Google Cursive for Notes on Chromebooks and Take a Chill Pill

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00

Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to Anything But Idle. The Productivity news podcast shows brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:13

And I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:14

And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is Episode 75. for August 16 2021, the show entitled Google cursive for notes on Chromebooks Take a chill pill, and more productivity and technology news this week. So just as a note for everybody, we are rearranging the episodes a bit going forward. In case you notice things are a bit different than usual, we’re hoping this new agenda will be more useful and entertaining to the live show viewers and podcast listeners alike. In essence, we’re still testing. But generally, we’ll be covering our stories of the week in two segments going forward, kind of flipping it, we’ll do our articles from the productivity blogosphere, periodicals and news media first, then followed by our productivity and related technology news thereafter, then we’ll have a rotating segment from productivity organization experts, and you’ve seen some of those before. And then after that, we’ll head into our featured story of the week, and our productivity resources of the week. And so just so you know, we’re changing those things around, and those dramatic parts of the show will then start to kind of subside over the next few episodes. So with that, let’s hop into our first part of our stories of the week works, our productivity articles, and gousto. What’s our first article this week?

Augusto Pinaud 1:31

So the first article is called the end of office and come from Seth Godin blog. And it’s interesting, because, you know, he’s, he’s claiming this story of the back office, okay, and where the back office comes, and how this concept of the office, as we understand that he’s 15 years old, or, you know, maybe a little bit more, and how is all this changing all these pandemic, all this working remotely, and all the discussions that are back and forward, he close the article saying, well, we’re social creative creatures, many people need a place to go what community to be a part of. But that doesn’t mean that the 1957 office building may be the best way to solve the problems. And it is interesting, because we have seen a lot of people one of these remote or hybrid mode to stay. And it is interesting. Also, when you look at the our societies in the past, we used to have the clubs and the other places to do that. social life, not necessarily the offers that social life in the office, something much, much recently in history. So where this is going to go, I don’t know. But without any doubt, it is interesting, you know, as a person who has been working for more than a decade, at home, I don’t want to go to an office building, if possible, ever again, let’s do a fun zoom meeting. There are many ways to connect, that do not imply the office even with the people at work, even with the people in you know, that goes to the office, there are so many ways to interact in a much better way than going to the office. So let’s see what happened with the change.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:25

Yeah, I’ll quote from the article. And I think this just kind of is the most salient argument in the entire article. He says, quote, some organizations dealt with enforced work from home by using endless zoom meetings as a form of compliance, a high tech way to take attendance. But others leaned into the opportunity to create nimble task oriented decision making and communications hubs, ones that were no longer constrained by physical proximity and quote, and I think that says it in a nutshell. And then onward to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 3:57

Our next article is the top nine ways to boost productivity with the smartphone. Sonic was interesting because so many years ago, I wrote that book, the iPad only book was was Michael solinsky. And at that time, B iPad only was revolutionary and even this day is still being slow. People still look at me like just the iPad, just just the iPad. I just have three of them but it’s just the iPad. But the reality is we’re looking more and more people being that iPhone or your Android only that that phone is their main device and we were discussing last week when we talk about the Samsung a special event with Art Gelwicks. We were discussing about the flip phone he you can now have a phone that you can open double it has dex functionalities you can connect a mouse and a keyboard and have a whole thing to play. But what you can use these for Well, the article talks about time management and recommend a couple of applications. also talks about reading books. And all talks about the Kindle, the Google reads through social the apple iBooks. There is also if people don’t know, your public library, most likely have an application that you can connect to the Kindle, or you can use their application. It’s the name flipping Libby Libby Yeah, so you can download Libby and access them. So that’s incredible to do this management obviously, as productivity people, you know, they stay quote, a bit a car, and remember the milk but to do is not be teams, you know, just call it office tasks on the go, you know, work Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Apple numbers, Apple sheets, podcasts, they also mentioned a couple. Really, this phone in my pocket, is I don’t know how many, but way more powerful than my first Mac, way more powerful than my first laptop, my apple 140. And it is a shame that most people have an incredible powerful device on their pocket. And they are under utilizing them to to other things when they could really get the most out of it, and can make something incredible out of it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:35

Yeah, I will. The only thing that the article does is it talks about Spotify as a podcasting app. And I would just encourage everyone to actually use a real podcasting app, our podcast app instead of Spotify. Spotify is on a slow, they were kind of in the war to get rid of the RSS feed, it seems I’m not saying that they claim that publicly but I would rather you use Google podcasts, Apple podcasts, overcast pocket casts some other podcast app instead of Spotify, to get your podcasts. But otherwise, I like the notion that the article talks about not as well written as it should be. But you know, the article itself really does dive into the various ways in which our phones are an extension of our capabilities today, they are really extending our capabilities, and they’re always on always with us. And that’s a very powerful component of our everyday lives. onward to our next article. Our

