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Stone Mountain has two smaller siblings, Panola Mountain and Arabia Mountain, all granite outcroppings called monadnocks. I’ve been to Panola a few times, including my most recent trip last year. To get to hike on the mountain itself, you must have a guide. While Panola is nowhere near as large or high as Stone Mountain, the flatter dome and lower traffic mean it is more natural with more solution pits growing blankets of small red flowers called diamorpha. Arabia Mountain, which I visited a few years ago, is smaller still with very little elevation, but less protected than Panola. However the area around Arabia Mountain has grown into an interesting collection of parks with paved bike trails running through it built by PATH. When I got the day off for Veterans Day this year, it was fairly warm, so I thought I would take Bella for a hike. Sweetwater and the Chattahoochee areas are pretty far away, so I thought we could go out to Arabia which also has miles of foot trails. We went to the Davidson Arabia Mountain Nature Center. There were a few cars parked there and we saw a few people on the trail. Part of the trail is over exposed granite where they used to quarry granite (hard to tell; there aren’t giant quarry pits like you would expect), and part was along a bike path, and part on a path along a creek and lake. It made for an interesting 3-mile hike and Bella enjoyed getting to stand in the creek. One offshoot trail was to a gravesite of some former residents of the area.

Yesterday was another decent day, so we drove out to a different spot, the Evans Mill Trailhead, and did a little bit longer hike from there, mostly through the woods, but some along the bike trail, and some through an old farm that I guess is abandoned though there is definitely stuff going on. Even though it was a Saturday and I was expecting it to be more crowded than the trip the previous Friday, we saw no one else on any of the trails until the very end as I was leaving and some people came out with their dogs. We also saw a deer cross the bike trail (Bella really like that but it was pretty far away) and I realized the bike trail is better for spotting wildlife in some ways because you can see a long way up and down the straight and cleared path and also you make a lot less noise walking than in the leaves on the footpaths.

Now that I have an Android phone taking the place of my iPod, I wanted to move all of my songs over to it. My CD’s are all ripped to MP3 already, so those came over pretty easily and an MP3 app called Phonograph seemed to handle them pretty well except for some of the double albums for which I needed to edit the tags for the disk number to play songs in the right order instead of playing Track 1 and the other Track 1. Not all players read the Disk tag, but Phonograph seems to. I was able to import a lot of the cover art either through Phonograph or another app that brought in the ones Phonograph didn’t catch.

I also have a lot of singles that I’ve downloaded. Some came from iTunes early on and then I switched to Amazon as much as possible since they let you download MP3’s instead of Apple’s proprietary protected format (.m4p). Eventually Apple switched to a new format (.m4a) which was maybe a little more open. I found out that with any of the m4a files I could convert them to mp3 in iTunes. So that was easy for a few songs I had bought lately including a bunch of songs by Postmodern Jukebox. When I first started buying iTunes, I would put them into a playlist and burn them to CD. I had 8 or so disks of songs. Once the songs were on CD, I could rip them to mp3 format. So most of the early songs I got from iTunes I had already ripped to MP3 and had wisely stored those in a folder of converted iTunes songs.
Continue reading “Getting Out of iTunes”

Ever since I had a Palm, I would write stuff down in notes, which Palm called Memos. Memos were very simple, but you could categorize a memo and filter the list of memos by category. No formatting, just a title and the content and a category. I think they were actual txt files, but maybe it was a database. Every time you would sync the Palm, the notes were backed up on your computer. In Palm Desktop you could edit a note and sync it back to the Palm. I ended up with something like 500 notes.

Then the Palms went away and I got an iPod Touch. After much searching (here, here, and here), I found NoteMaster. You couldn’t sync with iTunes because iTunes doesn’t work that way, but notes could sync with Google Drive or DropBox. Also you could password protect a category, so I had a secure category for things like web passwords. Notemaster allowed some very basic formatting which made for nicer looking notes.

Now I am on Android and there is no Notemaster app. So I’m back to looking at dozens of apps and trying to figure out which one can do the pretty basic things I want. It is complicated because some people want To Do lists, some want to scribble a note with their finger, some want to make audio notes, or picture notes. Some people want sticky notes for their desktop. I don’t want any of that.

Continue reading “Notes for Android”

I decided to upgrade my flip phone to a smart phone after many years and went looking for a plan that was cheap, which was the reason I never got a smart phone. There were a few, including some plans for just phone calls and texts, but for a little more I could get a data plan as well. I wound up with a service called Mint SIM. You pay for 3, 6, or 12 months in advance, so it is a prepaid plan, but calls and texts are unlimited and you get 2 GB of data (later bumped to 3 GB). The price can be as low as $15 per month. For $20 a month you can get a plan with 5 GB of data. 2 GB may be tough to meet, but 5 GB should be more than enough. So we’ll see how it goes and I can upgrade at any time.

Once you sign up, they mail you a SIM card that you put in your phone. They can give you a new phone number or you can port your old number over. Their service runs on the T Mobile network which is actually pretty good in Atlanta, but doesn’t have as much rural coverage as Verizon.

After 3 years of service (as of 2020) I highly recommend Mint Mobile. If you want to sign up, go to this referral link.

Continue reading “Mint Mobile”

I have had my current flip phone since about 2007, 10 years. I got it used from Susan when she upgraded to a smart phone for work (I had helped her pick it out originally). It has been incredibly durable and reliable and has saved me a bunch of money by never having to upgrade the phone. Since that time I have been part of Jeb’s Verizon Wireless family plan and as phones in his house got broken and needed an emergency upgrade, he could use the free upgrade available for my phone to get a free upgrade on another phone on the plan. I had a Palm that I used as a smart phone (without the phone) until 2010 when I got an iPod Touch, which set off some upgrade issues as I had to abandon my favorite Palm apps to migrate to Apple’s iOS apps. For music I had originally bought the 20 GB Archos Jukebox in 2002, which was a great way to listen to music on the train on the way to and from work. In 2003, Susan gave me an iPod and I have had an iPod ever since. At first the iPod was just for music, but when I got the Touch in 2010 that served double duty as a PDA and a source of music. I had used my last Palm to watch TV shows and even movies ripped from DVD’s by loading them to the memory card and the Touch was even better for that. So for a while I had a phone and Palm (and iPod), then I had the phone and iPod Touch, up to this week.

Continue reading “New Phone”