I am late with my TechParent piece for one reason, I am in love (so far) with Evernote.  It is rare that I will start with such an exclamatory, but Evernote finally managed to do something that I have been complaining about in many areas.  Take several ideas that are good on their own merits and make them better just by connecting the dots with other similar ideas.

Evernote does that in the area of becoming what I would consider (and please excuse my outdated reference) the Web 2.0 version of an actually working DayRunner.  Perhaps I should clarify that a bit for those that don’t remember or aren’t old enough to remember when you simply could not live without a DayRunner.  Day “planners” were of course around forever, but in the mid to late 80′s the “DayRunner” (and their clones) became in the analog world, the single most important “tool” a business person (or really any busy person) could have.   It has places and compartments for your Calendar, Address Book, Business Card Holder, a pad for scratching out thoughts, notes, etc and so on, all in one single easy to carry tool(and unfortunately easy to lose… a “feature” Evernote doesn’t share of course).  It is this all-in-one single and EASY TO USE metaphor that makes Evernote… uh… noteworthy.

Products like Google Notebook is good for jotting notes… so long as you are in your web browser.  Jotting a note or taking a picture as a reminder (the only thing I really consider the camera on a phone good for using), is fine for what it is, but it is separated from your other information, and the pictures and notes are separate applications, so you can not search across this information.  Evernote combines, text written files, web “clips”, audio files, pictures and combines them into a searchable repository that is available to use and retrieve from, both at your  PC through a client, any PC via the Web Client as well as on your mobile phone (assuming you have a SmartPhone.  If you are away from your own computer (and don’t have your phone handy), you can even e-mail something into Evernote.

Evernote bills iteself as your “external brain” and it is (or can be) a fairly good description.  All those tidbits stored away, regardless of the source, there ready to be tapped when you need to remember something.  Graphic laden items are run through a recognition engine, which when added to your tagging, makes it a powerful tool to remember and search through even say pictures of a book you spotted in a bookstore or coffee shop that you may want to buy later.  Or photograph the label of a bottle of wine you spotted in a restaurant, but wanted to buy later.  Even take a picture of notes you scribbled on a napkin, if your handwriting is reasonably legible… Evernote will convert it into searchable text.

You can even share certain notebooks with others.  And of course the fact that you can “share” will (justifiably) immediately bring up the one concern… privacy.   Well, to that end Evernote has a (granted somewhat limited) answer.  You can encrypt text in notes (images cannot at present be encrypted).  This can only be done presently from the Desktop client (available for both Windows and Macintosh).

It is a great way to organize everything, and more easily searchable than that stack of post-it notes cluttering your computer screen.  There is a premium pay version ($5/month or $45/year) which gives you more storage, but for many (and to check the service out) the free version which gives you 40 MB per month is more than enough.  That is enough space to store (approximately) 20,000 text messages or  400 camera phone snapshots or 270 Web Clips.  So why not give Evernote a try… think of it as an external hard drive adding to your brain capacity… and what parent couldn’t use that extra capacity with everything we try to remember day in and day out?

Tired of the slow load times of Media Player, QuickTime, and other “standard solutions” where you seem to have to spend more time waiting for the utility to load than (at least it seems) actually watching the video? Tired of needing multiple players for different video codecs? Wish you had one player that could do it all quickly (or at least a vast majority… I’m sure there is something it can’t handle, and I guess there is a person or two that still uses the RealAudio format… though I have no idea why).

The VideoLan VLC Media Player is what you just may have been wishing for all this time. It is still technically a beta weighing in with version number 0.8.6 (as of today anyway), it is cross platform (for those that care about such things), it is skinable so you can make it look any way you like, and best of all it is free (though they do accept Contributions to help fund the project). Also the entire downloads weights in at a svelt 9MB (for the Windows version).

There is no reason to be shackled to a lesser player any longer.

(Note:  Sorry about TechParent Tuesday appearing on Wednesday, apparently I sometimes can’t tell the difference between Save and Publish… opps.)

I don’t know how I missed this one coming down the road (I guess because I don’t actually have AT&T Wireless).  Starbucks and AT&T are now rolling out a new program for the highly caffeinated set that like to use Wi-Fi.

If you buy (or recharge) a Starbuckscard for your coffee purchases you get up to 2 hours a day of free Wi-Fi at all Starbucks location (for up to 30 days, you will need to recharge your card again within 30 days to continue to get the free wi-fi).

The only real potential drawback is that you must use your “up to 2 hours” in one session.  You can’t log in, leave and come back later (they say they may offer that later).  But for free… the price is certainly right, and can be good in a pinch, especially for somebody like me that spends entirely too much money in Starbucks anyway.

You can sign up at the at&t website or get more details from Starbucks.

As I noted in Friday’s report, even those that think they are protecting their kids sometimes need to take another look.  Well, I was doing just that when I found Glubble.  Glubble is a sort of hybrid social network like front end tied in with a Parental Control product like NetNanny. It seems to run the idea that “the family” all uses one computer, and wants Glubble to act as its private Social Network, with “family messages” available through the front end, and a Family Home Page.

Glubble sets its heights very high, and expects that everybody in the family will want to live with this kiddie front end.  Of course, that is also its greatest downfall.  It contains its own version of Bookmarks (Warning: It wipes out yours in the process), it has a predefined whitelist of products that it has predetermined are OK for your child.  While changing these aren’t difficult (it is only basically a whitelist), it is a bit tedious and more work that it should be.

If you and your children have different profiles, then this Firefox addon need to be installed and configured in each profile.  This in therory can  save the parent from being stuck with Glubble, but then it blows the whole point of the “social” and “family” aspects of the program.

The final nail in the coffin is that the program has reports of breaking (and/or removing) other addons as well as slowing Firefox itself.  Finally it modifies Google results, and doesn’t allow you to use other search engines (yet, but the company claims to be working on that). Glaxstar, the company behind Glubble has published several other very popular and sucessful Add-ons for Firefox… And given enough time, there is certainly some potential for it as a unique child friendly front end and Parental Control product.

If you are not using Firefox yet… why not?  You should be… just not with Glubble.  It just isn’t there quite yet.  Hopefully, there will be a version 2.0 with better control for the user over how it takes over your browser.

I am not a big television viewer myself. If not for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, I don’t know that I would be watching anything (other than Disney Channel with LatteGirl). But between blogs and Twitter, I know many of you do, and seemingly live and die by the schedules. Well, this week have I got a neat little tool for you. It is called mytvrss, and it is so simple, it is one of those things that I am sure many will bang their heads against the wall thinking, “Why didn’t I come up with that?”

The great thing about it, is the shear simplicity of it. You go to the sight (no registration required), check off the boxes on the shows you want to be kept up to date on, and click “Create Feed” It will generate a custom URL that you can use in your rss reader of your choice, and be kept up to date, on airing dates of the shows. Never miss a new episode again. It is like have a customized version of the TV Guide made just for you.