Augusto Pinaud 7:31

next article is all about Google and the pay cut, they are trying to say if you work remotely or work from home, you may lose money, and they apparently put out some kind of a calculator. And of course, there has been the critics have. And the critics are well, why if you were obviously you’re not making money, so that’s not the reason you’re doing why you’re going to pay me less if I can be as productive, coming to the office or not. And, you know, they think that’s a fair question to ask from the employee perspective, okay, why you’re going to take x percentage if I decide not to go to the office, but also, I’m going to say there is people who will happily take that same car, not to have the commute to be able to work better to be able to have a much higher quality of life. So I, as much as the article criticize the Google and the others who have decided to go to this way. Well, from my perspective, you’re free. If you think that 10% is unfair, or 20, or whatever is a percentage, you may get gone. You can always charge the rest of man Lee decide to do the commute.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:54

Yeah, and it looks like you know, several people who are, you know, quoted in the article, what they noted was, you know, that they just recently got a pay raise, and it would eradicate that pay raise that they feel like they work really hard for and so there needs to be some level of equity here in terms of how Google meters out this kind of pay cut. If they aren’t going to do that. If you’re, you know, if you lived in New York City, for example, and you decided to work from home, you wouldn’t be penalised, in essence, for working from home, but if you lived outside the city, then you would be and I’m presuming that’s kind of a cost of living adjustments scenario that they’re taking into account. But it just seems it just doesn’t seem very equitable. Because if those two people, you know, are working as hard as they need to, they’re getting the same performance metrics scores, but they just happened to be working from home. That doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason for them to lose the, you know, the pay that they were receiving for the same person’s work, and it’s going to ultimately hurt women more than men because Because more women have chosen to take work from home, because they are many times the primary caregivers of children is not across the board. But that that does happen. So they’re

Augusto Pinaud 10:11

the ones who are going to be heard their primary caregivers.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:13

Yeah. And so it’s going to hit unequally for people, people with children, ultimately, you know, probably more women. And so Google needs to kind of think this through because Google is looked to as a standard bearer for these kinds of employee policies. And if they choose to do this, this could potentially harm the work from home or distributed work movement. And I hope that they tread very carefully in terms of how they move forward with this particular policy. All right, moving on to our next article,

Augusto Pinaud 10:43

four things to do when you feel burnout, or tired from life hack. And say, it comes for four things, reevaluate your calendar, and quit comparing set boundaries and learn to say no, set on a schedule of self care, love and self maintenance. And the last one is sensory deprivation. I think it was really, in my opinion, three ways to get the first three on the article. I agree, you know, reevaluate your calendar, you know, look where it is. The second one, you know, set boundaries and learn to say no, okay, Guilty as charged. I’m awful at that. Okay, but the third one is scheduled self care, self love, and self maintenance. And this is so so important. And people tend to be so bad at this. And, and, again, Guilty as charged, I need to pay attention. This is something that comes into my weekly review every week, how I’m how I did with self care, and how I’m going to do better next week, or at least the same. So those are then the 10, they went into talking about tank therapy and sensory deprivation. I believe in meditation, I believe on other things, I have done the tanks. But if you are overwhelming, your schedule says the item number one, you don’t have the time to go to the tank, if you are not doing self care, you’re not going to go to the tank. So I think the fourth one doesn’t match with the rest of the article. But it wasn’t good. At least an article.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:24

Yeah, again, I felt like the sensory deprivation tank part was a little bit askew but but I understand where they’re coming from, which is that people are constantly being hit with lots of, of activities on digital devices that causes dopamine to go into overdrive, right? They’re constantly getting these little dopamine hits throughout their day, they look at the social media, they look at the email, they look at the next thing on their calendar, all of these little dopamine hits, it’s death by 1000 cuts of their of their sensory systems, and cutting back a bit and coming into a system that’s just a little bit slower can be useful to you, if you feel that level of burnout, you know, and I think that you should probably look to the first three tactics before you come to the first three strategies really, before you come to that fourth. But you know, I like the idea of using mindfulness activities, certainly breathwork as they talked about in meditation, but you know, I don’t know if you need to really go to sensory deprivation tanks to to to mitigate sensory overload or sensory overstimulation methods. So, Alright, next.

