In this Monday’s Link Roundup I particularly enjoyed Toss Productivity Out. It questions our usual notion of what it means to be productive. And for the grammar challenged like myself, you’ll find More one-or-two-word confusables a handy reference.
- The iPhone: a Scanner in Your Pocket. “The next time you read a document that contains information about your ancestors, wouldn’t it be nice to immediately scan an image of it and email the image to yourself? Even better, how about uploading the image immediately to Dropbox or to MobileMe iDisk? If you own an iPhone, you can do that right now by installing a bit of low-cost software.”
- More one-or-two-word confusables. “In July, I examined a dozen pairs of words that make copyeditors ask, “Should that be one word or two?” I asked for suggestions from readers for additions to the list, and you didn’t disappoint. Today, I look at another half-dozen word pairs that you wanted to know more about.”
- How to survive the age of distraction. “In the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21st century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat – an even more omnivorous i-Phone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn – and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing.”
- Confessions of a Typomaniac. “Of all the truly calamitous afflictions of the modern world, typomania is one of the most alarming and least understood. It was first diagnosed by the German designer Erik Spiekermann as a condition peculiar to the font-obsessed, and it has one common symptom: an inability to walk past a sign (or pick up a book or a menu) without needing to identify the typeface. Sometimes font freaks find this task easy, and they move on; and sometimes their entire day is wrecked until they nail it.”
- Toss Productivity Out. “Toss productivity advice out the window. Most of it is well-meaning, but the advice is wrong for a simple reason: it’s meant to squeeze the most productivity out of every day, instead of making your days better.”
- The typewriter lives on in India. “India’s typewriter culture survives the age of computers in offices where bureaucracy demands typed forms and in rural areas where many homes don’t have electricity.”
- Teen volunteers to ghostwrite life tales for patients. “For some teen volunteers at Banner Del E. Webb Medical Center in Sun City West, they’re discovering more about many patients’ backgrounds — and themselves in the process — during one-on-one interviews through a program called Life Stories. Started in January, the program offers two volunteers — this summer it’s 18-year-old Zack Welch and 15-year-old Lauren Harrell — a chance to get to know patients of all ages by asking questions relating to life as a child, interesting vacations, their jobs and careers, and dating and marriage.”
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