Tuesday, March 24, 2015

How to backup

Every once in a while I have a friend or family member that asks me if I know how and would be willing to retrieve files off their hard drive that just crashed. While it is possible, it's very time consuming and almost never recovers the files that they actually want back. While a good external hard drive is probably the easiest solution (especially if you have a tool such as Time Machine for Mac or something comparable for Windows) there are other more elegant and free solutions. The main deciding factor is the media type.


I want all my files to be saved locally so that I can access them while offline. Using Google Drive and Dropbox is the ideal solution. Instead of putting school assignments into the Documents folder on my Mac, I save them to a Documents folder inside my Google Drive folder. Since Google drive syncs all content to the cloud it's always backed up.  I prefer google drive to dropbox simply because it has more space (15GB instead of 2GB). With 15 GB of free storage, as long as it's just documents, I always have room and collaboration/sharing is already integrated.


For those with Android, Google+ is a great app that has auto backup and unlimited storage. Any pictures uploaded through the app will not count against your 15GB so long as they are 2048px. Pictures can be set to private by default which is great considering Google+ is a social platform. You can view and download them any time via the app or your Google Plus page. As an extra your photos are automatically enhanced using Google's photo algorithms that they revealed last year at Google IO and duplicates are merged into fun gifs known as Auto Awesome.

For those with tons of pics that just want a place to dump them all at full res, check out Flickr. Signing up gives you 1TB of free photo storage. Make sure that any uploads are marked as private as that may not be default.


Google comes to the rescue again with Google Play music. You can now as of Feb 26, 2015 upload 50,000 songs to your own personal music library. Here are some of the extra perks for uploading to the cloud:
1) Stream using the Google play mobile app, chrome extension, browser or other 3rd party apps such as "Gear for Google Play and YouTube" 
2) Automatic organizing that happens upon upload. Your music is analyzed much like the way Shazam works and metadata is automatically added so that your content is organized and can be searched by album, artist, and anything else. 
3) Google play often gives away free top name albums as promotional items that can added to your library with just a click.


For home movies, Flickr may be a good choice. For movies, you're probably best getting a hard drive and setting up a plex server.

So before you think about getting a hard drive consider what you're really trying to do. It may be easier to use the cloud. What kinds of data do you need to backup? Is there any great service you know of that I should try out?

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Rasperry pi.

In honor of the recent Pi day, I'll write about my neglected Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 mini computer. If you kept it running all year it would use about $2 of electricity. Because it uses an ARM processor it's operating system capabilities are mostly limited to Linux. While I have no problem with Linux, this product falls under the cool, but not so useful category. I have attempted on many occasions to try and find a use for it, but each time i come back to the fact that either 1) I already have a fully fledged Ubuntu server running out of my house which can do this better or 2) it would cost a lot more money to buy all the extra equipment need to make something like a Power cat feeder.

The benefits of the Raspberry Pi are that it's cheap and portable. To build anything else means I would be better off doing it with something else.

Until I think of an idea, here's to hoping my Pi won't go on (unused) forever.

I know there are a lot of ideas online, but what are some of yours? What would you build with a Raspberry Pi if you could?

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Myo Arbmand...4 sale

For Christmas I decided that I wanted a Myo Armband. I was very excited about this product at the time and was even willing to pre-order. About two months later, right as i was in fact going to cancel my preorder and exchange my gift to myself for something else I could buy right then, I got an email saying that my Myo Armband had shipped and my credit card was about to be charged.

A few days later I got the gadget and immediately tried it on. Fortunately there was enough battery to setup and try out my armband on a few applications including Netflix and VLC. I was impressed with how quickly it recognized some gestures. Then i soon realized, those were the only gestures I could get it to recognize. After some more tuning and training i was able to consistently fast forward, rewind, pause and do some other basic controls using just my arm. WOW! It's fun, and it's easy to set up and get going. Is it worth $200 dollars to me? Not really.

How often do you purchase things that are cool, but not that useful? What do you end up doing with them? Leave a comment below.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Timesheet by Tengent LLC

This week I'm writing about the application I'm currently in the process of developing.
Timesheet is an app that does exactly what you might think. It keeps track of time through an easy to use mobile app. iOS is more or less finished and Android is actively being developed. It was important to me to develop the app with the idea that Managers want to keep track of their employees. Therefore Employees can link to Managers who can then be alerted when employees clock in, out, leave notes, or have shifts flagged. With just a click employees can export their timecard as a .csv file. Both apps will work the same way and an employee or manager need only use the one app.

The app has four screens. Punch, History, Export, and Settings.

This is where the user starts and ends a shift. The interface is flexible enough to consider that employees may take breaks during the day, but will want to resume the shift from where they left off. They can also do things like add notes or event titles.

This allows the user to drill down into each Punch. It starts off grouped by pay periods, then shows each shift. Within each shift the user can view each punch and finally get a summary page.

After the Employee has linked with a Manager they can select a date range and export all the shifts found within that date range. By hitting SUBMIT an email draft appears with an attached .csv file and a email body explaining the purpose of the email as well as a total time calculated. All the user has to do is click send and the timecard is sent to whatever email address the Manager has chosen.

Minimal setup is required and it takes place on the Settings page. Users fill in their name, phone number and User type (Employee or Manager). Each user is verified by having a text message sent to their phone. When the click the link in the message, their account setup is completed and they can continue using the app.

Other options are specific to the User type. For example:
Employees can ask to be reminded when the period is about to end to submit their timecard. Managers can receive an alert when the employee punches in for the first time that day.

Timesheet hopes to alleviate the problem some business owners face when keeping track of time for their employees. Some use paper and pencil. Some use a spreadsheet. These methods still require more time and don't offer the security and analysis available through my app.

You can look forward to both iOS and Android apps being published early this summer.