Travel tales: Prague

Prague: What a city of magnificent buildings! At every corner the vista changes and even though I have long admired the buildings of Paris for their timeless elegance, those of Prague outshine them in so many ways.

From medieval to Baroque, Romantic and Victorian, all those influences and many more can be spied in the architecture of Prague. The sheer number, size and variety of buildings viewed in even a single day has delighted me and no doubt many hundreds of thousands of other tourists through the years.

From Prague Castle and St Vitus cathedral with its magnificent windows sitting high above the city down to the Old town square, beautiful buildings abound. Never before have I snapped 70 photos in a day but the architectural delights of Prague I fear have spoiled me for other city adventures. My camera skills are limited but even I am delighted with many of my captures which will help enhance my memories of our visit here. I look forward to sorting, editing, saving and labelling at the conclusion of our journey.

Food and recipes

Organise those recipes

I've been steadily getting rid of all those scraps of paper saved from magazines that had a recipe I just could not resist. In the process I investigated a variety of ways of digitising those resources.
My process is quite simple.

1. Use Evernote - create a notebook for recipes
2. Scan those pieces of paper using the phone or tablet
3. Add tags
4. View cook book in Evernote food - not at all necessary as Evernote does such a good job, but the Evernote food app is visually pleasing.

The power of Evernote search is the winner for me, it even searches the text within the images of my handwritten recipes from years ago. Once I was set on this path I continued to add interesting recipes read through Feedly or clipped from the web via the Chrome extension Clearly. Once I had loaded the Web clipper extension and turned on related searches, any Google search now searched my Evernote notebooks too. 

The only problem left was all those recipes in my shelves of recipe books. Here Eat your books came into play. It indexes the recipes in your cook books, making it easy to find which cook book had that favourite recipe. You can add five books for free but need a subscription to add more.

I put this information into the presentation below for patrons of Noosa Library Services along with some other interesting food sites. The apps and sites I used are detailed in the slides.

Digitise your recipes and enjoy!

Debunk it!

Tech help 5

Information at our fingertips, what a luxury we have at our disposal. Unfortunately, as we all well know, there are those who seek to take advantage of us on the internet. Just this week, two of the three email addresses in our household have been the target of a  phishing attack that our separate email providers did not detect as spam. This email sought to convince us that it was a receipt for an online purchase.

• Yes - we do often purchase goods online and the amount was not unreasonable enough to cause a panic.
• No - neither of us had made a purchase for that amount. 
• Yes - there was an attachment which would have contained a virus, trojan or malware of some sort had it been opened. 

Be alert, be aware is our motto.

This help session points to some useful sites that assist in raising our digital awareness and a couple of sites useful for debunking those tips, often too good to be true, that manage to arrive via email.

Mentioned below:
Stay Smart Online
Internet basics
Scam Watch
Snopes
Urban Legends