Spoiled

J.J. Abrams in Wired, "on the Magic of Mystery"

This is why I don't read rumor sites.

How (not) to Lock your Bike

Check out Streetfilms' three-part series on how to lock (and not lock) bikes in cities. I'm definitely still in the B-C range, but am learning fast.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Garbage 2.0

This is incredible:

Taipei has strived to achieve "zero landfill, total recycling" by 2010, 30 years ahead of the UN's trash targets. It will probably fall short, but its policies are still exemplary. The city has encouraged the private sector to build composting facilities and recycling plants, and requires residents to pay for trash collection by the bag. Garbage trucks playing Beethoven's "Für Elise" and Badarzewska's "The Maiden's Prayer" collect trash, which must be in city-approved bags, from residents, who toss the bags into the trucks themselves. Taipei promotes trade in secondhand goods and introduced new methods of kitchen-waste disposal -- one pilot program turns food waste into pig feed. The result: The volume of trash has been slashed by well over 60%.

Emphasis mine.

[via Fast Company, photo from Wikimedia Commons]

Easy Kindle Clippings

The main reason I use a Kindle is because I'm a chronic annotator*. It lets me highlight passages as I read them, which is minimally disruptive to my reading flow. The problem later though is, how to get those annotations into a human-readable format—the Kindle's MyClippings.txt file is definitely not this.

After some digging, I found Erik Lundqvist's MyClippings Java app for both Mac and Windows. It ain't pretty, but it'll export the file into HTML, CSV, or DOCX (for Word). From HTML, I just copy/paste into Google Docs, which makes my notes searchable.

How do you handle your Kindle annotations?

* Whenever I read anything (book, magazine, whatever), I take notes from it—quotes, passages that resonated, things to research further, etc. And because I'm a geek, I must eventually type up said notes, so that I can search them later. My nerdy note-taking goes way back—I've still got notes from 2000, when I used to scribble them into MacNoteTaker on my Palm V in Graffiti. Yikes.

Update: Dunno when this went live, but you can now see Kindle clippings on Amazon's site.

Pete Seeger

Give this 6-min PBS doco clip about Pete Seeger a watch, it's just fantastic.

Good Advice

Via Dipanshu, from the Global Pagoda.

Scratch those Itches

This is a great 37s post, and shows that everyone's capable of creating and innovating by scratching an itch. Doesn't matter what industry it is, or career, or materials, or place. Itch-scratching is hacking, plain and simple.