Some Tips and Tricks

Without making any excuses, let me confide in you that my writing skills are very bad. Especially my grammar. When I started following Grammarly in Twitter, because of all those fun quotes they publish, I found out that they had a Chrome extension which can help me with my posts. At least the free version (I ain’t rich to keep paying for all these tools, you know) does the basic checks and points me that something is wrong and to some extent makes sure to fix the spelling mistakes. If you buy it, I guess it will do a lot more. But then I can fix some when I know where the problem is. So, in case if you are interested, you need to click here for the Grammarly site, click here for the Chrome extension to be added (and make sure to enable it too).

Here is an image of how it actually points out the mistakes in a post (i.e. if you use chrome to type your posts, as I usually do)

 

Here is another tip, which I found out just yesterday.

If you have an android smartphone (not sure from which version of android this is applicable though, because I have the Lollipop version) and it is locked and if you want to use the flashlight for immediate purposes, you don’t have to unlock your phone to do that (which is what I used to do). You can just write V on top of the screen and lo behold the flashlight is on. Similarly type O for camera. But for this to work without unlocking your phone, you should have enabled the Gestures options in your settings. Here is a screenshot of my phone’s settings. When I found it out yesterday, had fun playing with it.

Hope these tips help you too.

What’s that app?

I ain’t on Facebook, irrespective of the fact that I am there as part of my friend’s posts, but then since I ain’t being tagged and for the fact that I don’t have an account over there (pseudo or not) I can claim that I am not there, yet (even in spite of being pressured a lot recently). But ever since I joined gym last year, I am on Whatsapp (even when I had my old phone with access to very less data using 2G) because the timings or any updates to my classes were done through Whatsapp. I am not fond of texting and try to avoid it as much as possible. That in turn means that I don’t take part in the Whatsapp conversations unless and otherwise it is necessary.

I literally groaned my frustration when my brother created a Family Whatsapp group and included all of my family members (yup, the only one who was left was my Mom who got an Android phone as a gift from my brother for her birthday last year and he set it up for her with an email account and loaded it with enough games for her to spend her free time). My brother is too much into all these social media stuff. He is the one who introduced me to blogging (even though he doesn’t do it anymore) and I will be grateful for that. But he texts too much for my comfort. But imagine my surprise when my sister also gets a little bit more involved in texting in Whatsapp, sharing the photos of kids, their daily activities, their fights, normal chit chat of the day and this inspite of them being in the same town and much closer to each other. No wonder my dad went running for the hills in a day or two , in other words , it means he left the group 😉 My mom is still figuring stuff out and I haven’t spoken to her yet on this to get her feedback on her view of this whole new text world. So yeah, suddenly everyone is on Whatsapp (well because every one has a phone now, duh!) irrespective of whether they are on Facebook or not. There are lots and lots of groups created to communicate (my brother told me that there is a 60+ member group he is part of , which consists of members of a whole village, imagine that), people share forwards and all those stuff they did earlier through FB using Whatsapp groups.

And not to mention the famous blueticks and the set of jokes and repercussions that it triggered when that got enabled. Blueticks should be used only when you really need to know if the other person received the message or not and not for why they haven’t replied. If you are able to disassociate receiving and replying you can live in peace with it. I just don’t care about it, blue or gray. What triggered this rant like post on Whatsapp ? Well this article, where they were talking about the growing numbers in Whatsapp. If every single person who has a phone and with the data getting cheaper (comparatively) start using Whatsapp instead of texting over Facebook it is obvious the numbers will grow exponentially. And I know I am already part of that when I got added to the Family group in Whatsapp. And I am already considering the mute option on them.

 

Also part of JustJoJan