Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 26

Podcast Solution. Sorta?

I mentioned a while back about a podcast I was behind on--way behind--and that it was eating up storage on my phone. Storage I couldn't afford to lose because I am very tight on space. Because this podcast only has its episodes available for free for a limited time, I couldn't delete them and download them again later.

And episodes kept piling up. Every Tuesday, a new one would download and I'd be thinking, why can't you guys take a vacation???

Belatedly, it occurred to me that there must be some way to transfer the episodes off my phone to my laptop.That way I could go back and listen to them later, but not have my phone off-loading apps I don't use every day.

In the past, I tried the iTunes thing with Apple Podcasts and that was a PITA. I tried other podcast programs and resubscribing to the podcast, but that was a pain, too. The answer was to save it as a file.

If I could only figure out how.

Online search, right? Well, yeah. I have an iPhone and a Windows PC and I use Downcast as my podcast program, not Apple Podcasts, so let's make it complicated, right? The first result said to plug in the phone and use Windows Explorer. Could it really be that easy?

No. That didn't work at all. My iPhone never showed up as a drive.

Another suggested plugging the phone in and using iTunes like it was Windows Explorer. I almost never log into iTunes and it didn't recognize my Apple password. I reset it. Everything went fine on my phone. My iPad stopped syncing messages and I was trying to reply. Ninety minutes trying to get everything working there again.

Clearly, this wasn't going to work.

There was a lot more PITA stuff before it occurred to me to check out the Downcast site. It took a little digging, but I found out how to do it. Hurrah!

Mostly. Instead of dragging and dropping the nearly 100 episodes of this podcast to my drive, I had to export off my phone one file at a time. Yes, that's correct. I had to send nearly 100 episodes of the podcast from my phone one episode at a time.

Now that I'm caught up, I will keep off-loading the episodes to my hard drive and it won't be such a pain because it will only be one episode at a time going forward.

If I remember. Because I forgot until I was typing this. Got the episode now.

West Coast Trail

I haven't shared any of my recent medals--mostly because I've been doing a lot of 3K virtual races and I'd be posting one every day. I recently did a longer one and received my medal.

The West Coast Trail is 47 miles or 76 kilometers. I've mentioned in previous posts that I like the street view so I can look around at where I am each day. This one had a partial street view. Some parts of the trail had it. Some parts didn't.

The medal was super cool and I really liked it. And yes, I played with the little door.

I like earning medals. It makes me happy. This company is my favorite for the virtual races for a few reasons like the app working better, but also because they have some of the coolest medals around.

Losing a Favorite

I found my perfect running shoe and I was like this is awesome! It was the Brooks Pureflow 6. I bought extras of the shoe when it was marked down because the Pureflow 7 was out.

I bought a 7, and it was okay. It didn't fit exactly the same as my beloved 6, but it was fine. Also, the 7 had no design and was ugly.

Almost immediately, I began to wait for the Pureflow 8. Surely the 8 would be more like the 6 and I would be back to awesome again.

I waited. And waited and waited.

Then, one day, I decided to go online and see if I could find out some kind of timeline for the 8. Imagine my shock and horror to learn that the Pureflow was discontinued. There wouldn't be an 8!

One of my favorite things about the Pureflow was the short drop. It was 4mm which I loved. (The drop is the difference between the heel and to the toe.) I began my hunt for another shoe with a 4mm drop. I found a Saucony, the Kinvara, and decided to try it out.

I liked the shoe a lot--when I was wearing socks.

I do wear socks when I'm working out, but I also like to wear it for just knocking around and I always forgo socks in that instance. The Kinvara was very rough on the inside and not a pleasure to wear barefoot. The Brooks had been smooth and perfect for sockless wear.

After a few months, I went back to Brooks. I ended up with the Ghost and that has a 12mm drop. Not my favorite, but I got used to it and the inside was silky smooth.

Then I wore out my Ghosts and needed a new pair. I spotted the Brooks Trace 2 and it was cheaper than the new Ghost. Hmm, I thought, maybe I'll try these.

The Trace also has a 12mm drop, but I'm used to it now, so that wasn't a deal breaker. At first, the soles felt firmer than the Ghost and I wasn't sure I liked that, but I continued to wear them and they developed a little bit of give. Within a couple of weeks, I realized I had a new favorite shoe! I'd still be all over the Pureflow if it returned, but the Trace is a nice sub.

