tools

New favorite phone app for exploring nature!

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We’ve been loving the Seek app for identifying plants when we’re out exploring. The app uses your camera and image recognition technology to identify plants, animals, and fungi. It’s a fun addition to stopping and smelling the flowers. It “gameifies” being outside, by giving badges for discoveries and offering optional challenges. They’re cute features but the coolest part really is the identification of plants, animals, and fungi. Seek doesn’t store or transmit location data, and you don’t even need to create an account to use the app (but you can if you want to). The app is totally free from iNaturalist, which a collaboration between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. It’s available for iOS and Android, and it does require internet in order to access the iNaturalist database and use the app. We haven’t had luck using it for bugs or animals yet (except humans …

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Moving Day Checklists for RVers

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We love our moving day checklists. There are so many different parts of moving day when you’re moving an RV, that it’s too easy to forget something minor that becomes a major hassle later. We double- and triple-check anything safety related (like hitching the trailer to the truck) with or without a list, but rushing to pack up the RV could mean getting to your destination with a gallon (or more) of water on the floor, the contents of your cupboards all over your floor, or just stinky because you forgot to take the trash out before you closed everything up up and traveled 300 miles on a 90-degree day. We use iPhone’s built-in Notes app, and have 3 shared checklists, so when one of us checks off a task, it updates the other’s list. There are other apps out there that work in similar ways, and this isn’t ideal …

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