My memory is bad. And I run out of stuff.
Every once in a while it comes to me I need to replenish a supply item. Maybe it's AAA batteries. Or epoxy. Spray paint. Mouse traps. Whatever.
Invariably, a few hours later, I forget what it was that I was low on. Hence, when I'm at the store, I can't remember what it was I had needed.
Too late, I only figure it out when at home I need it again. And I'm out. This is mostly for things I am just getting low on, or I just used up. Like, let's say, you you're getting low on whiteout or on scotch tape.
It's not important enough for its own trip, so you put it on a list. You forget about it as you only need the list when you're at the store.
At the store, all you have at that time, is your phone. And you can't remember what it was that you wanted to replenish.
So I keep a plain ASCII text file on my phone that started from Windows. Starting from Windows, somehow, allows me to edit in any Android editor. (Don't ask me why or how that works as I don't understand how it works.)
I keep a folder on the homescreen filled with text-reminder files. Organized by store type (hardware, grocery, clothing, whatever).
Because my eyes are bad, I make the homescreen shortcut icon obvious. With a big bold very obvious store icon for each type of store text file. (The whole goal here is efficiency as you won't use it if it's not fast.)
Like that big orange obvious you-can't-miss-it Home Depot icon image.
When I'm at home, and I notice I'm low on ten-penny nails, I whip out the phone, tap the homedepot.txt shortcut icon & speak into the microphone "Ten penny nails" & then I slide the phone back into my pocket.
Quick. Fast. Easy. Efficient. Otherwise I won't use it.
Then, days or weeks later, I'm at the Home Depot wondering what I need. I whip out the phone, tap the homescreen HomeDepot icon & it reminds me. "Ten penny nails"
With my bad eyes, I don't want to be reading the names on the files. I need some way to differentiate Home Depot from, oh, say, Costco. I want to see a big obvious orange HomeDepot icon standing out for me.
Here's a neat but super duper simple trick to creating icons. To make those shortcut icons, I go to "images.google.com" web page. But I go no further than that one web page (which is the trick).
Examples are Amazon, Target, Costco, A&P, GrandUnion, whatever. But let's say you want to make an icon for Home Depot, for example.
The only icon web page you need to go to is this one page & stop there.
That's it. I'm done with obtaining the image. Now all I have to do is crop it and save it in the correct ratio & format.
First I paste into Irfanview the whole page that the PrtScrn had saved. Then I crop out any desired image and save as a 1:1 ratio PNG file.
It's not intuitive how to crop a square in Irfanview so I'll tell you how. Actually, t's rather tricky as there are many entree point to the crop GUI.
Here's one way.
While viewing the pasted results in Irfanview, press [Shift+C] to "Create custom selection" & select the "1:1" side ratio & save it.
This will crop a 1:1 square (always of the wrong size & location) on your window which you then delicately move around and resize using a rather deft combination of your left & right mouse buttons.
You can also use the "Alt" key while drawing the to-be-cropped box. Expect frustration, but you may get the hang of it after a few tries.
Once you have the 1:1 square positioned & sized now you can crop. Press [Control+Y] and/or [Control+Shift+Y} to crop to your square. Save as a "PNG" file & copy over to the phone's icon directory. (For whatever reason, "ICO" files don't work on my Android phone.)
The number of pixels don't really matter, which is why a screenshot of the google images works even better than does saving an ICO file.
Besides, saving the image often requires visiting web pages. Each of which has cookie issues and watermark issues and the like. Just a screenshot of the Google Images results works better for icons.
I can usually pick out a perfectly recognizable icon from this one page.
On the phone, locate the homedepot.txt file & make a shortcut. Most Android file managers make shortcuts (eg
After that, when you're rooting around in the garage toolbox and you suddenly notice you are getting low on yellow teflon tape (or whatever), you whip out your phone, tap the big fat orange recognizable homedepot homescreen shortcut icon, and speak into the microphone "teflon tape".
If desired, you can replace the text editor with a checkbox app. Such as any one of these, but they don't allow a text file per store.
Nice. Quick. Easy. Simple. Efficient. Improvements?
One possible improvement is automatic syncronization of the todo files.
To sync the Windows text files with Android & vice versa you can use any of the quick peer-to-peer file transfer solutions everyone uses such as USB (connect the cable for file transfer if you're close to the PC) Bluetooth (use the Windows fsquirt.exe file transfer if you're not) WebRTC (use webrtc like
I don't know of any ready-made built-in Windows sync-to-android automated solutions (where you populate a folder with text files & it's always synced) but they probably exist - which would be an improvement on this.