Thursday, March 27, 2014

Thing #17--Connecting to Community

As you can see, I'm jumping around and not doing the Things in order.  I've never been good at lists. 

Thing #17 is about using apps that have to do with the local community.  Not being very app savvy, I don't know of any that pertain to the Bemidji area.  I'm sure they exist, I just haven't found them yet.  I decided to try one called Going Out.  It's one the Star Tribune put out.  It will tell you about events and places to dine out in the Twin Cities area.  I'm not very familiar with the Cities so I thought this would be a good opportunity to see what's there. 

Many theater and show options.  I knew there were a lot of theaters in the Cities, but I didn't know there were that many.  I also looked at the educational options like the art museums and the Science Museum.  The Science Museum has the Ultimate Dinosaurs exhibit right now.  My husband and I might have to check that out.  We never did grow out of our love of dinosaurs.  For some reason, when I tried to look up movies, it didn't want to tell me about those.  Perhaps because it's a "locater app," so it gathers info based on your location and I was no where near those movie theaters.  I don't know.  I'll have to try it again to see if it works better at another time.

One app that I haven't tried out yet, but hope to is Highlights of the Superior Hiking Trail.  Looks too useful to pass up, especially with how much time we like to spend along Lake Superior.



 
 

 

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Thing #9--Taking and Editing Photos

As you can tell from the title of this post, in this Thing I was to experiment with photos.  Rather fun.  I decided to try out Color Splurge.  This app allows you to play with the coloring of your photos.  If you're into photo editing this could be a fun app to have.  You can take and edit a photo using this app or upload one you have saved on your device or social media page.

I decided to upload a couple from my Facebook page.  This wasn't too hard.  The app took awhile to think about it, but it wasn't so long that it was inconvenient.  The photo is uploaded in black and white.  What you can do is select the rainbow color icon and use that to paint the original color back on the photo or you can select one color to paint on.  What is nice is you have many different shades to choose from, similar to many photo editing and drawing programs you may have on your desktop.  You also can change the size of your "paintbrush."  However, your paintbrush is your finger.  It's hard to do any minute detailing on your picture.  Also, the undo icon will undo all of your work, not just your most recent action.  I found that super annoying.  I had to start over several times.  I found it easier to select the B&W icon, paint over my mistake, and then try again with the color.

In the first photo I decided to just color my dress and leave the rest black and white.  This where I discovered that the undo button is over zealous and had to recolor many times. 



The second is a pitcher plant I photographed (along with a hapless ant) last summer at the Big Bog Rec Area.  I recolored the plant and left the background black and white. 



I don't think this will take the place of my usual photo editor, but if I wanted to play with my pictures on the go, this is an OK substitute.

Color Splurge
 

Celebrating 10 Things!

Just had to post the badge for completing 10 Things.  Almost half way through!

 

Monday, March 17, 2014

Thing #12--Books, Books and More Books

This Thing is by far my favorite Thing.  Out of the ones that I've tried anyway.  In the previous post for Thing #11 I believe I mentioned I'm not a huge ebook user.  It's true, I'm not.  I prefer paper books.  But in this Thing I discovered Wattpad.  While it hasn't converted me, it sure is a lot of fun.

Wattpad is a site where you can read books for free.  They have classics from Project Gutenberg and books that members have written.  Or are in the process of writing.  The latter I discovered to my chagrin while reading my first book.

There are many genres to look through.  I tried historical fiction first.  After I read the summaries of the first few, I changed my mind.  A little too graphic for my tastes.  After some searching, I found that a lot of the books are quite graphic.  So I chose a genre at random and ended up with "werewolf."  Well, if we're going weird, might as well go all the way.  It wasn't that great of a story.  Rather along the lines of fan fiction.  And the author didn't get werewolves right (but she does warn you about that at the beginning of the story).  My husband poked a little bit of fun at me while I was reading it.  Mostly because I kept reading it even though it was kind of silly.  But I felt like I should finish it since I started it.  However, I later found out the author was still writing it and it wasn't complete yet.  I had to wait two weeks for the end of the story.  How disappointing.

That same scenario played out another two times before I figured out how to limit my search to only completed books.  That backfired on me, too.  The first completed book I found ended in a cliff-hanger.  And the sequel hasn't been written yet.  Sometimes you just can't win. 

I've had lots of fun exploring this app.  I love to try out new books and authors and this is a great place to do that.  Two downsides to this app is that since it is rather interactive between the authors and the readers, the authors will many times post comments after adding a chapter to their work.  This can be interesting while reading a book that's currently being written, it can be a little distracting later on.  The other is at least half the stories I looked through have not been edited.  If you find misspellings and poor grammar as distracting as I do, many stories will be ruined for you.  Which is sad.       


Monday, March 10, 2014

Thing #11--Library and Reference

For this thing I explored a couple of the apps available at my library.  I'm not a huge ebook user so this was a good chance for me to get a little more experience with what we have to offer.

The first one I tried (or re-tried) was Zinio.  This is a great place to read magazines on your tablet or PC.  For free.  I was super excited when we first got this app.  I love magazines, but I don't like to pay the increasingly high prices for them at the store.  My enthusiasm diminished somewhat after playing around with it.  It is not a very intuitive app to use, so I haven't done much with it for a couple months.  I decided to give it another try. 

What makes this app a little frustrating to use is that you need to set up two account, one at the library's page and another in Zinio.  After that, you need to remember to first search and check out your magazine at the library's page then go to the Zinio app to download and read it.  If you forget and search for it in Zinio, it will want to charge you for it.  It took me awhile to get the hang of it.  After playing around with it and getting everything figured out, I really like it.  It's just frustrating to learn.

Also, I couldn't get any magazines to download to my Kindle Fire or a co-worker's Kindle Fire.  I don't know why.  But it worked great on the Nexus.

Next up was the 3M Cloud Library.  I up an account when we first got this, but that was longer ago than I care to admit.  Fortunately it wasn't hard to log in and start searching around.  I looked at the shelves by category, since I didn't want anything in particular.  Unfortunately some of the titles were already checked out, so I'd have to go on a waiting list.  Most of them I didn't bother.  The lists were so long, I think I would have gotten the book sometime next year.  One of the drawbacks to only having a single copy available for checkout.  I found a random book that only had a waiting time of two weeks and quickly put my name on the list for it.  Pretty easy to do.  I like that.  It was little tricky finding where I could check the books in early.  Which is a question I've been asked by patrons in the past and I was unable to help them.  At least not effectively.  Now I can actually show them how to do it.  Yay!

New at the library is Pronunciator.  This is an app to help you learn or brush up on foreign languages.  I haven't gotten farther than creating an account yet.  But it looks neat.