Nighty Night, Tasker!

If there's a time where I want something else to do all my work for me, it's right before going to bed and just after I get up. When it comes to my phone, I'm fortunate to have that thing in the form of Tasker. Now, this set of profiles might seem a bit lazy, but why do extra steps I don't need to?

The first part of this has to do with the app I use for an alarm clock, Gentle Alarm. It was the App of the Day on the Amazon store a long, long time ago and I'm glad I took advantage of that offer. I highly recommend it as your alarm clock app for a couple of reasons. First, the gentle alarm function. As I've mentioned before, I have trouble getting up in the morning. Here's the blurb about how Gentle Alarm helps with this:

Alarm clocks can't know if you are in light sleep or deep sleep (those movement based alarm clock don't work) but they can play a very quiet pre-alarm which you will only hear if you are in light sleep. If you are in deep sleep, you will simply sleep through the pre-alarm.

The pre-alarm plays 30min before you really want to get up (you can change that). If the pre-alarm wakes you up, you will be more refreshed than if you had slept until the main alarm because at that time you would have fallen back into deep sleep. Give it a try and I am sure you won't want to miss it anymore.


Now, since shifting to nights, I haven't had much need for an alarm clock. But, I do have to get up early from time to time and can say that it does seem to go a lot easier when I use Gentle Alarm to get me up. Take my anecdote for the datum it isn't. :)

Secondly, Gentle Alarm integrates with Tasker. That will come into play later, though as I want to go over the "Nighty Night" task first. This profile came about due to some weirdness that was going on with my phone. Some nights, not every night, Gentle Alarm would switch from it's darkened Night Mode to regular mode. As the screen was generally at full brightness before I put it into Night Mode, it would come on and flood the room....waking my wife. Not good. As it would occur in the middle of the night when I was asleep, and didn't happen consistently, troubleshooting it was out of the question. I needed a workaround.

I already had a profile set that would silence my phone starting at 11pm, I thought maybe I could integrate the workaround into that. But, in thinking about the various permutations, I wasn't happy with a simple timed launch of the event. For example, I could be up late one night, or go to bed earlier another. An entry that was tied to a specific time just wasn't going to cut it. I wanted more manual control of the automated process (I know, right?) and that's where Tasker's ability to create notifications comes in.



At 9:30pm each night, Tasker puts an icon in my notification area entitled "Nighty Night" (Alert task -> Notify). When I click that notification (State event -> Notification click), it runs the Nighty Night task which sets up my phone for going to bed:


* Turns all of the volumes off
* Sets screen orientation back to "on" (I don't like having my screen rotate most of the time, so I leave it off, but Gentle Alarm works better rotated)
* Reduces screen brightness to 35
* Creates a new notification called "Wakey Wakey"
* Launches Gentle Alarm.
* Enable my Daily alarm that is set to go off at 9am (in case I get to sleep in, more on this later).



So, just prior to going to sleep, I hit my notification, hit the Night Mode button on Gentle Alarm and I'm good to go! Two taps to get everything just how I like it before heading to sleep.

Then, comes the morning. Again, permutations of when I'll get up demanded I have some level of manual intervention here and that's where the Wakey Wakey notification mentioned above, as well as the Tasker integration of Gentle Alarm, comes in. If it's a morning where my daughter gets up well before my daily 9am alarm goes off, I can hit the Wakey Wakey icon and it'll reset everything that Nighty Night sets (orientation, screen brightness, etc). It'll also disable the Daily alarm since I don't need it now that I'm awake. On the other hand, if this is one of those mornings my wife lets me sleep in, when I dismiss the Daily alarm it signals Tasker to run Wakey Wakey instead. This way, no matter what time I wake up, whatever I do first will set my phone up for regular use.



The last thing Wakey Wakey does is put up another notification that allows me to reboot the phone with one click. My ROM of choice on my Evo is MIUI. It's a great and gorgeous ROM, but some of the builds have been a little flaky, so I've taken to rebooting it in the morning each day. With the notification, I hit reboot and by the time I've gotten downstairs and had a swig of water, my phone is again ready for use. Done!



As I said, these are all tiny tasks, but these are the minutiae that our days are made up of. These minor tasks never seem a burden until you figure out how to get rid of them...and then you wonder why you put up with them so long! Tasker..it does a body good!

