Unclutterer is one of my favorite blogs. They offer practical advice and tips on keeping your work, home and life tidy and clutter-free.This week, they've posted an article on using the iPhone for increased productivity and clutter reduction. There are several great tips, including my favorite -- photograph the bar codes of your membership cards (gym, Staples, etc.) and store them in an appropriately named album. Most scanners should have no trouble reading the bar codes (test this before ditching your cards, of course).
They also mention apps like Jott and Evernote. It's definitely worth a read. Check it out.
Update: Their website seems to be having a bit of trouble this morning, folks. We're sure they're working on it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-23-2008 @ 9:14AM
Hal said...
Am I think ony one that sees http://unclutterer.com/ as being a page of random characters?
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7-23-2008 @ 9:27AM
Erik said...
Thats all I'm seeing as well
7-23-2008 @ 9:27AM
rob said...
Nope, you are not the only one.
RE- photographing bar codes- I've NEVER had this work. I guess all the scanners at all the stores I visit must be hosed.
7-23-2008 @ 9:43AM
Hal said...
it's ironic that a blog on uncluttering should be filled with jumbled characters.
7-23-2008 @ 10:35AM
Tony said...
Photographing barcodes isn't goin to work from a security standpoint either. If it were me stood on the door and I saw someone trying to get past the scanner with a phone I'd demand they produce their card or get sent packing.
It's *way* too easy to copy a graphic scanned onto a phone. You could have sent that card to 50 people.
7-23-2008 @ 12:05PM
Mez Jr said...
@ Tony
I assume they're talking about those "reward cards" that stores pass out all over the place, not special coupons or something. And busting the nuts of a customer is a real good way to ensure he doesn't come back (as if forcing me to carry a membership card to a grocery/drug/book store is a good way).
7-23-2008 @ 9:16AM
Jash Sayani said...
Well, you forgot about reQuall. The best Sppech to Text TODO App. Freeware!
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7-23-2008 @ 9:19AM
Evan Lugh said...
Hal: Yeah me too..
http://www.grabup.com/uploads/1ac17073b436be63f659c3968a3258a2.png
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7-23-2008 @ 9:19AM
Neil said...
Umm - they do realise you actually can clip web pages to Evernote from your iPhone? Just sync their bookmarklet to your bookmarks folder.
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7-23-2008 @ 9:54AM
skyman375 said...
Why take digital photos of the cards? Why not scan them front and back, so you get a consistent size/quality image? I did this for my grocery store club cards and some others that I'm not to concerned about security for (I use eWallet to keep secure copies of my credit card information).
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7-23-2008 @ 10:24AM
dastranger said...
Because some people don't have a scanner? Just a thought...
7-23-2008 @ 9:57AM
mike said...
Why take digital photos of the cards? Why not scan them front and back, so you get a consistent size/quality image? I did this for my grocery store club cards and some others that I'm not to concerned about security for (I use eWallet to keep secure copies of my credit card information).
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7-23-2008 @ 10:04AM
King Fysel said...
Don't you just hate it when sites offer impractical advice and tips?
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7-23-2008 @ 10:12AM
Adegen said...
Umm, I tried the whole scanning your cards thing, and none of the bar code readers at any of the stores I go to could read the code off of the phone.
You also have to be comfortable letting the person that checks you out hold the phone over the lasers when it doesn't work when you try it.
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7-23-2008 @ 10:23AM
Erin at Unclutterer said...
Those of you having difficulty seeing our homepage, can you let me know what browser you're using and if you're still getting the problem? We can't recreate the problem any longer ...
Also, those of you having difficulty with photographing your bar codes, you can't take the picture with the iPhone. You have to upload the picture from a camera that has a high-quality zoom. A scan won't work, either, since the bar code has to be larger than actual size. This is explained in the article ... which, unfortunately, you probably can't see because of whatever this bug is ... sorry about that ...
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7-23-2008 @ 11:38AM
Pepijn Bruienne said...
Both FF 3 and Safari 3.1.2 produce garbage here. FWIW, lynx renders the page just fine, albeit in text mode. Curl also seems to have no problem pulling down the page's html and other code. Seems to me there's some issues with the chunked transfer encoding (Transfer-Encoding: chunked) and/or related mime types going on that are throwing FF and Safari off.
HTH.
7-23-2008 @ 11:43AM
Hal said...
iPhone 2.0 Safari and IE7 on xp sp2 (in England).
The article displays fine, its just http://unclutterer.com/ that is jumbled.
7-23-2008 @ 12:41PM
Jerry said...
The scanner thing only sorta works. CCD barcode scanners will do it, laser scanners will not do it. The vast majority of scanners in my area are laser scanners.
7-23-2008 @ 12:21PM
Pepijn Bruienne said...
So I had a hunch that the garbage on the screen was actually gzip-compresssed data, having seen that kind of thing before, which turns out to be the case. I'm not sure if you want to include a "Content-Encoding: gzip" to your code, the lack of which some browsers are choosing to ignore resulting in them properly decompressing the gzipped page content before rendering it. Anyway, for those wanting to verify, load the article (or home page) until all the "garbage" is in your browser window. Save the content as plain text, name it something like unclutterer.html.gz to your Desktop (or wherever you please). Double click the file with the .gz extension in the Finder (Windows users faites vos jeux) and hey-presto! The resulting html file will load just dandy (minus whatever dynamic content PHP is supposed to be generating) in your browser.
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