Reading Time: 2 minOver the past decade, Google has released a number of “dud” products, but some of those products lead to awesome additions in other ways. The oldest example is with Google Wave, the “email replacement” collaboration tool. It never took off and is long dead, but brought the amazing real-time “everybody type at the same time […]
Technology
Brand loyalty is a bad thing
Reading Time: 3 minOver the years I’ve worked hard to keep my digital life in a place where I can freely move from device to device without worrying about being too locked in to one system. Lifehacker wrote an article that summed it up perfectly: Brand loyalty is for suckers. You tend to hear this most often with […]
Where desktop computers still win
Reading Time: 3 minI was going through some old blog posts a few days ago and realized that I purchased my current home desktop computer more than seven years ago and it’s still running strong. I credit that largely to the fact that it’s a desktop with room for expansion, and not a laptop where things are quite […]
Playing with the Acer Chromebook R13
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve been a big fan of Google Chromebooks since they first came out. I first started playing with them more than six years ago and they’ve only gotten better since then. Chromebooks even recently started outselling Mac laptops, though that’s largely due to their much lower cost. I’ve had a handful of Chromebooks over the […]
Adding a Google Home to the mix
Reading Time: 2 minOne toy on my Christmas list this year was to pick up a “Google Home”, Google’s competitor to Amazon’s Echo. If you’re not familiar with Google Home, here is a promo video that Google produced a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KpLHdAURGo At the end of the day, Google Home is very similar to the Echo. The […]
Android’s new “live wallpapers” are quite smart
Reading Time: 2 minGoogle first introduced the concept of “live wallpaper” on Android on version 2.1 back in 2009. It was a cute idea, but didn’t work especially well. Back then, the “live” part of the wallpapers often required that you touch them. There are already plenty of other touch points on a phone, so adding that in […]
Google Keep is the best solution for quick notes
Reading Time: 3 minIt’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Asana for task management. For keeping up with projects, assignees, timelines and notes, Asana is tough to beat. That said, all of us at GreenMellen keep a small to-do list on the side for quick thoughts and notes. I’ve bounced around to a few different solutions […]
Uptime monitors with a delay are very useful
Reading Time: 3 minA few years ago, I set out to find a good service to monitor uptime on all of the websites we manage (it varies, up to around 150 of them at any given time). It initially came down to two leading contenders: Pingdom – Undoubtedly the best, but it would have cost us around $249/mo. […]
Burst mode on Android finally works like iOS
Reading Time: 3 minI mentioned a few days ago that I was jealous of one iPhone feature; iMessage. I think Apple is really mishandling it by not making it available on other devices, but if you’re an iPhone user it’s a great piece of software. Over the years, Android has typically been the first to develop new features […]
MightyText vs Pushbullet vs Hangouts
Reading Time: 2 minMany of you know that I’m a huge fan of Android, as I feel that it bests iPhone in many ways. One place that it’s lacking, however, is in synergy of text messaging across devices. Apple’s iMessage has downsides, but the way it syncs between phone and computer is quite slick. For years I used […]