Augusto Pinaud 13:28

So the next article is how to maintain a psychological safety in a hybrid workspace and goes a couple of examples. I don’t know, what was your take on this article?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:42

Sure. So I’ve been hailing the importance of psychological safety in work environments for years. And so it was good to see this noted by Trello in their blog post, I think the important things to understand is that psychological safety is a is this group phenomenon that has been studied very widely. Going back to the 1960s. When, you know, Edward w Deming and others were kind of looking at it in the in the space of factories. But now here we are, we’re seeing the concept of psychological safety being kind of torn apart by virtue of people being in remote and hybrid environments. The whole idea here is to give people space to be able to make mistakes, spaces to really, you know, take risks in the eyes of the group, and still do well here. And so it looks like and just joined us. Hi, Anne, how’s it going? She said, just jumping back to our prior article, she noted even 10 minutes a day of meditation can work wonders toward gaining inner peace and calm and she finds meditating Outdoors is the best and so appreciate that comment, and and so welcome. And so I couldn’t agree more. I do love actually meditating outdoors. I wish I could do it more often. And so psychological safety Though is really important, I think it’s one of those things where one, if we don’t provide psychological safety in our own internal spaces, places where we can feel a level of taking risk. And doing that level of work, we ultimately will take less risk. And taking less risk increases our chances of therefore being less creative, less innovative. And by creative, I really mean we don’t solve problems, we’ll be less likely to solve problems. And that’s just a human thing, we are just so used to solving problems. But when the team doesn’t give you space to do that, when you get ostracized or shut down, when you try to come up with new ideas, that can be really debilitating, that happens in relationships, that happens in team environments. And so I fully support the notion of people learning about what psychological safety is and does toward toward groups, and how to really increase and strengthen the concept of psychological safety at work. So, you know, it’s just like any other certain situation, if we feel safe, then we’re more likely to do it’s like, if you have a helmet on while you’re biking, you’re going to take more risks, hopefully, you know, not to a level of, you know, total disregard for safety. But you know, it’s like having a seatbelt on when you’re driving or any other kinds of things, you feel safe enough to be able to drive by virtue of knowing that you’re somewhat protected from potentially these things happening to you. I will note also, in the show notes, when when it does when the episode of the podcast is released, I put a link in the show notes to a quantitative measurement method for psychological safety for teams, it’s actually built into the Wikipedia article about psychological safety. So that is linked in there. It’s just a 10 statement query. And people can rank yes or no based on their agreement to those things. So you can do it based on a you know, five point scale or whatever you want. But then obviously, the higher the number of agreement, you know, metrics toward that list, the higher level of psychological safety is embedded in the team. So you really want to work to be able to build teams that have greater levels of psychological safety, and you will see teams get better, and therefore have greater cohesion. So it’s just important to remember that both building and maintaining psychological safety are very important to organizations. And I can imagine that’s even more important today, when we don’t have a lot of face time. And we could be a little bit, you know, hurt by email, or, you know, we can just not be paying attention to the fact that we might just start disregarding things that in a, in a physical environment, we may, we may actually be a little bit more sensitive about. And so I think it’s important for us to keep that in mind, top of mind as we move into more remote or distributed and hybrid work. Okay, what is our final productivity article,

Augusto Pinaud 17:48

our final article scum from Forge, and he’s one to wake up early, make it a habit. And this is a topic that says don’t make it a habit, don’t make it a habit. That’s what happened though, the glasses are not working anymore, but don’t make it a habit. And this topic that is close to me, I I have write about it. I have mentioned that, for the longest time, I was a proud member of the our club, you know, those people who waste time on post midnight, so you can work until three in the morning. That was me, okay. And at some point, I make the change. And so every time we talk about talking early, and wake up early, and what that means, I’m interested, you know, I don’t go to bed at the same time every night. But I go, I wake up every morning at the same time. And what that produce is that gets the body that when I’m not that tired, because I’d have did not have a busy day, then I can stay in bed reading longer. I tend to get in bed at the same time. I just don’t fall asleep I read. So but there is a routine, I wake up, I do my meditation, then I shower and then I do other things. So there is a whole routine that makes work working up early in the morning. really a pleasure. I’m looking forward to that time, between four and seven in the morning. That is three hours of silence that I can work that I can meditate that I can do a lot of things without really any interruptions for you. I don’t talk to clients in rugby in general, even the clients in Europe who are ready to talk to me at that time. They need to wait until much later. But it gives me that but the secret yet it’s not a habit. It’s a matter of the routine. Same thing as I’m going to bet there is a routine there is a stretch routine there is I have a foam roller next to my bed. I stretch my bag then I go into reading.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:56

Yeah, so I’ve been on this soapbox for many, many years talking about About my dislike of habits, and this is why, you know, I think near y’all really outlines it very well, the argument that I am consistently making and people think that I’m I’m somewhat being perverse when I say this, but you know, this is not about habit formation, he says, quote, in short, since habits are defined as impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought, not every behavior can become a habit, if you have to fight your alarm clock with every fiber of your being, just to resist the urge to keep snoozing, that’s not a habit, waking up early requires you to build a routine, not a habit. And that’s the point is that a complex behaviors strung together are routines, and so many people presume that impulse control is what is going to allow them to be able to build out something like a routine that is going to ultimately solve a problem. habits are not the panacea that everyone wants you to believe it is. And and so it’s not that habits are bad, I’m not against habits necessarily. I’m just for routines over habits because they allow you to take behaviors, string them into complex, you know, matrices, that your that your brain is much more readily available to work with. Plus, just like a sales methodology, if you’re a salesperson, you have a sales methodology, you follow the steps, you follow the checklist, and then you can identify where clients fall out of the funnel, along that that method with routines, you can do the same thing. You can kind of swap pieces in and out of the routine until you find the right order, you find the right items that fit into it, the right components, and then voila, you have something that actually works. And then in nears perspective, he talks about the idea that you want to be able to go to bed on time, you know, set yourself up to go to bed early enough so that you’re able to then wake up with the amount of time your body needs naturally to sleep. And so I’m fully for it. But I just I saw the article and I saw him saying what I have always been saying about routines. And I thought this just gives me a moment to soapbox. So with that, soapbox. I’m off the soapbox now. And we have covered our productivity articles from the blogosphere. And otherwise, we’re going to take our first break, and then we will come back and when we do come back, we will then get into our technology related news of the day and so we will see you after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 22:30

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:40

Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith joined with gousto pinout as always, for the show. And so onward to our productivity and technology related news segment. Augusto, what’s our first article today?

Augusto Pinaud 23:55

So I believe we’re talking about introducing a new child safety feature that will scan users photo libraries, and it has cost so much noise over the week, or over the last week. If it’s good, if it’s bad, if it’s you know, there is a perfect solution for any kind of solution like this. And the answer is no. But I think any step that many corporations take towards reduce or eliminate sexual abuse, it’s a step in the right direction, even if the application is not perfect. So they are there has been a lot I mean, on the on the notes you are going to find a couple of articles you’re even going to find interview they did was great for the Ricky acknowledging, you know, the confusion and trying to explain it a little bit more and what they’re trying to do for this, but

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:58

yeah, so so hold on a second. So There’s two different things here that Apple has done. And so it’s really important for people to understand this. One is Apple has hashed basically the Nick Mac the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that federally funded but independent organizations, database of explicit child explicit photography. This is not the actual images being downloaded, but a hash and algorithmic identifier so that it’s able to identify these things. If your device physical device in your hand, has downloaded onto it a number at some threshold, it’s not just one, I’m sure it’s not two or three, but it’s many of these kinds of sexually explicit child, you know, images, then you will trigger a system where a human will then review the material and then pass you along to authorities. Okay, so that’s the first piece that they’re doing. That’s independent of now another set of features, which are for parents and underage children, which basically allows the parent to be able to get a notification if a child either downloads or tries to send some kind of sexually explicit content. And so the first one is for children, I believe under 13. Correct me if I’m wrong, Augusto. But children under the age of 13, they will be notified automatically to the parents is not turned on by default, you have to turn it on. But once you do turn it on, then the parent will be automatically notified if one of those two conditions are met, they receive some kind of sexually explicit material or the child attempts to send some kind of sexually explicit material over that age, again, has to be set turned on, it’s not on by default. But at that point, the child will be notified and told just like with the turned on for under age, they’ll be notified, hey, this may be sexually explicit, you may not want to look at this. And then the other side to that is that if they go to send it, then again, it will it will tell them, hey, you’re sending sexually explicit material, you may want won’t want to do that. But it does not notify the parent. And so this is just a you know, like a nudge in the Cass Sunstein perspective of being able to help people make the right choices in the moment. So two different completely two different features. You know, Apple has done a poor job of communicating this most other technology companies are doing some level of this, this one happens to be on device as opposed to off device in the cloud. You do and can turn it off completely by turning off your connection to iCloud. And so for, for security advocates, this is obviously bad for parents of children. This is obviously sounding very good. You know, and this is the gnarly, very thorny topic of cybersecurity, right, it’s not easy, and none of this is going to make sense to everybody all of the time. And we do have to make some trade offs here. And I don’t know if this is the right trade off, we’ll see in time whether or not this is the right trade off. But we have to we have to figure out what we do. In the face of both cybercrime and exploitation of children, obviously, we don’t want that but we also don’t want that to be a Trojan horse for them eroding security for personal information and personal security. So it’s a it’s a tenuous line that we’re that we’re that was kind of a thread that we’re pulling from either end and of course, the Electronic Frontier Foundation are completely against it, you know, because they want absolute freedom and absolute security. And of course, we live in a world of Gray’s so just wanted to explain that for everybody. But as Augusto noted, there, there are many articles that are that we’ve added into the show notes so you can look at it and start to really understand what it means for you in that sense. Alright, on to our next.

