Studies in Semicolons

I don’t like hospitals and nursing homes that much. I mean, okay, nobody likes hospitals and nursing homes. But, for me, it’s not so much the sights or the smells, it’s the sounds. The relentless and constant beeping of old medical machines with monotone speakers is enough to drive me up the wall.

That’s why I finally went out and spent the $10 on Cleartones, a set of notification sounds by Hugo Verweij. I’ve got three devices in the apartment now, and I’ve spent some time considering what notifications are most important, and what aren’t. If I care so much about what is allowed to make sounds, I realized, I should also care what those sounds are.

Aural aesthetics doesn’t get nearly enough attention, in my book. Cleartones are the first set of artistic, dare I say deliberately designed, notification sounds and ringtones, and you get 50 of them for the same price as a crappy Pink Floyd poster in a college dorm room.

Now that I have them, I’ve got different tones for different kinds of notifications, so I can decide whether it’s worth picking my phone up for a new e-mail or location reminder. More importantly, I plan to switch them out often so the beeping never gets too dull.

There’s a ton of apps out there to control iTunes, Spotify and Rdio from a little desktop widget, but Bowtie delivers on the promise of the idea through a bunch of great-looking, clever themes. You’ll see them scroll by on the website. My current favorite is curLion, which appears to peel back the lower-left of your desktop to show album art. The best part: Bowtie’s 100% free.

After playing around some with Day One, and deciding its feature set was a bit too heavy for my occasional journaling needs, I set out to incorporate a journaling solution into my current nvALT workflow: new journal entries get named “journalx” followed by a dash-delimitated date. Though I like this for entry, I don’t like the idea of having hundreds of these “journalx” files around eventually.

This simple Ruby script, designed to be run once a month, takes all of last month’s journal entries, concatenates them into a single monthly file, and (if you wish) deletes the old files. My first foray into Ruby, and something super useful for my purposes.

Evening Edition is a well-written, pithy and world-minded take on the day’s news, updated twice a day to fit the schedule of Londoners and Pacific Time Zone denizens. I enjoy the writing, but there’s no chance I’ll remember to visit a webpage at the same time each day. For users of If This Then That, this recipe pulls each Pacific Time Zone edition into Instapaper when Evening Edition’s twitter account puts up a link each weekday at 5:15PM.