Fiddling

Snow Day Hobbies

wood.tang — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:16:27 -0500

It snowed almost a foot here in Chicago last night, and looking at all that white stuff made me think about junior high, when my school was out an entire week for snow. I built most of the eastern seaboard in SimCity 2000 that week, on a 33 MHz PC no less. I was a nerd. It was awesome.

I thought about how fun that sounded today after I finished shoveling, and considered digging around for an updated copy of SimCity online. Then I reminded myself that the last thing I need is another hobby involving the computer. I use a computer for work. When I’m finished working, I screw around on the internet. When I’m tired of that, I read books, which isn’t a whole lot different, if a little easier on the eyes and attention span.

Pardon me while I get out the nostalgia hankie, but I miss the days when my hobbies had nothing to do with staring at a glowing screen. When I was a kid, I could sit down in my room over an unopened wax box of Topps baseball cards and completely tune out the outside world until four hours later, when my mom called me to dinner, handed me a napkin, and told me to wipe the drool from chewing 36 sticks of gum off my chin.

Earlier this winter, I took my son to a model train show. The convention center was filled with little boys, their parents, and retired men wearing pinstriped overalls. As I watched those old boys hunched over their hand-painted landscapes, tinkering with a broken crossing gate or resetting an errant boxcar on the tracks, I envied them. They had that thing I used to have with my baseball cards, a hobby that completely absorbs their attention for hours at a time, something wholly disconnected from work and daily hassles, a place where they could go and forget about everything for at least a little while.

I need that again. Model trains won’t do; as much fun as those old coots looked like they were having, the last thing I need in my house is more toy trains. And baseball cards won’t cut it either. Since I stopped collecting, they’ve taken on too much stink of commercialism, ruined by glossy UV coatings, foil stamping, and limited editions. Besides, I need something that’s less about acquisition and more about simple escape.

I’m sure I’ll find it if I keep trying, whether it’s drawing, or cooking, or simply going to the gym more often. The point of my whole weepy ramble here is that we need to have hobbies that can completely whisk us away from the grind for a few hours, preferably something that involves working with our hands and doesn’t result in credit card debt or physical addiction. If you find it, it’ll be like having a snow day all over again.

”Snow Day Hobbies” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 01, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

"No Links Please" drains HREFs, discourages web fiddling

Merlin Mann — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:11:35 -0500

James Clarke – No Links Please!

Here’s a fun one. Our old pal (and the coiner of “life hacks”), Danny O’Brien, passes along an extreme attention aid that might be regarded as the heir apparent to his wonderful “Webolodeon” script for GreaseMonkey.

No Links Please will do its part to keep you from mindlessly surfing the web:

No Links Please! breaks the web by removing hyperlinks from all pages apart from Google. Without the knowledge or temptation of links you are free to devote all your time to real work and never roam the web again.

Oh, man, what a crazy way to be forced to see the web. But, if you’re “that guy” today and can’t stop dicking around on the web, this is much less dramatic than having to shut off the router. Try it, for fun; it’s amazing how ingrained our clicky-linky behavior is.

”"No Links Please" drains HREFs, discourages web fiddling” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 21, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

TaskPaper 1.0 adds new features (and "fiddling" isn't one of them)

Merlin Mann — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:49:12 -0400

Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper was recently released in a completed 1.0 version (previously), and if you’re the sort of person who casts about for a simple way to manage projects and tasks from a Mac, this just may be your app.

But, even more significantly, if you’re not looking for a simple action management system — if you’re that particularly pathetic sort of character who’s convinced that features like tagging, syncing, collaboration, graph paper generation, and the introduction of an onboard artisanal breadmaker are all that stands between you and getting your stuff done — well, you may need TaskPaper more than anybody. Because, friends, TaskPaper is just about fiddle-proof, and, frankly, I know a lot of people who could benefit from that today.

Here’s what a simple document looks like in TaskPaper:

There’s your projects, there’s your tasks, there’s your contexts, and there’s your ability to see what you’ve ticked off. THAT, as John Hodgman might say, IS ALL.

So, first off and best off, TaskPaper is just text. Although documents created with TaskPaper will have the “.taskpaper” suffix, you’ll find that you can open and edit the file with TextEdit, TextMate, or any other garden variety text app. Here’s what my test document looks like when opened in TextMate:

I like the clarity and simplicity of the document’s formatting, and how it virtually negates the ability to fiddle. Actually, on first glance, the magic of TaskPaper may look familiar to people who have used syntaxes like Chairman Gruber’s peerless Markdown. I mean it really is just endlessly portable and mungeable text; it’s TaskPaper’s li’l engine that turns that formatting into the hooks that let you “do stuff” like view by context or project, and so on. This latest cut adds tabs for doing this neato functional stuff, and I have to say it’s really appealing. The approach is similar to OmniFocus — but even more obsessively concerned with keeping the system focused solely on completing tasks (rather than grooming and feeding them for months while they grow long hair and learn how to drive a stick).

Yes: absolutely — TaskPaper will be way too simple for a lot of people’s needs (including mine). But, if you’re so overwhelmed with “flexibility” that you’re getting close to throwing in the towel on an electronic system and are considering going back to paper, (while I’d never be one to stand in your way) you might want to give TaskPaper a whirl. If you love text and could benefit from the portability of a simple electronic document, it’s definitely worth looking at.

TaskPaper is free to try, and it’ll only set you back $18.95 if you decide to buy a copy. Download ‘er now.

”TaskPaper 1.0 adds new features (and "fiddling" isn't one of them)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 24, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"