Augusto Pinaud 28:43

So our next one is new pearls 17 officially will let you run Windows 11. And that is really interesting because there was discussions that Windows 11 was not going to be able to run in them one that is the chipset the this is designed for and not only they have been able to create parallel for them one but they have now been able to be compatible with Windows 11. And I think for the people I know who use Windows and and I have more than one client who use a Mac with parallels. Having the ability to upgrade to Windows 11 will be exciting and having unknown that barrels will come with that will be really really good for them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:35

Fantastic. Good to hear on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 29:39

Now we are getting into the Android tablets and we are going to talk about the new novel tab p 12. Who is claiming to be the new high end Android in the market. So I don’t know enough. I thought I What do you think about the Lenovo p 12 as As a high end, cow, I, it isn’t the tablet the Chromebook market is interesting for me, because there is really not that high end, you know, monster in the market, there are some really good, but there is not that machine for a person who wants a really high end Chromebook to go and get or at least not that I have had. We are going to cover a couple today. But what do you think about the Lenovo p 12?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:29

Yeah, so I’m I’m not as bullish about the P 12. Pro as I am about some of the other Lenovo devices that have been released. Again, this is one of those cases where Lenovo puts out solid products. I mean, they put out the the duet, let’s say was two years ago now. And the duet was a really solid device at a good price. If they’re going into the high end market. I think that, you know, again, it’s to be determined. But from what I learned from from the Lenovo tab, p 11. Pro, it really wasn’t that great. And so it it kind of the luster, you know, rubbed off really quickly. And so it didn’t really come come out of the gate running the yoga tab 13, the yoga tab 11 great Android devices. And so I’m I’m looking forward to seeing what the P 12. Pro does. But to be quite honest, I mean, just from the specs that I’m seeing, it doesn’t seem that great, especially if you put it up against some of the other tablets that are out there, especially in the Chinese market. We’re seeing much better pro tablets coming onto the onto the market, you have the honor tab, V seven Pro, you have some really, really good ones. And the only distinction is that you know, Huawei and other companies are blocked from selling in the united states currently for you know, international cybersecurity reasons. But otherwise, I would probably get the one of the Huawei tablets any day, because they’re just better specs. So I’m a little bit I’m a little bit tenuous about the Lenovo p 12. Pro, the tab ptl 12. Pro, but you know, hope springs eternal it could it Come out, come out of the gate and people could love it. So we’ll see, see what happens. I’m looking forward to seeing actual pricing and actual specs. But you know, we need we need this. You know, I think that with Samsung’s Tab S, what is it now that s eight sh s nine coming out?

Augusto Pinaud 32:28

No.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:29

s 10. Maybe Yeah, we’re at the Tab S 10. Now, you know, like in those iterations of having really nice, beautiful tablets, you know, coming on the market, we need some more Android versions that allow you to have that seamless integration of the dex platform, so that you can go from Android on a mobile device to an Android on a big desktop display. And, you know, we really don’t have many of those in the Samsung world. But I would love to see some side loaded versions of it onto some other Android devices. So I just the specs just need to be high enough. And I’m curious to see how that will work. Again, that requires, you know, somewhat a little bit geekier than then not. But I think I think we’re in a good year for great designs, but probably not the best hardware coming out. And just because of the pandemic and supply chain shortages, with regarding to some of the sscs on backorder and, and other chips. So I’m not sure what we’re gonna get this year, I’m really looking forward to maybe a 2022 and 2023 market where we will hopefully have overcome some of the supply chain issues. And we’re going to see what Google does with this tensor chip that they’re building for the Google Pixel six and six Pro, if they are really starting to put machine learning on these SOC s. And they work really well. We’re gonna see that happen across the board with more and more, you know, manufacturers beyond just Apple, Apple seems to have gotten it out the gate, Google is now putting it out the gate will see Samsung follow with Intel. And we’ll see more and more of these machine learning pieces come out the gate, which means that processing can happen in dual modes, and we can see lots more data being, you know, happening, data processing happening on the device very quickly that doesn’t require the cloud. And I think that can be really good and powerful. It’s just I don’t know if this P 12. Pros is really the the the answer.

Augusto Pinaud 34:32

Well, I’m going to say goodbye to our to our next newest HP announced new cromo as machines and I don’t know about the P 12. I don’t have a dekstop. Okay, I have not had a next up. I don’t know since when. Okay, it’s been a really long time. But I’m going to admit the HP chromebase a 10. It’s one that has caught my attention, not random. It’s not only it’s a ridiculously sizes screen for a Chromebook. It’s a 21 inch for a Chromebook. I don’t think there’s I have seen anything that big, but it allows you to turn the screen. And that is something that when I write, there is nothing better than a long vertical screen. So I love that. So, um, that was incredible. And it’s not a bad price. And then they have the 11 inch, the Chromebook x 211 inch, it seems like a solid machine. But that Next up was that 21 vertical screen. sounds incredible. Tron and he’s sharing the Samsung tab. seven plus is the latest. So that shows that Ray and I are not Samsung clients, and we don’t have a tab. So thank you very much. And to put us in line with that information.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:58

