For the first time in a while I'm feeling on top of the paper I have to manage - I've got as little of it as possible and what I do have is high impact. At my desk, I'm all over it. But most days I need to leave my desk at some point, and I may be gone long enough that I can't necessarily plan all the tasks I'll work on while away.  read more »

Hey Merlin,

Can you please let us know how the grip tape worked on your macbookpro? Mine is a disaster and I’ve been looking for ways to protect it from external forces. I’m curious to find out where you put it and if it makes it too bulky or not.

Does anyone have any idea how I can use quicksilver to find an item, say pdf document, and then view that document using the new Leopard Quickview as for most things it is so much faster than opening the real application?

Has anyone else been experiencing (more than normal) buggy behavior with QuickSilver B52 (3813) recently?

The two culprits which may be related to and/or may be causing this excessive buggy-ness may be either my recent installation of Leopard, or my recent installation of TextExpander…

By buggy behavior, let me give you a couple examples…recently the Quicksilver clipboard history has been popping up sparatically without being triggered…this happens regularly - like once every ten minutes or so, and needless to say, its been a brutal side-effect…  read more »

My upgrade to Leopard went without any problems, thanks to good advice from wonderful sites like 43f. The only thing broken is my Quicksilver action to print to my DYMO LabelWriter 400. I upgraded to the latest drivers and nothing works.

Anyone has found a workaround for that?

Thanks, Denis

Spaces is a gem of Leopard!

I installed Mac OS X 10.5 yesterday and enabled the new “Spaces” feature. I expected Spaces to be similar to the multiple desktops that have been available on the many Unix and Linux windowing managers for more than a decade.  read more »

Congratulations to Merlin Mann and his wife Madeline on the birth of their girl Eleanor.

Christopher

Pretty simple, but pretty lame. They don’t look nice, but you can see the title of the To Do at least.

Here’s how:

In Leopard, iCal and Mail share all their to dos. But only some of them will travel with IMAP— and only those things that travel with IMAP (such as your Notes) can be read on the iPhone.

Only “Mail Calendars” will follow your IMAP. These “calendars” are strange beasts. They are visible in iCal, but they don’t take events— only to dos. You can create them in Mail, and after you’ve done so, you can create more through iCal.  read more »

Your new daughter is a real gorgeous bundle. Hope I’m not ruining it for everyone if i put your tweet here:

“A little while ago, my hour-old daughter laid on my chest for 30 minutes and sucked my pinky. I. Just. Wow. http://www.eleanormann.com/”

Things only get better from here. (You may want to repeat that as a mantra at 3am when you’ve had an hours sleep in the last 50 :D)

When we moved into a tall and narrow townhouse last summer, its advantages—more space, bigger rooms—came at the expense of having everything spread out on separate floors. Even though I’m quick to point out the bulbous calves and firmly sculpted buttocks I (further) developed from the all-day exercise of trudging up and down the stairs, I’ve also learned to avoid unnecessary trips.  read more »

A friend of mine just performed a clean install of leopard, and then went to get Quicksilver…but Blacktree is down….

http://quicksilver.blacktree.com

suspended acct. is the reason…does anyone know anything about this? thanks for the help.

I am currently subscribed to about 25 podcasts, each with either daily, bi-weekly, or weekly release. I benefit from listening to them all, but I feel like I don’t have enough free time to do so. Mostly I do my listening as I walk around campus or do odd things around the house, but often I need to focus on written material which prevents me from simultaneously understanding the podcasts.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to digest lots podcasts in a very structured and efficient manner? Is 25 podcasts a lot, or not much at all? Anything you have to say about this subject will interest me.

Thanks!

The Outsourced Brain

NYT’s David Brooks on outsourcing memory, reference, and decision-making to things that theoretically do it better:

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there.

And, ironically enough, if you didn’t catch the Grapes of Wrath reference, it’s easy enough to find it. Because, if you’re like me, sometimes you also outsource your pop culture knowledge to Google, Wikipedia, and IMDB.  read more »

Interesting editorial in today's Times about how we let the machines remember all of our details for us now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html?partner=rssnyt&e...

Hi everyone.

I bought a paperback copy of GTD some time ago, flicked through it idly, and have only just got around to sitting down and reading it properly. I'm about halfway through, and have a question about fitting it to my situation.

Some background: I'm a graphic design student, currently finishing my second-last year.

 read more »

I was recently skimming through my beloved old 1934 edition of Progressive Indexing and Filing, which I inherited at a young age from my grandmother—probably my first piece of productivity porn (the book, not my grandmother.) On page 85, I stumbled across a delightful little gem. Apparently, not only did the David not invent the tickler file (news to me), but it’s been around since at least 1934.  read more »

I have been receiving the following error when trying to access 43folders.com: Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.43folders.com/.

Operation aborted

I consistently received the error on separate Vista and XP machines all running IE7 when trying to access the register or contact functions, and home page. I downloaded Mozilla Firefox in order to register and report it…

As I anxiously await the Google Gods to bless me with IMAP support I’ve been thinking about how I will go about reorganizing mail.app. I can’t wait to be able to have ‘one stop shopping’ for my email organizational needs.

Given that I am a keyboard shortcut ninja with Gmail’s web interface (and mail.app for that matter) I was curious if there’s a way to reproduce some of the common gmail shortcuts. i.e. hitting ‘y’ to archive a message, etc.

Is this something that can be accomplished in Applescript or perhaps automator after I get Leopard installed tomorrow?

-Lon

Help! I have to do my yearly self evaluation which includes both numerical ratings and comments.

I hate these things and I never know how to answer. How hard do I toot my own horn and how much to do I go into the “what I could’ve done better” comments? I feel like I do a good job despite many internal and external challenges but how much do you talk about those challenges?

What are your thoughts on these things?

My GTD system has a weak point when it comes to digital project support material. I receive lots of files (.xls, .doc, .ppt, .pdf etc. etc.) through e-mail. I need these files to be searchable via Spotlight, so I have to save them on the hard disk. The problem arises when - and this is often - I need to keep the enclosing e-mail together with the enclosed file(s). How should I ‘tie’ the e-mail to the files on the hard disk?  read more »

Most people are rarely lucky enough to have the chance to ask for help like I am. I think our resident alliterative basket case would call this a first world problem.

I just started a new job (an IT internship for a large corporation), and my cube is bare. I fetched a few supplies for the desk, but before I go further getting myself situated, I wanted to ping you guys. What would you do if you had essentially no constraints on a new setup?  read more »