distraction

Quietube makes YouTube watching distraction-free

Quietube is a new tool to enhance the YouTube-watching experience. The idea is that you can watch just the video, with none of the other YouTube page elements. To do this, you simply add its bookmarklet to your browser's bookmarks toolbar, and click it on any YouTube page.

While not as elegant as YouTube Cinema, which is my favorite YouTube enhancer, Quietube doesn't require installing an extension. It also creates a TinyURL you can pass along to others to share the video in Quietube mode.

One thing YouTube watchers may miss, however, is that each video is treated … Read more

Write without distraction

JDarkRoom is a free, full-screen text editor that's designed to help you focus on your writing by eliminating distractions. When you open JDarkRoom, your screen goes completely black except for a blinking green cursor. By design, JDarkRoom gives you a limited feature set, with support for only basic word-processing functions such as cut, copy, paste, undo, and line and word count. JDarkRoom opens quickly (although not quite as quickly as Text Edit) and offers many options for fonts, auto-saving, and screen and type color. Its interface can take some getting used to (for example, it uses some nonstandard keystrokes, … Read more

App to reduce distraction

Isolator is a small, simple application designed to enhance your productivity by reducing visual distractions. Isolator can blur, cover up, or hide all other application windows and the dock, with a quick keystroke or by clicking on Isolator's icon in the menu bar.

You can set blur intensity, background color, opacity, and fade speed, and you can choose from several options for how Isolator is activated and whether it opens on start-up. The developer behind Isolator has done an excellent job of adding functionality in successive updates (like the blur effect and support for multiple monitors) while making sure … Read more

96: Driving the new Nissan 370Z

Driving the new Nissan 370Z, Detroit is close to the bailout it's begging for, punching holes in the hands-free panacea, and TomTom offers routing online. Listen now: Download today's podcast SHOW NOTES

• Nissan 370Z review

• Ford looking to sell Volvo

• TomTom online routing in early beta

• Study report on how cell phones are distracting, no matter what

Dark Room isolates you and your text

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

OK, not really, but the freeware Windows app Dark Room (based off the Mac OS X 10.4 software WriteRoom) looks a heck of a lot like the classic text-adventure game Zork.

The idea behind Dark Room and WriteRoom is simple: offer a distraction-free application for writing text. Both apps throw out the bells and whistles and provide a lightweight text editor without buttons, menus, or anything else that might disturb your concentration.… Read more