The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll talk about the latest viral video game, Fortnite: Battle Royale, why it is so addictive, and as parents, what we can do about it.  My son just turned 16.  Around last Halloween, he scraped some money together and bought himself an early Xmas present — a PlayStation console.  That’s when he fell over the Fortnite addiction cliff. I didn’t quite understand the impact, until a couple of months later when every single one of his grades has fallen by at least a full letter grade and he was walking around with huge bags under his eyes. It’s highly addictive, way more fun than schoolwork, and tough on a high school sleep schedule.  We had to make some changes. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about Fortnite and why it is so addictive.  Game Concept First let’s just cover the Fortnite basics.  It’s loosely based on the Hunger Games premise. You and 99...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share three ways I use the iPad search function. I use my iPad A LOT.  I did an app purge this week and started out with 264 apps — I kid you not. I’m always looking for more efficient ways to get things done on my iPad, so let me show you 3 ways the iPad search function is indispensable to me.  First of all, here’s what I’m talking about when I refer to the Search function. You get here by swiping down on the home screen. So, the first way i use this is to 1 - Search for Apps As i said, i have too many apps to keep track of.  I organize some of them by folder — and my organizing logic makes total sense — or at least it did at one point, but i don’t always remember where I’ve put things.  I mean I had 264 apps, right?  As a result, I use this search bar to search for apps ALL THE TIME.  In fact, it’s so much faster than digging through folders or eve...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share my process for “spring cleaning” my iPad and iPhone.  I’ll show you how I determine which apps to keep and how I organize my screens. I try to do about 15 minutes of organizing every weekend just to stay on top of the chaos. This weekend I chose to do a little digital organizing. My iPhone and iPad were overflowing with apps that I don’t use and it was time to purge and organize my digital space. Unfortunately, for me this took MUCH longer than 15 minutes, but this may be a faster process for you.  Okay — before I reveal the embarrassing number of apps that I had on my iPad, let me just make a couple of excuses for myself 1) I DO constantly download new apps to try new systems and solve tech problems. I probably end up using something like 10% of the apps that I download.  And 2) by far the biggest issue is that in Settings I have Automatic Download turned on for...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I resurrected the Quick Add feature that Google Calendar killed off in their last interface release.  This allows you to schedule appointments using normal English syntax (rather than having to parse everything into database fields).  I'll also show you how I use this practically in my life.   I'm not sure exactly when Google Calendar did away with the Quick Add function, but I miss it.  Normally, when you put in an appointment, you have to parse your fields for subject, date, time, location, etc. like you are putting in a database entry.  The Quick Add feature used to let you type in a calendar entry using normal English grammar, Like  "Lunch with Sally on 2/28 12-2pm at Panera" and it would do the work of parsing that information into the database fields with reasonable accuracy.  Getting rid of this feature, frankly feels like tec...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’m going to talk about bad computer posture and what to do about it! So, what is bad computer posture?  Just take a minute to think about how your posture might be affected by our society's recent dependency on computers and smart phones. The most pronounced issue is that we are losing the curve in our necks. Necks are supposed to look like this with a healthy curve. You can see that having a curve in your neck nicely stacks your head on top of your shoulders. By looking at screens constantly, we are changing the curve in our neck to be more straight. Our ears no longer stack on top of our shoulders, because our head is jutting out in front of us.  Some call this forward head or forward carriage.  Here’s the problem with that — every time you move your head forward an inch, 10lb of extra weight are added to your neck. This creates all kinds of problems, including h...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll talk about the Equifax data breach from 2017 and the steps you should do to make sure your data is safe.  Last year, Equifax revealed that they had had a data security breach and that criminals has obtained very private data — like social security numbers, birth dates, and drivers license numbers — from almost 150 million people.  That is almost half of the people in the United States. Even though you may have never voluntarily done business with Equifax, they most likely have all of your data because they are one of the 3 big credit reporting agencies.  That means every time you open up a line of credit, they are the company that sends the detailed credit report showing that you are a good credit risk — or not.  So, what does this mean?  It means that the criminals who stole that data can now use your private information in order to open up new lines of cred...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’m going to give you a quick tutorial on my favorite handwriting app — Notability — and show you how I take notes in class and from textbooks using the Notability app on the iPad.  There are many people who open up their laptops during class and type out their notes.  There are some nice things about this. You can store your notes with all of your other class documents and they are searchable.  The problem for me is that I don’t retain information quite as well when I type it. The kinesthetic act of writing actually helps me to commit information to memory.  Add to that the ability with handwritten notes to color code, pull in photos, draw sketches, and create relationships and it is hands down better for me than typewritten notes.  I’ve tried a bunch of different note apps.  Notability continues to be my favorite for a couple of reasons. For one thing — it ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you how I use Google Sheets to organize my citations and sources for papers and research projects. I'm in my first year of graduate school and we do a lot of writing.  References and citations are very important, as they are for any discipline.  I supposed if I was writing a dissertation with a hundred citations, I would feel the need to pay for and learn a whole complicated citation software, but since I'm not, I prefer to use tools that I already use and know well.  AND despite the fact I'm not writing a dissertation, I have written some papers that have had over 25 sources, so I do need SOME kind of system to organize and manage my citations.   I started out, as most people do, with kind of a hodge-podge system of just cutting and pasting URLs from the Internet and sticking them at the bottom of the Word document of the paper.  Or, if I'm doing r...