Tag Archives: tips & tricks

Preserving Cell Phone Power During An Electrical Outage

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For better or worse Hurricane Sandy will be past us on the east coast in 48 hours. But winter is coming, bringing yet more opportunities for electrical service to be interrupted.

Cell phone towers have backup batteries that can last for some hours or longer, so keeping your cell phone available for emergency calls is a good idea. Here are some tips to maximize the juice in smartphones:

– Turn off your phone’s wifi side (since your cable modem isn’t on, so there’s no sense it letting the phone keep searching for a signal) and Bluetooth services.

– Turn off most of its location services. On an iPhone go to Settings-Privacy-Location Services. You can either turn it off altogether, or leave Location Services on but go in and turn it off for most individual apps – if you have emergency notification apps like Ping4Alerts and CodeRED leave those on to get warnings from your city/state emergency management).

– Adjust the screen illumination to be as dim as possible, and to turn off the screen with the shortest available idle time.

– If you don’t plan to use your laptop for offline work, charge your phone from its battery.

– If you have a car, get a 12V charger for your phone (and gas up the car before the storm!).

– Plan ahead: this 12V storage battery (designed for powering Celestron telescopes) has two 12V jacks plus built-in small and large lights. Also pick up a DC/AC inverter and you can charge your phone plus power some other gear (e.g., recharge a laptop).

How To Roll A Yoga Mat

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“What do you mean?! I just roll it up, right?” 

That’s what most people do: start at one end of the mat and roll until the other end is reached. But think about what that means:

– Your yoga mat has two sides: when you unroll it for use one side lies flat on the floor of whatever studio/gym/living room/etc in which you are exercising (or outside on the ground). You put your hands/feet/knees/butt/head on the other side.

– When class is over, you pick up the mat at one end, curl the mat end under or over and start rolling – either way you are rolling the two sides into contact with each other!

– Whatever was on the floor/rug/ground underneath the mat is now being transferred onto the side of the mat you will use next time to be in contact with your body (and that’s assuming you have a pattern or other indicator of which side is “up” – otherwise you might be using the “down” side up next time).

Unless you wash or thoroughly wipe down both sides of your mat after every class you are only using it for padding/traction, not for preventing contact with a multi-use floor of unknown cleanliness.

So instead of rolling up the mat starting from one end, do it this way:

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Facebook Tip: Creating An Event Owned By Your Corporate Page

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These days when people are promoting a local happening they usually create a Facebook event (and frequently ONLY that for PR – but this is not about the limitations of that as a PR scheme).

So often I feel like banging my head on the monitor when I see how some folks undermine themselves through not understanding the details necessary for a Facebook event to be found and seen by their audience.

I was planning to list a number of tips, but explaining how to do this first one is sufficiently complex that I’ll save the others for a later post!

If your event is a personal social activity (e.g., a birthday party), go ahead and create it as your personal Facebook persona. HOWEVER – if the event is an activity by a “corporate” entity such as your band, your catering service, etc. it is important to create the event as your “Page” persona.

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How to Avoid Reposting Urban Legends

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You’ve seen the emails and Facebook posts from your friends:

  • OMG – this famous actor just died!
  • Please take these actions to protect my Facebook privacy.
  • Watch out for this new computer virus!!!
  • A friend of a friend woke up in the bathtub with his kidney missing!!!!!

Frequently followed by a request to repost/forward to all of your friends.

But before you do that, take this step in order to avoid passing on an Urban Legend:

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