Category: Program

Soundrown is one of those small, obscure internet programs that turns out to be immensely helpful. It is exactly what it sounds like: a site for sore ears. Tired of listening to a conversation when you want to be reading? Soundrown! Want the calming effect of listening to a coffee shop on fire with birds in the background? Soundrown! Want to write and need the right sounds to get in the mood? You guessed it… Soundrown!

Okay, in all fairness, I think the only intended purpose is the last one. But hey, they’re all fun. And you can relax, it isn’t like they recorded a coffee shop on fire. What they do have are multiple audio tracks you can listen to, multiple at a time if you’d like. Presently, these are Coffee Shop, Rain, Waves, Fire, Birds, Night, Train, Fountain, White Noise, and Playground. Each has its own volume bar, so you can adjust them accordingly. They have a random button if you don’t want to select one yourself, as well as music, which is currently in Beta and has exactly one song. I’ve listened to that song a lot.

They also have links to a couple of articles in the Menu, Knowledge section. Quite honestly, I haven’t gotten to reading them yet, but they look interesting and I’ll likely be reading them soon. I mainly use this site for the song; it’s just under six minutes of gentle instrumental music, which I’ve found to be the best music for me to read or write to without getting distracted.

We’ve all had moments where there was a word, we knew what it meant, maybe approximately how long it was or what it started with, but we couldn’t for the life of us remember what the word was. Where it’s right there, right on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t remember what exactly it is. It’s infuriating to say the least, and if you’re obsessive like I am, you then spend the rest of the day on and off contemplating what that word might have been.

Not anymore! As random information that I stumbled across while browsing the Internet has so enlightened me, there is a website called, shocker, Tip of My Tongue, made for this exact purpose. Forgot a word? Just go to Tip Of My Tongue! It can take a few tries to match up the definitions, and it isn’t perfect, but it’s quite helpful nonetheless.

Here’s how it works: There are four rows, Partial Word, Letters, Word Meaning, and Refine Search. Partial Word allows you to type in what it may start and end with, or contain somewhere in the middle. Letters also has three functional settings, Unscramble, Must have, and Can’t have. Word Meaning hypothetically allows for multiple meanings to the word, but I’ve found it easier to just use one and adjust how I word it until it matches up. Refine Search is for the minimum length, maximum length, and whatever the word may sound like.

As an author, and just a compulsive human in general, this has saved me multiple headaches of trying to find the word I want to use, whether it’s in a story, an essay, or a speech.

Omaze is a website that a friend introduced me to a while back, as a fellow Doctor Who fan. At the time, they were running a sweepstakes/raffle for a chance to eat breakfast with some of the different Doctor’s.

This is what Omaze does: they get famous people to agree to some activity or another that they’d be willing to engage in with a random fan and choose a charity. The sweepstakes is set up on the website, and, quantity depending on how much money you donate, you get chances to win the sweepstakes. For instance, there was one that was tea with Benedict Cumberbatch in LA followed by the Avengers Infinity War Premiere. All of the money from the raffle goes to the charity that was chosen. To continue the example above, Mr. Cumberbatch chose the GEANCO Foundation, which aids the poor and vulnerable in Africa.

I think that Omaze is a really nice idea, because it allows people to meet their idols while simultaneously helping others. I’ve only followed the possibilities on it loosely, generally, but what I have seen was quite impressing, both by how much they can get the celebrities to engage in this sort of thing and by how much money they’ve been able to raise through it.

Or, the free version of training it, anyhow. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s this program called Lumosity that had a whole bunch of ads going around a few years back, and, while I usually ignore ads with extreme prejudice, I eventually caved and downloaded it. I completely forgot that it existed for a couple years until it found its way into my Facebook feed, and I’ve since restarted the habit of using it. Like I said, I use the free version, so, while I’ll try to point out premium stuff, that’s not my focus.

Lumosity is a program that uses a plethora of games to train different aspects of your mind, namely Speed, Memory, Attention, Flexibility, Problem Solving, Math, and, more recently, Vocabulary. It does this by, each day, selecting games for you to play (free version – 3, Premium – 5). Each game has its own scoring methods, in which you attempt to beat your personal high scores. The scores of the games in each category are averaged for the score listed for each of those categories, except for Vocabulary, where they just count the unique words you’ve used, and the scores of all of the games are averaged to form your LPI, or Lumosity Performance Index, which is “a standardized scale calculated from all your game scores.” In the free version, you are able to see your Best LPI, Current LPI, and LPI’s for each “Cognitive Area,” which I usually just refer to as categories. They also track your mood and sleep trends based off of the questions at the beginning of the lesson, and average them.

In free version, you are able to go back and repeatedly play the three games you had that day as much as you would like, but in the Premium version, not only do you get 5 games, but you have access to all 60+ games. These aren’t the only Premium perks. You also get an algorithm that “generates workouts based on your training habits and preferences,” a more detailed training history, how you compare to other people, and a system called “Insights.”

