The Hypnotic Beast

How to turn your Monitor into an Inspirational Image Board Using Tumblr and Google Picasa

You need an image board. No I’m not talking about 4chan, I’m talking about the motivational tool creative people use to remind themselves of their goals. Usually this is a piece of pegboard pinned with pictures from magazines centered around your goals in a collage-like way. However we are tech savvy beasts and don’t want to get glue stuck to our fur. The solution? Use Google Picasa‘s screen saver to display images from a Tumblr blog dedicated to the images that inspire you. Whenever you’re not actively using your computer your monitor becomes a cornucopia of positive images to filter into your subconscious. Step One- Install Picasa The first thing you need to do is install Google Picasa. Since we’re only using the screen saver that comes bundled with it, there no need to actually open the program once it’s installed, much less have it index all the images on your computer. But you can if you want. It’s a pretty good piece of software for indexing all your images and touching them up. Step Two- Start a Tumblr Blog This is the fun part. Go to Tumblr.com and start an image blog containing the pictures you’d like to appear on your screen for your image board. Just re-blog anything you find inspirational. Some good tags to search for are #inspiration, #quote, #gym, #exercise, etc. Another fun thing to do is add quotes to your favorite pictures using an image editing program or a web-based image macro making program. Go wild and let your inspiration drive

Defenders of the Beastie

Details on plans for my business.

Five Minute Meditation

Sixteenth episode of the Hypnotic Beast Podcast hypnotically suggests starting the practice of a daily five to ten minute meditation.

How to get Mind Stereo to Work with Pandora

I’m a big fan of audio brain wave entrainment. I used to be someone who couldn’t relax. Then I discovered the wonderful world of audio entrainment. Now I’m hooked. Whenever I’m down or need to relax I listen to audio modulated to a specific brain wave. Yes, I know the brain has multiple frequencies going at any given time and that it’s probably not one hundred percent accurate or efficient, but it’s one modality of hypnosis I enjoy. Usually I make my mix tapes and listen to them on my smart phone. If I’m at home I may try to listen to modulated music on Mind Stereo. However, I also really love Pandora, especially its new age genre stations. And Mind Stereo doesn’t work with Pandora directly–it can only use internet radio streams. It was tough, but I finally figured out how to get the two to work together. The trick is to turn Pandora into a localized internet radio station–one that only plays on your computer. To do this two different pieces of free software are required. The first is Xammp, a mini web-server emulator for your computer. Web developers use it to emulate a web server offline. Out of the box it will only serve webpages locally to your computer only. I like the portable version. The second is a home-brew pirate radio utility called Pandoracaster. Step One: Download and install Xammp. Step Two: Download Pandoracaster and unzip it into Xammp’s “htdocs” folder. Step Three: Start up the