Pubs, cinemas, museums, schools, and restaurants are closed, visits to parents, children, friends, and relatives are temporarily disallowed – and in many companies, there's hardly anything left to do when working from home. The coronavirus (COVID-19) has completely upended the daily routines of many people around the world. Where just a few weeks ago we had too little time for everything, now pure boredom reigns in many households – and the hands on the clock seem to stand still. And not all families are lucky enough to own a house and a garden for playing.
To prevent cabin fever at home, today we're giving you some digital activity tips on how to make good use of your time during coronavirus boredom and lockdown. These tools will help you accomplish digital tasks for which you now have plenty of time: Digital activity tips for home and for the whole family – for you and your children – online and offline – both alone in isolation and in coronavirus quarantine.
Activity Tip against Coronavirus Boredom No. 1: Digitize your video and music collection
- Do you still own a wall unit full of CDs and DVDs that you've always wanted to digitize and convert into MP3s or MP4s?
- Or are records and CDs belonging to you or your children still stacked up in the basement?
Then this is the perfect time to put this plan into action. With the tool MyFormatConverter, you can rip all your audio and video files and save them in the size and format of your choice.
This way, you can easily put all your movies and music CDs on a hard drive, make space on your shelf, and have all your songs ready to play on your PC at any time. And the best part: for well-known discs, the software – if you're online – automatically labels the song list and downloads the cover from the web.
Here you can find more about MyFormatConverter, a multimedia tool that allows you to convert media files as you wish, in addition to digitizing CDs and DVDs, edit videos, audios, and images, and much more! This program has been one of our most popular products for many years. With this tool, you can't go wrong.
And if you're limiting yourself to ripping only audio CDs, you can also use our free tool freeTunes 4 for this. You'll find it on a page where we've compiled several free offers and full versions for you.
Activity Tip against Coronavirus Boredom No. 2: expand your own film and music collection
You have now digitized your music and film collection and prepared it for the next movie night at home. But are a few evergreens still missing? Then simply download them to your PC and put songs and movies into your new digital archive. Of course: you can listen to all songs online at any time right now. Your children's generation probably does nothing else. But someday the coronavirus will be history, and the lockdown and contact restrictions will end, and then...
...then you'll have the songs digitally available for your smartphone, for the player in your car, or for all those places and holiday destinations where you might not have internet access.
Here's how you can get your best-ofs from all over the world from the internet: With MovieJack. The software helps you implement activity tip No. 2 during coronavirus. MovieJack is designed purely for private users. This makes it completely legal to save songs and movies offered online on YouTube, for example, for private use on your own hard drive. Here you can find more information about the software MovieJack - the music and video downloader
Activity Tip against Coronavirus Boredom No. 3: Convert old 2D films to 3D
After you have digitized your video collection – and expanded it with the help of MovieJack, why not convert the 2D films to 3D? Here too, there are special tools that handle the 3D conversion with just a few mouse clicks. So, if not now, when?
For converting 2D to 3D, we also recommend the multimedia software MyFormatConverter, which masters all currently common 3D methods with its anaglyph, shutter, and polarization technologies. Note: The 2D to 3D functions are only included in the Premium version of the software.
We offer a somewhat more limited, but free alternative with the tool Makeme 3D. With this tool, you can also effortlessly implement this activity tip during coronavirus. You can also find the software on the page with free offers and full versions.
Activity Tip against Coronavirus Boredom No. 4: Sort and optimize photos
Organizing your digital pictures, which are usually scattered across various mobile phones, smartphones, and digital cameras, is also a lifelong task. A tip for an activity that parents can very well tackle together with their children during the coronavirus!
In addition to tools that help you find and delete duplicate photos spread across various hard drives and storage media (e.g., Duplicate Photo Cleaner), there are also many tools that enhance and optimize all your photos.
The most important functions of these programs are:
- Improvement of contrasts
- Removal of image noise
- Red-eye retouching
- Color adjustment including brightness/darkness correction
- and much more.
This can be done individually, meaning you optimize picture by picture, or with fully automatic optimization algorithms that allow you to process all pictures in batches.
Perhaps you now have the time and inclination to use individual optimization to get the most out of it? This takes longer, but it's an exciting activity that guarantees no boredom. And the results will best suit your taste.
In any case, take a look at our Photomizer, our tool for automatic image enhancement!
With Simply Good Pictures 4 and Photomizer Retro we also offer two free alternatives, which you can also find on our page with free full versions.
Meaningful Activity
Even though it gets increasingly difficult to spend time indoors or stay in self-imposed quarantine as temperatures rise, these tools offer you several ways to keep busy meaningfully during the COVID-19-related lockdown and contact restrictions. And unfulfilled PC tasks will finally be completed.
We hope you'll have a lot of fun with these ideas even after the lockdown and contact restrictions end!
Of course, in addition to these digital tips, there are also the classics among activity tips against coronavirus boredom.
For example, you can:
- read new books or a new book
- subscribe to Netflix or Amazon Prime
- learn a new language
- cook something delicious for your loved one
- rearrange old furniture
- try yoga
- do creative crafts with the children
- find time to talk and chat live with friends
- do small and light exercises daily for your health
Stay healthy!
