Rambling

A friend was telling me about the yogurt maker she had bought, and how wonderful the yogurt was. I soon realised that all it is is an insulated tub that keeps the ingredients warm.

So I decided I wanted one too, the yogurt really was good! Searching the internet for the best price I came across several sites that said you don’t need a yogurt maker. You just need to insulate the tub with towels and keep it somewhere warm like an airing cupboard. I don’t have an airing cupboard, or anywhere suitable to keep the tub warm, but I do have a vacuum flask and found that works very well.

I made the yogurt by boiling ordinary milk then letting it cool a bit then adding a large spoon full of live yogurt bought from the shop. I put the lot into the flask and left overnight and in the morning had great yogurt. When I make my next batch I will use a spoonful of this batch to start it off.

I used ordinary semi-skimmed milk, but my friend says UHT milk is even tastier, so I will try that next time. She says the yogurt can be kept for two weeks in the fridge, but mine won’t last that long.

I put some chopped up strawberries in mine today, and it was lovely. Chopped nuts are good to add to it too, but I suppose you could add almost any fruit or nuts.

If you read my post about using JDVoiceMail to record memos and “To Do’s” to my self, you may be wondering how I solved the problem of recording them when I was away from my computer.

Well, the answer came sort of accidentally. I originally thought of buying a hand held dictating machine. I found some good ones on that well known auction site, and bid on a couple. The ones I bid on also had the facility to connect to a computer and copy files to and from it. Luckily for me I was out bid on both of them, one sold for £25 and the other went for £27.

I say it was lucky because at the same time I had bought an MP4 player from a seller in China and was waiting for it to arrive. It arrived after I had been out bid on both dictating machines and was busily watching several other auctions to see how high the bidding was going.

When the MP4 player arrived I was pleased to find it was fully working and a great little gadget. It can play music, videos, radio, you can even read ebooks with it, and it can be used as a USB drive. But what really pleased me was it can also record sound. You can click record and talk to it and it records everything you say in crystal clear quality.

So I had been bidding £20 on dictation machines that had 256kb memory and had the facility to copy files onto a computer. And all along I had bought this MP4 player which could do exactly the same thing, but had 8gb of memory.

So now I have a much better “dictation machine” that also plays music, videos, radio, shows photos etc, when it is not being used as a dictation machine. And it was nearly half the price of the dedicated dictation machine.

All in all I am well pleased with this little gadget, and so pleased I set my maximum bid at £20 for the dictation machines.

The one, small, draw back is the MP4 player saves the recordings as Recording01.mp3, Recording02.mp3 etc. so I have to rename them to something meaningful after copying them to my computer. A small price to pay for such a great little gadget.

Click here for a good selection of MP4 Players.

For years I have tried to use those “to do” programs, without any kind of success. I’ve tried specific to do programs, PIMs with a built in to do list and at work I have tried the to do facility in Outlook. I even wrote a “to do” database in access once, spent weeks getting it just right too. It did everything I wanted it to do without any bells or whistles. It was small, fast and very easy to use, but I gave up with it after a week.

I guess I’m not a “To Do” sort of person. I could never get into the habit of making a list of things to do, then checking and making sure I do the things on the list.

Then a few weeks ago I found I was having many ideas for posts in my blog, and for articles, but kept forgetting them before I had a chance to type them up. I tried my old “To Do” database, as the field for notes was a Memo field and can hold a lot of text. Unfortunately I gave up with that after a few days, partly because I’m not the type of person to use the database and partly because I wasn’t always at my computer when I had the idea.

Then, a couple off weeks ago I came across a great little program, JDVoiceMail. This is a Freeware program which cost nothing to download or use. It is designed to record and send voice messages by email. And it works very well too. However, I don’t use it to send voice messages by email, I just use it to record “to do” messages to myself and save them. JDVoiceMail saves the messages in mp3 format so they can be listened to by anyone with a program that plays mp3 files. All I do is hit the Record button and speak a message to myself then hit the stop button. After that you can email the file, delete it or save it. I choose the save option and save the file in my “memo” folder.

Note that when you do this and hit the record button it adds the next message on to the last one. To create a new message, in a new file, you have to use the File > New menu options. Or you can close then reopen the program.

Now, at a later date, I just click on the saved file and hear myself telling me what to do. It was a bit weird at first, especially as my voice sound bad when recorded, or when I talk on the telephone, or leave messages on answering machines. But I soon got used to hearing my own voice and now use JDVoiceMail a lot.

Now all I need a program that can transcribe my mp3 files into text and I can dictate entire posts or articles and have then typed up automatically.

I also solved the problem of recording messages when I’m not at the computer, but I’ll put that in another post.

A friend has just emails me to say he has been fined by a private parking company. He is, understandably, very upset over this as his fine was for parking in his own parking space outside his own home.

Apparently the “fine” states that he did not display his parking permit in the correct manner. He says he had his permit clearly on display on the dashboard, but he has looked at the rules and they say it should be fixed to the windscreen.

I believe this to be petty, to say the least! I don’t know anything about private parking companies, but I’m going to find out and I’ll let you know in a later post.

I’ve just come across a brilliant web site that can trace mobile phones. This is a great service if you have children as you can track where they are at any time. It would also be useful if you run a business and need to know where your employees are when they are on the road. Also very useful for climbers, hikers and ramblers etc. If you have an accident and can’t use your mobile phone to summon help then your partner or other person can trace your mobile and direct help to you.

The site is Trace a Mobile and the service isn’t free. But for £5 per month it could be money well spent, especially as you get 120 free traces per year plus a free SMS service.

The service can be used with O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile and the site says it hopes to offer the service to Virgin Mobile and 3 customers in early 2008.

If you have children, or just need to know where someone is, then this site is well worth checking out.