These are lower threshold links to stuff I've recently enjoyed.

• The Macalope On MacBreak Weekly - "Yes, it’s true. The Macalope will be on next week’s edition of MacBreak Weekly." The MBW crew seems to remain convinced that I am the Macalope. Tune in this week, and we shall see...
• Daring Fireball: iPhone SDK, iPhone SDK! Wherefore Art Thou iPhone SDK? - Gruber's analysis seems spot-on to me: with a product this big, it pays to manage expectations and hold out the possibility of an unpromised lagniappe or two.
• How to talk to the press | fortuitous - Mathowie talkes to the press a good bit more than I do, so I learned a lot from this. Love the tip about listening for frenetic typing.
• Jonathan Coulton » Blog Archive » How I Did It - JoCo tells the story of how he got where he is with his music and the internet. Essential reading for those who want to go indie on the web today. Would love to see more of these from other folks as well.
• Rosetta Stone for Unix - (PDF) - Ginormous table that lets you compare commands between different flavors of Unix. (via: adurity's bookmarks on del.icio.us)
• MailTags 2.0 leaves beta, goes official - The sine qua non Mail.app plugin goes 2.0. Can't imagine using Mail without this guy plus Mail Act-On.
• Twitter Blog: Are You Twittering @ Me? - "In other words, if somebody Twitters "@biz liking the new Replies tab!" it will get saved at Twitter.com/replies." I love this feature. I can't keep up with the (gulp) 2,300 folks who've been kind enough to "friend" me, but at least now I can see when they're saying something in my direction. Very cool.
• Facebook | Merlin Mann - In related news. I succumbed. Largely because of this awesomeness. (links require Facebook membership)

Submit your ideas for links to del.icio.us, and be sure to include the tag "for:43folders."

Lower threshold links to stuff I wouldn't want you to miss. It's been quite a while since we've done some shorties, so what the heck.

• Inquisitor 3. Spotlight for the web. - I tried Inquisitor when it first came out, and, for some reason, it didn't move me. But now, I love its smartypants, mind-reader replacement for Safari's search bar. Sogudi is still my first love for ad hoc location bar searches, but the ability to add custom search engines to Inquisitor is hot hot hot. Free as in beer, too.
• Picked up one of these Behance notebooks the other day. It is very lovely and well-designed. Not sure if it's a quantum functional improvement over a sheet of printer paper, but it's definitely a classy piece of productivity pr0n. And the Helvetica! Ah the Helvetica.
• Service Scrubber - I've mentioned before that I think OS X Services are one of the most woefully under-utilized tricks in the current Apple world. But the actual Services menu can, over time get cluttered. This handy little donationware app will shut off Services you don't want to appear in the menu and let you re-map the key bindings of ones you do use. Very handy.
• 010: Interview: John Vanderslice, Part 2 | The Merlin Show - John Vanderslice on high-volume email: "You can't make sense of all that correspondence. You just can't."
• On the advice of my pal Katie Spence, I picked up Unstuck, which looks to be a pretty neat little book about generating ideas and then seeing them through into real "stuff." Presented in a "choose your own adventure" style that makes for interactive fun. They also have a website that (with a bit of typo-correction and expansion) could turn into an excellent adjunct to the hardback edition (the book clearly wants to be hypertext).
• Gizmodo reports on less costly options for hooking up your new Apple TV. My take: A) it's crazy for Apple not to include at least gratis composite cables for a device aimed at the fat part of the media-viewing curve, and B) the charlatans at Monster and their ilk should be horsewhipped for what they're charging media noobs for cables.

A few books, apps, and other baubles I've enjoyed lately.

• As a kid, I devoured dorky books like Haley's Hints, and I'm convinced it's partly what made me into the sort of person drawn to the life hacks phenomenon. If you suffer from the same affliction and nurse a passion for clever little tips on removing stains, moving furniture, or drying a sweater, you'll love this one, too. It's nicely indexed and the nano-sections make it perfect bedtime (or bathroom) reading.
• SuperDuper, the most excellent backup tool/disk cloner, had a recent upgrade that added scheduled, non-attended backups and several other nice features to the mix. I love this app. Love it.
• Xinha Here so rules. True WYSIWYG HTML editing inside Firefox may be (I say for the umpteenth time) what finally moves me to The Fox and keeps me there. Combining Xinha with Writeboard -- or even Writely, I guess -- gives me a glimpse of where the web might be heading (and Redmond's Office team may have a lot to find troubling about it). Great little chunk of func. Go, Firefox. [via LH]
• A wonderful reader gifted me with a much-desired item from my AMZN wishlist -- a terrific little book called Buddhism Plain and Simple. In the 20 years I've flirted with learning more about Buddhist practice, this book has brought the clearest and most practical presentation I've come across. Re-framing Buddhism not as a religion but as a way of seeing has really flipped a switch in my head. Great little book that I can highly recommend (and many thanks to my kind giftor for bringing it to me).
• On a recent field trip to pester my friends at Mule I found myself jealously coveting a lot of the toys and tech on Mike Monteiro's desk, including a most excellent wireless Microsoft mouse. As a consequence, I dropped by CompUsa on the way home, picked up the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 and have been really pleased with it so far, I'm happy to say. It has a bunch of programmable buttons, nice precision, and a wacky "zoom in" feature that's probably fun at parties. I also love that the scroll wheel goes side-to-side as well as up-and-down -- if you ever have the kind of hot and heavy makeout sessions with Excel that I do, this is a Very Good Thing.
• I also nabbed me a RadioShark which is kind of like a TiVo for your favorite local radio stations. It's a plastic thingee that connnects to your USB port and ships with some fairly janky software for automating recording. The reception also sucks, and it has a very 1.0 feeling in general, but combining it with RadioTime is actually ace. You can use the RadioTime site to schedule all your favorite shows (local and otherwise accessible via the web) and RT does all the heavy lifting of recording streams, bodyslamming the RadioShark in line, then dumping the product right into iTunes. At $39.95 a year, the RadioTime service is steep, and I do wish the next-gen Shark could be "flashed" in a way that allows for independent (un-connected to the Mac) recording. Still if you're a huge Public Radio nerd like me, it's nice to know you'll never miss another "Fascinatin' Rhythm" or "Writer's Almanac".

It's been a while, so how about some Friday remainders?

Our theoretically weekly roundup of stuff that didn't fit anyplace else.

ETech ahead: expect delays, next seven days.

Friday means its time for our weekly do-si-do of bulleted beauties.

Today’s gonna be a quickie since I can audibly hear a couple deadlines whooshing past me right this second.

Our usual Friday skip through the meadow of Merlin's marginally-productive brain.