I really like the looks of the new Doxie Flip scanner. My friend Mike Rohde posted a great review and video of it in action. That said, I’ve been using TurboScan for iPhone for a couple of years now to use the camera for essentially the same thing for a couple of years now. It’s not the prettiest app out there but it works really well and gets the job done.
With the recent end of the Enough Podcast, it was really nice of Robert Wall of Untitled Minimalism to put together an archive and torrent of all 225 episodes and make it publicly available. I’m seeding it as are many others. Grab it and listen to any you have missed
Designer and consultant Josh Gross exploring a really interesting idea he’s calling One Hour: "I’m making myself available for consulting one hour at a time, starting at $1. Each time someone purchases an hour, the price goes up $1."
The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, the pseudonym under which J.K. Rowling wrote the book, is one of the finest whodunits I have ever read. I was engaged and locked in pretty much as soon as I started it. She has an amazing ability to sketch characters quickly and such confidence in her subject matter that you might swear she has written a hundred of these before. In fact, I would argue that the writing here is stronger than many of her Harry Potter books. Highly recommended.
Speaking of books, I’m really excited for Kevin Kelly’s Catalog of Possibilities: Cool Tools. As a fellow fan of the late, great, Whole Earth Catalog and a long time reader of his Cool Tools site, I can’t imagine not having such a valuable resource in my arsenal.
C.J. Chilvers reminds us of the many reasons why paper still matters. My favorite: "The benefits of holding your work in your hand is a pleasure digital workers are too often deprived of."
Mike Vardy reminds us of how much we can get done in only 7 minutes. Try sitting and doing absolutely nothing for even 5 minutes and see how long it feels when you are not regularly accustomed to doing so. I think we would all do a bit better if we had a better sense of the passage of time and the ways we can choose to fill it.
Finally, I really, really, enjoyed this piece by Jack Cheng on living for a time in a yurt and the insight it gives on the many lives we live.