How to Enable Quiet Hours in Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 makes it very easy to configure alerts for all sorts of things. It can beep when you’ve got a new email, bong when you’ve got an upcoming appointment or make all sorts of noises when you’ve not a new call on Skype. All those things are great during normal business hours, but what about those quiet times when you just want to watch your cat videos in peace?

Windows 8.1 implements a new feature called quiet hours that will help you out. 7tutorial’s Ciprian Adrian Rusen explains in a recent article that you can select times where Windows will stifle those annoying alerts and even silence Skype calls to keep things quiet. This is great if you’ve got your computer running all night while you sleep or even during work hours when you don’t want to be bothered.

If you think this feature is as useful as we do, share it with your friends.

Enable quiet hours in Windows 8.1.

Original Source – 7tutorials – Introducing Windows 8.1: What are Quiet Hours & How to Configure Them?

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Featured photo credit: Tired man sleeping at work with computer. Office people sometimes dozing on workplace.via Shutterstock

Robert Kingsley is a former IT Support Engineer with a degree in computer networking. He left his desk job in 2011 to write full-time and has never looked back. You can check out more of his work on About.com where he is the Guide to Windows operating systems.

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My quiet city: sound artist Jason Sweeney on life in Adelaide

Design

Jason Sweeney lives and works in Adelaide, Australia, a city he describes as “a prototype for what a developed city in the western world could be like.” Here, he describes his life in the city. Also, see and hear his favorite Adelaideian spots in the photoessay by Kristin Alford, accompanied by audio snippets of the same places recorded by Sweeney.

Victoria Park in Adelaide, a serene spot musician Jason Sweeney says he tries to hang out in every day. Photo: Kristin Alford.

As a teenager, Jason Sweeney was bullied. It was the mid-1980s, and he was one of hundreds of students at the Urrbrae Agricultural High School in Adelaide, South Australia. He was a bright kid, who loved animals and wanted to become a veterinarian. Unfortunately, the school’s own environment often turned violent.

“It was classic bad, bad, bullying,” he remembers in a Skype conversation. “The physical aspect of being beaten up in high school and being pushed around is one thing — that’s very tangible. But I think for me, the worst part was actually the verbal stuff, the way kids would speak to me, and the things they would say. The words they would use to attack is a kind of passive violence that kids inflict upon each other through sound and words.”

Jason was “bullied incessantly” by two boys in particular for the entire five years of high school. “I was trapped and hounded in the boys’ toilets and pushed against fences. I had stuff thrown at me in class, was set up for blame for things I didn’t do, and was constantly hassled or taunted on the school bus. It was horrible really. My final day of high school was one of the most extraordinarily happy days of my life.”

Not surprisingly, being bullied as a teen was an “incredibly traumatic experience” that had a monumental impact on Sweeney. It not only caused lifelong anxiety, and for him to “hate being around groups of people,” but it also inspired him to seek quiet spaces in the world — a personal, day-to-day quest that he’s segued into his current career as an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with sound and music.

“The foundation of what I do is based in making music, and I work in different areas in interconnected ways,” he explains. As a composer of electronic music, he’s released music with two bands, Panoptique Electrical and Pretty Boy Crossover, via the label Sensory Projects. He’s created a number of interactive works for galleries, theaters and public spaces, and he has also delved into writing and directing low-budget, experimental surrealistic films, including The Dead Speak Back, about a woman who’s a medium. (Warning: The trailer might give you nightmares.)

See photos and hear the sounds of Sweeney’s favorite places in Adelaide »

Adelaide has a reputation for gruesome and mysterious serial killings, which may be why Salman Rushdie, when he visited the city’s Adelaide Festival, called it “the perfect setting for a Stephen King novel.”

“I think he said that because of the strange quietness of the city,” says Sweeney.

The “strange quietness” stirred something else in Sweeney, too: In 2013, he launched Stereopublic: Crowdsourcing the Quiet, a participatory art project and smartphone app that maps the quietest spaces within a city. His vision — to give people the opportunity to find and submit quiet places in any city, which are then geo-tagged and placed on a map — was given a prize as part of TED’s City 2.0 project in 2012, and it has been growing in scope ever since.

The idea came about when Sweeney was living in an underground storage room with no windows and no natural air in Melbourne in 2007. “Melbourne is definitely one of the most populated cities in Australia, and so this was an interesting place to live,” he says. “I was in such an enclosed space in an incredibly congested, noisy city. My only opening to the world was actually this [surveillance-type] camera that you could tune into the television and see outside. But I think it was really the catalyst for me, wanting to not ever live in the heart of the city ever again. It brought up a lot of anxiety, realizing how in cities we’re crowded by what surrounds us on a daily basis.”

He lasted nine months in the bunker, and then left Melbourne to return to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, a metro area with a population of 1.23 million. He originally designed the Stereopublic project to ask people how they felt in crowds (did they hate them as much as he did?) Then, it morphed into an exploration of the meaning of quiet. “When I came back to Adelaide, I literally had space. I felt the contrast between here and Melbourne. Adelaide is a prototype for what a developed city in the western world could be like if it maintained levels of quiet as a way of being, as a way to think about the future. I thought a lot about how the impact of movement in a city creates noise. There are noises that traffic and buildings make. Decibel levels are slowly degrading our own hearing. We’re all sort of slowly going deaf as we stand on the streets.”

See photos and hear the sounds of Sweeney’s favorite places in Adelaide »

Sweeney has ping-ponged between Adelaide and its outskirts, beaches and suburbs for his entire life. “I guess it’s my hometown,” he says. “It’s a city that even if you leave it, you always return to it.” In April 2013, he moved to live in the hills right outside of the city. But he visits the heart of the city regularly. “Adelaide is flat and the city is based on a grid system, so all roads lead to the middle of town,” he says. The city is also surrounded by a greenbelt known as the Park Lands. Neatly nestled between the foothills and the ocean, it only takes a short car ride to be either at the water or in the trees.

To date, response to Sweeney’s call for quiet has been overwhelming. “Originally, my team and I said, ‘Let’s hope for something like five cities,’ and so far we’re up to 18,” he says. Those cities include Perth, London, Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York City and Shenzhen, with more than 800 pockets of peace, ranging from botanical gardens to underground car parks. He’s constantly looking for new tucked-in spots, too. In Adelaide, which is known for its wine and Haigh’s Chocolates (founded in 1915; free tours are given of its factory on Greenhill Road), his favorite spots include an elevator that travels up the Renaissance Tower in the Rundle Mall, not far from the University of South Australia. “It provides a sense of temporary seclusion,” he says. Another spot is a tiny parklet behind the Adelaide City Council offices, near the center of town. “It’s a beautifully hidden spot between buildings where workers often go and eat lunch or have a sneaky cigarette break,” he describes.

Call these spots a necessary respite for a guy who’s moved around a lot: Sweeney was born in McLaren Vale in South Australia in 1971, but his family was extremely transient, and he lived in “about 50 different rental houses” all over South Australia throughout his youth. His mother was an education administrator and his father worked in accountancy. At 17, Sweeney started his first band, an experimental project that involved Casio keyboards and tape loops. He later got a job at a community radio station, Three D Radio, and discovered a kinship among the other musicians who gravitated there.

See photos and hear the sounds of Sweeney’s favorite places in Adelaide »

He still seeks out nerve centers of like-minded people, recently getting involved in Soundpond.net, an online radio station where he hosts a weekly ambient radio show called “Sound Introversion.” “The show has become a natural extension of the quiet-seeking,” he says. “I just love the energy there. It’s another hub of DJs and electronic musicians — really diverse people I can actually relate to.”

Sweeney’s favorite sound in the world, however, is rain — something Adelaide seems to offer in spurts. “Adelaide has kind of a temperate climate,” he says. “It’s mostly dry, and sometimes a bit desert-like — warm days and crisp, chilly evenings.”

The weather, lately, has soothed his soul. “There’s been so much rain here recently, and it’s very foggy as well, so it’s an incredible sensorial experience waking up in this area. I was born in winter, when a storm was happening, and I’ve always really connected to rain. Any time a musician or a composer uses rain in a piece of music, I’m always like, ‘Yep — now that’s a sound I love.’”

Check out all of Sweeney’s favorite places in Adelaide in this handy annotated map »

See photos and hear the sounds of Sweeney’s favorite places in Adelaide » To see other profiles in this series, along with a whole host of city-related content, see TED’s Cities topic page »

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Finding Quiet and Mindfulness Through Food

Note from Leo: Jodi Ettenberg, author of The Food Traveler’s Handbook: How to Find Cheap, Safe and Delicious Food Anywhere in the World is a friend of mine, an amazing person, an accomplished world traveler. A former lawyer, she writes about the stories behind the foods we eat on her site, Legal Nomads. She gets the shakes if she goes too long without sticky rice.

And now I’ll turn it over to Jodi!

In the middle of a visit to Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, I found myself sitting on the floor of a temple kitchen, chopsticks in hand.  The others in my group, a haphazard mix of people from my tiny guesthouse, were long gone. I wondered if they would realize I was missing, but I didn’t really care. I was too busy staring at the woman in front of me, an older lady with cropped gray hair and very few teeth. On our visit to this temple, a woman’s shelter in the middle of Cai Rang, we took a shortcut through the kitchen to get to the next section of the building. Everyone walked through without stopping. I took one look at the bubbling pots of vegetarian food, the bustle of women chopping and moving and stirring, and I crouched down to ask what was going on.

Lunch, it turned out, was going on. And the women making it, ranging from 15 to 75 years old, were beside themselves with mirth that I wanted to get in on the fun.

*

The idea of quiet is one Leo has addressed thoughtfully on this site, and a concept that differs depending on where we are in this world. When not at home, how do we remain mindful and carve out a quiet space even as noise and newness whir around us? For me, the answer is through food.

In a guest post in 2010, Jules Clancy discussed mindfulness while eating, talking about routines and awareness during mealtimes. From a different angle, I wanted to address food as a tool to connect to a place and its people, grounding us all in the process.

Here’s how:

1. During pre-trip research, learn not just about the history of a place but also about the stories behind the foods you will eat. I often use the example of ketchup, formerly a Fujianese fermented fish sauce that has morphed into the sweet condiment we know (and some of us love) today. Each of the table condiments, spices and dishes has taken form over the years. What better way to learn and be present in what is “now” than by examining how we got here?  It is also a really effective way to get kids interested in food. Other examples include how tomatoes came to Italy and how the chili came to India. In each of these cases, we can all deepen appreciation of a place, its customs and its foods in tracing the roots of one specific food.

Resources:

2. Use food etiquette rules as a springboard for understanding culture. Reading about a place is no substitute for being there and watching life unfold, and table manners are no exception.  The resources below are starting points but the real fun comes in observing from the ground level. I’ve found myself truly appreciating all the little things that go into mealtimes by paying close attention to the traditions each country abides by as it eats. In Thailand, for example, I learned that one should eat off a plate that has been stacked on another, as that ritual is reserved for memorializing the dead. In Indonesia, I was reminded to eat with my right hand (tough for a lefty!), stemming from traditions of bathroom ablutions and which hand is cleaner for use during mealtimes. While not required when visiting a new place, adhering to some of these traditions indicates some prior research, and often has resulted in an impromptu invite to join a family table or two.

Resources:

3. Go to markets at dawn with a pen, a paper and no camera. I love Instagram and memorializing my meals through photos, but one of the first things I do in a new country is head to the dawn food markets with a pen and a paper, and nothing more. The first thoughts that come to you as you explore that initial sensory overload are the ones that stay with you, and having them scribbled down on paper entrenches them into your mind that much more. With kids, I often suggest crayons and a notebook too – it has been fascinating to watch their colorful take on a morning market scene. A bonus to return to later on, once you are more accustomed to your destination, these initial thoughts and notes serve to remind you of the simple pleasures of watchfulness.

4. Pick the street stalls with women and children in line. Observation is part of what makes travel fun, and mealtimes are an ideal opportunity to look around and learn. When choosing your street stalls, I suggest picking ones with women and children in line, as those will often be the safer options from a food poisoning angle. Families eating at a crowded stall > just taxi drivers eating at a crowded stall, especially for a foreign (visiting) stomach. I would also caution against eating at a stall where the person preparing the food is also touching money – picking a stall with two people (one for payment, one for preparation) might be better for your stomach.

5. Appreciate the foods you eat and the condiments that flavor them. This is a simple but important point. Travel helps us keep our lives in perspective, both by showing us what we are lucky to have and by juxtaposing different histories and customs over our own. Those of us who can afford to travel usually do take time to appreciate it (I hope!). Food has become the prism for that appreciation in my travels. In observing at how communities supplement ingredients with condiments, make use of whatever they have available, and bring families to the table; we can practice thankfulness in our own routines, even when returning home.

6. Stop to ask questions about why people use food ingredients and how. While not directly contributing to mindful eating, stopping to talk to people about the ingredients they use is a natural extension of the other advice in this post. In most countries around the world, taking that extra step to offer your curiosity can lead to a shared meal, a wedding invite or a chance to try home cooking in a family setting. By showing that you care about the food that binds, you not only connect yourself to your setting but you connect people to you.

In the case of that Mekong meal, I learned that some Vietnamese people practice vegetarianism that is linked to the lunar calendar, eating vegetarian food on the 1st and 15th days of each lunar month. They usually visit a temple first, and as a result many temples will prepare vegetarian feasts on those days. Sitting on the floor of the kitchen, I watched the women mix tapioca flour with tofu,  frying the wisps until crispy, and preside over a huge cauldron bubbling with herbs and spices.

And then, I was asked to join in for lunch.

When people ask me how I use food as a tool when I travel, I cite stories like these, examples where stopping to appreciate an ingredient, a method or a tradition has snowballed into a wonderful learning experience. It takes only a few extra minutes of your time but the rewards are internalized and magnified on an infinite scale.

Find more from Jodi Ettenberg at her blog, Legal Nomads, and in her book, The Food Traveler’s Handbook: How to Find Cheap, Safe and Delicious Food Anywhere in the World.

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Why Noise is Better Than Quiet

The sound of silence. It’s what many of us yearn for when working. We try to get away from all of the noise and distractions of our surroundings and get to a place – whether natural or virtual – to achieve that quiet space we long for.

But that’s not necessarily the best thing for you to do.

I’m not suggesting that you attempt to do your work in a noisy coffee shop or while your co-worker is playing loud music, but what I am suggesting is that you learn to work with noise rather than try to get away from it. After all, noise can be your best friend if you let it.

The biggest problem with quiet is not so much that it is counter-productive to look for it (as in, it takes a lot of time just to find it), but that it can serve to be counter-productive once you do discover it. This may seem odd to you at first glance – as it was for me – but after listening to Dan Benjamin discuss the problem with quiet on an episode of his Back to Work podcast, it sunk in.

Benjamin — and I’m paraphrasing here — discusses how we are not meant to work in a completely quiet or noise-free environment. In fact, if you’re out in the woods and you hear the crickets chirping and other sounds of nature going on around you — and then it all stops — it means that there is danger lurking somewhere. It creates a tension that actually inhibits progress (save for the source of danger, perhaps) rather than promotes it.

You need to learn to work with the noise. When it’s too quiet, your mind naturally wonders when the next shoe is going to drop – or when the next distraction is going to arrive. That takes your focus away from the work. To have a din of crowd noise or the hum of your heating system clearly audible while you are working away may be enough for you to keep you on task. For others, they may need the hustle and bustle of an office or coffee shop to keep them focused on what they are doing. Absolute quiet (or the removal of ambient noise) can really work against you in many circumstances.

Benjamin’s co-host, Merlin Mann, takes it a step further by saying (again, I’m paraphrasing here) that if you can’t deal with the distraction, then you clearly don’t care enough about what you’re doing at that moment. I need to have some kind of noise going on in order to write. Whether it be some music in the background or the noise of my kids playing in the house, I need to have some form of sound happening around me so that it pushes me to get the writing done. My kids playing is a reminder that I need to push through the work so I can join them, but it’s also a reminder of why I’m writing to begin with: to provide for them.

Quiet can be your best friend when you need to let your mind wander. There’s often nothing better to have around you than “quietude” when you don’t have to focus on one thing in particular. When you invite quiet into your world, you invite the possibility of noise as well. That means that the noise of your ideas, your thoughts, your plans and your goals that may not have a a chance to breathe otherwise can freely enter and leave your mind without fear of repression. That’s when quiet works for you – and when you need that time that is when you should work to find quiet.

Noise is very subjective. One person’s music is another person’s noise. But what you can accomplish while surrounded by noise of varying volumes can be very specific, because your mind (when disciplined and working on something important enough to you) can wade through the noise and get to the work. Quiet invites your own personal noise into your world, which can be the ultimate distraction unless you want all of it to be present.

So don’t seek quiet to escape the noise – it can and will work for you. Seek to find quiet for the time to let your own personal noise come into play. That’s when counter-productivity can turn into productivity in both the short – and loing – term.

(Photo credit: Portrait of Young Man via Shutterstock)

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Learning to Sit Alone, in a Quiet Empty Room

‘All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’ ~Blaise Pascal

Think about some of the problems of our daily lives, and how many of them would be eased if we could learn to sit alone, in a quiet empty room, with contentment.

If you’re content to sit alone quietly, you don’t need to eat junk food, to shop on impulse, to buy the latest gadget, to be on social media to see what everyone else is talking about or doing, to compare yourself to others, to make more money to keep up with the Joneses, to achieve glory or power, to conquer other lands or wage war, to be rude or violent to others, to be selfish or greedy, to be constantly busy or productive.

You are content, and need nothing else. It solves a lot of problems.

Can you sit alone in an empty room? Can you enjoy the joy of quiet?

Most of us have trouble sitting alone, quietly, doing nothing. We have the need to do something, to check our inboxes and social media, to be productive. Sitting still can be difficult if you haven’t cultivated the habit.

I’ve been learning. In the morning, as my coffee is brewing, I sit. Even for a few minutes, at first, it is instructive. You learn to listen to your thoughts, to be aware of your urges to do something else, to plan and set goals. You learn to watch yourself, but to just sit still and not act on those urges. You learn to be content with stillness.

You learn to savor the quiet. It’s something most of us don’t have, quiet, and it takes some getting used to. When we’re driving our cars or out exercising or eating or working, we have music playing or we talk with people or we have the television on. Quiet can be amazing, though, because it helps us calm down, contemplate, slow down to savor the emptiness.

An empty room, too, is a luxury. I try to empty my room of clutter, so that it’s fairly bare. That leaves only me, and the room is a blank slate ready to be filled with me, my creativity, my silence. I love a spartan room.

Being alone is another pleasure we too often neglect. When we are alone, we go on the Internet or TV to see what else is going on, what others are doing or saying, instead of just being alone. This isolation is a necessary thing, that allows us to find ourselves, to learn to be content with little instead of always wanting more.

Can you practice being alone, being still, being quiet? Just a little at first, then perhaps a bit more. Listen, watch, learn about yourself. Find contentment. Need nothing more.

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The Quiet Theory of Influence

Most online marketing people will teach you how to use social media to reach a larger audience, how to use email lists and the scarcity principle and social proof, how to create authority, how to effectively convert pageviews into sales.

Most marketers, online or off, are full of it.

Converting visitors into buyers is a soul-less use of your creative energy. Reject it, out of hand.

I find more value in creating something of value. I find influence a better metric than sales or traffic or reader numbers.

And I’ve learned something that the screaming marketers will never tell you: instead of screaming, prefer quiet.

When everyone yells “Look at me!”, become quiet.

When others seek attention, turn your attention inward.

When everyone wants pageviews and sales, be valuable.

When others try to pull visitors to their sites, let people find you themselves.

When most blogs have popups and drop-downs urging readers to subscribe to their newsletters, get out of your readers’ way.

When others brag of their success, let others laud you instead.

When others cling greedily to copyrights, give your work away.

When others use goals to drive themselves to change the world, learn to be content, and people will ask to learn your secrets.

I’ve found all of the above to be true. When you’ve created something of real value, you don’t need to do any marketing, spend any money on advertising, or push people to subscribe.

People will find you, and they’ll think you’re so great they want to tell their friends about it. Your readers will become your marketers. Your value will become your advertising budget.

Imagine owning a muffin shop. If the muffins are commonplace, you’ll have to advertise and do some “guerilla marketing” to get customers. But if your muffins make people roll their eyes in ecstasy, they will tell the world of your deliciousness, and the world will pound on your muffin-scented door.

Become quiet, find contentedness, become valuable. These trump marketing every time, and as you learn to listen to your inner music, you can now ignore the marketers hawking their oils of snakedness.
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