Remainders 11.13.2007

I know it has been a while again since my last post. What can I say, I am busier than you <smile>. Once again, I give you the roadside attractions I have captured while driving around the intertubes in my big truck…

David Seah takes a turn with the Inka Pen, a highly portable pen that can attach to your keychain. He seems to like it a lot, despite the fact it gets him stopped by theTSA because it looks like it could be part of a bomb makers toolkit.

Looking to lead a “paperless” life? Well, that is impossible but you can reduce, digitize and organize it better. This is the best article/whitepaper I have seen thus far on how one person gets their paper on, and off. It’s 43 Folders so you know it’s legit.

Dustin Wax at Lifehack.org has some neat index card hackery. The main thing is how to make the ever-so-hard-to-find vertically oriented ones. Of course, that is another reason I just buy the Levenger brand.

Along the same lines, my friend Ryan is rocking it again. This time, he is mashing up Field Notes Brand notebooks with Levenger Pocket Briefcases. Anyone who has seen my well battered Field Notes cover will understand how much the speaks to me.

Lifehacker has a good rundown of how to use the nifty new To-Do features Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) Mail.

Hanging with Ryan from Brassing Adds Character

Pen TestBeen a very busy day so far and is only getting more so. Therefore, just a quick post for now…

Had the great pleasure of hanging out for a few with Ryan Roossinck from Brassing Adds Character last night. What a treat it was. We spent hours geeking out over his massive collection of Pens, my hefty collection of notebooks and our mutual eclectic music tastes. I honestly think this kid (yes, I am enough his senior to use that term) is my brother from another mother because we have so much in common it is scary.

The highlight for me though was having the chance to play with a ton of different pens, nibs and ink types. Ryan is a real serious pen freak and has many custom nibs and rare models. He is a deep abyss of knowledge when it comes to pens and their histories so it was fascinating to just sit back and listen to each story behind the pens. His writing is even smaller than mine so he is also a fan of very fine nibs making each pen absolutly drool worthy to use. By the time it was all said and done, Imanaged to fill up a nice sized page of test doodles. Good times…

If I have not said it firmly enough before, Ryan’s blog is a fantastic read and there are more great things to come. If you have any fascination at all with analog capture tools, this is a must add to your daily web reads list.

TaskPaper 1.0

As I have mentioned before, I have been really enjoying a new list management product called TaskPaper which has been in development for a little while now. It is officially released as of today and it is a decidedly simple but stunning effective little app. Not too hard on the wallet either.

What I love about it is that it is basically just an simple interface wrapped around a text file. The features are minimal but effective. It has everything you need and nothing it does not (which seems so rare these days). There are just tasks and projects. Items can have context tags. You can open those contexts and projects in tabs and/or narrow them down with a search. Being that it is basically just a text file, you can easily change the extension and then open it up with any text editor which makes it highly portable.

Larger projects require more levels of detail, so I have not entirely given up on OmniFocus (still in alpha but also very good). I have a couple of “Big P’s” with “Sub P’s” and “Baby P’s” that I still manage there. But for the basics, TaskPaper is just what I need right now.