How to Adult Vol.2: Make work easier!
If you're like me, and you spend an awful lot of time each day infront of a screen, you'll pick up a bunch of handy little websites, software and other little tools for getting you through the day. I'm always on the lookout for cool new websites or programs to help me out. So with that, I thought I'd share some of my favorites! As ever, if you've got some other suggestions, let me know in the comment!
1. f.lux (https://justgetflux.com/)
This is my #1 pick for a reason. It's been the greatest relief on my eyes since I first discovered it years ago. f.lux is a teeny tiny little program that runs in the background. It slightly tweaks and adjusts things like the brightness, warmth and colors of your screen throughout the day to relieve some of the strain on your eyes. If you do a cycle through on the program, you'll notice that in the morning, the screen is a little brighter and has a slight blue tint to it, and in the evening, a little dimmer with a slight red tint. The thing is, you never notice these changes, unless you're away from your desk for an hour or so as it transitions. BUT, the effect is definitely noticable on your eyes. If, like me, you have to do some color-sensitive work, you can also right-click the tray icon and temporarily disable it for an hour or so. Oh, and the other big benefit is it's free, with no ads, no popups, no updater notifications or anything like that.
2. nourish. (http://www.nourish.live)
I discovered this website a little while ago. Very simply put, it's a link to two separate youtube streams; a lofi/chill and a good vibes stream. Each one runs 24/7, ad free, and provides plenty of nice background music to help you work through the day. As an extra added bonus level of chill, I also have www.rainymood.com open in another tab, so you get nice chill music, and the sound of rain. Very relaxing!
3. Winamp (http://www.winamp.com)
Since being established back in 1997, Winamp, in my opinion, is still one of the best media players. It's very light on resources, and there's a tonne of plugins to support just about every file type out there. It's easy to use and navigate, and has an excellent media library setup. It also has great support for portable devices, such as phones, ipods etc., so moving your music around is very easy. And, for those who actually use it, it's got some great visualisation plugins. Because who doesn't love pretty colours!
4. WeTransfer (http://www.wetransfer.com)
This is a sort of instant-dropbox. The free version (which doesn't require sign-up), allows you to transfer files of up to 2Gb. Each time you transfer a file, it sends an email download link to the recipient, and you also get an email confirmation when they actually download the file. I use this quite a lot for sending large files to our clients or consultants, and it's served me well so far!
5. Bullzip (http://www.bullzip.com)
A day doesn't go by when I don't have to send out some PDFs. However, if you don't have the pro version of something like Adobe Acrobat, finding a good way to save files to PDFs can be frustrating. There are some other fairly decent PDF programs out there, however, my personal favorite is Bullzip. There's no watermarks, it's very easy to use, and allows for a lot of flexibility. This means that with a bit of research, you can "print" to a PDF, and set it up to keep the file size down. I've been using this for quite some time now, and it's been excellent so far.
6. Agar (http://www.agar.io)
All work and no play, etc. This is a fun little game that you can play for 10 minutes or so in between tasks. The objective is simple, grow big and eat other blobs.
-n