I try not to go on about how much I love the movie Stalker. It sounds kind of pretentious–people think it’s an “art film”–and I can’t really articulate why I like it. The only time I saw it in the cinema, the couple behind me summed it up as “two hours of walking to a place that everyone decides they didn’t want to go in the first place.” I can’t disagree with that. But it’s still one of my favourite movies, and countless creative people have named it amongst their greatest influences.
UPDATE: You can also grab an eBook of Roadside Picnic, the novel on which Stalker was loosely based, from the Roadside Picnic Wikipedia Page. The Stalker games, which draw on the movie for setting, also frequently go on sale on Steam.
With Mailbox opening up to everyone, and thus devouring the media attention for email clients, I thought this might bear mentioning. Triage is a simple email client designed to very quickly work through only the new mail in your inbox. With a flick you decide to archive or keep a message. If you keep it, it stays unread in your inbox, but you won’t see it again in Triage. You can also type out a quick reply. Works with anything that uses IMAP. I’ve sent the developers an email to see if it’s possible to have Triage delete rather than archive. If so, it’s a definite buy for me.
UPDATE: Just heard back from the developers, and the app can indeed be set to update rather than just archive.
Alternatives to the stock apps with which your iPhone ships. I don’t necessarily agree with all their choices as the best alternatives, but they are definitely better alternatives.
Like so many people (everyone?), I sometimes struggle with focus. I have a number of strategies that work, but sound plays a role in all of them. In this article I’ll take you through my focus-related audio tools.
Focus-related audio falls into four categories: music that’s acceptable background music like classic ambient; generated noise (white, pink, or brown); binaural beats; environmental audio (like rain, oceans, trains, etc). Most serve to mask distracting sounds or soothe you. Binaural beats actually adjust the way the brain is working, helping you relax or concentrate. Many folks claim that’s a little “woo”. I know nothing about the science, and I accept this may be a placebo response, but they work for me.
This app on the Mac is number one tool for audio focus.
Relax Melodies Premium features all the options: binaural beats, environmental audio, noise, and music. You can add as many of them as you want by clicking or tapping on the icon, and adjust the audio of each track individually. Mixes you enjoy can be added to favourites.
The interface is both over-the-top and hard to use. You can only adjust the audio of a playing track by stopping it and starting it again. You can’t adjust the overall volume, it’s on a track-by-track basis. So if you have four tracks playing, and you want to reduce the volume on all of them, that’s 4 × 3 clicks for a total of 12. This doesn’t really matter, though. You’ll start it, set a few favourites, and let it go.
There are specific versions of this app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I own the Mac and iPhone versions. The iPhone version at 2x is good enough for me on the iPad. My one beef with the iPhone version is the omission of my favourite sound: rain on a tent.
Noisy is a modern rewrite of Noise, which I used for years as well. All this app does is play white or pink noise. Lately I’ve found it has started to stutter, but I have all kinds of nonesense running on my Mac these days. This is perfect to drown out conversations just enough so they don’t draw your attention. You can even run it at low volumes under your music. Pink noise is much less harsh that white, I’d recommend that.
Single-Site Browsers
I have three single-site browsers set up that I use to create a nice work environment. The first two are sounds: the engine sounds from the Next Generation-era Enterprise, and ambient noise from the Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both are HTML files on my local machine that contain nothing but an embed of these videos. Every hour or so they need to be restarted, but that’s not really an issue: if I notice, I restart. If not, then I’m focusing, and their services aren’t needed.
(from the Ommwriter site)
The last app is the odd one out. It’s actually a distraction-free writing environment/plain-text editor. The unique appeal of Ommwriter over the competition is that it really seeks to be an environment, and that’s how it fits this theme. There are different backgrounds, different audio themes, and the keys click. It can feel really satisfying to be typing away, hearing the clicks like rain on a window. I use the seventh key sound with the chromatherapy background, and the music track with the nice vinyl fuzz to it.
Not so much a bundle as a curated collection of games. This release includes a previously for-pay gamebook game that’s well reviewed. Great for those of us who’re dialling back the game spending!
I recently lost someone very close to me, and I’m helping that person’s surviving spouse sort through their financials. They’d done a great job of keeping their stuff organized, but it wasn’t perfect. This page, while somewhat US-specific, will really help you get your stuff in order.
