The Fairphone, World’s First Ethically Sourced Smartphone, Opens Pre-Sales To General Public | TechCrunch

The Fairphone, World’s First Ethically Sourced Smartphone, Opens Pre-Sales To General Public | TechCrunch

7 Tools To Improve The Way You Use Evernote

by Danny Stieben

For most people, the note-taking application of choice is Evernote. And Evernote users have good reasons for choosing the service for their note-taking needs — it’s very functional, highly accessible, and has add-on features that can take you beyond the default Evernote experience.

If you’re not already convinced, read why you should be using Evernote as your go-to place for remembering everything. In fact, there are a number of apps, plugins, and even pieces of hardware which can take advantage of Evernote, making the service even more beneficial for you.

Here are seven tools that hopefully will make you tap into the potential of this widely popular note-taking application.

EyeFi SD Card

If you like taking plenty of pictures with a camera that uses an SD card for storage, you’re in luck. The EyeFi SD card is a Wi-Fi enabled storage device which can detect when you’ve taken a new picture, and then upload the picture to your favorite service such as Flickr as well as Evernote. This is great if you use Evernote for everything, as it’ll be a quick and easy way to store your images in the cloud where you have access to them anywhere, as well as incorporate them into any other Evernote notes that you already have or make in the future. It is not free but is a worthy investment if you take a lot of pictures and are searching for a SD card.

EverClip

If you do a lot of browsing and research on your Android or iOS mobile device, you probably want to create a lot of clips from the pages that you look at. While Evernote is capable of doing this for you, it requires you to switch back to the app every time you wish to clip something. Instead, you may want to use an Android and iOS app called EverClip. This app lets you quickly and easily clip whatever you’d like, and send it straight to Evernote.

EverClip can also send everything that’s in your system clipboard to Evernote, so that you won’t lose anything that may have been important to you at some time or another. If EverClip saves more than you really want to keep, you can always delete notes — it’s just a good way of making sure that you won’t miss out on anything. With EverClip, you’ll have more time to complete your research. There are both free and paid versions of EverClip available for Android, but iOSusers can only use the paid version.

Skitch

Evernote is capable of a lot of different formatting styles, but it lacks annotation features. If you want to draw or annotate on images, you’ll need Skitch. While it is developed by the people behind Evernote, Skitch is a separate application for drawing on a blank note, as well as annotating on different images and PDFs. This brings along a more intuitive approach to taking notes, and it’s especially valuable for students who have to add little notes to lecture materials all the time. It’s free and available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.

StudyBlue

Students can get a lot done by using Evernote for school,by using it to save lecture notes, even audio recordings, and them organizing them for easy access. However, once you’ve written down all those notes, you’ll need to study them in order to ace your next test. There’s a service called StudyBlue which can help turn your notes into studying material. You can create flashcards, automatically create self-quizzes, track which terms or concepts you’re struggling with to focus on, set up study reminders, and a save feature to continue wherever you left off in your study session.

You can also use StudyBlue with your browser or on your mobile device, making it easy to study wherever you are. If you ever need to revisit your notes, you can go to your original notes on Evernote or to your StudyBlue backpack.

Source: www.makeuseof.com

Microsoft’s Cheap Shot At The iPad Actually Points Out Exactly Why Windows 8 Tabs Suck | TechCrunch

Microsoft’s Cheap Shot At The iPad Actually Points Out Exactly Why Windows 8 Tabs Suck | TechCrunch

Collection of Factoids

Top 10 places to visit in the Netherlands | Expatica The Netherlands

Top 10 places to visit in the Netherlands | Expatica The Netherlands

Project Muhoozi…!

Red Pepper Publications Closed!

The Monitor Newspaper Besieged!

