pyrosarco

A little perusing through a Moto Q forum the other day found a Candlelight replacement application.  In case you don’t know, Candlelight is an application for smart phones that allows for quick backlight increasing or decreasing.  It saves you a lot of battery power.

This new application, Candlelight Replacement, can be found here, and allows for one to adust the brightness of the screen in increments and even fade between different levels.  Yes, you can do most of this through the phone menus, but that is tedious.  With the replacement program, one can just click on the desktop icon for it, and then proceed to change the brightness.

The forum post also says that you can make the phone’s backlight much brighter than normal, at loss of battery power of course, but perhaps you want a bright phone.  Hope this is found useful, enjoy.

I was stumbling through some music tonight and it reminded me that I wanted this one song by GG Allin.  I heard the song originally in a skate video that I downloaded for free.  Try as I might, I couldn’t the version of the song I wanted anywhere.  So I began thinking, how would I go about getting this song out of the video.  My first thought was that someone would have a tutorial online or something.  So I searched Google quickly, only to find multiple programs that will convert .mov to .mp3.  I really wasn’t in the mood to download a spyware infested program, so I began poking around in Quicktime.

Now for this to work, I believe you need Quicktime Pro, so go get that.  Alright, do you have it now?  Good.  So open up your .mov video and go into the menu ‘Window.’  From here click ‘Show Movie Properties’ or for those of you who love short cuts, just type CTRL + J.

Alright, so now you have the window with all the audio and video listings open.  This is where it can be a pain in the ass.  If the video is big, and they didn’t lable each individual song, or the tracks are huge, you could have problems finding what you want.  But if your looking at skate videos like me, at four minutes a pop, then the audio is probably a single track.  So click the which audio you think it is (look at the duration, it can help give you a hint of which track is yours), and then click on the extract button in the upper left.  Another Quicktime window should pop up.  Do a File > Save As, and save it somewhere where you will find it, like your desktop.

If you don’t already have file extensions showing, go into Windows Explorer (Windows Key + E) and click on Tools > Folder Options.  Select the View tab and uncheck ‘Hide extensions for known file types.’  This should show you ‘whatever.mov’ instead of just ‘whatever’.  With that in mind, right click on your movie and select Rename.  Rename it to ‘whatever.aac’, this should keep it as a Quicktime file, but will change it from video to strickly sound, which you already did, sorta, by exptracting it.

Now that you have this double click it to open the file with Quicktime and go File > Export.  Change your Export type to a .wav and say save.  This may take some time depending on the file size.

Once you have your file, ‘whatever.wav’, drop it into  iTunes and right click and select convert to mp3.

That’s that.  Easy?  Sort of, but you didn’t have to download any programs.  This is good if you only want to do it for a few songs, otherwise, get a program.  Please don’t use this to do anything illegal because I will take no responsibility for it.  The song I am getting is a cover.

Yesterday I was having one of those days where things I wanted to get done, were just not happening.  There was nobody to blame but myself.  I was at the point of having a minor mental breakdown–I have had plenty of mental breakdowns over the past six months–when I took a step back.  I realized that I wasn’t going to get anything done and then I went and didn’t.  I came back to my computer last evening wanting to write about something but having no inspiration.  Then it hit me.  What if your environment helped and hindered your productivity? Immediately I knew that this statement was true–a messy environment leads to disorder and failure at moving quickly and completing tasks.  But what about a non-physical environment, what about the environment inside your head?

For the last 6 months I have been living out of a suitcase.  I would leave college and go home on the weekends to visit with my family and friends.  Each Sunday evening I would have qualms about going back to school; there was too much work, I wasn’t enjoying the classes I was taking, I didn’t understand some of the information they were trying to force feed me, and ultimately I was not having a good time being there.  This would build up, and build up, and I would become unstable and complain about it.  I was not able to cope mentally and that made me unable to cope physically.

Environment and [Mental] Productivity

The environment you expose yourself to physically must be neat; or at least organized in some fashion that you understand.  You don’t want to have all sorts of tasks lying around that make it hard to get things done.  Yesterday I had a lengthy list of things to get done: contact schools, look for a job, change cell phone area code, feed dogs, etc.  However I could not get these things done because I found myself too worried about the condition of my room.  There was laundry lying around because I didn’t have hangers.  I didn’t have hangers because my closet was already full with clothing.  A vicious cycle begins with overloading yourself with tasks to do.  If you try to put in too much information, your mental computer wont be able to handle it and in turn you will find your physical self helpless.  Therefore, by keeping and environment clean you will be more productive.

As for a mental environment, it needs to be small.   One can not deal with having a huge area to memorize, maintain, or think about.  For the last six months I was constantly living between home and school, I had two lives.  I had two rooms to memorize where I put things.  Two groups of friends to keep up with and manage.  Everything that used to be simple and straightforward became doubly hard because there was two of everything.  My mind could not take the mental expansion that was occurring.  Greek and Roman philosophers used to take a single favorite place, map it out in their minds, and then return to that place in order to memorize series of words, objects, lists, or whatever.  The point is that for you to be mentally stable you need something constant, and that constant functions better if it is small and and have personal meaning.

Increase Productivity By

• Keep areas neat or organized
• Doing tasks right the first time - this way you will not be thinking about how you could have done it better
• Do not overload yourself with tasks to do - being productive is not about how much you do, but what is worth doing
• Rid yourself of unneeded tasks or delegate them to others - however not your spouse or significant other because they will get mad if they have to clean up the books you threw on the floor
• Allot a small amount of time to get things done - this is called Parkinsons (when you give yourself less time to do something, you’re less likely to put off doing it.  Tim Ferris talks about this in his book the Four Hour Work Week - I recommend reading it for advice on productivity and streamlining, some of it is a bit radical)
• Keep your mental locations small -you will focus better and have a better memory

I have a Moto Q running Windows Mobile 5, and it is a batter hog.  I mean seriously, my phone died once already today.  Granted the 100+ text messages I receive each day isn’t helping, but what am I supposed to since I need to contact people and they need to contact me?

Well, with some researc I found this app that will help anyone one who uses a smart phone (I think) or at least those of us that have one with Windows Mobile 5.  The program is called Candelight and it comes as a .CAB file.  You download it, install it on your phone, and then click on the icon to activate it.  Presto!  It dims your screen, instantly saving you battery life.

But on the other hand, I still have the problem of receiving a gross amount of text messages.  Everyday I receive well over 100 texts and my phone battery just cant keep up with it.  Part of the problem is the fact that I have a Moto Q, and that it is running a lot of other tasks at the same time.  My problem is really the vibrations.  One it is annoying, and two making parts move kills the battery.  To my knowledge, there is no way to turn off the vibration notification on the Moto Q.  I have tried going through the menus and researching it online to no avail.  Does anyone know of such a way to turn of vibration?  A hack, anything will do.

If not, is there someone out there willing and adept at writing .CAB files that would be willing to take a few minutes *ahem* and write a program that will install and give you options to control the vibrations of your smart phone?  Espcially in the case of a Moto Q running WM5.