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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Links of favor for April 18

  • NEAT Receipts Scanner - Sharp-looking receipt scanner for the Mac, coming soon. I tend to avoid one-off gadgets that have any kind of permanent footprint on my desk, but this looks pretty handy if it works.
  • Footers In Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine - Inspiring collection of ways to use the space at the top and bottom of a web page. The first advocate for this approach that I can recall is Derek, who always uses his footers to such lovely and functional effect.
  • A Pattern Language for Productivity - Gah! I feared I'd waited too long. I've totally been meaning to start something like this on the 43f wiki for a couple years. (curses self). Nice start, here. Should be useful for folks.
  • The Fishbowl: Twitterpated - I get a surprising amount of flack for not following more people on Twitter. Which dumbfounds me. It's like being angry at someone because they aren't watching enough TV. Anyhow, some of these hyper-following people strike me as either nutjobs or cynics, e.g. "in one case, 34,000. If you were truly following all these people, and they updated only once per day on average, you would be reading a Twitter message every two seconds." Yeah. That sounds really fun and enriching. [via anarchaia]
  • Word Spy - speed mentoring - "Getting advice in a series of short conversations with experts and other mentors." I need me more of this.
  • BENTWOOD by contexture design workshop - My gosh, what a lovely idea; a wooden bangle that turns into a coffee cup sleeve. Smart. [via Erika]
  • Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes | Life, Tutorials - Guilty as charged on a number of these. I think the one I'm laziest about is straight quotation marks (""") where I really mean inches (""). I do love that people care this much about this stuff (most of the time).
  • Mac Mini Media Centre / journal / hicksdesign - Jon has been sharing how he's setting up his Mac Mini as a home entertainment juggernaut. This post outlines his basic setup, the apps he uses, etc. He also has a companion Flickr set. I'd love to hear more from folks on workflow. How -- hypothetically -- an AVI from out in the wild gets downloaded, encoded when necessary, and then dropped into the "~/Movies" folder. Maybe Automator? As a new Mini owner with the same goals, I'd love to hear your tips here in comments.
  • Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio) | Berkman Center - Clay's book is justifiably hyped right now, because it's just so damned good. If you enjoyed seeing the Claymeister General on Colbert, you might want to catch this swell talk, where he gets a bit more room to say his piece on a world where things get organized without organizers.
  • Spark | CBC Radio | Disaster Preparedness Kit for your digital life - "...Nora and Merlin Mann (of 43Folders fame) are putting together a 'Disaster Preparedness Kit' for your digital life. Do you have a tip, trick, or tool that puts your mind at ease and keeps you from worrying about data loss?"
TOPICS: Daily Links
Joe's picture

Typographic mistakes

Thankfully, plenty of people care about proper punctuation/typography. See most of Lynn Truss' books (particularly "Eats, Shoots and Leaves").

My favorite spelling/typographical pet peeve is lack of use of a dieresis. This typographic mark (the name of which sounds unfortunately like some sort of bowel disorder) is used to indicate that two adjacent vowels belong to two different syllables by placing what otherwise looks like an umlaut (two horizontal dots above a letter: ü) above the second vowel.

The names Zoe and Chloe might be pronounced "zoh" and "cloh" (like Cletus did to two of his many children in an episode of The Simpsons) were it not for the occasional parent who names their kids Zoë (ZOH-ee) and Chloë (CLOH-ee). Plenty of other words benefit from use of a dieresis instead of a hyphen (or nothing): coöperate vs. co-operate or cooperate, e.g. Some words look, and sound, funny without a dieresis: preemptive, preeminent,)

Even if you don't want to employ the dieresis, at least now you'll know what it is when you see it (and won't think people are trying to act pretentious by sticking some diacritical marks on their name like some sort of '80s metal band).

 
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