Mark Joyner of Simpleology has apparently hooked up with one of my favorite visionaries, Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project. Together, this Monday, they're teaching people who can't how to draw.

• Where I Go [Chris Glass] - One of those old-school "home page" conventions that I miss most is the once-ubiquitous links page. In addition to being my personal muse on all things visual, Chris Glass also posts his highly clickable list of favorite sites. Need to make me one of these.
• helvetica - ThisNext - Casting about for gift ideas for the Helvetica lover in your life? Not a problem.
• Graphic Design and typography - Swiss Legacy - "...a collaborative blog focused on typography, swiss graphic design and grid." Grid pr0n, and that's okay by me. (seems to be down just now)
• My personal war against Crackberry - "Here at the office, we’ve begun to make most of our meetings 'topless' (i.e. no laptops allowed). I’ve gone a step further by trying to ban any form of networked communication from the working meetings I put together." Good on ya, Todd.
• And now it's all this: Shortened URLs with Quicksilver - Python script lets you build a fast Quicksilver trigger for generating (and copying) a shortened url based on the the front Safari window. Really useful. [via Daring Fireball]
• What are the most intellectually stimulating podcasts? | Ask MetaFilter - I'm so overwhelmed by podcasts these days that I've pared down to about five, most of which are mentioned here. My single "don't miss" right now is "Radio Lab," which is kinda like This American Life with more science and less Yo La Tengo.
• WiiHealthy - [via MeFi] - I wonder what kind of hideous freak I'm becoming by playing an hour of Wii Bowling each night while a 12-lb. baby is footballed over my non-dominant arm. That seems like the makings of a pretty odd workout when I think of it.

Last year, I stumbled upon a blog post about buying prescription eyeglasses online. It sounded too good to be true: you could get any frames you wanted quickly and cheaply, and the comments were filled with optometrists freaking out. Eventually, the author launched a dedicated blog for it called Glassy Eyes. When the site was recently mentioned on MetaFilter right around the time I was getting my 2-year exam, I decided to take the plunge myself and order some glasses online.

1. A place for everything.

This has been an especially valuable lesson for me. It's easy and common to toss your keys and wallet somewhere when you enter your home. If you're not tossing them in the same place every time, the next time you're about to leave and need your keys to get back inside, you may not remember where it was you tossed them -- or maybe you left them in a pocket without tossing them at all, but which pocket was it? What were you wearing, and where is that article of clothing now?

Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I'm making progress. I won't claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so much information from the internet, but lately I've been as content with the process as I can hope.

Back at work killing time? Sure you are. After all, it's nationwide "Thumb up your butt" week, right? You bet it is.

So, from the archives of 43 Folders (and the on-hiatus Merlin Show), here's four of my favorite videos of stuff I've done. Hope you like 'em.

• Daily Galaxy on the virtues of clutter - For a junk junkie like me, I don't know if this counts as "triggering material" or not.
• The OSX86 project builds a "Hackintosh" - Some kind of convergence, done lo-fi.
• One Laptop Per Child faces competition… over who can create the cheapest functional computers for kids in developing countries. And how to get around the "W" word. You probably already know that the OLPC comes with its own special benefits, though. (No, not these benefits!)
• How to Develop a Mindset for Math - This has always been one of my greatest challenges. Numbers will eat me! [via.]

I Want Sandy is an email-based, automated personal assistant created by Rael Dornfest and values of n, makers of Stikkit. I've been messing around with her (in a totally platonic way) since Cory Doctorow mentioned it last week, and it's really slick.

One of the secrets to Napoleon's amazing success (and he was a guy who definitely got things done) was embracing the high-tech innovation of canned food. He's the one who coined the phrase "an army marches on its stomach," after all. After observing my own habits, I know what he means.

This may not count as a real find since it's on the Google's own support site, but this list of recommended IMAP client settings is interesting in that it differs from many of the Gmail IMAP how-to's I've seen so far.

Regarding Sent mail:

Do NOT save sent messages on the server. If your client is sending mail through Gmail's SMTP server, your sent messages will be automatically copied to the [Gmail]/Sent Mail folder.

...and Junk folders:

In the few weeks since I wrote my first plea to trim the fat from your iTunes library, I've continued purging my own collection. On the first pass, I simply deleted the clearly objectionable stuff, things that I couldn't understand what made me want to keep them in the first place. It was rather easy, and like I said, it slimmed my corpulent media collection by a third.

Now though, it's getting down to brass tacks, and I'm making some hard decisions about what to keep. I don't need to do this for disk space, mind you, but as I've been trying to do a better job of organizing all my music and video with smarter lists and ratings, I've come to a simple conclusion: even if I still think it's good, I just have too much.

• Google Trends Reveals People's Predictability - The correlation between searches on "rain" and "depression" is fascinating.
• apophenia: algorithms for dumb security questions - Great idea for creating a reusable "security question" pattern. (cf. previously here) [via anarchaia]
• David Allen Company :: GTD Gear :: *New* The GTD® Tickler File - Pretty pricey, if you're asking me, but a quick way to get started with your own 43 folders (and they do look well-constructed). [via]
• I need examples of things and secrets only a very in the know sort of person would know about - Wonderful ideas for "stuff normal people won't know." And, yes: Grenyarnia is much more exclusive than Svenborgia. Psh. Can't believe you didn't know that.
• An Entirely Other Day - Utterly Failing to Get Things Done - Greg Knauss should totally write something for 43 Folders. Am I wrong? Am I?
• Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in Theatre School - Terrific post that gets you thinking at a much higher level than your more quotidian "Try not to say 'um.'" tips. Highly recommended.
• Quantification Table for Site Owner - Leslie Harpold's fun personal Harper's Index makes me melancholy to see her again. Sure do miss her.

New Scientist has a piece in this week's newsletter on using the "semantic web" to get organized, focusing on a site with which I'm unfamiliar called Twine.

It's in invite-only Beta now, but might be worth checking out.

Key grafs :

<

blockquote>Twine uses a semantic approach to act as a personal organiser, bookmark service, and a social network combined.

In Part One, I relayed a few of Leslie Harpold's amazing and simple methods of looking better every day. In this episode, it's all about staying in touch with the people in your life, and letting them know they matter just by keeping track of them from time to time.

I will confess that I am awful at staying in touch with anyone. Friends, relations, friends of relations, pets... you name it, I have at one point or another completely lost touch with it. I have no excuse, really, and there are a few simple things that Leslie would do to help her not lose touch with those people in her life who were important, whether for personal or professional reasons.

While most sensible Mac users were looking forward to cool new features in Leopard like Cover Flow, Quick Look, and Time Machine, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, itching to try out iCal and Mail.app's new to-do list integration. I agree with Merlin's approach to using a bunch of single-purpose applications that are very good at what they do instead of a bloated piece of do-everything-ware like Outlook--"a series of super-sharp paring knives over one monstrous Swiss Army Knife"--as he put it, but I looked forward to a little bit of teamwork between two of the applications I use the most. And boy, am I disappointed.

Sometimes surprises come from unexpected places. (Um, I guess that’s part of why they’re surprising.) Case in point, yesterday I opened Sciral Consistency as I’ve done several times a day for the last five years. This time, however, something happened that hasn't occurred since sometime in 2005. A notification window announced that a new version of the application was available for downloading.

It's the central contradiction at the heart of our all-too-finite existence that we cannot reconcile the uncontainability of our dreams with the futile limitation of our resources. It's no wonder we've come rely on strategies to get through the day. In David Allen's world, the metaphor is the overloaded information-driven workplace. For Merlin, it's the in-box.

I have a lot of trouble keeping track of what I'm supposed to be doing. It's not that I necessarily have trouble prioritizing my tasks or scheduling things - I mean I do, but that's not the main problem.

The main problem is that I've got too many things I really need (want) to do - too many long-term projects with potential - and I'm never exactly sure when they're a few weeks away from a grand payoff and when they're just wasting my time.

I suppose this is a crisis of faith.

So there I was in Las Vegas, flush with cash and giddy with excitement. Seduced by the sleek lines, thin profile, and promised efficiency of the PRS-505. Call me “Sony Reader,” I imagined it purring, “and together we will travel the world.” It spoke to both the bibliophile and gadget hound that live deep within my soul. How could I resist?