The Samsung Chromebook Pro is here!

This is my first attempt to draft and publish a new post entirely on this machine…

The Samsung Chromebook Plus is already out in the wild and available for purchase. With the calendar flipping to March today, I can now say that the PRO model will be available next month!

While I was mostly ready to switch from Mac to ChromeOS/Android, the last piece of the puzzle was this Jekyll blog which is generated on my machine, then the static site is uploaded to Heroku. With no means of generating the site locally on a Chromebook or Android device, I had to spend some time figuring out my alternatives.

If you can read this, then our efforts worked! And here’s what we did…

Pocket is our “read it later” service of choice. Unfortunately, its current sharing options leave a little something to be desired.

Even though Joe and I both have our own Pocket accounts, for the longest time there was no in-app way to notify each other when we found something we think the other person should read. Even though that feature has recently been added, we didn’t just want a notification that required action. I wanted to directly add to his reading list so that articles would automatically be downloaded for offline reading with no action required on Joe’s part. So, I cobbled together my own direct sharing system so that I can simply tag an article in Pocket for Joe, and it will automatically show up right in his Pocket reading list.

This is how I did it...

It’s been exactly two months since the day my Desktop Picasa app stopped connecting to my Google account. The secret handshakes no longer worked. The known tricks for appending URLs were useless. Whether I was ready to or not, I had to move on.

I’m still trying to recover, but here’s more or less how things go now . . .

“Shared Albums” in Google Photos are great for collaborating. I finally got Joe on board with adding his travel photos directly to my shared albums, and it worked perfectly! So, if you think you’ll want this set up where multiple people contribute to the same album, you should probably just create a “new shared album” right off the bat, right? WRONG!