3 Technologies That Will Make Your Life Easier

As a techie I am always looking for new and better ways to use technology in my life. Through these searches, I always come across some great ideas that most people don’t know about. In this post I will discuss three of these ideas and how to use these technologies to make your life easier. Family Calendaring System The 21st century’s idea of your family’s “refrigerator calendar” is in using the “cloud.” Have your family calendar sync to Mom and Dad’s work computer, the family computer, and everyone’s smartphone. Now, each family member can view what time soccer practice is and when the next family vacation will take place. The only requirement is an internet connection! Simply have each family member sign up for a Google calendar account at calendar.google.com and create and share the calendar with the family. It really is that simple and free! Automatic Backup With so much of our lives wrapped up in our computers, a catastrophic failure would be devastating. I don’t know what I would do if I lost my many years worth of pictures. That’s why it is so important to backup your computer. There is a right way and a wrong way to backup your data. The best backup strategy that I have found is called 3, 2, 1 Backup. To implement this strategy there must be: Three backup copies of anything you want to keep. Two different storage media. (External Hard drive, CD/DVD, or online backup). One offsite storage site. With this storage strategy you are much more likely to get your data back when you lose it. Email Aggregation Strategy I monitor many email addresses including my personal email, my work email and several addresses from web projects I am working on. I may use more addresses than most, but I don’t think my problem is unique. I wanted to find an email solution where I could check all of my email in one place and also have it on my phone. I found a solution that works for me and it may work for you too. Here’s how to access this technology using Google’s Gmail: 1. Create a Gmail account if you don’t already have one. 2. Forward all of your email addresses to your Gmail account. 3. Add a label for each of your email addresses. (i.e. Create a label for all email forwarded from each of your email addresses and make the label the same as the email address.) 4. Add a “Send Mail As” for each of your email addresses. That way you can send mail using Gmail and it looks like you are using your other accounts. Now you only have to check one account for all of your email! As an added bonus, you only have to add your one Gmail account to your smartphone to check all of your email.