Just occasionally everyone raves about a piece of software and I really don't get it. I never got Pinterest or Instagram, for instance. In those cases it's just that they aren't really useful to me - but the service I'm struggling with here really feels like it's something that should be valuable. And time after time I go to it, think hmm... and get nowhere. It's called IFTTT , short for If This Then That, and its role is to automate those trivial repetitive tasks we find ourselves doing. The concept is simple but powerful. You have a trigger, which is something happening on anyone of 82 services (or 'channels' as IFTTT confusingly calls them), such as email or Facebook or Evernote, etc. etc. When that something happens, IFTTT automatically carries out an instruction. It could be to send you a text, or perform a task in another service. Examples work better than the abstract with this kind of thing. You can write your own 'recipes', but IFT...

The way most of use computer programs makes sledgehammers and nuts a minor infringement on the 'getting the scale right' tally. Our requirements are orders of magnitude simpler than the programs' ability.  Take Audacity, the impressively free audio editing program I use. It can do all sorts of exciting things. Just look at that huge menu of effects of which I use... one. The program comes in hugely useful when I edit the tracks recorded for my company's increasingly vast emporium of organ pieces and hymn accompaniments , but my routine is always the same. Read in a track, make sure the lead in and out are consistent times, wipe any audio before the playing, fade out the audio at the end. And save. Touching a tiny part of the application's capabilities. Though it's not so extreme most of us also have a limited repertoire in more familiar programs, whether it's an office suite like Word, Excel and Powerpoint, or image manipulation. Just like Audacity...