Insights has a lot of subsets, presently 9. Four of these appear to be an overall program: Your Monthly Gains and Drops, Your Occupation Profile, Your Lumosity Community, and Your Game Strength Profile. The others are each based off of a different game, which is listed at the beginning of the title — Train of Thought: Your Planning Skills, Disillusion: Your Play Style, Lost in Migration: How You Filter Information, Ebb and Flow: Your Speed and Accuracy, and Word Bubbles: Your Writer Profile. What do each of these mean? For the most part, I have no clue.

The only one of these I have had the pleasure of trying (thanks e-mail promo codes!) was the Writer Profile. I enjoyed the game Word Bubbles already, which gives you two starter letters on the first round for you to make words out of (ex: PR), three for the first half of the second round and then two (TRI, then TR) and four for the first third of the third round, going down incrementally (you get the idea and I’m out of examples, so yeah). Your Writer Profile matches your vocabulary with the most unique and frequently used thousand or so words from famous writers, to compare your top six matches. Each time you play, this updates, so your matches may shift over time. Though the order of them varied, I spent my three days of Writer Profile with only one set of matches: J. K. Rowling, Agatha Christie, Stephen Hawking, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, and Stephen Covey. I had to look up the last guy (it provided brief bios on each in case you didn’t know who they were), but I was pleased with my selection overall.

Lumosity has also recently added a side program called Mindfulness, which focuses on breathing and being in the moment. I was tentative about trying it, but determined that I should, if only to say that I had tried. I would best summarize it as poking the dot on the screen to sync with your breathing. When you inhaled, you held your finger on the screen (or clicked on the computer, I assume) and the little white circle got bigger, then watched it contract when you exhaled and let go. As amusing as it was, it was also surprisingly effective. This noted, I’ve only done the first three or so exercises on it, all in one day, and then forgotten about it until this post. Whoops.

Scratch? What’s that? Like, a cat game or something? Well, yes and no. There are cat games on it, but Scratch itself is not a cat game. Scratch is a free coding platform where you can code your own games and videos, and play or watch other people’s coded games and videos. When I first learned about it in third or fourth grade, I was skeptical. Why would I want to code things? That sounded hard. But by the time our first day on Scratch was over, I felt differently.

The program provides different tutorials for you to use if you want to try something specific. What I like about Scratch, but what I know some of my friends don’t, is that you don’t have to type each code. The codes are sorted into categories of Motion, Looks, Sound, Pen, Data, Events, Control, Sensing, Operators, and More Blocks. You click on the category, then drag whichever command you want into a chain of codes.

Most commands have variables, like the sprites (things on the screen that you’re commanding), numbers, or words. Sometimes, commands like Controls have a box for another command inside of it. For example, the command Repeat would then have a chain of codes inside of it to tell it what to repeat. Or sometimes, there are multiple boxes, like the command If Then Else. After “If”, there’s a box for a single command, e.g. Touching color ___. Under “If Then,” there’s a box for a chain of commands, and another spot for a chain under else.

Once you are finished adding sprites and backgrounds, coding them, and testing and editing your project over and over again, you can choose to publish it on Scratch, which just means that anyone else could stumble across it and play it. Or you could keep it in your folder for you, and only you, to play. You can also organize projects into Studios.

Basically, Scratch carries the fun of coding without the need to learn an entire coding language.

I’m sorry, what? Yes, it’s called NoodleTools. Dude, don’t judge. It’s actually really helpful. Let me explain: When we were about to do our Shakespeare project in my English class, our teacher mentioned a research tool online that we would be expected to use. Of course, we all collectively groaned, as we generally do when we are told we have to do just about anything. Because, you know, kids. But after using NoodleTools for three different projects in that class, I’ve grown to appreciate it, and now I bring it to you.

There are three formats of citations listed: MLA, APA, and Chicago/Turabian, depending on which you need for your project (if it doesn’t really matter, I suggest MLA) and what detail of citations: Starter (6 forms), Junior (Simplified for you) and Advanced (70+ forms). If this doesn’t matter either, I’d go with Junior, since it’s the least complicated to use. You can write in the details and it will cite for you, or, if the source comes cited, you can just copy and paste the citation.

You can share the project with another user, as either a full-access collaborator or a proof-reader, which has less access. You can also share it with a project inbox, so you could each work on a separate part and collect them all in the inbox.

To collect the information, you make notecards, which have three main subsections inside. There’s the quote section, where you copy and paste the information from the website so that you don’t have to switch back and forth between the tab with the info and your notes constantly, the restate section, where you say it your way and cut out any unnecessary information, and the thinking section, where you make other notes to explore or use later. The notecards can be arranged in stacks to organize like information.

The only downside I have found to NoodleTools is that you can’t make piles of the piles of the notecards, where I like subdividing more than once, but then you can just drag them form clusters, so I suppose that’s a minor issue.

This program has been extremely helpful for the organization of my projects over the past year, and I hope it can help some of you as well.

Last weekend, my mother and I went to Philadelphia. I’ll probably spend the next few weeks raving about the assorted aspects of that trip, but today I want to talk about the travel agency that sent us there.

You see, we didn’t actually know where we were going until the day we left. We used this cool agency called Pack Up + Go to decide that for us. You fill out a survey – where you’ve been recently, where you’re headed in the near future, hotel vs B&B, what days you’d like to book the trip for, what sort of stuff you like, car or bus/train/plane.

Pack Up + Go arranges your flights and accommodations, sends you a list of what to pack and the weather forecast for where you’re headed, checks you in for your flights once check-in opens and emails you your boarding passes. They also send you an envelope that you don’t open until the day of departure with where you are headed, lists of places you might want to go in that place, and a map of the city.

As if this wasn’t enough, they also provided us with a dinner reservation and tickets to the Academy of Natural Sciences (which I will refrain from speaking about until a later post), most likely because we specified our interest in science and history on our survey.

Rosetta Stone is an online course in foreign languages. They offer a large variety of languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Dutch, English (either British or American), Filipino, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Pashto, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish (either Latin American or Spanish), Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. I am currently taking Latin American Spanish, so that is the course that I will be talking about.

The course (under the My Learning tab) is split into units: Unit 1 is Language Basics, Unit 2 is Greeting and Introductions, Unit 3 is Work and School, etc. Each unit has five Core Lessons (Rosetta Stone includes time estimates, which place a Core Lesson at about thirty minutes). After each Core Lesson, there will be a series of breakdown lessons.

Not every breakdown type is used for each lesson, and some are used multiple times within one lesson. The breakdowns are Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and the occasional Review for a previous lesson.

Some of these may sound like they’re the same thing, but I assure you, each breakdown is unique. For instance, Speaking and Pronunciation. Speaking has you using sentences, whereas pronunciation has you sound out syllables and differentiate between similar sounds.

To practice conversation skills, you can click on the Phrasebook tab. Here you choose what type of conversation (e.g. Shopping) to practice. It will provide a picture and audio for you. You can choose to record yourself saying those terms, which the program will grade for accuracy.

When you’re tired of the hardcore practice, you could always click over to Extended Learning. This is one of my favorite places to go. There are three sections of Extended Learning: Play, Talk, and Read.

For Play, there are five games to play. Each of these can be played either Solo or Duo. If you choose to play Duo, it will connect you to another student, which may take awhile. Each game practices a different skill.

BuzzBingo has a story in the language you are learning, and a bingo board with words on them. When you hear the word in the story, click on the word on the board. Once you get a Bingo it will show you any words you may have missed.

Picari has a pile of pictures. Instead of a story, it merely says a sentence, and you double-click on the picture that matches it. You can click and drag an image to move it out of the way.

Super Bubble Mania is a game that I haven’t played that much. It’s sort of like Candy Crush: you are trying to match colors, but unlike Candy Crush, you aren’t moving the bubbles. Each color has a sound assigned to it. When you hear the particular syllable for a sound, you click on a group of bubbles that belong to that color. The larger the group, the more points.

MemGo is, yup, you guessed it, a memory game. There are pictures and sentences; you are trying to match the picture to the sentence, but just like a standard Memory game, you can only flip two tiles over at a time.

The final game is Prospero. In Prospero, you are searching for treasure. You click on a square in the grid and say the sentence that goes with both pictures (i.e. two girls; eight fish would be “Ellas tienen ocho peces,” which translates to, “They have eight fish.”) Once you say the sentence correctly, the square will be dug up. Some have treasure, some do not.

To be honest, I haven’t really used the Talk function yet. I don’t seem to be online at the correct times to coincide with other users who are looking to play those games. There are two ways to play the Talk games: Duo or Simbio. Duo works the same way for Talk as it does for Play: it matches you up with a student who is learning the same language as you are. Simbio is, in my opinion, more interesting: they pair you up with someone who is learning your native language, and have you play one round in each. This way, you learn from them and they learn from you.

Read is another fun one. They provide short stories that you can listen to, read, or even record yourself reading. The stories are grouped by Unit, so if you’ve finished Unit 1, the Unit 1 stories should be entirely comprehensible. If you haven’t encountered a term in a lesson before, it will be underlined. You can hover your cursor over these words to receive an image of whatever the word represents.

This is one of the quirks that I found in Rosetta Stone, and I’m not entirely sure whether I like it or not, it’s certainly interesting: they don’t ever actually give you the English translation for the Spanish word. You get pictures and figure out what it means progressively. This can be frustrating, but also trains you so that when talking to someone from, say, Guatemala, when you see an apple, you don’t think of the English word (apple) and then translate the word (manzana), you just see the apple and recognize it’s Spanish term (manzana).