Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: May 4, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Watching

  • The Big C
    I really liked this show, while TheHusband was so-so about it but after the last season, it’s really gotten awful. The dialogue is cliched and trite, Cathy is at the core a terrible human being, and the plots are all over the place. We watched the opening of fourth season and that was enough to cement we would not be watching it again. I see this is apparently the last season, but nothing can get us to finish it out. I should have some kind of feeling for the main characters, but when I can’t even be arsed to finish out the final season, you know it’s bad.
  • Vikings
    Ragnar, Lagertha, and Floki are done for the season and I’m terribly sad to see them go. Sure this show had some growing pains, but over all, it was one of the better things on TV this past season and I’m beyond thrilled it’s coming back as a second season next year.

Weekly watching: DaVinci’s Demons, Justified, Mad MenNurse JackieThe BorgiasVeepDoctor WhoGame of Thrones,  The Vampire Diaries, Elementary, The Americans.

Links

  • AOL pulls plug on ComicsAlliance

Reviews

Evernote Hello
I’m an Evernote evangelist and just about every product of theirs I love. But Hello? Meh.
The idea is brilliant: Scan in business cards, they get OCRed, and you can assign them to meetings and add notes. Each scanned card gets its own note in Evernote, and in theory, all of the OCRed information is supposed to get populated in the fields. After all the conferneces I attend, my business card pile is inches thick. The idea of assigning cards to meetings and giving them notes is genius! Also available for free on Apple Store, AND iPhone and iPad compatible? Brilliant! Also takes advantage of your premium features from Evernote? Even better!
Except it doesn’t work quite the way

  • Cards are easy to scan into the software, but the OCR is off and doesn’t populate the fields as intended, so you still have to manually fill in the fields.
  • To start the process, you have to either scan in a card or manually add the card THEN you create the meeting. You can’t just add cards and assign them to meetings later.
  • Meetings are automatically set by location. So if I sit there scanning cards forever that I’ve gathered from various places, they all automatically get added to the same meeting at the time I’ve scanned them in.  So then you have to go in and manually change each and every card to its appropriate meeting place/location.
  • Meeting locations are powered by Foursquare — which one one hand, I understand, but on the other — seems odd.
  • Each card becomes its own note in Evernote, so you can view them on any device but you can’t edit them in any other version of Evernote other than Hello.
  • I can’t figure out, after scanning in cards, how to view individual cards or cards by meeting. The cards in the HOME option act as a scroll but I can’t sort by meeting. It just tells me I have X number of cards.
  • Searching is only available in the HOME option, which seems clunky.
  • Hello is very insistant on connecting to Facebook and LinkedIn, which I don’t want to do. But it keeps driving me nuts on making connections. No. I  just want to sort business cards. I don’t need you to make new connections for me.

This could be really awesome but instead, it’s just meh. It’s getting deleted.
Jolidrive
Launched a few years ago as a netbookOS whose sole purpose was to turn netbooks into a cloud devices, Jolidrive has now expanded into an online service to collate all of your cloud computing apps via the browser. Sounds like a great idea: Jolidrive runs as an extension in your browser and loads in an empty tab. After logging into your Jolidrive account, you can add other services and have them easily accessible in one location. Problem is: Its execution and design is terrible. Here’s why:

  • Accounts are added into one of two places: Jolidrive’s applications and services tabs. Services are vendors they have partnerships with, such as Twitter and Facebook, whose application will run natively within the Jolidrive interface. Applications are vendors you can add but do not run natively within the Jolidrive interface. When clicking on an application, it will launch that application it its own tab. Clicking on Evernote brings me to the Evernote web login. In short, the applications tab is a page full of bookmarks that don’t really add any value.
  • If the confusion of applications vs services isn’t enough, in order to add services, you have to “share” with your friends/followers on various social networks. You’re given 3 or 4 “free” services and any services added after that require the social promotion fee to get added to your Jolidrive dashboard. This is probably the dumbest method of social promotion because it’s annoying AND you can change the content of the Tweet to be something other than they append for you. Which I did. Since the content is not hard coded, all the dashboard is registering is that I tweeted/FB something, so it unlocked applications even though the content in my tweet had nothing to do with Jolidrive as I changed the tweet to say, “sugar.”
  • The Jolidrive dashboard within Chrome, regardless of Mac or PC, is slow to load since it’s just a front end to drive.jolicloud.com and not a local native client.
  • The interface is clunky and unintuitive.
  • Some of applications refuse to connect or authenticate, like Facebook, despite browser/computer.
  • When you delete your account, you get a notice stating your account will be deleted within 2 weeks – er what?

Bottom line: Terrible.
What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003