This is an excellent article along the lines of the 4-Hour-Work-Week. The source site (Lifereboot) looks pretty nice as well.

[ The Working Dead ]

Bill Maher gets it right again.

[ The Truth Behind The War Against Cannabis and Hemp ]

How quickly can you access the exact piece of information that you need at any given moment? How easy is it to harness the experiences and knowledge of others and incorporate them into your own schema?

I’ve been thinking a bit about why some people care so much about operating system upgrades, and I think the answer is so simple as to be elusive:

For those who use computers to enhance their own abilities to learn and grow, an operating system upgrade equates to an upgrade of one’s own mental abilities. It’s all about improving your ability to create, absorb, manipulate, and store ideas and information for easy retrieval.

A good way to think of this is like an AI brain implant in the future. Imagine you have an AI1000 that allows you to interface with Google just by thinking. But imagine that it takes a full 3 seconds and a lot of effort to get the implant to accept your request and go off to do your work.

Now imagine that the new AI5000 comes out that brings response times down from 3 seconds to .1 second, and it also allows you to incorporate the results in a much more integrated fashion (almost as if you produced the answer yourself).

That’s an upgrade.

It’s not just improving your implant, but rather your overall performance as an intellectual. And that’s what we’re doing with our current OS upgrades as well, just to a much lesser degree. That’s why upgrading your operating system matters; it’s because the operating system — even as disconnected as it is from us today — represents an extension of our overall abilities as thinkers and creators.:

Wow, this thing is getting awfully close to Minority Report’s “futuristic” UI.

Tim Ferriss just returned from another mini-retirement, this time in the Slovak Republic. He blogged about the whole trip and even put up a video of some gun play.

But at its core the post was about time management, and it basically consisted of one nugget:

Just remember: if you don’t have attention, you don’t have time. Did I have time to check e-mail and voicemail? Sure. It might take 10 minutes. Did I have the attention to risk fishing for crises in those 10 minutes? Not at all.

Attention, not time. So if spending 10 minutes to do something is going to pull on your attention for much longer than that, judge by the latter not by the former. Email and voicemail are great examples because they recursively hide additional time-drains within them.

Nice concept.:

There are quite a few hidden features of Leopard that will appeal to the Linux and Security geeks among us. One that’s particularly cool is that Leopard’s Mail.app finally includes IDLE support natively.

Nice.

Chris Pirillo just put up his own blog post and video of Apple’s say command pronouncing “OS X”.

He’s all into the video thing these days, so his has the whole voice over deal and larger fonts. If you can stomach another brief foray into pedantry do check it out.

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

In the tech world it’s easy to find debates about how to pronounce things. One of those things is OS X. Most people either say “Oh Es Ex” or “Oh Es Ten“. So which is it? As it turns out, it’s not a matter of preference like most claim — that is unless you simply prefer to pronounce it incorrectly. In this case there is actually a correct way.

At the center of this issue is a simple concept: when an authority for a particular product or movement explicitly states how that thing is pronounced, that pronunciation does in fact become the correct one.

Examples of this include Linus Torvalds clearly stating that Linux is to be pronounced “linicks” ( Video ) and Ubuntu Linux’s creators giving an exact phonetic breakdown of how to pronounce their product [oo-boon-too] ( Ubuntu.com ). The point is that if the creator is still alive (and they offer an opinion on the matter) we can use them as the ultimate authority.

OS X

With OS X many people point to the fact that Steve Jobs clearly says, “Oh Es Ten” when he says the name. That’s fairly convincing, but it turns out there’s an even better illustration: we can ask the operating system itself how to pronounce its own name. OS X comes with a built-in program called say which literally “says” anything you tell it to.

[ Video Demo ]

Why debate it when we can go right to the source? The trick is that if you tell it to say the letter “X”, it says “Ex”. But if you tell it to say, “OS X“, it says “Oh Es Ten“. (See Video)

me@computer me $ say “X”

Ex.

me@computer me $ say “OS X”

Oh Es Ten.

gg.

We were just told precisely how to say “OS X” by the best possible source — the operating system itself.: