Thursday, May 24, 2012

Schwab Paperless

me: I'd like to signup for paperless statements
Schwab: We actually can't yet, we're working on it
me: Can I just opt-out of statements?
Schwab: No
me: Can I send statements to a PO Box?
Schwab: Yes
me: So if I can find someone who runs a PO Box/shredder service
I can finally be done with your statements?
Schwab: Hm. I guess so.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Android Apps

New phone - moving the apps I care about over to it. Here's my list - what's yours?

Installed
Pocket (Read It Later) - lets you add any webpage or link to a queue to be read later, even if you aren't connected. Great for a subway or plane ride, and the equivalent of letting you open infinite tabs in the browser.

NewsRob - offline RSS reader tied to Google Reader. I'm open to recommendations for something better, the management features for this are so-so and the reading is meh.

Yelp

Draw Some - I love Pictionary.

Dropbox - free 2gb of synced files.

Google Drive - Google Docs, Office documents, and free 5gb of synced files.

My Tracks - I track my biking with it.

Play Music - streams music you've uploaded to Google Music for free over the web. Good for really long podcasts that would eat up too much SD Card space. Useless in bad connectivity areas.

Pandora - try creating a station with the Gladiator Soundtrack as the seed.

Weather Underground - better weather app

Wifi Analyzer - lets you see all the wifi points in your building, what channels they're on. I once used this to find a friend's apartment when I was lost in their building, using their wifi name like a homing beacon.



Not Installed
I specifically don't install several apps:

Google+ - no one uses this, and it's over 30mb.

Facebook - the official Android Facebook app is terrible. It's slow, it has very few features, it breaks all the time, it doesn't support basic things like tagging friends - why would I use it? I know why it's terrible and the short version is the developers at Facebook are very proud of it, but no one should endure it.

QuickOffice/other Office apps - Google Docs (renamed Google Drive) can now edit Office style files, so there's no need for another app for this

Skype - this app sounds useful but in my experience it's just the thing I wish I hadn't accidentally opened.