All of this working from home has meant that I have not spent this much uninterrupted time behind my personal computer since I do not know when. This is to say, over the past few weeks I have dialed in my personal setup in a way that is super-useful to me and I thought I’d share the apps/tools I’ve started/revisited using since working from home during the quarantine.
First up, Apple’s AirPods Pros.
I’ve never owned headphones with active noise cancelation before but, man, where have these been all of my life???? Right now, there is a huge racket in my house from one of my kids shooting hoops in his room with a nerf basketball. I can feel the ball bouncing but my concentration is not broken because I can not hear the sound of the ball bouncing. This is AMAZING!
Throughout the day I am bathed in the warm nothingness of active noise cancellation. On occasion I’ve noticed that I do not even have music playing, I’m just enjoying the near-silence that they offer. If you need to concentrate in a noisy house, highly recommended.
Audio/Listening/Zoom
Over the past few weeks I’ve evolved a somewhat complicated Zoom/music listening setup on my iMac. At work, we live in Zoom and I’ve had to do some refactoring to balance my music and Zoom needs. I’ll detail a few of those tools here:
Triode: I listen to The Current throughout the day when I’m not actively listening to music from my collection. Triode is *the* best radio playing application, ever. If you listen to internet radio stations, hard to imagine life without it.
I want my music to play through my Kinter Tripath amplifier to my external speakers but want my Zoom/Facetime audio to go through my iMac display. This black magic wizardry is achieved through an application called SoundSource from Rogue Ameoba. Combined with a cheap dongle, I can easily send audio from any app to any output. Awesome application, highly recommended.
As an aside, I have been using this time while trapped in my office to re-rip some CDs into Lossless (ALAC) format and am using XLD running on an old, headless Mac mini to do so.
Other apps for maintaining sanity:
DayOne Journal. I’ve been using this application for years but making notes about what it is like to experience this quarantine has felt important.
Waking Up. Sam Harris’ meditation app has been my meditation app of choice for about a year now. I have less time to use it now that we are all at home but every time I use it, I feel better.
I’ve got a few other notable mentions like Parallels, Microsoft Teams and OneDrive which have all made getting real work in a Windows-centric environment less unproductive. Also, I just started using GeekTool to pipe some useful outputs to my desktop but the jury is still out on how useful that is. If time permits I’ll circle back in a few weeks to update here.