The Great Evernote RSS Reader

For years, I've had an on-again off-again relationship with Evernote. As someone who is terminally unorganized (my doctor says I only have 40-50 years left to live because of it), my biggest problem was finding a way to make all of that data ubiquitous so I can manage it easily and everywhere. I'm back on again with Evernote, primarily due to the introduction of their Chrome extension, Clearly.

For some time, I'd used Readability as a way to get the data I wanted into whatever I was using as a note-storage vault. Using the Readability bookmarkelt, I could easily trim pages from ad-flashing, comment-choked nightmares into slim documents containing only the information I cared about. Someone had even combined the Evernote Clipper bookmarklet with the Readability one making for a one-click solution. But, it never really worked perfectly and, as stated before, Evernote never had enough love from me to make it long term.

But, Clearly DOES work extremely well! And because of it, I've taken another hard look at Evernote and have fallen in love with it. I'm inside this tool every day now, sometimes 5-6x each day...either updating my journal or trying to get the hundreds of notes I already have squirreled away into a neatly organized mess.

As with most tools, once you start power-using it, you start to see the potential to use it to solve other, apparently unrelated issues. Such is what lead to this idea I'm about to outline...

As with most geeks living in the 21st century, I suffer from information overload. I'm subscribed to about 50 different sites via their RSS feeds and use Google Reader to keep up with it all. But, I've found the way I do things to be too slow and cumbersome. My primary issue is with Gawker sites like Lifehacker and IO9, the two sites I feel compelled to visit every day. I have no idea what the issue is with these two sites, but I can have Chrome open all day long, with dozens of tabs generally in view at any time. The instant I open more than two pages from Gawker, my whole machine crawls to a halt.

Now, it's very likely it's some combination of my extensions and the proxy at work as I don't experience this issue too often elsewhere. But, seeing as most of the visiting of these sites occurs when I'm in between tasks at work, it's a pain in the ass I had to find a solution for. I also had the problem that it might not be something appropriate for me to read at work, so I'd fill up my inbox with things to read later...and then never get to them.

Additionally, if I find an article I like, I'm likely to want to save it. Since coming back to Evernote full time, I've been using Clearly to snip them up. If what I want is going to end up in Evernote anyway, it seemed to make some kind of sense to just figure out a way to eliminate the middle man.

And that's where If This Then That comes in. IFTTT is a site that will automate your social media for you. For example, I've got a task setup that will fire every time I post a status message on Facebook and send it to me as an e-mail. Since Facebook's search leaves a lot to be desired, plus I wanted to have an archive of things I posted there, this process makes my social network history much more manageable. (Recently, I've started switching these tasks over to put the items in Evernote instead of sending an e-mail.)

The secret sauce in this task is IFTTT's ability to react to an item being starred in Reader. When I do that, IFTTT posts that article into an Evernote notebook named RIL (for Read It Later, see what I did there?). I can then go in at my convenience and just read the articles in Evernote. As an added plus, they're already in Evernote, I just have to drag articles I want to keep into the appropriate notebook when I'm done reading. Or, if I don't want to keep it, I just delete.

One last tidbit: most sites will only post a summary of an article in RSS. Some, like Lifehacker, will offer the full articles on a separate feed. If they don't, you can try WizardRSS. It's a site that will pull full articles instead of summaries from the site and give them as their own RSS feed. It doesn't work on every site, but it gets enough of them that I watch each day.

I've been using this method for about a week and a half now, and I have to tell you it's made my RSS surfing so much more efficient. For example, when I'm done looking through a particular site's articles, I always mark the whole site as read so I easily know what's got new stories when I come back. The problem is, if I found an article that I had the slightest interest in but didn't want to read it at that time, I'd just leave it unread in Reader. Messy, messy! No more, I've moved all of those waiting to be read articles into Evernote and I'll get to them when I get to them.

Now, Reader is generally empty except for the few new items. I can scan through all of my feeds in a matter of minutes and star just the items I MIGHT want to read. I can then read them on my phone or computer at my convenience. I gotta tell you...it's made me so efficient at getting through my news I run out everyday and that's something that's NEVER happened before!