It is frustrating to have to allow some app to compress you video or image files before you can upload them to your intended destination. Also frustrating is the cap on “over the air” uploading from your iPhone even when it is connected to WIFI. To top it all off, I like to have my video residing natively on YouTube and Facebook, but hate having to go through the painful uploading process twice. PixelPipe solves all of those problems.

PixelPipe focuses on one thing: publish photos, video, audio, text and files on over 100 online destinations. Basically that means it will put your media on every blogging, social media, and online storage site you can imagine.

Once you register for an account, you set up “destinations” like YouTube and Facebook and it adds them to your list of destinations.  Then, once you are ready to upload, you select the media you would like to upload, click upload and it does the rest (one upload to multiple destinations).  It has a 250MB cap which should make most of your HD clips uploadable; though, if you have edited them into a snazzy video, it may exceed the limit.

Its one flaw is its UI.  Once you fire it up, it is not obvious how to go about selecting which destination you are uploading to at that particular moment (you have to go into settings>edit destinations and then select “enable default” or “disable default” in a drop-down next to each destination).  It is this kind of unfriendly UI that would make you think twice before buying it, but is worth putting up with in this free version.

The bad UI aside, this app should be on everyone’s iPhone who does ministry as it allows you to easily upload media to lots of locations on the spot without having to wait until you get back in the office and have the time to sync it with your computer.

We just recently used this to upload videos of our kids on a mission trip every day while we were on the trip, and got rave reviews about our communication from parents as soon as we stepped off the busses.  Do yourself a favor and try PixelPipe out today.  There are versions available for tons of phones and operating systems (iPhone, Android, Nokia, Palm, IM clients, Windows, Mac, and Linux).

I find that most of my youth ministry friends are using their phones for organization; in fact I have not used a paper organizer for years (from my monochrome Visor Palm device in 2000 to currently my Motorola Droid). That said I do prefer a pen and paper when it comes to brainstorming ideas, I mostly use a homemade journal or a Moleskine for creative space.  Other than blank paper here are a couple of sites that I think do a good job of offering several templates for you to use in sparking ideas or if you are just looking for free day planner inserts instead of giving Franklin Covey $50 bucks.

Pocket Mod:
Disposable organizer on one sheet of paper with multiple uses. There are dozens of options to choose. (My mother-in-law said she would use this concept as a kindergarten teacher for making little booklets).  Here are similar sites that do the same thing (www.pocketmod.com/v2 and www.pocketmod.com/app)

DIY Planner:
You can Google and find several calendar tools but this site has it all. Browse through all their “templates” and find downloads for several types of time management tools.  From 3×5 card size to full sheets. Sift through all their FREE resources.

I, like many in our field, have ADD. That makes assigning, completing and following up on tasks an adventure with our team. It is common for us to be in a car on the way to Starbucks or walking down the hall when we remember an essential task we need to do, or we need someone else to do.   Until now, we have had no solution outside of everyone carrying a pad of paper around with us at all times to remedy this situation.

Fortunately, we found Remember the Milk and production is up something eight percent.  Remember the Milk is basically a todo list system that is stored online.  What caught our eye was its ability to create lists that are shared with each other.  Once shared, we can each put tasks on everyone’s list.

It does all the standard stuff like priorities, due dates, and notes, but it also has fields for an estimate on the time it should take, location for the task, and tags.

However, none of these are the reasons we went with this over another service.  The reason we chose Remember the Milk is because of the sheer volume of ways in which you can access the information.  It has an iPhone app (like everyone else), but it also has an Android app and a way to sync it with your Blackberry or Windows Mobile device.  Want it to appear in Gmail?  They have a gadget.  Want to access it offline?  They have gears integration.  It also interfaces with Jott, twitter and a ton of stuff I’ve never heard of .

Its interface is not always transparent, but is easy to navigate after a couple of minutes fooling around with it.  For us it’s a great solution. It’s free for the basic account and $25 for the pro account which adds a couple of features and the ability to download the phone apps.  Worth every penny.

If you are not familiar with Evernote, it is a clean and easy note taking software (Learn  More). It is a great way to capture and organize ideas, web pages, audio, and more.  It is a web app, desktop app (syncs beautifully), it is available for Mac and PC and most handheld devices.  But this is not a commercial for Evernote (which is FREE).  I wanted to share a few of the way I am using it that might spark ideas for you in your ministry context.

In Evernote you can create different “notebooks” to work from and store things in.  I have “notebooks” with ideas, links to youtube clips I might want to use in a lesson, series ideas.  I find this to be much better than having several documents on my computer (which are not synced with an online source) or a bunch of scattered documents in Google Docs.  It is one location to do a mind dump, and that helps me sleep at night.  (Another place to do a great mind dump is “OmniFocus” but that is a different post for another time).

One of my folders is called “CODES.” I use have tons of serial numbers for software and did not know how to keep track of them. Now they are all in one place.  I guess I could use a word doc but Evernote is searchable so I can search the word “Burning Monkey Solitaire” and the note with that serial I entered will pop up.  I cannot lock it so I guess I am a little exposed but no one uses my computer but me and to access it online you need my user name and password.

This is my favorite use for Evernote.  Back in the day my youth ministry professor challenged us to take time and write out stories from our lives.  Write down what ever we could remember…the funny, dramatic, edgy, capturing stories that have happened in our lives.  So I wrote.  I took a word document and started writing bullet points and then went back to fill in details.  I would carve out time in my schedule to remember and write. If I would be reminded of a personal story throughout the day or while others were teaching I would jot it down and add it to this list.  This Word doc with dozens of stories was hard to sift through but I would go through this list as I planned messages.  Then came Evernote! Evernote allows you to “tag” notes within notebooks.  So I created a notebook called “Stories” and I added each story as a note and then tagged the note according to topics that would fit in different messages. So I have one notebook with dozens of notes that are easily searchable by topic (through tags) and searchable by content (meaning words in the story).

