Friday, March 20, 2020

14 Free Apps That Will Make You Incredibly Productive

14 Free Apps That Will Make You Incredibly Productive Doug Aamoth, writing for FastCompany, has done the hard work of sorting through the dozens of apps that promise to make your life easier to uncover the ones that actually can  make your life easier! Here’s our roundup of the top 14 apps to have at your fingertips to maximize productivity and minimize chaos! Emails and CommunicationsBoomerangThis easy-to-integrate app is essentially a snooze button for your email. You can dismiss an email from your inbox and set a time for it to return later, write a draft response at 1 am and schedule it to send right as you walk into the office, or set reminders to reply at a more reasonable hour. The free version gives you 10 email interactions a month.Burner  and MailDropThis one is so neat- it generates disposable phone numbers (or email accounts) that you can use whenever you need to make a number publicly available (without leaving your own precious digits visible for mass consumption. MailDrop is a no-frills temporary email address that disappears after 24 inactive hours; it’s great for Craigslist or promotional blasts.CordChances are if you have the Apple iOS, you’ve accidentally mashed that little microphone button and sent an audio snippet from the inside of your pocket. Cord helps you do that on purpose and with a group- you can send 12-second voice messages back and forth with ease.Group MeCreate and disband on-the-go private chat rooms when you need to chat with a group of people at once (and then make them stop flooding your text inbox with emoji conversations).VoxerThis converts your phone into a walkie-talkie without the strenuous button pushing or limited 30-foot radius for maintaining a connection. You can also leave voice messages in case they miss your rendezvous.Scheduling and MeetingsMeekanThis group scheduling app identifies available meeting times with just a list of participant emails, accommodates multiple time zones, and coordinates with existing calendars.PreziMany of my stud ents used Prezi instead of Powerpoint this summer- it made me feel old. Retain your youth and relevancy by learning how to use this cloud-based presentation tool! It lets you stream to remote attendees and post public presentations.ToolsCCleanerFor six months I had a defunct wireless client pop up whenever I booted up my Mac asking permission to run itself; I couldn’t seem to figure out where to uninstall it! CCleaner to the rescue! It will speed up your computer by deleting the flotsam and jetsam left behind in upgrades, file transfers, and browsing.CanvasI am a sucker for an easily customizable form app. From invoices to other frequently used workplace templates, Canvas lets you make and share them easily.PostfityIf your business or your personal brand relies heavily on social media (which†¦ it should), an app like Postfity may help you manage the myriad channels of posts and content you want to space out evenly. It has a scheduling tool and a linking functionality so you can share the same thing everywhere, or diversify your media presence.(PSA: don’t have Twitter and Instagram post verbatim to your Facebook. Schedule slightly different content for each feed. Your family, friends, and colleagues will appreciate it).OnavoMaybe you’re constantly going back and forth with how much data you think you’ll use versus how much you actually use. Onavo can help! It will not only help track usage, but will also compress files accordingly to save your data mileage for the cat gifs that really count.SyncSpaceWho doesn’t love a virtual whiteboard? It never gets old! It has everything but the marker fumes, lets you and your team collaborate on a shared visual document, then emails the changes around later.BreatherImagine AirBnb and ZipCar had a baby that let you hold meetings in it. Breather identifies available workspaces around cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Montreal, and Ottowa; your phone will unlock your insta-off ice for a half hour at a time so you can meet with clients, charge your phone, or just put your feet up before dashing off to the next appointment.BRB scheduling a Breather to present my latest Prezi- everybody check their Voxer messages!

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Gryposaurus - Facts and Figures

Gryposaurus - Facts and Figures Name: Gryposaurus (Greek for hook-nosed lizard); pronounced GRIP-oh-SORE-us Habitat: Woodlands of North America Historical Period: Late Cretaceous (85-75 million years ago) Size and Weight: Up to 40 feet long and five tons Diet: Plants Distinguishing Characteristics: Long, narrow skull; large bump on nose; occasional bipedal posture About Gryposaurus In most ways a typical hadrosauror duck-billed dinosaurof late Cretaceous North America, Gryposaurus was distinguished by the prominent, arched bump on its nose, from which its name {hook-nosed lizard) derives. As with other such ornately equipped dinosaurs (like the horned, frilled ceratopsians), paleontologists speculate that this feature evolved as a sexually selected characteristic that is, males with bigger, more prominent noses were more attractive to females during mating season. However, Gryposaurus may also have used its giant schnozz to honk and blare at fellow herd members, o alert them to skulking raptors and tyrannosaurs, and (somewhat less probably) it may even have poked the flanks of these predators with its nose in an attempt to drive them away. Like other hadrosaurs, the 30-foot-long, two-ton, plant-eating Gryposaurus was similar in behavior to modern bison and buffaloand the numerous fossil specimens that have been discovered across North America are a strong hint that this duck-billed dinosaur roamed the continent in herds (though whether these herds contained a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand individuals is impossible to say). However, theres one important difference between these ancient hadrosaurs and modern cattle (or wildebeest): when startled by predators, Gryposaurus could run briefly on its two hind legs, which must have made for a comical sight during stampedes! The name Gryposaurus is often used interchangeably with Kritosaurus, thanks to the confusion surrounding this dinosaurs taxonomic history. The type fossil of Gryposaurus was discovered in Canadas Alberta Province in 1913, and later described and named by the Canadian paleontologist Lawrence Lambe. However, the American fossil hunter Barnum Brown had discovered a similar genus a few years earlier, in New Mexico, which he named Kritosaurus (separated lizard). The Gryposaurus skeleton described by Lambe provided additional clues about the proper reconstruction of the Kritosaurus skeleton, and although Brown himself proposed that the two genera should be synonymized, they have both managed to survive down to the present day. (We wont even mention the suggestion of Jack Horner that both Gryposaurus and Kritosaurus should be synonymized with Hadrosaurus!) Today, there are three generally accepted species of Gryposaurus. The type species, G. notabilis, is known by about two dozen skulls, as well as two more complete specimens that had originally been assigned to a since-synonymized species, G. incurvimanus. A second species, G. latidens, was discovered in Montana; its represented by fewer individuals than G. notabilis, the hooked nose of this species was set farther down its snout and its teeth of which were less derived (harking back to those of the much earlier Iguanodon). Finally, theres G. monumentensis, named in 2007 after the discovery of a single individual in Utah. As you may have guessed from its name, this Gryposaurus species was larger than the others, some adults attaining 40 feet in length and weights in the neighborhood of five tons.