Many of the comments were written at the time (which explains why some of them are in the first person):
- 100 email hacks (e-book). No matter how good you are at managing email, there’ll be something useful for you in this little treasure trove, which was written by the makers of Sanebox (which is great, by the way).
- How to be happy: There has been a lot of scientific research into what causes happiness and what doesn’t. Fortunately, the research has been summarized into a single book, ”The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubormirsky. Even more fortunately, someone has summarized the whole book into an eight-minute rap. Here it is. (It’s also available from iTunes, Amazon, etc..) It contains some really useful, counterintuitive advice that might (should) change your life. It’s hard to take it all in in one go, so it’s worth listening to repeatedly.
- I’ve just started using Workflowy. It now has an iPhone app. I was looking for an alternative to iThoughts HD, which is a great mind-mapping tool, but it doesn’t sync to Mac well. Mind maps are just indented bullet point lists. They have the advantage that they appeal to spacial memory, but they take up a lot of screen space. Workflowy seems great so far.
- Google Alerts doesn’t work very well these days. Mention.com is an alternative.
- A profile of Stumptown Coffee Roasters (video): A great example of a promotional video. It follows Pixar’s Rule #1: “You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.”
- Unathletic dog. Not work, but it made me laugh.
- I’m only saving this for the following extract: “In 1986, Michael Foot was the subject of one of the best-known newspaper headlines of all time. The Times ran an article about Foot, who had been put in charge of a nuclear disarmament committee. The headline stated “Foot Heads Arms Body.” Although originally written as a joke by editor Martyn Cornell, the paper ran it.
- If your site’s functionality is complicated, the following tools let you create a “welcome tour” for it in less than 15 minutes: Taurus, Intro.js and Joyride. The easiest way to understand how they work is to click on Taurus’s “Start Demo” button. You can create a quick tour in about a minute.
- ÜberConference. A voice conference solution that has a great web-based management interface. You can see who’s on the call and who’s speaking, and you can mute people or put “earmuffs” on them. We haven’t tried it yet, but it looks useful.
- From Shopify, The Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping (e-book).
- The Ergotron Workfit S is the best solution I’ve found so far for a standing desk compatible with Apple 27” monitors. I ordered two of them, and really love them. If you have an Apple Cinema Display, you’ll need one of these Vesa mounts. I also bought a muvman chair for my standing desk set-up, to support me while I’m standing. It’s apparently good for your posture, thanks to the four-degree angle. The height can be adjusted easily and quickly. It feels a bit weird at first (it’s not very comfortable but that’s not what I look for when I work) but you get used to it quickly.
