The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll show you my workaround for getting around the export limits for Kindle highlights. I did a video a little while ago showing how I export Kindle highlights to Evernote and Google Sheets.  So, I ran into an issue recently that I hadn't encountered before.  I'm in a graduate program and am renting my textbooks for the semester in digital format.  As I do my reading for the semester, I've been highlighting passages and then exporting them into a spreadsheet as a means of taking notes on the reading.  The way I usually do this is by accessing the Kindle management website through my PC at this URL ( https://read.amazon.com/notebook ).   The issue I was running into was that I had apparently exceeded the number of highlights or amount of text that the website lets you export, so I was getting this message.  I was having to go back into an earlier cha...

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 t...

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 ...

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...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I will share 6 secret features in the iOS mail app that I have stumbled upon over years of using it! iOS Mail is a pretty basic app. Apple has added some functionality to it over the years, but it is still pretty bare bones. Even though I have tried out other mail apps, I keep coming back to iOS Mail — maybe because I like the integration with other iOS functions, maybe because I’m used to the way it works. Either way, I’m going to share some of the secrets that I’ve learned over the years.  Some you may know — some may be new!  First up 1 - Shake to Undo Okay — this is a basic iOS feature that works across all of its apps, but I feel like it is particularly important to know when working in Mail. If you accidentally delete a bunch of text, which I do ALL THE TIME, you can undo by shaking your device. This is a little less important since recently Apple added an undo button th...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video — I’m doing a quick public service announcement for all the iPhone 6 users who experienced a slow down after installing iOS 11.  I still have an iPhone 6.  iPhones are expensive and there had been really no reason to upgrade. EXCEPT that I downloaded iOS several months ago and my phone slowed to a crawl.  Did this happen to you?  My iPhone is not my primary device — I use my iPad much more, but I use it while I’m out and about to check texts, make appointments, and check my to do list. All of these activities became so slow that it was almost pointless to even use my phone for anything other than taking phone calls. Here are some real timing that I clocked: 19 seconds to open iMessage to view a text  22 seconds to open Google Calendar, even longer to actually edit or add an appointment  Up to 30 seconds to open a note in Evernote Incoming calls would ring o...

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 talk about how I deal with mundane household chores.  I'm someone who enjoys a good project, but I’m not great at routine maintenance tasks.  Unfortunately, life is FULL of mundane maintenance tasks that need to be done, but aren’t very exciting.  When I started staying at home with my kids, I gave up all of my interesting projects at work and was faced with the grinding monotony of a mountain of household chores.  Laundry that needed to be done, folded, and put away on a daily basis in a never-ending cycle was honestly enough to make me want to run screaming.  I once worked on a temporarily basis at a large government Library.  This is a job I thought I would love — after all, I love libraries. However, I would no sooner get back from shelving a cart of heavy Dewey decimal ordered books, when there would be no fewer than FIVE more carts to shelve — they...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I get organized and stay on top of my assignments for my part-time grad school program.  First of all, let me just say that although my life seems hectic to me, it is no where NEAR what some of my fellow students are experiencing.  There are lots of folks who are part-time students, working full time, and raising small children, some of them as single parents. Hats off to them.  That said, I think my methodology could be helpful for anyone — regardless of how crazy your schedule is.   I started grad school this fall, so I’m still working through some of the tools I’m using. I started out with a different organizing system than the one I use for everyday life and promptly discarded it after a couple of months.  Life is too crazy to have to check multiple systems.  If you’ve seen any of my ADHD videos, you’ll know that I use Toodledo for a task l...

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock with the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I plan big projects out using Toodledo and Google Calendar.   Okay - you have a big project looming and you are doing EVERYTHING you can to avoid getting started. Where do you even start?  We all know that awful saying about how to eat an elephant.  Well, of course that is how you have to handle big projects — one bite at a time.  So, the first thing you do is give yourself a 30 minute task — today or a couple of days in the future — to sit down and break down the individual tasks making up the project. I do this on a Google spreadsheet — I’ll  link  to a sample of the one I use for brainstorming.  You need to break it down into doable tasks and estimate how long each will take.  Let me give you an example.  I have a 15-page term paper due for one of my grad school classes this semester.  It’s about 5 weeks out from the due date...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll show you how to quickly turn an email, or really anything printable, into a PDF on your iPad.  Occasionally, I need to turn an email or photo into a PDF.  Maybe I need to upload it to Google Drive or draw on it.  There are workarounds for photos. If your email isn’t long, you can use one of those workarounds.  But for long emails, if I try to cut and paste the email into a PDF creating app and the formatting turns whacky, up until now I’ve been out of luck. I finally stumbled onto a hidden solution for this.  See the problem is that the native iPad email app doesn’t give you a share button.  So, say you have a long email with a bunch of formatting like this one.  You want to turn it into a PDF so that you can mark it up or save it or whatever.  If you try to copy and paste into Notability for example, you lose all of the images and formatting. ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll tell you why you should ditch the innate Calendar app on the iPhone and use the Google Calendar app.  A couple of weeks ago I decided to stress test the Google Calendar app for iPhone and iPad and temporarily ditch the innate iOS Calendar app that I had been using for nearly a decade.  Okay -- admittedly this was a pretty low risk proposition on my part: I already use Google Calendar to sync with my iOS calendar, so i didn't need to migrate data or manage parallel systems during this test.  I could cut over immediately with no import or really any work at all. AND I could revert back to the old system at any time without any loss of data.  I had tried the Google Calendar app at times in the past, but I have some picky requirements that I am not willing to compromise on, so the app never totally met my needs. I guess they have done some development, since I'm now us...