It feels good to have a go-to shoe again!

Boxed In

Quick post today. 

I wanted to visualize my plot a little better and I remembered a few books ago I used an artist's sketchpad and drew in boxes with a ruler. That got me thinking that there must be a quicker way. Like on a computer.

Word came to mind, so I opened the program and thought about how to set it up. And then I thought there must be a quicker way. Surely someone else wanted boxes on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper.

I'll do an online search.

It took a couple of different tries with the search site, but I finally found exactly what I wanted at Printable Paper.

They had all kinds of templates available for free, but the one I needed was in the comic section. The link above goes to the template I'm using.

 

Here's a picture I took before I wrote anything except the chapter numbers on the page. I also marked some percentages in the chapter boxes to give myself a general guideline of how far I'm into the story.

Will I do this for every book? Probably not, but I liked it for this one. There's only room for a sentence or two, but that was all I wanted. Now in a glance, I know what happened when.

Little Rewards and a Payoff

I've been thinking more about rewards for writing and achieving milestones in the manuscript. Medals don't work--and really, I'd need a whole lot of individual one because if they were the same, it wouldn't be interesting--but I decided maybe something else would.

Knitting needles and accessories!

I don't really need any more needles which means I can't really justify buying them. That's what makes this idea work. If I was going to buy them for myself anyway, then it wouldn't be a compelling reward.

I have a set of interchangeable needles where the cords make me insane. A friend told me that there's another brand with cords almost exactly like my very favorite ones--they're just a little expensive. Perfect as a reward! Now I have to earn them.

I decided that when I'm around the halfway point, I deserve a bigger reward. I have this great knitting needle case for one brand of needles. I'd like to buy that same style of case (in different material) for a different brand of needles. Again. I don't really need this, but I'd sure like it.

The reward for finishing the book? A set of short tip needles from my favorite needle company. They're expensive, but short tip is perfect for knitting sleeves and socks and other small items.

If this idea works, I'll have to figure out what to do for the next book because knitting needle needs are not limitless. It only feels that way.

Tiny Little Notes

I've mentioned previously on the blog that I have a habit of writing myself little Post-it Notes that make sense when I jot the words down, but don't make sense months later when I find them again. This problem is also electronic as well.

I was looking for something in my notes app on my phone and started opening older ones. I have some that go back to before the pandemic.

The oldest note is 2017 and is a list of movies that were recommended.

2018 includes potential book titles that are probably lame, a list of potential character names that I'll probably never get to use since my heroes and heroines tell me what their name is, and instructions on how to delete old passwords off my work computer. Everything still makes sense.

And then we get to the cryptic ones. The ones that leave me scratching my head and going, what does this mean? I mulled it over for a while, decided I wasn't going to figure it out, and (believe it or not) deleted them!

Major victory! I usually hang on to things like this on the off chance that one day lightning will strike and I'll remember what I meant.

Next step? Try to put more information in my notes so they make sense months (or years) later.

It's All About That Bling

The one thing that doing all these races has taught me is that I'm highly motivated by medals. When I don't feel like walking for half an hour, I remind myself that it nets me another medal. That gets me moving.

It also started me thinking. If it works for working out, would it work for writing? Like a medal for every 10,000 words.

No one had created anything like this that I could find doing some online searching. I checked into having medals made specially for word count, but the cost had me rethinking that idea.

And really? Medals for writing 10K, 20K, 30K, etc might be cool for one book, but twenty books from now? Probably not.

I tried searching for other ideas for rewards. Most of them weren't of interest to me. Spa day. Lunch out. Read a book. Watch TV for an hour. None of these ideas is going to goad me along like a medal would.

Was there something I could buy as a treat for reaching word count or chapter goals?

I thought about that for a little while, too, but it would have to be something I wouldn't buy myself normally and that makes it hard. One thing I have in my wish list is a tiara. That's something I probably wouldn't actually buy.

I know, you're thinking tiara? Really? Well, yes. One of the reasons why I trained and trained to do a 5K race before the pandemic was that one of the items you were given along the route was a tiara. It turned out to be plastic, which was a brutal disappointment, but I guess I should have expected that. (I also got a MEDAL!)