You Too Can Benefit From The Power Of Email Signatures

by Saikat Basu A signature tells you something about a personality. Just as two people hardly write alike, they also sign differently. That’s how the “science” of Graphology came into being. But the digital age and the email signature have reduced the way you sign-off on a mail to a footnote. Just a typed name, and maybe a phone number or a Twitter handle – how utterly dull. Just as there is a way to write and format proper emails, there are also ways to end them well. A few years back, I showed you how to create custom signatures in Gmail with Firefox add-ons. Much of that information remains true. So do the six tips to get more out of your Gmail email signatures. The common thread is to not only create a stylistic impression, but also create a personal brand or promote a corporate one. So, without further ado, let’s look at how you can benefit from the power of email signatures. The Benefits of an Email Signature An email signature shows your openness to communicate. A well designed email signature conveys professionalism via your emails. An email signature is a promotion tool for a business, a website/blog, a book, or a social cause. An email signature with the relevant information is your short-biography. An email signature is also a social networking tool, like a business card. The Absolute Basics of an Email Signature A neat email signature says just one simple thing – you care about the way you communicate. So, a basic email signature without a touch of pretension should answer who you are, what you do, and how you can be contacted. I personally prefer an email signature that is minimal and does not hog space. Our attention spans being limited as it is, I feel you could start with these points… Your full name. Your contact information. Your personal or professional website/blog. Your business address (or any other you might want to include). Include links to your social network profiles only if they are important enough. Designing a Simple Text Email Signature Email signatures in simple text allow you to create clean lines of information without fancy graphics and logos. They are also consistent across devices and aren’t handicapped if image blockers are in place (as in Gmail or Outlook). Designing a simple text signature for your email takes some creative thought because you can only work with fonts, font sizes, symbols, spacing, and the colors available. The following image illustrates a neat text signature created in Gmail: This is a simple signature that took me just 3 minutes to set up in Gmail. All I used was the Verdana font and some spacing between the letters of my name to make it stand out. If it suits you, you can pick the colors of your company logo to design your text signature. Here’s another look at it with a placement of the address: To take your default Gmail signature beyond text, you can use the rich text editor in Gmail to spice it up with hyperlinks and images too. Take Your Gmail Signature beyond Simple Text The rich text signature editor in Gmail also helps you create HTML logos. You can insert small transparent logo icons for the services you want represented in your signature. An advanced Google Image Search will give you the location of such icons. Many services have media logos in different sizes, for instance: Twitter. Preferably, go for 16px by 16px sized transparent icons. Upload and position them appropriately. Here’s a sample signature I created quickly: Also note (as this Gmail support page says) – if you send mail “from” multiple addresses in Gmail, you can set a different signature for each address in the General tab of your settings. You can also use the power of canned responses to set up multiple email signatures in the same account. Create a Signature with LinkedIn LinkedIn has a rich signature generator that helps you populate your emails with HTML signatures. The signature generator comes with many hued themes to give your emails a stylized look. The LinkedIn signature generator gives you a JavaScript window as seen below. You can copy-paste the code into email clients which support HTML signatures. The signature generator does not say that it supports online email clients. But there is a simple workaround you can implement for Gmail. Simply copy all the text in your LinkedIn signature and paste it into a new compose window. Gmail automatically displays the signature with the LinkedIn theme chosen exactly preserved. You can save and re-use this signature as a canned response. Spice Up Your Emails with Third-Party Email Signature Tools WiseStamp WiseStamp is a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Thunderbird. The browser extension comes with many email signature templates which you can customize with your own information like a profile picture or logo, IM & social profiles. The singular feature of WiseStamp is that it gives you a choice of apps across the social web which you can connect to with your signature. For instance, you can add a Facebook email app to promote a Facebook page or a WordPress app to give your blog readership a boost. The free version gives you two signatures (e.g. personal and business), while the paid version with different plans comes with multiple signature support. Last year, Tina did a comprehensive review on WiseStamp. Since then new apps like Pinterest and Instagram have been introduced. Outlook.com is a webmail platform that is supported. One of the significant additions are the  Sidebar Apps. Sidebar Apps allows you to showcase your content alongside your emails. The sidebar placement allows you to promote your content on the right-hand side of your emails and potentially garner more eyeballs. Sidebar Apps are available for YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest for now. Sigwich Sigwich is another third-party app that helps you create an appealing signature. It works with email clients like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo, and on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Sigwich has a powerful signature engine that helps you build a creative signature easily. It has 6 different signature layouts that give you enough room to design a customized look. After touching up your signature, you can install the signature file and use it with your email client. Do note that you have to sign-up for a free account before you can click on download. The optional signature layouts are good, but I wasn’t too satisfied with Sigwich. One of the little bugs I found while using Sigwich was that the Image Cropper wasn’t working properly. I missed the ability to color the fonts. Going head-to-head, WiseStamp is far more powerful and easier to use. There are many do’s and don’ts for creating the perfect email signature. Using the right tool is perhaps number one on the list. Keeping it simple and slim should be at number two. The benefits of using an email signature are often intangible. But you never know where the good word is being carried to. What about you? Do you consistently use an email signature? Mention how it benefits you? How did you design it? If not, it’s about time you did. Source: www.makeuseof.com

Supporters of 'The Biggest Little Football Club in the World''

How To Protect Yourself From Online Services Shutting Down

by Nancy Messieh Google’s unfortunate decision to shut down its RSS reader service, Google Reader, is an important reminder of just how unreliable the cloud can be. When using free online services, and in some cases even some paid ones, you can never be too sure what is going to happen to your content, and whether or not the service will be available a year from now. Apps and services are bought, companies develop their strategy, and a lot of times, that means moving away from the one service or feature that you love the most. Google Reader’s popularity, and a pretty vociferous outcry following Google’s decision to pull the plug, has done little to convince the tech giant to go back on its decision, forcing people to look for alternatives. And Google is certainly not alone. Blogging platformPosterous similarly announced its shutdown last February, having been acquired by Twitter, and gave users two months to look for alternatives. The old saying goes, if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product, has never rung more true than at these times when a company decides it no longer needs you, or has been acquired by a bigger outfit. Here are a few ways you can at least prepare yourself for the inevitable. Only Choose Services That Provide a Backup Feature This is the golden rule of protecting yourself from an ultimate shutdown. Always choose services that provide a backup feature. Better yet, if you can, choose a service that allows you to backup your data to a common format that will likely be compatible with other services such as XML or CSV files. This way you can be sure your content can easily end up somewhere else. If you can also backup your content from the service to a readable format on your computer, that’s always great too. Either way, if a free cloud-based service doesn’t give its users the basic courtesy of exporting their own content, it’s difficult to trust them with your data. Perform Regular Backups Now that you know the service can provide you with backups, to stay on the safe side, perform regular backups, even if there’s been no talk from the service itself of an impending shutdown. With the finicky and unreliable of the Internet, you simply never know what could happen, so you might as well run a backup at least once a month, particularly if you’re extremely active on that service. Do you tend to be forgetful when it comes to backups? Set up a reminder on your calendar, phone or computer. Always Keep An Eye Out For Alternatives While you might love the service you’re using, it’s always good to keep an eye out for alternatives. You never know when you might have to make the switch, and rather than scramble to find an alternative that you might end up not liking, always be aware of the competition and their features so if you need to make a quick switch, you can do so while well informed of what to expect. Monitor Social Media Accounts Or Blogs For Announcements The chances are that if a site or service is shutting down, they’ll send you an email telling you as much, and doing so at least a few months in advance to give you a chance to find an alternative. At least that is what they should give you the courtesy of doing. Just in case you’ve got filters set up in your email inbox, or you just happen to not check your email too often, it might also be a good idea to monitor any available Twitter, Facebook or Google+ accounts, or alternatively an official blog, where you can expect to find announcements. This way you’ll always know about any worrying downtime, will get a better sense of how often the service is affected by glitches, or in the worst case scenario, when it is shutting down. Find Out More About The Developers If possible, try to find out more about the developers behind the app or service. Do they have a track record for launching services and abandoning them or shutting them down? It’s always good to know who you’re dealing with, and knowing a developer or company’s history can be a great way to get a bit of peace of mind. Crunchbase is a great resource for finding out everything you need to know about the companies you’re trusting with your data. Choose Services With Offline Features Services like Evernote offer you offline or desktop access to your content. Even Google, awful track record aside, provides Google Drive which you can access using a desktop app. Choosing services that come with desktop features or automatic sync are a great way to not have to worry about the very first rule – remembering to backup your content – since it’s all automated for you anyway. Choose a Paid Service If you’re really worried about losing access to your content, a paid service is another route to consider. With the Posterous shutdown,Posthaven came to the forefront as a viable alternative, promising it would never shut down, but offering users the service at the cost of $5 a month. makeuseof.com Stay Off The Cloud At the end of the day, if you’re really worried about your content, there’s no better tip than staying off the cloud. The minute you choose to use a third party cloud-based service, you’re putting your trust in someone else’s hands and that’s something you simply have to come to terms with. We certainly don’t recommend staying off the cloud – there’s a lot of convenience and handy features that come with cloud-based services, but if you really want to protect yourself – as the old adage goes – nothing beats abstinence. Do you have any tips on protect yourself from a service shutdown? Let us know in the comments. Source: