notifications

Be told when anything happens online

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If you visit a lot of websites all the time, stop and ask me about RSS instead. You’ll have plenty of chances as I rarely shut up about it. But as well as this tool for making websites send you their new articles, there are ways to get all sorts of information without schlepping off to site after site. One new way involves IFTTT and a tool called TrackIf:

TrackIf helps you track the web and alerts you if anything you want changes online, helping you be the first to know when anything happens online. Track price drops on any product at nearly any shopping site. Something you want out of stock? No problem, TrackIf can alert you if it’s available again.

Connect TrackIf to anything – IFTTT

Read the full piece. It’ll either bore you or awaken a brilliant interest in automating te web for you. A brilliant interest that becomes all consuming, but there you go.

Apparently some football team did something or other

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I think it was football. Is Chelsea a football team or a goldfish? I’m sure it’s one or the other and I’m certain that what it or they do is massively important to them. But I was just watching Community on my iPad when TuneIn Radio popped up a notification telling me this breaking news that, frankly, I’ve already forgotten.

As notifications go, this was stylish enough and more importantly as notifications go, this one went. But in what algorithm did TuneIn Radio see I’d tuned in to the Today programme on Radio 4, heard that it was in the middle of its Thought for the Day, sigh and say aloud “at least it isn’t the sport” before switching it off, and conclude that I must want sport and/or goldfish news.

It’s bugging me now. Hang on.

No, I can’t get the notification back to check what it was about.

Maybe I’m just narked at being so interrupted by something so trivial – to me, anyway. I could blame TuneIn Radio for notifiying me when I hadn’t said I wanted to but, let’s be fair, maybe I allowed notifications back when I installed it a few years ago. That this is the first-ever is a little suspicious but it could be my fault, it could be finger trouble.

But I don’t think an app with such a broad use as TuneIn Radio should do this. It’s not like I’ve elected to install a Wimbledon Cricket app, then I would think it reasonable that it send notifications, especially if I’ve said okay. TuneIn Radio is a quick way of tuning in to pretty much any radio station anywhere in the world. It’s nicer on the iPad than BBC’s own iPlayer Radio, I use a fair bit.

I could’ve got the answer wrong if it asked me to allow notifications. But if it had ever asked whether I wanted sport or goldfish news, there is no question but that I would’ve said no.

So I’m narked that TuneIn does this.

Stop me. This is a bad new habit

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I’m a bit swamped. And today I set an alarm to prod me into a particular task at a particular time.

That’s not a time in my To Do list: I don’t find the timed reminders in OmniFocus all that useful because I just don’t find them. I’ll pick up my phone and discover a reminder notification is there. If it made a sound, I didn’t catch it.

This could be a problem with my iPhone: I have difficulties with the alarm sometimes going off and sometimes not. It will always display the alarm notification, the one with stop or snooze buttons, but it might not make any noise. I would be considering my hearing if it weren’t that sometimes it does work.

For a year or more now, I’ve been setting two alarms: one for 04:59 and one for 05:01 because one or either or both will sound and I’ll take that.

I suppose I’m just using the same workaround to solve my tasks problem but I really don’t like it. I set three alarms today for three certain things that had to certainly be done. When it came down to it, I postponed one of them. And I snoozed all three several times.

This is just a senseless waste of my concentration and I’ve got to stop it.

If something works, fine. If it doesn’t, why keep doing it? I need to take a step out, I think, and re-examine my OmniFocus To Do lists.

Hang on, I’ll just set an alarm for that.