Amazon sells tiaras that are not plastic for brides, prom, etc. But then I thought what am I going to actually do with a real tiara? The plastic one sits atop a jewelry case in my bedroom, collecting dust and it means something because I seriously earned that thing.

So I crossed tiara off the reward list.

This leaves me with no rewards. Someone needs to make medals for writers.

Crazy Computer Day

It all started so innocently.

It was a Sunday night. I was winding down for the day and planning to head to bed in a couple of hours. I was scrolling through Facebook on my phone and saw something about my password manager and how there had been a breach and users should move to a different one.

No problem, I thought. My anti-virus program comes with a free password manager. I'll move over there.

But my browser wouldn't show the icon for the extension even though it said it had installed it and the program kept showing a popup, insisting it was not installed.

I'd noticed a few other extensions I'd added recently also didn't have icons. I did some online searches to troubleshoot and nothing worked for me.

I kept trying. I found more instructions. This wiped out all my extension icons including the ones that had been present and working for me. Trying to uninstall and reinstall the extensions did nothing.

Frustrated, I gave up on the anti-virus password manager and tried 1Password. It insisted that I didn't have some Java thing installed and refused to move forward. I did some online searches on that and I did have it installed. 1Password insisted otherwise.

I went back to the anti-virus password manager briefly, but the same issue remained. I tried a third password manager. This one worked.

My browser, though, is still an issue. All my extension icons are gone and I rely on them. I can't figure out how to fix this and it's getting later and later and my alarm clock goes off early.

I'd heard about a browser recently that was recommended for privacy. Might as well try that, I thought. I loaded all my favorite extensions on there and I have icons and it works as expected. It would almost be good except it has a couple little quirks that are making me crazy. No bookmarks menu, which means to access favorite websites, I need to click into the settings and maneuver from there. Also, there is no way to pin websites to the new tab when you open one.

My solution? I'm using both browsers. Sigh.

Fonts, Fonts, Fonts

I like fonts. It's fun to play with them and I use them to create things like flyers for charity events at work, graphics for the blog, and general creative ideas. I might stink at art, but I'm good with typography.

Except I like fonts a little too much.

I have a font manager because I have too many to put on my computer. If I tried, it would bog down the entire thing. I like my font manager and it's got a lot of useful tools, including categorization. Except that I have to manually put them into the categories (at least I haven't found a way for it to do it for me) and from the beginning I had an overwhelming number of fonts. Taking the time to categorize them? Who has that kind of time?

And then I had this idea for graphics. I knew the exact font I want and I'm sure I own it. The problem? I can't find it. Even with the font manager, it takes a long time to scroll through the fonts. They're sorted alphabetically and I'm in the Bs now.

I'm debating how badly I want to find this font for this project or if I can live without it. I'm stubborn. It might take me a while longer to give up.

The Sale Email

I have a huge weakness for storage containers. Maybe because I have this fantasy that they will be the answer. Maybe they would be if I only had time (and the willpower) to go through my office and set everything up.

As you can imagine, I love stores that sell organizing supplies. For Presidents' Day weekend, one of these stores sent me an email telling me I had 20% off.

Well, I hustled over to their website. I have one of their systems as my desk and shelving space in my home office and I wanted some more hooks and baskets for my pegboard. They were reasonably priced, but unless I spent $75, no free shipping. Since there was zero chance I was driving to the north side of Atlanta, that meant I didn't buy them.

Here's a picture of my desk with the pegboards behind the monitors and to the left and right of them. If the desk was a little bit wider, this would be the most awesome system ever. I love it!

Okay, so 20% off meant I could spend money on other organization tools, get to the free shipping and get my hooks. This store sells these baskets that I love! I wanted more. The baskets are suggested for pantry use, but I use them in my closet, which has become a large bathroom storage area as well as a clothes closet. 

These baskets have a handle! One of the things I kept wishing is that I'd bought more than three because they're all in use and I could use more. Now was my opportunity.

I also did pick up some baskets that I might use in the pantry. I also might use them on the top (still empty) shelf of my desk. Although maybe not since I can't reach the top shelf without a step ladder. I nearly ordered plastic bins that looked as if they'd be great for notebooks and papers, but I have some of those I bought from another store, so I decided against them.

The wire pantry baskets? They're aqua. The only thing better would be fuchsia.