Monday 2 February 2015

Some handy apps

With the fire season upon us I thought I would take a look at an app that can help identify emergencies in your area.  The app is called Emergency Aus and is free to download to your mobile device from the Google play and Apple App store. The purpose of the app is to advise you of any emergencies in your area. This is achieved by crowd sourced observations and official sources such as DFES and BOM alerts. Firstly you set your home area in which alerts will be notified, you can choose how large the radius for this is. Making on observation is relatively easy, you can choose from preset options such as storm is coming, smoke plume, heavy rain etc. or you can make your own detailed observation. This observation uses your current location and then alerts others in the area. The more observations made, the more likely there is an issue in the area. Official warnings are still present from DFES and BOM but this is a quick way of seeing what is happening in your area based on crowd sourced information.

If you have more than one computer near each other and are constantly juggling keyboards and mice then you'll like Mouse without Borders. This is a free program from Microsoft which allows you to use your keyboard and mouse on multiple computers. Once installed, you can freely move your mouse between screens as if they were all connected to the same computer. This does require the computers to be on the same network. I have found this to be very useful and eliminates confusion about which mouse is connected to which computer. You can even drag and drop files between computers.  More information on these apps can be found here: