Category: Resources Tools Tips (Page 2 of 3)

Stop Being Productive and Enjoy Yourself

August 27, 2009 / Bengt

Leo Babauta has another great post over at Zen Habits, Get Less Done: Stop Being Productive and Enjoy Yourself.

There’s too much emphasis these days on productivity, on hyperefficiency, on squeezing the most production out of every last minute. People have forgotten how to relax. How to be lazy. How to enjoy life.

Productivity is not good in itself, it’s very important to decide what we do. We need to manage our attention and our priorities.

It’s possible we’re trying to get more done because we love doing it — and if that’s the case, that’s wonderful. But even then, working long hours and neglecting the rest of life isn’t always the best idea. Sometimes it’s good to Get Less Done, to relax, to breathe.

We do need to relax and breathe. No one runs their car engine on full throttle all the time, why do it with yourself?

Leo lists some useful tips on how to relax and ends the post like this:

Step by step, learn to relax. Learn that productivity isn’t everything. Creating is great, but you don’t need to fill every second with work. When you do work, get excited, pour yourself into it, work on important, high-impact tasks … and then relax.

Now I’ll do what I do on a regular basis, it’s also in Leo’s list of tips, I’ll go for a walk.

This was originally posted at Forty Plus Two, another blog of mine.

WriteMonkey text editor

July 15, 2009 / Bengt

Through Another Fantastic Full Screen Text Editor I found WriteMonkey. It says:

Zenware for full screen distraction free creative writing. No whistles and bells, just empty screen, you and your words. WriteMonkey is light, fast, and perfectly handy for those who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter but live in modern times.

I downloaded WriteMonkey and test it. It’s a great software with many features. I like the easy toggle between full screen (for no distractions) and small window to access other stuff. My only complaint so far is the progress or status bar that has very little information.

Read more:
WriteMonkey Text Editor where it says that WriteMonkey is the new king of full-screen distraction free text editing.

Wordle, create word clouds

June 22, 2009 / Bengt

I found Wordle through Lifehacker.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

It’s an interesting tool that I will test, could be fun to do for blog posts.

Facebook and vanity links

June 13, 2009 / Bengt

Facebook has finally realized that so called vanity links are better than their old version.

My old Facebook link is

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=633735409

My new vanity style link which makes more sense is

http://www.facebook.com/bengt.wendel

To create your vanity link just log in to your Facebook account and then go to Facebook username.

Images, favicons and some text

April 8, 2009 / Bengt

When searching for images for my blogs I use Flickr Creative Commons (free if source is given) and iStockphoto where you buy the right to use images.

For more sources, see 100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images.

A favicon (also known as a website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon) is a 16×16 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage. I use FavIcon from Pics to create my favicons, the service is free and easy to use.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Great when you are more focused on looks than text content andd simply want “filler text” for testing something.

Q10 text editor

April 6, 2009 / Bengt

Maki, @doshdosh, tweeted about Q10 text editor. It’s freeware and Q10 says it is “a simple but powerful text editor designed and built with writers in mind”.

There are several interesting features but what hooked me is this:

Perfectly portable. A single self-contained executable file. That’s all. Easy to use with a pendrive, so you can carry your writing environment with you everywhere.

Update April 11,2009.
I have installed and tested Q10. It is a bit odd (to me) to have a totally blank screen without any visible distractions. I like the typewriter sound when writing, getting an audio feedback is actually great.

Q10 is a plain but powerful text editor. No formating can be done, all you can do is write which is the sole purpose of this software. Q10 creates txt-files, import them into your word processor of choice and do the formatting there.

You can have an information bar that shows current number of words, pages, lines, paragraphs and characters. Quite useful in order to see your writing progress.

In summary – I like Q10 and will use it when I need to focus on my writing.

MyAlltop

March 18, 2009 / Bengt

Alltop has been around for a while, collecting news and feeds. They label themselves as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. Just a few of their pages: news from CNN, news from the BBC, news from the New York Times and news from Newsweek.

Alltop has now launched MyAlltop which gives you the possibility to tailor a page that matches your own preferences. I have decided to give it a try, I like the quick way to browse articles by just hovering over them in the lists.

My own version, btwendel, is a work in progress. There is more I want to add and I will probably drop some of what is there now.