Happy 45th Earth Day!  The year is 2015 which means that today is the 45th annual Earth Day as 1970 fades long in the distance. There are those who believe we would have never believed we would have made it this far, although by now most of those folks are either dead or very elderly. 45 years is half a life-time.

It’s wass a beautiful morning with the grass finally starting to turn green in the city, and trees starting to bud up. Yesterday’s rain really helped. The bus was a few minutes late but it’s moving well downtown. Hopefully this will be the end of the fire risk, and ensure a delightful summer. I always enjoy when things green up, all the more so after this awful winter.

Installed my first paid app on my phone. I’ve had Pop-up Notifications Free on my phone for a few weeks but I decided I really liked the app and both wanted to support the app development and get some more advanced features in the paid, $1.33 version. For that price, I figured why not?

The Android 4.3 system doesn’t have pop-up notifications, so you have to swipe down the top of the screen to pull down the notifications. With all this push towards hands-free phone use while driving, I’ve been looking for a solution that can let me know if I have received a pressing the phone to receive a message or notification, that I need to pull over and address, or I can safely ignore for later.

I first installed “Shouter” which reads your alerts and messages while driving. It seemed like a good approach, but I found it to be distracting to listen to hear what the message was. If the windows were open on my truck or I was listening to music, I often would miss the alert.

Then I discovered Pop-Up Notifications Free. This app pops-up the notifications automatically on the screen, for a preset time with no user interaction. This works perfectly in my truck, as I usually have Waze map and police reporter app open in my phone cradle right next to the speedometer. This way when I get a notification, it pops up, I can glance at it, an know why my phone is beeping while driving.

It works and works great.