The Marble Jar Channel

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 be...

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...

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 rea...

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 limitatio...

 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...

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 ma...

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 fami...