I figured we were on the seven seven was was sounded right to me and but but anyway, the point is, is well taken here, though, that there was the chrome bass coming out, it’s at 21.5 inches, it is smaller than the last chrome base that was on the market, there was there was a there was a chrome base that was 23 inches, but that did not have a rotating screen to give you that long view. It’s beautiful. I think this this chrome base is actually beautiful. For those who don’t know, anytime a chrome base comes up, I tend to talk about this, which is that there are multiple form factors for Chromebooks. And so we have Chromebooks, which are the laptop versions of Chrome OS, we then have chrome bits, which are the little the thumb drives, you just stick it in any HDMI port of any monitor, and it turns it into a computer, you can connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse if you’d like to, we then have chrome boxes, Chrome boxes are those little mini PCs like a Mac Mini. So small box form factor that you can then connect all kinds of peripherals to, and then we have the chrome base. And the chrome base, of course gives us that all in one device where you have the monitor built in to a some kind of arm that can be stabilized and giving you all of those peripherals on the on the on the on the device for usage. And so chrome comes in all of these wonderful flavors. And that is fantastic. And I’m just very excited. They actually have a works with Chrome monitor that I think is 24 inches of gousto. And so that has also come out along with beta is 23.8. But

Augusto Pinaud 37:31

yes, 20

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:32

Yeah, so So 20 is 24 inches. And, and then they also announced that that new Chromebook that is kind of a competitor to the Lenovo Chromebook duet or even the the latest Lenovo tab 12 Pro, I mean, these are really all in that same class of tablets, turn computers when you want them to be. And so this is the XR x 211. So another 11 inch screen, when I’ve just learned is that while the 11 inch form is is good for just needing something on the go, I really can’t use that as my daily driver. And so I really like the fact that we have these works with Chrome monitors that now just USB cable, plug it right into a device like the X 211. And now you’ve got a full size 23.8 inch screen to work on. And so I really like that plus you have the touchscreen capability, because you have the you have the main device that you can just use for touchscreen purposes. So I’m, I’m really excited about what Chrome is doing with their OEM partners to really bring more devices in multiple different form factors. And so yeah, I just think Chrome OS is is rockin it. And good good on HP for bringing a really great Chrome OS lineup here that I think will really complement the existing Chrome devices, Chrome OS devices on the market. So what’s next,

Augusto Pinaud 38:58

our next is what’s up is getting a view one option to send in photos and videos that disappear. And telegram does that and is great. I have two elderly parents who don’t live close and lose their passwords often. And they are in my machine. So I get often called Can you please send me the password. And so this is something that I can do that is useful, I can send it it will disappear. And it will not stay in their devices. So I’m glad that WhatsApp is doing that. And I hope everybody will do that, you know, the from the standard messages and Google on Android and everywhere else. This should be not an assumption call to have but something that everybody have for default.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:46

Absolutely. This is just extending their overtime disappearing messages and other kinds of things. This is an additional feature in that feature set. All right on to our next door. Final

Augusto Pinaud 39:57

news is Google meet users may have Options finally took the hose to limit the screen sharing to mute others. So seems like Google meat is copying some of those things that zoom has been doing for the longest time. And users like me have Google me that’s been complaining for the same longest time. So it is good that is starting to come, you will be able to have up to 25 cohoes per meeting. That seems a lot of people but but again, it’s good. It’s It’s good that Google, it’s going to put more effort behind Google meet Google meet is a great product, especially when your company leaves in the Google ecosystem, why? If I’m paying already for Google meat, I need to go and hire soon because Google meat doesn’t fit. There is no skews from Google in this. So I’m excited to see that you are going to be able to do that to start muting others on many other things into this.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:57

