The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll make the case for diagraming and labeling your holiday lights so that there is less thinking and time spent setting up  each year. I am not going to pretend to be some kind of holiday light expert, but hats off to those who REALLY do it up each year — I love amazing displays.  I have a very modest set up, but every year I bring out the bin of lights and garlands for our outdoors and I have to re-remember how I have set everything up in the past.  You know — which cord went where?  And what did I plug into this?  I have a world class terrible memory and because I’m slightly ADHD, this process takes forever since there are too many things happening with the whole family decorating and I end up in kind of an unproductive loop. Once I got it totally figured out this year, I decided I didn’t want to have to do all of that mental work again, so I spent a little time diagraming and labeling so that I cou

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share with you how I used Avery.com to print all of my holiday address labels for free. This is my annual seasonal challenge -- what is the best and easiest way to print address labels for my holiday cards?  I keep my addresses in a Google spreadsheet, which I update each year.  For a couple of years, I used a GSheets Add-on from Avery called "Create and Print Labels -- Labelmaker", but the formatting was awful and then they discontinued the free version, so you have to pay 80 buck for a lifetime license.  Which, honestly, doesn't make ANY sense to me.  I mean -- you'd think that Avery would make money from their labels, right?  Wouldn't they be able to sell MORE labels if they could make it easier to use them?  Last year, I resorted to firing up Microsoft Excel and Word in order to produce my labels, but I'm always salty when I have take steps back in time to u

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how we use Amazon Household in our family. For a long time, my family operated with just one Amazon prime account.  That was all we really needed. After all, I’m the chief procurement office for our house, so I do the vast majority of the shopping. And for whatever reason, no one really watched Amazon Prime videos but me.  Fast forward to now, my kids are teenagers — one is in high school, one in college.  For a whole host of reasons, having multiple accounts now seems much more attractive.  The biggest things was that my son is Not Trustworthy - with my credit card.   If he has access to my account he can not only order stuff to be sent to himself without approval, but he figured out how to just create cash by sending himself gift cards.  I had to shut this down.  And because he can’t be trusted with the login credentials on my account, it became kind of a Hassle - Any time he wanted

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you why I prefer Kindle or ebooks to hard copy or physical books.  This is obviously a super personal decision.  And by that, I mean -- everyone has preferences and it really shouldn't matter to anyone else how you read your books.  That said, I've gotten this question about which reading format I prefer, so I'm going to attempt to answer it.  The one thing I will say is that most people have a natural resistance to change.  Like when, unbeknownst to you, one of your apps is automatically updated and you have to spend a bunch of time figuring  out where everything is again in the new and "improved" version?  That's annoying, right?  Well, I think the same could be said for how we read.  I remember (and this is going to date me), in undergrad I used to write out my papers and essays by hand on many pieces of paper with scratch outs and inserted lines and all.

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I’ll share my tips for successfully navigating a group project or a group paper. So, you’ve been assigned a group project. Fun!  Just kidding —  I hate them.  It’s not that I don’t like other students — I do.  And I feel like you can learn a lot from others if you share your work.   But group projects are objectively terrible — and professors continue to insist that we participate in them and all earn the same grade despite the fact that VERY RARELY is everyone in the group doing the same amount work. Right now, I’m in graduate school for social work, but in my 20s I earned a degree in information systems.  The professors always insisted that group projects were a way to “simulate how groups work in the business world.”   Since at the time I was working IN the business world in many groups, I had a pretty good sense of what that was like, and I really couldn’t disagree more with their assessment.  In

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I will give you a quick review on the MarginNote app. A while ago, I was asked by some viewers to compare a couple of apps to GoodReader. One of these was MarginNote.  GoodReader is my primary app for reading and highlighting PDFs and managing PDF files. I use another app, Notability, or for handwritten notes.   After diving into MarginNote, I’ve come to the conclusion that it would not be a good replacement for GoodReader. Instead, it is more of a mind mapping and studying app to help you to understand information from multiple sources.  This video lays down my initial thoughts, but I plan to use the app more, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it after some practice use.  Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of good documentation on how to use MarginNote. You just have to kind of dive in. The developer provides a MarginNote “mind map “as a form of documentation, but the limitations of this format f

 Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel, and in today’s video, I will review the Aspire Budgeting spreadsheet and app. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a bunch of budgeting systems. I happen to love this souped up Google spreadsheet budget. I am a spreadsheet fan in general and I’m impressed with just how much this developer was able to do inside the limitations of a cloud-based spreadsheet app.  To access the spreadsheet, go to AspireBudgeting.com and click the button to copy the spreadsheet to your own Google Drive.  It is both way simpler than normal budgeting apps and also has a little steeper learning curve. First of all – it is entirely free.  I’m guessing it started as a personal spreadsheet and the developer decided to make it available to others. He has a Patreon account that you can contribute to, but there doesn’t appear to be any other way that he is making money from this passion project. There is no linking of your financial acc

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I will do a comparison of two PDF readers — LiquidText and Goodreader. Just so you know a bit about my user profile — I am finishing up a graduate degree in social work and I work primarily on an early version of the iPad Pro.  I have been using Goodreader for some time, but I am pretty open to other apps if they would better suit my needs.  I use GoodReader for two reasons: to read and highlight PDFs and to manage PDF files. I use a different app, Notability, for handwriting/drawing, so I don’t need either of these apps to perform that function for me.  OK – let’s get started on this side by side comparison of GoodReader and LiquidText. First, Price - Goodreader is $6 in the App Store and you can download LiquidText for free.  Liquidtext has a pro version for $30, but most of those extra functions were outside of my basic needs.  I will happily throw down $6 for an app that makes my life easier, so I

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I will share my recent journey to make digital art a bigger part of my life using Procreate on the iPad. I’m doing this video to share how I used the last several months to get into digital art.  My hope is that some of the specifics that I figured out along the way may help others who are thinking about walking down this path.  I’m gonna talk through the following things: a little bit of background, the importance of daily practice, why I chose digital art over traditional art, the Procreate app,  my supplies, training, ideas for topics or projects, and building a supportive community. Let’s get started. Background Are used to draw a lot as a kid. The last time I did anything serious was probably when I took a couple of studio art classes in college. And apart from some creative signs and birthday cakes, I haven’t done much for the last several decades.   That said, I am from a family who creates thin

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel, and in today’s video I will review the Toshl personal finance and budget app.  This is part of a series where I give you my thoughts on a variety of budgeting apps. Toshl is a European app — it appears to be based in Slovenia.  It’s free version has limited the number of accounts and budget items that you can add. The pro version for two dollars a month has unlimited accounts and budget items, but does not include linked banking accounts. For five dollars per month, you can upgrade to the Medici level which allows for linked financial accounts. Toshl is available for iOS, android, and has a Web app. It syncs across all of the platforms by pulling data from the cloud. Linking accounts was quite easy. It even asked whether I wanted to import past transactions or for importing to start today. After having reviewed a number of these apps, I’m always interested in how the developers have chosen to set up the screens. Toshl seem

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel, and in today’s video I will provide a review of the Saru Personal Finance and Budgeting App. This is part of a series where I review budget apps. The Saru app is a free budgeting system that is available on iOS, Android, and believe it or not, PC software. Based on the way this app looks, I’m guessing it started out as a Microsoft mobile app. There is extremely limited information about it online, so I don’t know the history, but that’s what the interface looks like to me. In addition, you can sync between devices through a Microsoft login (another giveaway).  It has some ads, which you can get rid of by paying a nominal one time fee. I think it’s around two dollars.  The ads are not really a big deal, but a couple times I got into situations where I could not get rid of the ad without killing the app. In addition to having a throwback interface, Saru embraces a more traditional budgeting philosophy than some of the other

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I will review the Money Manager 365 budgeting app. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a variety of apps for financial budgeting.  Money Manager 365 is an app that is available both for iOS and Android platforms.  It does not have a website component, but you can sync multiple devices.  I should say at the outset that this app doesn’t not link with your bank or credit card accounts, so it is manual entry only. Perhaps because of this, Money Manager 365 offers most of its services for free — you can upgrade to a Pro (or VIP) account, which gives you the ability to sync more than 2 devices and get rid of ads for just less than $1 per month.  Everyone has their own way that works best for them for budgeting. I am partial to apps that automatically link to your accounts and pull in transactions as they occur. Otherwise, I think it is easy to miss things. However, I know that other people r