Time travel your email.

Futureme is a web site that allows you to email yourself in the future. You can remind yourself of stuff in the future (or "tickle" yourself in the GDT parlance).

What makes it fun, is that you can optionally post your email anonymously and see what others are emailing themselves. A surprising amount of the emails posted are about relationships and wondering if the person they are with is the one, or if they will ever get over so-and-so.

But it is really a practical service. Here's how I use it:

• Remind myself that on new year's day, comicbookfonts.com has a sale on their fonts in time to get them.
• Set a date to decide what I'm going to do about that big idea I have - either let it go or start to put some serious effort into it.
• Remind myself of my anniversary and birthdays that I care about a day ahead of time.

Evernote review

Evernote is almost a standard. It's such a versatile tool that it's kind of hard to explain exactly what it is. But if I'll try to nutshell if for you: it's a thing that lets you clip stuff, store it in the cloud, categorize it, and search it.

So let's start with clipping. You can add web pages, images, audio, video, text - just about anything. All this stuff is stored in the cloud for easy access. You can do this with your smartphone, tablet/iPad, or your computer, and a bunch third party apps can throw stuff into it for you. Some blogs even have 'add to Evernote' buttons. You can attach notes to the stuff, and you can clip multiple things into one note. You can also combine or separate notes as you need.

Then you categorize it. You put stuff into major groups, and you can tag stuff with any keyword that you want. The difference between a category and a tag is semantic and depends on what you're trying to do with the app. I went off the deep end with categories before I figured this out. Another option is to just not categorize any of it. It's just whatever works best for you.

Then you can search. You can search by category, tag, or any string of text. Where the app really shines, is that it does automatic OCR that is really accurate. This means you can scan say, a restaurant menu, upload it, and then search for "soup" and that menu will show up with a box around where it says "soup" in the image.

So why would you want something like this? Here are a couple of ways that I have used it:

• A glorified todo list - text yourself a note or record your voice from your phone and later add supporting material. Then move this to your todo list, or use Evernote itself as your list.
• Organize business cards - scan then recycle any originals you have. Then start taking pictures of business cards instead of collecting them in the first place.
• Write a research paper - store research notes attached to web pages. Later organize the notes into an outline.
• Become a rockstar - record yourself humming a song idea to write a complete song later.
• Get rid of paper clutter - scan reciepts, menus, magazine clippings - just about anything - and throw the original in a recycling bin.
• Keep an inspiration list - save cool graphic and product design ideas from magazines, the web, or take a picture of anything you see that inspires you. Then go through when your muse isn't available and you have a deadline.

Pros:

1. Clip anything anywhere.
2. It can turn your junk-drawer mind into a well organized filing cabinet.
3. Very versatile and open to whatever you can do with it - it can act more like a platform than an app.
4. Never loose a thought or idea again.

Cons:

1. Isn't always obvious the best way to use it.
2. Doesn't start to make sense until you put a bunch of stuff into it.
3. Not the best todo list. Do you really need a complex system to organize your thoughts? Maybe paper and pencil is a better way to go.

AirRun. Cloud crowdsourcing errands. There's an app for that.

Me and my friend like to tell each other crazy money making schemes that we want to do. Last time I spoke to J., he was telling me about another great idea of his. I thought it was pretty cool, and left it at that.

Just today, I found out that the idea was so great, that someone's already done it. And, of course, I signed up for it. They called it AirRun. This short video explains it all:

Basically, you can apply for or request an errand. You pay (or get paid depending on if you are a 'Runner' or a 'Seeker') with cash, check, PayPal or Square.

That's it! Brilliant. Let's see how it pans out.

A girlfriend in the cloud?

Cloud Girlfriend. What?

Yes. I have a girlfriend in the cloud. What does it mean? I don't know yet, but I'm beta testing one.

I signed up for the open beta of Cloud Girlfriend (with the permission of my real girlfriend. Thank you  A., for putting up with this. It is all for science). I got accepted a week after the request, and now I'm in.

Here's my experience:

I was asked for a gender and gender preference. Then I had to choose a 'fantasy' first and last name (I chose Aristotle Danger) and a fake image. I couldn't upload my own image, but I could choose among a pool of relatively good looking men. So I picked one that sorta looked like me but bit sexier.

Next I was asked chose from a list of five binary choices of who I was (Don Juan or Don Quixote was one. Tough choice, but and I chose Quixote) and another 5 binary choices of what I was looking for in a (choose one) male or female. Lastly, a short fantasy bio for me and a short text of what I was looking for.

I was then told I to request a 'date.' I flipped through images of women (two of them were repeat images) with 1 line bios. I requested 4 dates rapid fire. A girl ("Karen Robertson") accepted my 'date' request (apparently "Tits McGee" was unavailable), and we went into a chat that reminded me of the way the iPhone does text messaging with bubbles. We chatted for a minute. The fake person was flirty and nice. I left the chat.

So far as I can tell, it is like Chatroulette, but the person on the other end is hired to be nice to you. Sort of a curated chat.

Overall it wasn't a bad experience. Will I do it again? No. Is it a worthwhile service? Um. I can think of a few (unusual?) scenarios where you might want to fake that you have a girlfriend, but it doesn't look like it does that. It's just a chat room. You can find one anywhere online if you want.

Mapping L.A.

Mapping L.A. is the efforts of a community to figure out just what it is.

LA has some 114 neighborhoods and the lines between them is not so obvious. In some cases, it is hotly contested. The city never officially designated these areas, even though the post office and many of it's residences have.

This is especially a problem for reporters. They need to accurately tell the location of events, but it this becomes difficult when one doesn't know where one is.

So the LA Times decided to crowd source the problem and created a project where they will be taking suggestions and drawing up a map of where all the little neighborhoods in LA actually are. They call it Mapping L.A.

Signing legal documents in the cloud

Did you know that you could sign documents without killing trees?

I found this out when I had a W-4 document to sign for a new job. I got the form in an email and was requested to print, sign and fax the form back to them. I don't have a printer and Kinko's was out of the way. But with a little research, I found an alternative.

Check the laws in your country, but here in the US, it's legal under an act of congress on June 30th, 2000. Yup! And we even have "National ESIGN Day" to celebrate it.

There are many ways to do it, but you basically just import the document into a drawing/painting/photo editing app, sign it with your mouse/touchscreen/trackpad, and then email it back to the concerned party. I used a mish-mash of apps on my iPad, android phone, and in the cloud to accomplish this. Here's a hand howto if you can't figure it out for yourself.

Pillarbox - Get your computer out of the way and just type

If you need to type and you want the computer to just get out of the way, that's what this app does.

Pillarbox is a web app that let's you write. You can set how many words you want to write (for this article I set it at 250 because I didn't want to bore you) or you can set a timer for how long you want to write. It keeps your text in the middle of the screen so you don't have to scroll.

It gives you a black screen with a grey column in the middle and you just type in it.

You can change the colors and font sizes if you want, and if you know CSS, you can change just about everything about the appearance.

It uses HTML 5 offline storage, so the text exists in your browser cache and is saved automatically. To save the text to an external file is to select all, copy and paste it into another app.

The one mark against it is that it only works on Chrome. It is a Chrome app that you get from the Web Store.

Download it here.