Do You Google+ ?

Do you Google+ ?

After an initial flurry on interest in Google+ I couldn't quite decide what it was for. Like many people I keep contact with friends and family on facebook and it servers a purpose, I can't say I actually like the platform but it does keep me in contact. Google+ is a similar swervice but for a while I couldn't understand what it was actually for. If nobody I knew was on it then what use is it to me?

Over the past few months a number of different additions have been made to it. There are now communities that seem to be well populated including several for Ham radio.

Again I wasn't really sure how these things would benefit me, especially as time seems to disappear very quickly at the moment. But yesterday it struck me that you get out what you put in. Not exactly innovative thinking but I posted a question on one community and was pleasantly surprised to see the responses came quickly and they were relevant. Having tested the water I think its time I used it a bit more, not just a personal news service from various blogs and sites now that Google Reader is going to be shut down.

So if you fancy dipping a toe into the various communities I can recommend it. I struggle to actually explain what the service is but as a geek I've found it useful in keeping myself up to date with my interests.

A little help

Ok so this one isn’t strictly amateur radio but its a handy tip, or at least I think so.

I’m just about old enough to remember to tie up my shoelaces in the morning (Although its taken me 2 days to remember that I broke my shoelace and as yet haven’t remembered to open the drawer and replace it with the one I knew I bought a while ago). So I can remember that its quite easy to ‘Just upload your photo’s’ to this site or ‘just back up every 10 minutes’ or other mundane tasks that your computer should do for you without even questioning it. In fact it should almost be law that stuff is backed up as soon as you put it on your PC without having to ‘Just set this or that up’.

Where am I going with this?

The answer is recently I found If this then that (ifttt) and have used it to do simple tasks like cross posting and other little tasks on web based systems that it current supports.

Another one I found is Dropbox automator which like the name suggests does stuff to folders and files in you Dropbox folder as soon as you put them in. A pretty handy tool for when, like me you need to re-size photos for putting in this blog, uploading documents to Google Docs and other little boring jobs.

Hope you get some use out of these services like me, now where’s that shoelace before I forget