The 43F wiki is up.

Obama on Vacationing and Time to Think - NYTimes.com

I like this snippet of accidentally-captured conversation between Barack Obama and British MP, David Cameron. Cameron asks Obama if he will be taking any time off for a vacation this summer:

Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be ...

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. ... In 15 minute increments and ...

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

This encourages and inspires me. If people as busy as these two guys (or Bill Gates, for that matter) can make time to rise above the noise, it's hard to imagine why each of us wouldn't want to occasionally unchalk our diary enough to try something similar.

[via Mrs. Mann]

A few books, apps, and other baubles I've enjoyed lately.

• As a kid, I devoured dorky books like Haley's Hints, and I'm convinced it's partly what made me into the sort of person drawn to the life hacks phenomenon. If you suffer from the same affliction and nurse a passion for clever little tips on removing stains, moving furniture, or drying a sweater, you'll love this one, too. It's nicely indexed and the nano-sections make it perfect bedtime (or bathroom) reading.
• SuperDuper, the most excellent backup tool/disk cloner, had a recent upgrade that added scheduled, non-attended backups and several other nice features to the mix. I love this app. Love it.
• Xinha Here so rules. True WYSIWYG HTML editing inside Firefox may be (I say for the umpteenth time) what finally moves me to The Fox and keeps me there. Combining Xinha with Writeboard -- or even Writely, I guess -- gives me a glimpse of where the web might be heading (and Redmond's Office team may have a lot to find troubling about it). Great little chunk of func. Go, Firefox. [via LH]
• A wonderful reader gifted me with a much-desired item from my AMZN wishlist -- a terrific little book called Buddhism Plain and Simple. In the 20 years I've flirted with learning more about Buddhist practice, this book has brought the clearest and most practical presentation I've come across. Re-framing Buddhism not as a religion but as a way of seeing has really flipped a switch in my head. Great little book that I can highly recommend (and many thanks to my kind giftor for bringing it to me).
• On a recent field trip to pester my friends at Mule I found myself jealously coveting a lot of the toys and tech on Mike Monteiro's desk, including a most excellent wireless Microsoft mouse. As a consequence, I dropped by CompUsa on the way home, picked up the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 and have been really pleased with it so far, I'm happy to say. It has a bunch of programmable buttons, nice precision, and a wacky "zoom in" feature that's probably fun at parties. I also love that the scroll wheel goes side-to-side as well as up-and-down -- if you ever have the kind of hot and heavy makeout sessions with Excel that I do, this is a Very Good Thing.
• I also nabbed me a RadioShark which is kind of like a TiVo for your favorite local radio stations. It's a plastic thingee that connnects to your USB port and ships with some fairly janky software for automating recording. The reception also sucks, and it has a very 1.0 feeling in general, but combining it with RadioTime is actually ace. You can use the RadioTime site to schedule all your favorite shows (local and otherwise accessible via the web) and RT does all the heavy lifting of recording streams, bodyslamming the RadioShark in line, then dumping the product right into iTunes. At $39.95 a year, the RadioTime service is steep, and I do wish the next-gen Shark could be "flashed" in a way that allows for independent (un-connected to the Mac) recording. Still if you're a huge Public Radio nerd like me, it's nice to know you'll never miss another "Fascinatin' Rhythm" or "Writer's Almanac".

Browse Life Tools

UK-based collection of "life tools" covering topics like time management, stress management, decision making, etc.

Similar to (the oft-linked and more exhaustive) "Mind Tools," there's several cool articles in here if you dig around a bit (along with the now-ubiquitous Capital Letter Nouns for you corner-office types). A few I particularly like are Force Field Analysis, Meditation and Changing Behaviour.

Nothing earth-shatteringly new, but I do think these sorts of extreme distillations can sometimes be useful in providing people a foothold toward improving their world. Just underneath the candy-colored shells of pop psychology and "personal development," you can often find some profound, reliable, and time-tested insights into what makes us tick.

Then, of course, there's "Mission Statements." If you're -- you know -- looking to state your mission.

[ via del.icio.us/popular ]

Of all the speculation and Steve-watching over the past few weeks, the recent chatter about an Apple "nano-computer" may be the most interesting and thought-provoking of the bunch.

Bob Snow writes:

I think Apple will introduce a nano-computer, masquerading as a smart-phone . Basically a tablet computer the size of a Treo or Blackberry with a far more clever input method, full face screen and some version of iLife running on it. Ideally it would be a stand alone wireless nano-computer running OS X. Think of all the capabilities of a MacBook combined with a phone...

Current technology would of course make this computer a brick, much larger than a Zune and more expensive than a MacBook. The Apple genius-phone will have to point the way to such a device with a mobile version of OS X and iLife. Much of your data and the programs that manipulate it might be located on the internet. Strip down the memory. Even sync it with your computer rather than replace your computer. Whatever it takes to put a placeholder out there to position Apple for the coming revolution. It might take a serious partnership with Google to pull this off. Phone service providers be damned.

And here I was conservatively predicting/begging-for (@00:51:04) a 12” MacBook Pro by next year. Always thinking too small big. Now I want me the notional MacBook Nano.

So, what's your guess? What will Steve's E-ticket ride be at Macworld this year?

mccamon.org

Mike McCamon offers a clever way to get just his task list from iCal printed onto index cards for his Hipster PDA. Applescript to the rescue:

• Do Not Reply - Now “/dev/null” has a posse. Owner of “donotreply.com” domain receives the flotsam emails generated by the work of half-assing IT guys (and their poor, hapless users). Maybe a good time to go and change those “fake” reply addresses, because right now some fairly sensitive stuff is getting “bounced.” [via codinghorror]
• Magical thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - “Adherents of magical belief systems often do not see their beliefs as being magical.” Cf.: Cargo cults.
• Psychology Today: Magical Thinking - “Even hard-core skeptics can’t help but find sympathy in the fabric of the universe—and occasionally try to pull its strings.” Love the idea of any continuum that has “skeptics at one end and schizophrenics at the other.”
• Juggling Sheep: Fully Present - Fatherhood - “I’m not babysitting. I’m fathering. I’m being a dad. I’m doing the single-most important thing I could be doing right now - spending meaningful time with my son.”
• Health workers offer help to S.F.’s packrats - “Oblena has seen people unable to sleep on their beds because of the clutter. He inspected the room of one man who slept every night on a black metal folding chair, surrounded by mounds of clutter.” [via obscure store]
• SXSW day 2 - Worst Website Ever - Many thanks to Roo for videotaping my pitch for FlockdUp.com during Andy’s “Worst Website Ever” panel at SxSW. Here’s the slides if you want to follow along on the drilldown; Full video after the jump.

SubEthaEdit’s document-sharing functionality must be seen to be believed. Groups of Mac users—in the same room or scattered across the world—can view and edit a single text-based document at the same time. In practice, this has some powerful applications, such as pair programming and shared conference notes. I’ve also had great luck using it as a unified project management tool, where a team’s meeting participants share notes, capture TODOs, and even provide back-channel information all in one or two simple text files.