Yeah, so this makes a lot of sense. You can have 100, breakout rooms and 25 co hosts and up to I mean, most accounts, you’re having 250. You know, in the in the business, nuts business starter than Business Standard, I think it’s 250 participants, which means that if you have 25, breakout rooms, you have 10 people per room, you need additional co hosts who can manage those breakout rooms. So they’re just giving some flexibility there as they as they beef up there. This is all within Google workspace, basically business versions of Google workspace currently, so that everybody’s on the same page here. So these are within Google workspace for business, one of the Business Standard starter or higher plans. for those purposes, I think this is a great step in that direction. I think that they’ll bring this to consumer, you know, at some point, certainly probably not immediately. And I’m just happy to see Google meet continuing to get love and attention, because we know that this is going to be you know, just an issue going forward. And just note that this was already available in Google workspace for education customers. So the controls were already there. So this is just extending now into the business space before they probably streamline and rollout some of these features to Google workspace, consumer level folks, that is the free and Google workspace individual users. All right, I think that is our productivity and technology articles for the week, which brings us on to our next segment, which is productivity resource of the week. And so of course, gousto, and I come across many personal productivity tools, apps and services on our productivity journeys. So in this segment, productivity resources of the week, we each bring you one new or old, doesn’t matter we think you might like. And so this week, we have two resources. And I’m going to bring it up on my screen. Wonderful. So our first resource is as mine and as actually let me get my screen settled here. And so what I thought since the theme of this week was taking a chill pill in honor of national relaxation day that I think is coming up soon, I thought we might use a little bit of nature. And so this is an app that I use, it’s called alltrails. And it’s just phenomenal. It allows you to be able to type in pretty much any city park or trail name, and it will show you those outdoor spaces that you can, you can go to, and so it auto locates you, right. And so this is because of my VPN telling you that I’m near Ashburn, Virginia. And so it just automatically gives you the ability to go ahead and look at all of the various trails that you can do. So you could just take a nature break. So just like the Japanese called forest bathing, you know, you could just take a nature, you know, break and go do something near you in nature. And so the apps are great. They’re on Android and iOS, you download the app, and then you have all of these exploration areas at your fingertips. And they have different things. So it tells you like, you know, how much time do you want to be away? And what do you want to do? Does it? Do they have space for dogs? Can you go mountain biking, is it wheelchair friendly, it has all of these really great features for being able to search and filter for the types of places you want to go. And then you can go ahead and hop right into it. So this is a really great app. And I think it’s a it’s a good way for you to relax, which is exerting some physical energy. It’s sometimes very mentally emotionally relieving. And so that’s my productivity resource this week, what’s yours because

Augusto Pinaud 44:33

mine is an anti productivity resource of the week. And it’s called game pgn. And it works in iOS and basically allows you to have fun or play games via text message. So the reason I’m bringing this again is anti productive, I get it but I have discover I played chess with a couple Friends, and we are playing. I used to love to play chess and I lost the game mostly because I didn’t have somebody to play with. Now with this, I can play. I can, you know, do it. And not only that, I can even get my kids, my father, I can play with my father. So it gets to be fun. It doesn’t need to be the time that I may not have. But I can move make the movement away for their movement. So it may not be productivity, but it bring that chill factor, it is great to see the notification and all the notifications are no problem. Some of them are then for me to wait to move, make my next move. So it’s something that I appreciate that I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:42

have on my phone. Fantastic. Wonderful. All right. And so with that we are done with our productivity resources of the week. And that brings us to our story of the week. Our featured story this week is a story called cursive is Google’s new pw a for notes on Chromebooks. And so Augusto talked to us about cursive what is cursive.

Augusto Pinaud 46:06

cursive is what one is the first progressive web app pw a. Okay, that is going to take allows you to take notes in Chromebooks with the stylus. I’m an iPad user, I love my Apple Pencil, I love to take notes with that thing. And when I got the Chromebook that doesn’t know what the word that was one of my things until I begin looking at the applications, but I wanted everything to synchronize that was not as simple. If Google make this or as making this is as a W, A pw a, that means you will be able to open this almost anywhere, you may not be able to do the cursive, not every machine has. But if you have a surface, now you will be able to use the same app as your Chromebook. And that is something really, really exciting. One of the things that for me are really, really important is that ability to have the to be able to find the same notes on one device to the other doesn’t matter which device you grab, you should have the same information. So I am really, really excited. Obviously, Google is making note notebooks and things that you can make. So at least for what I have seen, it’s going to be really, really, really incredible. And they announced it in with hp x 211, that we mentioned earlier is going to come pre installed into that. But it’s basically going to work with every w pw application in a device. And I am really, really excited about it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:50

