I love Zap Reader. What is it? Well the site says,
“ZAP Reader is a web based speed reading program that will change the way you read on your computer… There is nothing to install, it works with most popular browsers, and it’s totally free!”
I’m having a hard time with my eyesight lately but I have a TON to read for my studies. Zap Reader has helped a lot. I wish they had a mobile version or an iPhone app but they don’t… I sent an email to the developer requesting one though.
In the meantime, I have come up with a workable solution:
Create a bookmarklet on iPhone Safari browser:
1. Go to zapreader.com in the iPhone browswer.
2. Press the + button then “Add Bookmark” and “Save.” (Safari won’t allow you to edit the url here so we have to come back and fix it.)
3. Copy the following text: javascript:location.href='http://www.zapreader.com/reader?URL='+encode URIComponent(location.href);
(If you can’t copy it on your iPhone, email it to yourself and copy it there.)
Go to your iPhone email and copy that text.
5. In Safari, press the bookmark icon then the edit button. Select the Zap Reader shortcut that you just made. Replace the zapreader.com url with the bookmarklet url that you just copied. Press done until you return to your browser.
To use the Zap Reader bookmarklet on the iPhone:
1. Go to the page you want to read.
2. Press the bookmark icon then the Zap Reader bookmark.
3. Turn your iphone to landscape then ’stretch’ and move the page so that the text will fill the screen. Press play.
My iPhone wasn’t playing nicely with my external speakers. So I stuck the thing in a glass bowl. It was much louder! To complete the geekery, I made a holder out of duct tape. Of course.
Somehow an X-acto knife and some duct tape caught my attention yesterday… this is what happened next.
I considered not posting my first attempt at duct tape creations… in fear that I would out myself as a geek. [To those of you who didn't already know.] Rachel assures me that it will just “add to my charm.”
“If you use Gmail, you want Xoopit. Upgrade Gmail to search, browse and share files, photos and videos. Use Google Search while composing mail. Get information about people on a mail thread. Xoopit works for Gmail, Google Mail and Google Apps users.”
Xoopit offers a great firefox extension which makes Gmail ever so awesome. Yesterday they added a facebook feature. Now you can change your facebook status on gmail…. and you can see the facebook profile photo and status of the author of the email you’re viewing.
Boot the computer to the CD and take a test drive. You can try out Ubuntu without installing it.
Triple check to make sure your beloved files are backed up on an external hard drive then follow the prompts on the CD to install Ubuntu. [If your hard drive is big enough, you can run Windows and Linux. Mine isn't. I wiped the drive clean and started over, Windows free. FREEDOM!]
Realize that you don’t actually know how to use Linux… start Googling… It’s not that hard.
So far so good. The only problem is they don’t have a Google Chrome for Linux yet. Oh well, I’ll wait. There is a Chrome theme for Firefox and a few extensions that make it act a litle more like Chrome… but it’s just not the same. Sigh.
It’s that time again… time to post photos of a totally geeky project. I know you’re excited, aren’t you?
This idea kind of came from Unclutter.com. They used the same thing to organize computer cables and called it a card cable organizer.
Ahh… my phone and headset are charging together… How sweet.
Oh look, look… the cords aren’t getting lost on the floor under a pile of um… stuff.
Yeh… that stuff. It isn’t pretty.
There you have it my geeky friends. With some tape, a hole punch, scissors, and a plastic card, you too can be the proud owner of a delightfuly geeky charging station.
My (World’s Tiniest) flash drive case broke after repeated abuse and an adventure in the washing machine. Scotch tape and superglue kept it alive for a year but it needed replaced. I’m too cheap to buy a new one… so I made a new case following these instructions.
That’s a photo of my finished product on the left. Worried that it would get accidentally thrown away if I left it like the instructions suggested, I turned it into a geeky key chain…
And this friends, is the first post in over one year that qualifies for the Tech Tangents category.
flash drive case broke after repeated abuse and an adventure in the washing machine. Scotch tape and superglue kept it alive for a year but it needed replaced. I’m too cheap to buy a new one… so I made a new case following 