For example, if I were teaching on dating, I click on my notebook and search “date” or “girls” or “purity” and all stories that I tagged with those words pop up. This has been a great asset for my teaching and planning.

Are you using Evernote differently?  Post a comment and share any of your ideas

LINK: Evernote

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister.  Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more.  My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.

That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS.  After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random).  Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.

Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time!  Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.

There’s also a prayer journal where you can keep more detailed info on the prayers.  The only thing I wish it did was have some group option to be able to use it to remind a whole prayer group and an iPhone app for adding new requests, but there’s always future updates to look forward to.  Check it out at www.echoprayer.com And, let me know see any cruise ministry openings!

Last weekend was the Simply Youth Ministry Conference, and there was lots of great training. One of the speakers, Tim Schmoyer videoed his seminar on Communicating Youth Group News with Teens and Parents and dropped it on YouTube. You can watch it here (it was really good):

If you’d like to pickup more seminars from last week end you can get them here. Or if you’d like to register for next year (It’s going to sell out early) Visit: youthministry.com/symc.

It’s my experience that I can often tell when a site is going to spam me. However, there are those times when I need something, and the site requires me to fork over my email and “verify” it forcing me into the conundrum of deciding between and endless barrage of spam and whatever I think I “need” from the site.  This is where Mailinator comes in.  You simply give anything @mailinator.com … anything you choose… and Mailinator will have your email waiting for you when you surf over to their website:mailinator.com. Once you check your email you can have it deleted or just leave it and Mailinator will automatically delete the email in a couple of hours.

Of course there are other applications for this like giving a “persistent” teenager the wrong address or giving it to a vendor at a conference to obtain a free glowing pencil topper, but we do not endorse or participate in anything like that here.  It’s just a quick tip.  And it is FREE!

It seems that although everyone makes their forms downloadable online as a PDF, almost no one formats the files as editable forms that can be filled out within acrobat reader. This means I have to download the form, print it out, fill it out by hand, and then either walk it over to whoever needs it or scan it, save it, and attach it to an email. Sounds like it would be easier to just stop by the registration table and fill it out on the spot.  Formulate Pro fixes that problem.

I should say, that if you have Acrobat Pro, there is a typewriter and annotation tool that works relatively well, but at $449 from Adobe’s site, or $378 from Amazon, it is a little pricey just for filling out forms. That is where Formulate Pro comes in. This tool does one thing, and does it well. It allows you to type, draw and make check marks on top of the PDF.  Then, you can save it with those edits as a PDF of print it out. And, it’s free!

After downloading and installing the app it is as simple as opening the PDF, clicking the “T” (text tool) for typing, the squiggle tool for drawing, or the checkmark to check a box, then save or print. Right now, it’s only for mac, but the source code is available at GitHub.

My main computer that I use for all my day to day work is pushing 3 years old, and it’s really starting to show it’s age. I realize that 3 years doesn’t sound like that long, but it’s the longest I’ve used a computer since the 386 I built my freshmen year of college. But in these economic times I’m sure most of us aren’t able to replace our computers as often as we would like. I find myself in a constant battle in keeping mine from crashing and losing hours of work. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but is there anything we can do that can help prolong the life of our aging machines? Here are a few things that I have found that has helped:

1. Hardware Upgrades: Sometimes over time we can develop some hardware problems that are easy to tackle ourselves.  Two upgrades we can do that make a huge difference are RAM and Harddrive.  If you find your aging computer slowing down, make sure you have the maximum amount of RAM your computer can handle.  If you don’t know the maximum amount for your machine head over to Crucial.com, and run their memory scanner and they will tell you how much your computer can take.  You can also buy the upgrade from them, and their prices are some of the best around.  Another upgrade that can make a big difference is upgrading your hard drive.  Chances are your computer came with a small, slow drive that upgrading can make a huge difference.  If you drive is too full it can slow you down, also upgrading to a faster drive can make a big difference in performance.

2. Clean up the hard drive. You may not feel comfortable swapping out your harddrive, and if you have a laptop it may not be easy.  But that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck.  You can defrag your drive to help speed it up.  I would also clean off unneeded programs and files to free up space.

3. Clean install. This is much more drastic, but often times using the system restore disks your computer came with reinstalling everything often helps fix problems that can be difficult to find and fix another way.  Now if you feel you need to take this step make sure you have a good backup and all the install files for your software because this will result in erasing your hard drive back to the way it came from the factory.  If you are planning to upgrade your computer to the latest operating system (Windows 7 or Snow Leopard) this can be a great time to do this.

4. Find a New Use For It.  You may find that your old computer is just not worth upgrading or fixing so you do take the step to get a new one.  That doesn’t mean the old computer is now completely useless.  You may be able to turn it into a home server to keep your photos or music on so you can share them with other computers in your house.  Or maybe that old laptop will be perfect to your spouse, parent, or child.  I find often times other people in my life don’t have the same requirements that I have, and while my old computer may not be great for editing video anymore, it may be perfect to check facebook or playing webkinz.

What do you do with your old computers?  How old is too old?

Let’s face it, a lot of our church websites need help.  Most of the time they aren’t up to the design and functionality we would like.  Well, the guys over at Snapshot Web would like to help fix that.  They are giving away a year worth of hosting, plus a custom design just for you.  Just follow the link and take their quick survey to be entered.  Who knows, a new church website could be in your future.