Tips Posts 1–5 of 12

  • How to Create a Free, Private Knowledge Base

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    You can easily create your own, free, private knowledge base site with minimal effort. Here's how it works - you will capture your knowlede base notes in Markdown files, which get turned into a searchable website by Docusaurus, and then are published privately on the web via Gitlab pages. Then you can access and search them from anywhere.

  • How to Run Emby in the Cloud

    I’ve been running Emby locally within our network on an old mini-pc because I’ve found it’s the easiest and most user-friendly way to share media within a family. However, when you have it inside your network, it’s harder to access from your phone and you can’t hook it up to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

    Emby logo

    I wanted to try hosting it externally to see if it would simplify things, but I couldn’t find a good resouce on how to do this. I eventually got it working and figured I’d share how to do it in case it helps others.

  • Speedy meetings are awesome, but not the way Google created them

    Google introduced Speedy Meetings in 2011, which shortens meetings from 30 to 25 or 60 to 50 minutes. The intended goal was to allow you to “prep for your next meeting or get to your next appointment if you have a packed schedule.”

    Speedy Meetings

    Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, speedy meetings the way Google has created them just don’t work. The temptation to keep the meeting going until :30 or :00 is just overwhelming. Human nature leads to people to keep talking past the supposed speedy meeting end time.

    But there is a solution. Instead of ending meetings early, I’ve found it works much better to start meetings late! Wait wait, I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out.

  • Switching from Google Workspace to Zoho - the Good, the Bad and the Buggy

    Late last year, Google announced they’d be doing away with their free, legacy G Suite (now called Google Workspace) program. I’d been using G Suite with my jedfonner.com domain for 17 years to handle email, calendar and Google Docs. When Eli and Isaac had gotten old enough, I’d given them accounts at jedfonner.com too. Even though Google eventually walked back their plans to force people off their free tier, this scare made me realize I didn’t want to be beholden to Google for such crucial systems as my email and calendar for me and my family.

    Looking around for alternatives, I looked at a few like ProtonMail and Tutanota but eventually I settled on Zoho. I’d actually been using Zoho Notebook for a while, ever since Google Keep stopped working on my phone, and I liked how the company was focused on being a low-cost but full featured suite of products for teams and businesses. So I decided to take the leap and move from Google to Zoho Workplace.

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    Let me tell you about my experience moving away from Google. If after reading this post you are interested in signing up or switching to Zoho, use this referral link to earn $100 in promotional credit: https://go.zoho.com/uDa.