MacBreak Weekly 85: You Look Mac Today

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, and Andy Ihnatko

Wombats, Pystar clones, Back to My Mac, Aussie iPhones on Vodafone, and more.

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 85.

This week my Audible pick is That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and my application pick is TimeMachineEditor. The former is a wonderful radio series by two British comics that I'm currently obsessed with, while the latter is a very handy app for manually setting how often Time Machine backs up your Mac.

How-To: Truly reset your .Mac sync data [Ars Technica]

I never have trouble finding company when it comes to whining about the reliability of .Mac syncing. It's surely not fair to lay all of this at the feet of the .Mac developers -- sync is, we are often reminded, "hard." But if you want to rely on syncing your Calendars, Contacts, Preferences, snippets, Yojimbo, and what have you via .Mac in a battlefield environment, you're going to need a strong stomach, a lot of patience, and reliable backups. Plus, friends, you will regularly have to _reset frickin' everything_.

Entirely overfamiliar with that particular reality, I was pleased to get pointed toward David Chartier's tutorial on saving your .Mac's village by burning it to the ground. It's a handy, illustrated companion piece to Apple's own advice on scorching earth. Very handy, and, yeah, you will eventually need it. So print it out. Maybe even have it laminated.

Apple's .Mac syncing features are sometimes no exception to these problems, and even though Apple provides a number of decent solutions in its .Mac sync support pages, they don't always work. Fortunately, a brief adventure using .Mac sync chat support (found at the bottom of that aforelinked page) cleared up a repeating "merge/overwrite" sync dialog problem for me, and we felt the procedure was worth sharing.

FWIW, here's a few other things I do (as a raving .Mac paranoiac):

This is an intriguing idea. Keith converts his important to-dos into scheduled blocks of work.

Doodle: Scheduling meetings

This has been mentioned here before (just in comments, I think), but I have to repeat: I can't say enough good things about Doodle. It takes the idiotically over-complicated problem of figuring out when all of n people are available to do something, and in the simplest way conceivable, polls all the participants to find the optimal time and date.

I'm always thrilled when colleagues send a meeting invite in the form of a Doodle email; it requires zero fiddling on my part and pleasantly skirts the need for the endless email threads that most people rely on to get a group of people extant in one time-space unit.

I'm risking the indignity of a double-post on an "old" link for a good reason: with all the foam and fuss over "Web 2.0," and the ever higher (Ever! Higher!) technology we shovel to solve stupid human problems, it's refreshing to see adoption of a tool that ends up being no more complicated than a white board with electrical-tape columns.

I wish stuff like Doodle would inspire more developers to start with the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. No Arial Rounded, no whizzy AJAX, and no angel-round-attracting gradients. Just a modest solution to a single dumb problem. That is a life hack, defined.

What's your favorite idiotically simple web tool right now?

Productive Talk #04: Teams

43 Folders and The David Allen Company present the fourth in a series of conversations that David and Merlin recently had about Getting Things Done.

In this episode, David and Merlin talk about the role of GTD in teams and how to lead by example.

(Running time: 08:46)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

A quick Google search yesterday afternoon ended up turning into an index card surfin’ safari. Thought I’d share some of the spoils of my distraction in the form of some fun links.

Some of these are pretty great, and a few are sort of silly, but you do have to love the breadth of uses to which people can put their brain and a penny’s worth of cardstock.

Writer’s Block, Geek-Block, and Procrastination

I like this practical, tactical approach to “cringe-busting” a list of tasks that you’ve been procrastinating. Basically, you write down each thing you want to do as well as the anxiety that’s kept you from doing it.

Cool Tool: It's All Too Much

As my battle with clutter continues, one of my favorite people (and one of the smartest guys writing for the web, period), Kevin Kelly, noticed my efforts and took note of my affection for Peter Walsh's wonderful book, It's All Too Much.

My review for Cool Tools is indeed adapted from a few posts that originated here, but I think it's worth pointing to because, a) that book has had a huge influence on how I think about my relationship to "stuff," b) I'm honored that KK liked what I'd had to say about it, and c) if you aren't already reading Kevin's sites -- particularly his consistently insightful The Technium column -- you'd do yourself a favor to get acquainted fast. Kevin's the real deal.

Another, as usual, hilarious New Yorker essay from David Sedaris. Mentioned here, first, because of his opening paragraph, which reveals David's personal method for "ubiquitous capture":