Fastmail.fm has been taking an unexpected dirtnap since Thursday afternoon that looks likely to stretch lazily through the weekend.

My old mail has reportedly been queued and will supposedly wind its way back to me by Monday or so; my previously unequivocal recommendations of Fastmail will not return with it.

Anyhoo, I've rerouted all my main email accounts to Gmail for now (I'm merlinmann at that particular domain), so if you've tried to send me anything important since about 14:00 PST on Thursday, please just resend it -- with my apologies.

Hack for Charger Storage

Howard Rheingold, online pioneer and dapper man of the mustache and Indiana Jones hats, has started a new video blog to update his seminal 1992 essay, “A Slice of Life in my Virtual Community,” with how he spends his time online with today’s technologies. The first video is a little remedial, but what caught my eye is his promise to clue us in to his daily process, including not only his office time, but time spent on hobbies like painting and gardening. Looking back at that sentence, I know that sounds about as exciting as getting a flu shot, but I’m a sucker for watching how smart people manage their days. Should be worth a watch.

Rollabind/Circa vs. Legal Pads

Ideal bag for mobile lifestyle

• Wired Blogs: Gadget Lab - “The Fatboy Nano will play video and come in matt black [sic], silver, cranberry, light blue and light green.”
• Buddy List Zero: action-based instant messaging - “Want to really Get Things Done? Then turn off IM. These are tips on the skills, tools and attitude needed to empty your buddy list — and then keep it that way.” Roll, Sippey, roll.
• stolen iphone | Ask MetaFilter - “So, yes, the phone is as dead as a brick and considering that when you buy a new iPhone you can’t even get past the picture of the globe all the stuff inside the phone is pretty much locked up also.”
• PocketTweets - My pick of the week on yesterday’s MacBreak Weekly is this beautiful app for doing Twitter on your iPhone. Breaks out of the WAP-ish, Gopher-ish menu approach by crafting a lickable AJAX app that’s all about the iPhone experience.
• Coffee and Tea Mugs Ensure Proper Ratio - “…have a coloring guide on the inside rim to ensure the proper ratio of coffee/tea to milk.” Sometimes it not just a cup. Super cool.
• KQED | Perspectives: Get Off Your iPod - Area Man protests lack of face-to-face human communication by making, wearing t-shirt.

OSXCon | Merlin Mann

Danny and I had a great time doing our talk yesterday at O’Reilly’s OSXCon. Met a bunch of great people and enjoyed the chance to hang with like-minded nerds. I love that people want to show me their squirrely productivity setups. Time management pr0n! Totally into it.

Our time for the session just flew by, so we didn’t have the time we would have liked to spend with all the apps. If you were there (or just like to play with OS X apps), here are links to all the things we talked about (or planned to talk about). If I left anything off or you have any questions, feel free to leave comments.

Thanks to Derrick and Vee for all their hard work, and thanks to everyone who showed up, asked questions, and just said hi. Stay in touch.

• TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X - Text editor with interesting shell integration
• Daring Fireball: Markdown - Turn structured txt into valid XHTML
  • HumaneText.service - Txt to HTML and back again, as an OS X Service
• Quicksilver - Application launcher and much more
• nondeterministic . net : hack : fiwt - Incremental search for Safari pages
• michael-mccracken.net - [i-search] - Incremental search in many Cocoa text fields
• Notational Velocity - Sexy note-taking and incremental search in one nerd-friendly app
• Welcome to Flying Meat Software, home of VoodooPad - Wiki comes to your Mac’s desktop
• PithHelmet - Filter ads, apply styles, and protect your privacy, per-site
• Welcome to Growl! - Notification program lets you know what’s happening under the bonnet
• Tynsoe projects - [GeekTool] - Make your Desktop look like “The Matrix” with notifications, photos, and shell output
• Safari Enhancer - Flip on the debug menu and more
• Bonus - Here’s the modest “hamburger helper” html file I use as a snippet in TextMate

Also—since a bunch of folks had asked—the Finder replacement app you saw in the demos is Path Finder. It’s a terrific, super-functional app that adds tons of features to speed up your work flow.

I keep my notes on 3 x 5 index cards, quasi-hipster-pda style, but basically just a lump of cards with a rubber band around them. The cards keep getting bent and messed up, so I'm looking for a simple, but good-looking, card holder. I've seen Levenger's, but that's too complicated. I don't need pockets & pads.

I often end up using my Desktop as a parking lot for current files. Not exactly an inbox, but given how easy it is to hit CMD-D in a dialog box, it’s where a lot of tmp files, exported jpgs, and assorted stuff naturally ends up. Still, I find it distratcting when too much stuff accumulates there, so I also keep a “Junk” folder on the desktop.