Thursday, March 20, 2014

More Evernote.

I recently wrote about my new note-taking scheme. Today, I want to give a progress report and add some details about additional ways I'm now using Evernote to supplement my brain.

A while ago I started using ifttt to automate some tasks that would otherwise take too many steps to bother with. For example, I use it to track updates to certain websites (via their RSS feeds) and automatically save new articles to Pocket (I also use Pocket to save articles for later reading from Feedly, Twitter, and Facebook, among other tools. Sometimes I use Yahoo! Pipes as an intermediate step to filter a feed by a certain keyword or author, or to do other more complex operations that ifttt can't do by itself).

Ifttt has a number of channels that I am using to create new notes in Evernote. For example, I can call up ifttt on my phone and record a message, which will be posted as an audio file to Evernote, as well as being run through a text-to-speech processor. (I'm not quite sure whose text-to-speech processor is being used for this. If you know, please fill me in!)

For another example, I have started trying a new trick to automatically create notes related to any travel that I take. I take my RSS activity feed from TripIt, filter it through a Yahoo! Pipe to only show those entries that indicate I am leaving on a trip, and then have ifttt create a new note for me to enter any notes I may want to take about the trip. I've just set this up so I don't know how well it will work yet, but I'm enthusiastic about the possibility of automating yet another aspect of my life.

What kind of automation tricks are you using? Let me know!