S. Worthen | Weblog

Yesterday, I discovered a new-to-me keyboard command of great delight. I rely heavily on keyboard commands, but I do not sit down and read manuals usually, which means there are probably a great many handy ones which I have been failing to us.

cmd-H is my new one, discovered by means of, effectively, a typo. It is lovely. It hides away the currently-active program along with all its windows. The task bar is still there to tell me the program is still running - but the stray windows are hidden away from cluttering up that as well. In moments of too much necessarily-open software, it creates instant, blissful tidiness. I have every hope that my replacement machine will still have it as a feature too.

This weekend, C released version 3 of one of the Android apps he's been working on in his spare time. And so I am finally getting around to telling you about it.

Expense Clam is an expense tracking app for Android which has features such as photographing receipts, data export, and automatic currency detection of whatever country you have just traveled to. There are two versions. Expense Clam is free if you are willing to put up with ads after 30 days, and if not, there's the paid version, which costs all of £1.70.

If this might be of use to you - and you have a device running Android* - they are both downloadable from the Android Marketplace.

* Unlike me at this point. Also, yes, the logo could use major improvement, but the rest of it looks pretty good, I think.

Edited to add: If only it were a different kind of shellfish, he could use something like this. But I don't have any Playmobil clams.

Around six years ago, C. and I were living in Toronto. On one of that year's gift-giving events, he very generously gave me a capacious USB stick, all of 2 Gig, a relative extravagance at the time for the price of c. C$80. It was silver, capped in plastic, and I kept it attached to its lanyard to help ensure I didn't lose it. It came with two spare caps.

I used it over the years, for work as a student, as a conference-presenter, as a teacher. I used it on both sides of the ocean, in computer labs, and to share hexadecimal passwords with countless houseguests. I used it weekly in the spring for teaching presentations, to Kent and back again. When I arrived at the DWJ conference in Bristol in July, and labellementeuse asked if she could borrow a USB stick before we'd even gotten as far as introductions (she was about to present and a little panicked!), that was the USB stick she borrowed.

Last week, first week of classes, and I lost it. I don't know precisely where or how, but it's gone. I realized on the train back home last week, and ransacked my bags. I called security, whose collection of memory sticks was mostly one Gig sticks. This week, back on campus, I checked all the classrooms I'd been in. I asked the secretaries.

I'm fairly certain I didn't lose anything critical in terms of confidentiality or security, but what I did lose was an object of sentimentality. It was my first, my only USB stick. I still have the two spare caps for it.

On Wednesday, I went to the local W.H. Smith to buy a new one, the most obvious local place. A main street retail shop, charging full price for the product. I didn't see any on display, but asking produced more results. "What size do you want?", he asked. One or two Gig, I replied. He shook his head. "The smallest we have is Four."

UK£9.99, full High Street price. Four Gig. Times have changed. Purple. My second USB stick.