43 Folders

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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Routing searches through Dowser

I've been experimenting with Dowser, a cool little python script that lets you conduct searches on Google, Teoma, Wikipedia and more from a local "web page" (screenshots). It looks like you can add your own search engines, too, although I haven't tried that yet. The beauty part is that Dowser watches what you do and builds a cache and an alphabetical index based on what you've been searching for. It's pretty nifty and potentially quite useful.

I mention it here because fans of our pet search utilities like Sogudi or Quicksilver's built-in site searching can easily re-route a few of their favorite searches through Dowser. You just need to change the strings you've recorded in your setup for either app.

Once you have Dowser installed and running on your Mac, try changing Sogudi 's Google string to "http://127.0.0.1:5309/search?q=@@@&s=google". Now all your searches "feed" Dowser cache-building info that you can use downstream.

Any other good Dowser hacks out there?

About Merlin

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Bio

Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. He’s best known for being the guy who created the website you’re reading right now. He lives in San Francisco, does lots of public speaking, and helps make cool things like You Look Nice Today, Back to Work, and Kung Fu Grippe. Also? He’s writing this book, he lives with this face, he suffers from this hair, he answers these questions, and he’s had this life. So far.

Merlin’s favorite thing he’s written in the past few years is an essay entitled, “Cranking.”

 
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Cranking

Merlin used to crank. He’s not cranking any more.

This is an essay about family, priorities, and Shakey’s Pizza, and it’s probably the best thing he’s written. »

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This is the video of Merlin’s keynote at Webstock 2011. The one where he cried. You should watch it. »