The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you about the benefits of Kombucha, or fermented sweet tea, and step by step instructions on how I make it at home! There is good scientific evidence that Americans should have more probiotics in our diet.  Probiotics are the good bacteria that live in our guts and help us to digest our food properly.  Almost every culture has a fermented food or two that serve to replenish that good bacteria: Koreans have kim chee, Germans have sauerkraut, folks in the Mediterranean have yogurt, Japanese have natto, which is smelly fermented soybeans.  In the US, we have some foods we think of as fermented, but since we are bacteria-phobes, most everything is pasteurized which kills all of the good stuff.   I have been looking for a good fermented food to supplement our diet without having to buy a bunch of expensive probiotic pills.  First I tried making kim chee, but the salt content was

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll show you how I export all of my highlighted passages from a PDF on an iPad using the GoodReader app.  I’m in graduate school and when I am researching for a project or paper, I spend a lot of time cut and pasting quotes or data from documents into my citations spreadsheet.  When I’m getting information from an online source, sometimes I have no choice but to painstakingly cut and paste each passage.  But when I’m reading a long PDF, wouldn’t it be easier to just highlight all the passages as I go and THEN export them all at one time?  I figured out how to do this from a Kindle — you can see my video on that — but now I’ll show you how I do it for a PDF document on an iPad using the GoodReader app.  First of all, you’ll need to send your PDF to the GoodReader app. I’m planning to do a longer tutorial video on the GoodReader app which has LOTS of great functionality built into it, but for n

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll share my super quick tip on getting rid of blank lines in a text document on an iPad or PC.  Have you ever cut and pasted something into an email or an Evernote memo or even a Pages document on your iPad and found that it was formatted with blank lines between each bullet or each line?  Sometimes it is easy to go in and delete each blank line, but sometimes you are pasting in hundreds of lines and that process would take you forever.  On my PC, my go-to fix for this was to paste the whole mess into Word and use Find and Replace to find to two paragraph returns together and replace them with just one paragraph return. You had to go into special characters in order to make it happen, but it would do the trick. On the iPad, the Pages app doesn’t have this option, so here’s my solution.  Select and copy the whole passage.  Then paste this into a new spreadsheet in Google Sheets. This soluti

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll go through the step-by-step process I use when writing a research paper. Every person is different, but I think there are some basic steps to writing a good research paper -- and it doesn't involve just typing out as many words on a topic that you can possibly think of.  Now, these are fairly generic steps, but I think they would apply the majority of research papers give or take a couple.  If your paper is 8 pages or longer, I would strongly urge you to plan out the steps for your paper at least 4 weeks in advance.  You can watch my video on planning out big projects or research papers.  I'll give you an idea of how long I think most of these steps would take for a 15 page paper and you can adjust accordingly based on your assignment and general research and writing speed.  Here we go: Understand the instructions - read through the instructions for the assignment thorou

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my favorite podcast app -- Stitcher, why I like it better than the others that I’ve tried, and I'll take you through all of the features that I love the best.  I have been on the hunt for the best podcast app for years now.  Stitcher is the 4th one I’ve tried and I like it the best by far.  In case you are interested, the others that I tested out were the indigenous Apple Podcast app, iCatcher, and Overcast.  Stitcher has a premium service, which involves content, but I just use the free app.   For whatever reason, I have found podcast apps to be unnecessarily confusing. Because I’m reasonably tech savvy, I generally chalk this up to design flaws (rather than user stupidity), but I was honestly starting to wonder in the case of podcast apps. Was there something inherently confusing about RSS feeds?  Once I found Stitcher, I realized that it was possible to have a clean

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share the tools and processes that I use to help my teenagers with their executive functioning for school.  If you are watching this video, you probably have a kid with ADHD or executive functioning issues. My kids have both. Executive functioning refers to the ability to plan ahead, remember assignments, organize, manage time, and get things done.  As you already know, there is a narrow line that we walk as parents.  Do we help our children?  Or do we allow them to fail and learn their lesson the hard way?  I’m sure you have run into a couple of well meaning, but slightly clueless folks who say, “They will never learn if you don’t let them fail!”  Well - that may be true of a kid who doesn’t suffer from ADHD or executive functioning problems.  But for kids who do, a) they have probably been receiving negative feedback their whole school career and b) failure is inevitable in most cases

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my latest obsession with posture, body pain, and the exercise solutions recommended by Egoscue therapy.  Recently I have become obsessed with good posture. I did an earlier video on how to fix computer posture. What I have discovered since doing that video is that it is virtually impossible to entirely fix your upper body posture (slumped shoulders and forward head) without first fixing your spine.  Most of the thoughts in this video come directly from the book Pain Free by Pete Egoscue.  Egoscue is a Vietnam veteran who came home from war with a Purple Heart and chronic nerve pain from battle injuries.  He discovered the limits of modern medicine in dealing with chronic pain and set out to find a way to live without pain.  In his book, he presents his revolutionary philosophy that ties together posture, body alignment, and pain management. Let me just take you through the ba

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you my workaround for creating an email distro or group list for iOS Mail.  As I’ve said in other videos, iOS Mail is a really basic app. I haven’t found a better option yet, but it does require some hacks and workarounds to approximate a full service mail app.  Here’s is a missing feature that has bugged me for years — there is no way to add an email group in contacts so that you can email the same group of people regularly.  I’m sure you can immediately think of examples in your life, but 2 of mine are an email group that I send photos to once a month and an email group for a discussion series that I lead. Since I can’t create a group of emails, I either have to add each person individually to the email — which is error prone and annoying OR I have to go back through emails, find one that I sent to this group before, forward it, and then delete the old subject and the old em