by Jared Francais | May 10, 2016 | iOS, Technology
I’m horrible at organizing paperwork. If I get a receipt for something, odds are it hits the trash vs the filing cabinet. That can be a problem when you are talking about large purchases needing warranty, or when you are keeping records for vehicle maintenance. So initially I just started snapping pictures using my camera phone. The problem I quickly found was that my camera roll was now getting polluted with receipts and it was taking up a lot of extra space.
That is when I came across Scanner Pro from Readdle. This little app turns your camera phone into a handheld document scanner. You can scan a document in colour, grey scale, or black and white. Once scanned you can save as an image or a PDF document (I recommend). It has a nice interface for picking out what areas to scan, and then an assortment of options of things to do with the scanned document once complete. Recently they even added OCR functions. It is a little quirky jumping in and our of scans, but take a look at the workflows, it makes it easy to set up common workflows for your scans (email this scan, file it in google drive, etc)
I now not only use this app to file receipts (I have it hooked to save them to my google drive automatically), but I also use it to quickly scan receipts that I need to submit to my insurance company for claims. Need to send a paper recipe to a friend? Quickly scan it and email it off.
This guy won’t give you the quality of a fancy flatbed scanner at home, so I wouldn’t recommend it for scanning pictures, but if you are like me and do most of your scanning of documents, it is a must have in the toolkit. I have it installed on my iPhone and iPad and you can get it from the itunes store for about $6. Sorry non-iOS folks, I think this guy is only available on the iOS platform. Luckily that is my platform of choice for mobile these days.
by Jared Francais | May 9, 2016 | Family, Roughriders, Technology, Websites
I’ve had a few people ask me about my “Family Guy” style profile photo and where I got it done. At the time I was looking for something fun/creative to use for a profile photo when I stumbled across the website Fiverr.com. The website is essentially a portal of people willing for do work for $5 (US, with a small service fee tacked on). Services range from people willing the vector-ize and clean up your artwork, do small pieces of translation, record voice overs, and in my case, do caricatures.
I found a seller that did Family Guy style portraits (seller Virtues, whom I highly recommend), bought a few gigs (the credits you use to pay for services), uploaded a picture, and waited. I liked the result so much that I re-ordered in the style of the Jays (my new coed slopitch team as well as my favorite baseball team) and the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Sellers will also offer up-sells, where they will add extra features or customizations to an order for an extra few bucks. This year for our anniversary I wanted to do something a bit special so I had a Disney style portrait of our wedding photo done for an anniversary card. It was a few up-sell credits from $5 but I was very pleased with the results. It made a fun, unique anniversary gift.
So if you are looking for a small little service done for a few dollars, I suggest taking a look at Fiverr.com and I’m sure you will find something neat to try.
by Jared Francais | May 4, 2016 | Blog, Family, iOS, Roughriders, Slopitch, Technology
I’ve noticed a couple things lately, I have the urge to write and that my personal website is stale as stale can be. So I figured this would be a good opportunity to fix them both. I’m not sure where the urge the write came from. It isn’t often that I pick up a book to pass the time. I often have to pause and really think about my their/there/your/you’re and other intricacies of the English language. I’m sure my writing will be filled with no-nos like spelling errors, acronyms and winky faces. But I think writing can be a bit therapeutic, a good tool to clear your mind and focus which I admit has been a challenge of late.
So what will I write about? What shall I *blog*? Well, anyone who knows me knows I’m a passionate Saskatchewan Roughrider fan, I’m sure there will be lots of that. I’m also an avid slopitch player and curler, I’d bet I’ll banter about that. But I want to share more than just my passion for my sports. I’m also a bit of a techy guy. I often get asked questions about how my home media is set up, what apps I run on my phone, do I have any tips or tricks that I can share? So I figured this would be a great place to start. I’m primarily an iOS guy when it comes to phone/tablet and a Windows guy when it comes to the home computer, but I also have plenty other cool like gadgets and such that I will blog about. I hope to share enough tidbits to keep you entertained.
And yes, I have an amazing family, so you will definitely be hearing about that. My wife is a wonderful photographer (see Finelite Photography & Design), so I’m sure I will steal the odd photo to keep things looking pretty around here.
And lastly, there are a few random website links I visit often. I have included them all here, partly for you to explore, and partly so I don’t lose them. Either way, it is useful to someone 😉
Talk Soon,
J
PS – Notice the winky face?
by Jared Francais | Dec 22, 2014 | Blog, Family
Wishing you the best during this festive season, Merry Christmas!
