• Inconsolata - "It is a monospace font, designed for code listings and the like, in print." This has quickly become my new favorite monospace font. It’s kicky, and looks great in TextMate, esp. at larger sizes.
• Star Wars viewing order (kottke.org) - Veen has wisdom on the proper order for showing your child the Star Wars movies: “Show him Episodes 4 and 5 together and let him know that ‘They find Han - he was ok.’ Leave it at that. Let him experience the later disappointments as we did - all grown up.”
• Wakerupper.com - Free Wake-up Calls and Telephone Reminders - Get fancy-hotel-like wakeup service for your phone. Optimized for iPhone
• The Onion: Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults - "All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen…" (see also)
• Getting things done with mutt - "Mutt is extremely powerful, but lacks a little when attempting to implement GTD and the ‘Inbox Zero’ concept." Looks like a cool patch.
• your monkey called - "LIFEHACK: Create a simple but effective 'mood necklace' from freely available materials!"

I've started collecting stories -- some of which may be entirely apocryphal tall tales -- of the purported lengths to which people are going to filter noise and to ensure that their time and attention aren't ceded to bad ideas, thoughtless people, or garden-variety time burglars.

Here's a few of the more novel ones I've picked up. I'd also love to hear your favorites from amongst the cheats, tricks, and squirrely rules you've heard about:

Acting without doing SOUNDS good, but... (Ask MetaFilter)

I really liked this AskMe question about Quicksilver, since it's one that comes up a lot for folks who don't get as enthused about the app as I (and many of you) do:

Everywhere I go on the internet, Mac users rave about Quicksilver. I've downloaded it a couple times, and I sort of get that it COULD be really useful, but I am not sure how...

So what am I missing with Quicksilver? I see so many other people who get a lot of use out of it, and I am sure I can fit it in somewhere, too, but I just can't seem to figure it out....

Here's a portion of how I responded in comments:

I have a friend who told me he was thinking about giving his project managers a weekly pile of chips that could be redeemed for person-hours in meetings. So, to schedule firewalled, group face-time, the PM would need to cough up the equivalent number of tokens from her pile. Thus, one, long, all-hands meeting might require the whole week's stack. While, fewer, shorter meetings with smaller groups made the pile go further.

It was just an idea, and I'm pretty sure he never implemented it, but I think it's a fascinating concept. Why? Because I love the idea of re-introducing scarcity into systems that lack boundaries.

My pal, Penney, once told me that when she was a kid, and her family went on vacation, they would "drop the spoon" every afternoon. I knew this was a cousin of the disco nap, but I never knew it was a purported invention of Salvador Dalí, (according to QuestionSwap):

Lie down or sit in comfy seat holding a spoon in your fingertips. you should be holding it in a way that - when you loose consciousness (sleep) you drop it... the Clatter (put a big plate on the floor under your hand) will wake you.... and you get woken JUST as you enter the best "dreamy" bit of your sleep.

Related (though pretty insane, if you're asking me) is the notorious "Thomas Edison Nap," which, repeated through the day, is intended to stand in lieu of an actual solid night's sleep (and which seems to have partly inspired some of the polyphasic sleep nutjobs proponents). Edison is said to have naturally needed less sleep in a day, and seldom slept very much in a given stretch, claiming that excessive sleep was a sign of laziness -- and yet: