Merlin Mann's "43 Folders" blog is devoted to turning the advice in David Allen's amazing productivity book Getting Things Done into material that is suited to people who lead technological lifestyles (Getting Things Done barely mentions computers and doesn't have anything on stuff like hacking producivity with perl scripts).

But sometimes Merlin goes low-tech, as he did with his amazing post from last September on the "Hipster PDA" -- a bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. Now he's extending the Hipster PDA with tips and tricks he's derived since then. It's great stuff -- Craig of Craigslist carries around old business cards in his shirt-pocket with notes to himself in tiny writing on the back of them. Hipster PDA is like that on steroids.

The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let’s make one together.

Link

When the Tsunami hit India's Little Andaman island, Lakshmi Narain Roy whisked his family, including his pregnant wife, onto the family rickshaw and pedaled to higher ground. A few hours later, Namita Roy gave birth to a baby boy, three weeks premature. From a Reuters report:

"On Wednesday, we learned a Navy ship had come into the bay but the jetty was damaged and so with help from other locals I carried her and the baby on to a dinghy and took her out to the big ship at sea," (Roy said.)

Reaching Port Blair after a 7-hour journey Roy's wife was rushed to the local hospital where doctors immediately cleaned up her uterus and gave her some medicines.

"It was the doctors who suggested we name the boy Tsunami and we also liked the name and decided to call him that. After all it is a name everyone will instantly notice and remember."

Link (via Fortean Times)

BoingBoing buddy Wiley Wiggins says "First images of the Animated Philip K. Dick film A SCANNER DARKLY [directed by Rick Linklater]. I am not involved with this film (unfortunately), but I have seen about 20 minutes of it and it is the most incredible piece of animation I have ever seen."
Link to pics on AICN, link to Wiley's post.

BB reader Steve Portigal says,

Like the combination of several Richard Pryor plots (rewritten by William Gibson?) this escapee hangs out in an abandoned Circuit City... during which time he played hoops with a mini-basketball net and watched Spider-Man 2 on a DVD player. He also routed water from an adjacent Toys "R" Us and even installed a smoke detector.

Link to Seattle Times story (no reg) Link to Charlotte Observer (reg required)

Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson interviews Bill Gates at CES -- in part, about blogs and Microsoft's MSN Spaces.

Gizmodo: So would it be fair to say your idea with Spaces will be more hands-off? Since you're kind of giving the power of the individual to publish, you don't really care what they say?

Gates: No. There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that...

Gizmodo: So since it's sitting on your servers you want to be more careful of it.

Gates: No, there are rules about... if you get notified that it's stolen materials or pornography or things like that. Our policies are just related to what the laws are. The idea of the open empowerment—that's why we've always loved the PC. And there are many examples over the last several decades where the power of the PC to let people publish and communicate has made a huge difference in terms of people trying to control information flow. And that's why the PC is such a fantastic development.

Link (Thanks, Nathan, who comments here!)

Technorati's David Sifry says,

Technorati's developer contest winners have been announced! Winners included GovTrack, a site that tracks bills in congress and congresscritters, and what bloggers are saying about them, whitelabel.org, which transforms the BBC's news site to include links to wikipedia and bloggers links, PersonalDemocracy.com, which tracks what bloggers are saying about members of the US house and senate, and many more.

Link

Spotted on the politech list -- Declan says, "It's provocative and raises some of the hoary who's-a-journalist-and-can-get-creds issues that are becoming important again."

As two prominent Washington journalists struggle to avoid jail time over their refusal to disclose confidential sources, one of the biggest obstacles the reporters face is America's fastgrowing army of citizen Web loggers, or bloggers.

It’s not that the town criers of the online world are campaigning to send Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine to prison. Rather, it’s the bloggers' very existence that undercuts the journalists' legal defense.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are scheduled to appear before a federal appeals court in the capital to argue that reporters should have a legal privilege not to testify about their sources under most circumstances. A federal prosecutor investigating whether the White House leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, has asked the pair to appear before a grand jury to answer questions.They have refused.

The crux of the reporters' contention is that the public would be less well informed if journalists could not promise their sources confidentiality. However, the proliferation of blogs and bloggers could represent the Achilles' heel in this approach. If Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are entitled to claim special treatment in the courts, so too could hundreds of thousands of Americans who use the Internet to post comments about their views on current events.

Link

Museum security guard told a child to stop sketching paintings in a museum -- because they're copyrighted.

It is standard operating procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh.

Over the weekend at the North Carolina Museum of Art there were works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Degas and some Illanas. Julia Illana is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook. "I love to draw in my notebook," Illana said.

Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into trouble with museum security. A museum guard told Julia's parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.

Link (Thanks, Cowicide)

Author, photographer, and blogger Susannah Breslin (whose work I've posted about here often) is taking an unusual approach to the financing of her next book Porn Happy -- she's seeking patrons via blog.
Link. See also this newly-minted Susannah Breslin fansite: Link

The pool of unredeemed frequent-flier miles is the most voluminous currency in the world, worth more than the cash supply of dollars and pounds combined.

According to a new analysis by The Economist magazine, the global stock is worth more than $700bn (£370bn), more than all the US dollar bills in circulation, and streets ahead of Britain's £42bn of notes and coins...

A close look at the rules can expose unbeatable deals. A civil engineer from California, David Phillips, became known as the "pudding guy" after calculating that an offer of frequent flyer miles with food at his local supermarket yielded a remarkable return. He spent $3,000 on 12,000 Healthy Choice chocolate desserts and earned $25,000 worth of free flights, enough to pay for travel for the rest of his life.

Link

Circadiana is a new blog written by "Coturnix," who appears to be an academic studying sleep. Yesterday, Couturnix posted a wonderful, informative, lucid essay on the biological and social nature of sleep and how it interacts with technology. Technology -- the light bulb, in particular -- is a drug that exerts a powerful physical force on our sleep habits, one that we haven't yet figured out how to metabolize safely. Coturnix's piece is the most fascinating thing I've read on the subject -- and I did a ton of research on the subject for my novel Eastern Standard Tribe, but I wish I'd had this paper then.

A classical sociobiological just-so story posits that this kind of individual variation on the lark/owl continuum had an adaptive function, namely to ensure that at every time of night at least one member of the tribe was awake. Thus some stood guard early in the night, others late in the night, listening to the sounds of the jungle (or savannah, or whatever) while the midnight break is thought to have been used for copulating with whomever also happens to be awake at the time - this was before the social invention of sexual monogamy...

Pretending that sleep-need does not exist is also institutionalized. I am not talking just about night-shifts and rotating shifts (those will kill you), night flights, being available for communication 24/7, stores open 24/7, etc - those are part of a modern society, will not go away, and we just need to learn how to adjust. I am talking about the building standards. With a huge proportion of the population working at night, why do windows have no blinds? Some old manors do, but new buildings do not. Never. Some have fake blinds, just for show, screwed into the outside walls on the sides of windows, yet cannot be closed. There are no built-in black curtains, or roll-down wooden blinds. It is difficult to find such curtains in stores if one wants to install one. What is going on? I have never seen, heard, read about, or experienced another country in the world in which sleep is not sacred, and blinds are not an essential part of a house.

I see some striking parallels between the way this society treats sleep and the way it treats sex. Both are sinful activities, associated with one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth and Lust). Both are associated with the most powerful biological needs. Both are supposed to be a taboo topic. Both are supposed to be done in private, at night, with a pretense that it is never actually happening. Education in sleep hygiene and sex hygiene are both slighted, one way or another (the former passively, the latter actively opposed). Both are thought to interfere with one's productivity - ah, the good old Protestant work ethic! Why are Avarice and Greed not treated the same way? Raking in money by selling mega-burgers is just fine, and a decent topic of conversation, even a point of pride. Why are we still allowing Puritan Calvinist way of thinking, coupled with capitalist creed, to still guide the way we live our lives, or even think about life. Sleeping, whether with someone or alone, is a basic human need, thus a basic human right. Neither really detracts from the workplace productivity - au contraire: well rested and well satisfied people are happy, energetic, enthusiastic and productive. It is sleep repressed people, along with the dour sex repressed people, who are the problem, making everyone nervous. How much longer are we going to hide under the covers?

Link

Here are 100 MP3 episodes of a kids' radio show that starred some of the cast of Lord of the Rings, downloadable as a Creative Commons licensed .torrent.

A good few years back, I was involved in a radio drama series for children - a 'Cartoon for Radio' called Ashley's Worlds. I've made the whole thing available as a bittorrent file.

If you're not sure what a bittorrent is, you should read the Wikipedia entry on the topic.

So - what do you need to know about Ashley's Worlds? It was originally established to entertain my son, Jake. He was a fair bit younger then - but he still enjoys the series now.

All the characters are cats - and, well... it'll make itself clear as it goes along.

The real Ashley was my cat, who sadly passed away last year.

Cast:
Craig Parker - Ashley
Carl Bland - Bishop
David Weatherley - Tobias
Belinda Todd - Tabitha
Merv Smith - The Strange Old Cat

I've registered Ashley's Worlds under a Creative Commons Licence so that people can be encouraged to listen to it without fear that they'll be breaking copyright by listening.

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

SanDisk is shipping an SD memory card with a tiny hinge; fold it back to reveal a USB interface. Take the chip out of your camera and plug it straight into your laptop to move your pix over; carry your USB thumbdrive in your camera, not on your keychain. Link (Thanks, elNorm!)