Useful Tags When Relaxing at Home

If you have been keeping up so far with our Tag Ideas series, you would notice that most of the stuff we talk about is helping you about making work more streamlined and relaxing. Of course, life at home shouldn’t be all work and no play.

NFC Tags could also help you out with making shortcuts in accessing some smartphone features that help you relax and enjoy your experience at home. It’s not only for you though; you could also help out a friend or a relative that came to visit with their NFC capable devices. What am I talking about? Let me share with you today’s round of ideas.

Movie Schedules

We live in a very internet connected world. What used to just show up on a list on a special cable channel is now available through the web. Sometimes, it is even faster to check the web rather than you TV.

With our NFC tags, we can easily set it up to take you directly to a website that would show the latest movie schedule for your favorite channel.

NFC Tags are rather unobtrusive and thin enough to be stuck to the back of a remote and remain unnoticeable.

Secure Wi-Fi pairing

Remember what I told you about helping out a visitor? Sometimes, they want to connect with your Internet connection. We trust them and all, but some people are still very reluctant to announce their Wi-Fi keys to anyone. Well, with our NFC tags, you don’t have to worry about that little detail.

With our NFC tags, we can set up another person’s phone by anonymously giving them the keys to your Wi-Fi connection. Here’s the best part – they won’t know the actual keys. It will simply be saved to their device and kept secret from prying ears.

Of course, since we are connecting them to the internet connection anyways, we can also program the tag to start up their Wi-Fi radios right away.

It is pretty easy to set up. When adding an action, simply choose the option that says, “Wifi Connect”, and then choose “Next”.

You can configure the SSID that you want them to connect with. Set it up so that the SSID is hidden for added security SSID. Next, choose the security type that your router uses and then enter the passkey that is used. After that, choose “OK” and that is pretty much it!

Identify Songs from the Radio

Have you ever heard of an app called “SoundHound”? This app uses your phone’s microphone to listen to music that you hear and then cross match it with an online database of songs. The idea is to find out the title of the song.

Everybody has come across a time when you hear a new song on the radio that you like and you are just dying to know the title of that song. Sometimes, you do know the song, and it is entirely familiar, but you can’t seem to put your finger around the title.

With your NFC tag, you can put a sticker near or even on your radio and program it to launch SoundHound. It’s very convenient since you need to get close to the speaker anyway to get a good sample of sound for your microphone to chew on. This way, you won’t be scrambling to launch the app to get a good sample of the song and identify it.

Here is the best part – SoundHound is one of those apps that you can set to launch an activity right away. The activity we are looking for is the “Identify Now” activity so as soon as you tap the tag, your app would be listening right away.

The activity to look for should be labeled like this: “com.soundhound.android.appcommon.activity.SoundHoundIdNow”

Book Reading Mode

One of the greatest pleasures in life is reading. Nowadays, reading is no longer done on just newspapers and physical books. The world is slowly moving on to e-books, which means that you may end up reading books on your smartphone more often.

The idea here is to place a tag near your favorite area for book reading. That could be at the bedside table, or your most comfortable chair in the garden.

You can program the tag to set the brightness level to the one you desire. If you read outside, you are likely to keep that at max. When indoors, you can set it up to mid-level or maybe just set it at auto-brightness.

You may also want to set the display timeout to maximum. We wouldn’t want to have the phone display turn off as you are engaged in a very compelling dialogue.

Since we are going read a book, we expect that the screen won’t be moving around so much while reading. When we read in bed, sometimes, we find ourselves rolling to the side to let our back rest. It’s annoying when you are reading in portrait and then suddenly it switches to landscape since you are now lying sideways. The simple solution is to turn off auto rotation with the NFC tag.

Finally, program your tag to launch your favorite e-book reader and enjoy the rest of the evening.

Guided Gaming

Some of us play games with a user guide right beside us. Nowadays, game guides also come in apps that are downloadable in the Play Store. Maybe you play GTA and want to keep a shortlist of the codes to make the game more “fun”. Maybe you want your Pokedex handy as you play along the life of a trainer. Maybe you are simply playing a game with lots of trophies and you don’t want to miss anything.

No matter the activity, you can set a reprogrammable NFC tag at the back of the controller. You can program a new app or site to it depending on the game you would be playing for a while. It would be best to keep it reprogrammable so that you don’t have to keep buying new tags every time you finish a game and start a new one.