Yeah, so so that folks know you already have pretty good handwriting technology built into your Chrome OS and Android devices. So cursive is actually utilizing that on top of the framework that is already in existence. So I think cursive is going to be really a unique player in this market. When Augusto and I first came across the story, we were talking about it and I immediately thought to myself, Oh my gosh, how is it that Google Keep the Google Keep team is not really the forefront of this particular piece. But it seems to be its own application. And eventually, I’m presuming it can only but get bundled into Google Keep in some way shape, or form or melded together in some in some way, shape or form. I don’t think the Google team keep team will allow it to just float off there by itself in that sense. But I think that this is really interesting, right? So your handwritten notes are going to then get synchronized to Google Drive because that’s going to be its its cloud storage component. It’s probably way right now it’s structured to be limited purely to the x x 211. And so other devices will not have it at first, but then they will allow it out after this kind of honeymoon period testing it on the X 211. And then you will see it now available across the board. You know, you’ll be able to do this on desktops and on mobile and, and and on tablets. And I think this is a really good start for Google in terms of their productivity, you know, ecosystem. They have keep, they have tasks, they have calendar, they have email they have now handwriting capabilities, the Google Keep have handwriting technologies in its technology to begin with. And it’s tech stack, it really wasn’t particularly or isn’t particularly all that great. But what it does have is really great image optical character recognition. It has the OCR built into it that has all of these really great features that I think the two of those applications bundling cursive into the Google Keep ecosystem I think would be really, really powerful. And I can’t imagine that the Google Drive team wants to see cursive and keep really competing for you know, resources, co you know, programming resources and otherwise. So I see this A long term play to bundle those two together, I could be wrong, it could be that Chrome OS decides to bundle cursive into its project and be completely becomes a part of Chrome OS. Who knows. But I’m looking forward to seeing the pw pw a become a full fledged app for things like the iPad for things like I Android and seeing where that goes because I think there could be a lot of opportunity here to be able to just seamlessly take notes from place to place to place as you all know, I am a note taking afficionado you know, I love Evernote. And right now the handwriting experience in Evernote is not the greatest. And I’m hoping that fixes itself and gets better over the next few quarters. But not withstanding, there’s always a good reason to have good competition in the market and unhealthy competition in the market.

Augusto Pinaud 50:50

Good competition. And I have said this over and over and over just make everybody’s better. So if Google can really pull this out and bring it to the iPad and bring it to the to the surface and bring it to the other ones. Now we are going to get a consistent, good experience for handwriting and hopefully it’s going to allow us to import PDF so we can do notes into those PDF inside of cursive. I think they have a winning recipe. Of course they can kill it before then of 2021.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 51:20

Let’s really hope not, let’s hope not. But that is that is sometimes on the on the on the list of things Google does. Alright, we’ve got some announcements, and then we’re gonna close out. Okay, so what are what are announcements this week. So next

Augusto Pinaud 51:35

week, next 18 of August, Dr. Frank Buck and myself are going to come to the foreign statement of the comparison we have been doing between to do is and remember the milk. And our event is going to be held in the personal productivity club personal productivity club, and we are going to be discussing the final labels, the filters, and the connection with the calendar. So if you want to come you are more than invited. And then next is a free event. And then next week on Tuesday, the dates escaping me. So there’ll be 25th, the 25th we are going to come again unmade for the final conclusion. So now that we cover we think everything for episodes, we are going to come to what was experienced what we learn been Dr. Buck a person who live works and recommends recommend remember the milk and me somebody who it’s really involving to do is it was a great experience. So that day, we will close the event and and come with the final conclusions.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:41

Wait, so you’re saying the following Tuesday. So that’s the 20. That’s Tuesday the 24th? On eastern time, so Okay, so so it’s Wednesday of this week, and then Tuesday or next week? All right. There we go. All right, sir. Well, thank you for the announcements. We have lots of extra news that we can’t cover in our episodes. I’ll talk about that in a moment. But otherwise, we’ve covered the productivity and related technology news this week. Thanks so much, Augusto, for joining me this every week on Anything But Idle.

Augusto Pinaud 53:12

It’s my pleasure. Thank you very much.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:14

No problem. Alright, so if we didn’t miss something, just note that we have an extra stories section in the show notes which are published. For those of you watching live, it’s published tomorrow morning. And for those of you who are listening in the podcast, it is there in the podcast, show notes. Just click on Anything But Idle comm forward slash 075, which will take you to the page that it is on. And so you can watch and listen to the podcast episode there. But there on that page, in the extra story section, you will see all of the other news that we can’t cover in our timeframe in this hour block with you all live. That being the case, if we didn’t miss something, feel free to send that along to us either through the contact page on Anything But idle.com You can also tweet or DMS on Twitter at Anything But Idle you can of course, tweeter tweet, either Agusta or myself at our personal profiles. But we do have that specific Twitter handle Anything But Idle for any stories that you might want to let us know about. And we’ll let the audience know in a future episode while you’re on Anything But Idle. Like I said, you have our show notes those have links to all the stories we discussed tools, the productivity resources of the week, and a text transcript so it has both a readable transcript that’s it just click the Read More link it’ll expand you can read it right there on the page, or you can click on the PDF download link below that and that’ll go ahead and download a PDF to your device and you can then open it up and read it off line. If this is your first time watching the live stream Feel free to subscribe and like the video that helps us make new personal productivity friends brings new viewers and listeners into the fold and so thank you for doing that. If you are listening in your favorite podcast app and you’re not a subscriber Feel free to go ahead and do that you can do that for free Just go to Anything But Idle comm and then click on subscribe or follow I forget which word it says on the on the tabs but click on one of those And it will go ahead and give you instructions on how to subscribe to the show or follow the show to get episodes downloaded each week. And with that, we will see you all next time Anything But Idle. Thanks so much everybody, here’s to your productive life.