• Timbuk2 - Steve Sleeve - Timbuk2’s MacBook Air sleeve stylishly adopts the look of the interoffice mail envelope Steve demoed at Macworld. Very clever. I’m gettin’ one.
• persistent.info: Mail Trends - “Thus was born Mail Trends, an IMAP-based email analysis project. It can generate a bunch of tables, graphs and distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, etc.” Mihai is a stone cold stud.
• Hivelogic: Offices and The Creativity Zone - “In the very same way you’d want to find the right time and place to read a book, creative types need to setup the specific conditions they need to enter The Zone.” [via DF]
• Clipboard History triggers unwantedly - If your QS Clipboard window has taken on a life of its own, try deleting and re-installing the Clipboard plug-in. Saved my sanity. Also: I’m kind of liking the adverb “unwantedly.”
• Leather Hipster PDA Case from Staples on Flickr - Handsome-looking $10 case available at Staples. (By the bye, Levenger, thumbs-down for appropriating the Hipster PDA name without attribution; not classy) [Flickr photo link via djohnson]
• Apple - Downloads - Dashboard Widgets - HostsWidget - “Allows you to manipulate your “/etc/hosts” file quickly and easily.” [via siliconmeadow]
• Nothing Up My Sleeve: Twitter as a Moral Compass - Gordon shares how to use htaccess to alter a hotlinked image on just the one thieving domain. Man, I’d love to see Yahoo! do this to the Drudge Report (check the man’s code for imgs src’d from straight off yimg.com).

When it's hard to stay focused, try going 'topless' to meetings - San Jose Mercury News

Our good pals over at Adaptive Path have been experimenting with banning laptops and other communication devices in meetings (something I've supported in the past). From today's Mercury News:

Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going "topless," as in no laptops allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: BlackBerrys, iPhones and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend...

But as laptops have gotten lighter and smart-phones even smarter, people have discovered a handy diversion, making more eye contact these days with their screens than one another. The practice became so pervasive that Todd Wilkens turned to his company blog to wage his "personal war against CrackBerry..."

His San Francisco design firm, Adaptive Path, now strongly encourages everyone to leave their laptops at their desks. His colleague, Dan Saffer, coined the term "topless" as in "laptop-less." Also booted are mobile and smart-phones, which must be stowed on a counter or in a box during meetings. It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers, Wilkens said.

"All of our meetings got a lot more productive," he said.

[via Dan Saffer]

A Brief Message: No Resistance Is Futile

Paul Ford has been posting six-word Twitter updates for a few weeks, and now he's also created the magnum opus of six-word criticism: sexological reviews of the 763 mp3s in this year's SxSW torrent.

Writing on (the 200-words-or-less site) A Brief Message, Paul talks about how the constraint changed his approach and his thinking:

Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs. In this spirit, I'm rewriting some blog software to read directly from Excel. We'll see how that goes.

Yes. Constraints. As Paul shows, constraints get you thinking about the creative process in a whole new way.

Me? I ♥ constraints. 30 seconds. 5 things. Less than 140 characters.

In fact:

Twitter's making me a stronger writer. I think harder about how to say more using fewer and shorter words. Nothing beats hitting the Twoosh. (140 chars)

Let's close with a favorite quote on creative constraint from Anne Lamott's wonderful Bird by Bird. She explains that she keeps a one-inch-square picture frame on her desk to remind her of "short assignments:"

It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being.

Well put. (And only 17 characters north of the Twoosh.)

MacBreak Weekly 81: Click the Throbber

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, and Alex Lindsay Safari 3.1, security update, Apple mulls music subscription plan, this week's picks and more.

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 81.

Very fun episode this week if I do say so. Andy and I nerded out a lot, there was much jollity, we worked blue a few times, and my (repeat) pick o' the week is SafariStand -- specifically for the amazing "Copy Link as Markdown" and "Copy Link HTML Tag" functionality. Dammit: go pimp your Safari!

Update, 2008-03-20 16:29:45

Next Week: Patrick Wilson from Weezer

Oh, man. How did I forget this? Next week, MacBreak Weekly's special guest will be Pat Wilson, the drummer from Weezer and The Rentals and the multi-instrumental leader of That Special Goodness. Yeah, I know; I can't believe it, either, but he actually asked Leo if he could be on the show. Weird. I wonder if he sent email to the wrong place and actually thinks we're Grammar Girl or something.

Anyhow, it's on, and I'm thrilled, because I go way back with Weezer. After the jump's a live video of an old Weezer favorite (which, according to WikiPee, Pat co-wrote), "My Name is Jonas."

• 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.