minimum once a month.  Really, anything at all would be better than what I've been doing.  I'll mainly write about my life, family, interests, and opinions about, current events and local and state politics (I'll try to steer clear of national issues for my own sanity).  Pretty...
2 comments
Read more

Install ownCloud 2.0 on Ubuntu Server.

    I recently stumbled upon a tutorial on how to  setup ownCloud on a Debian machine .  I had actually never heard of ownCloud until reading this tutorial but now it is one of the projects I am most excited about.  ownCloud is an open source project that allows you to use your own server to store files, songs and do a bunch of other stuff.  It is similar to the many cloud services available on the web except it never leaves your "custody."     One very easy way to start using ownCloud is to install ownCloud 1.1 from the Ubuntu repository by running:  $ sudo apt-get install owncloud     However, ownCloud 1.1 is pretty boring compared to the super sexiness of ownCloud 2.0 in my opinion.  So if you are cool with drab old 1.1 then go ahead and just apt-get it.  But if you want the sexiness of 2.0 on your Ubuntu server please follow along... Getting ownCloud 2 up and running! Log into your Ubuntu server and install...
Post a Comment
Read more