Useful Tags When Working Around the House
NFC Tag Ideas: When at Home Part 2: Working Around the House
Now that you are home, you don’t expect to just lie down and do nothing. We have to maintain the house and perform our household chores. If you think that your Smartphone and NFC are useless in this situation, think again.
NFC tasks are not all about profiles. NFC tags can help you quickly perform some tasks with your smartphone as you work around the house. Let’s talk about a few situations in today’s NFC Tag Ideas. I will list out places where you can put a tag as well as the suggested tasks you can automate.
At the Fridge
The fridge is where we keep one of the home’s most valuable resources – food. We always check if we have enough food, condiments and cold cuts. Back when phones weren’t so smart, we used to keep a bunch of post it’s and magnet notes on the fridge. Why? Because we usually check it first before we hit the grocery.
There are lots of apps in the Play Store that you can use as a simple checklist. One of the things that fail about traditional checklists is that people tend to forget to bring them along. In this day and age, forgetting to bring your phone is almost tantamount or even graver than losing your wallet. You are most likely to keep it with you wherever you go.
The idea here is to keep a checklist app of your choice and then keep a tag on your fridge which is programmed to quickly launch your checklist app as soon as you tag it. That way, you can easily add to the list what is missing. You will end up having that list with you wherever you go, so you can buy what you need as soon as you leave the house.
At the Kitchen
There are several ideas for a kitchen based NFC tag. The smartphones and tablets nowadays penetrate even the kitchen after all, and wouldn’t you want to have NFC to keep things going faster as you scurry around the kitchen?
Timer Tags
The first is an array of timers. You can put out 3 tags near your stove or oven (but not on the hot or metal areas) and program them to set your timer on a specific range. You can have more or less depending on your budget on tags as well as the range of time you need.
For example, one tag could be set for a 3 minute timer, while another is set for a 5 minute timer. You can have a 3rd one set up for a 10 minute timer if you need to wait long. You can change it up to the usual amount of time you wait for when cooking or baking.
Cookbook
The famous Apple saying “there’s an app for everything” also applies to Android now. As such, you can also find a cookbook app which is perfect for those who like to change it up in the kitchen with fresh dishes.
There are also plenty of free sites that offer cooking recipes and guides to cooking, which you can set to your tag as well as a direct link to your browser.
You can place your tag near the door to your kitchen and program the tag to load up your favorite cookbook app or site, so as soon as you enter the premises, your cookbook is loaded up and ready to go.
At the Washing Machine
The idea here is pretty much the same as in the kitchen. You set up one timer for the amount of time you usually leave your clothes in the wash. Set up the washing machine and leave with your smartphone. Take a break or do other work, then go back when the alarm rings.
If you want to save up on tags, you can always set a tag that launches the Clock activity ‘timer’ instead, so you can choose the time whenever you tap the tag. It might be labeled as “com.sec.android.app.clockpage.timer.Timer” when you look through the available activities in the “Clock” app.
Additional Settings
Make sure that when you are setting a tag that triggers an alarm, you take the time to also set the alarm volume to your preferred level.
Most people just keep it at max most of the time at home but you might have set it a little lower when you set an alarm somewhere public like the library or the sleeping quarters at work. It doesn’t take much memory anyway so add it in to make sure you can actually hear your alarm.
When you set up a tag that launches a reference application such as a cookbook, you may want to keep the phone from turning off while reading. You can program your tag to increase the default screen timeout to as long as 10 minutes.
Of course, you wouldn’t want your phone to stay on that long when you are not using your reference app, so make sure to make it a switch tag with the next switch set up to return the screen timeout to the normal levels.
