From the ‘not a good idea’ department, the Zing! Spoon.

Until recently I would end up in travel situations, that were otherwise going along swimmingly, sitting in frustration in a hotel room, or a friend’s guest room, trying to figure out where to plug in my various electronic gear to charge. Then I spotted one of these mini power strips from Monster called Outlets To Go. The first one I ran across had four outlets but they make them in 3 and 6 outlets as well. My favorite is the 3 - it is the smallest and lightest and I rarely have more than three items to plug in. I was so happy with it that I bought one for both Jillian and for my Mom. They run around $12 at Amazon. I think we may carry a few in the IT “store” with our USB flash drives and extra power supplies that staff can pick up from us.Oh, and I’m not sure whether to share this last part or leave it as a surprise, but the connector that goes into the wall has a soft blue nightlight built-in.

Ran across this on Cool Tools yesterday - a free, downloadable PDF Physics manual written with skill and humor. And at 1500 pages, thorough.

How do objects and images move? How can animals move? What is motion?

How does a rainbow form? Is levitation possible? Do time machines exist? What does ‘quantum’ mean? What is the maximum force value found in nature? Is ‘empty space’ really empty? Is the universe a set? Which problems in physics are still unsolved?

Download at http://www.motionmountain.net/text.html

There are lots of “cleaners” out there for Mac OS X. With 10.4 I used OnyX, a UNIX-based GUI that easily let me clear caches, purge downloaded files, and clean up other out-of-the-way places in OS X. After upgrading to 10.5 I found Hazel. Hazel cleans based on rules you write. So, if you’re looking to free up space by clearing out your Download folder of items more than 7 days old, all you have to do is write a rule in Hazel and it will automatically delete items in the specified folder that are older than 7 days. If you’re a fan of iTunes’ smart playlist you’ll quickly take to Hazel.

I often save documents to my desktop with the intention of moving them later, but then never do. I also have the habit of following strict naming conventions with my documents. These habits lend themselves wonderfully to Hazel. For example, I wrote a rule in Hazel that said ‘if there is a document that contains “safety” in the file name and has the extension .doc anywhere in my (jgalante) users folder, then move it to the “07-08 Safety Notes” folder in Documents’ (see screenshot). Now when I’m taking notes at the Safety committee meeting and I save to my desktop, Hazel autmotically moves the document to my Safety folder.

That’s a pretty simple example of what Hazel can do, but it gives you an idea. You can also use Hazel to automatically apply color labels, comments, and other metadata to files and folder. Noodlesoft, the makers of Hazel, have a great website and are actively creating a community where people can share their rule recipes and tips (the import/export feature of Hazel makes sharing very easy). Hazel is still young, but it’s robust and with an active community behind it I can see this becoming as popular and powerful as Quicksilver.

I’ve been enjoying practicing Inbox Zero as described by Merlin Mann at 43Folders. For the last couple of weeks I have kept my inbox close to or at zero and WOW, it’s an amazing feeling.

Merlin’s got quite a rant going on the subject which is well worth reading.

Get yourself over to www.inboxzero.com and then let us know in the comments what you think about it.

The latest revision of Ubuntu, 7.10 aka ‘Gutsy Gibbon’, came out this week. I updated my home computer last night and am very pleased: Flash and Java are now included, both of which used to be huge hurdles. Also included in the new distro is Compiz Fusion which gives a slightly new aesthetic, 3-D effects, and some advanced desktop features (this Fusion demo will blow your mind!). Fusion requires a newer video card, but it plays very nice with older hardware. Most exciting, IMO, about Gutsy Gibbon is that you can print. Finally. It’s the simple things in life that make me happy, and successfully printing a page is a joyous event that has been absent in my previous experiences with Ubuntu.

Check out Brian DeLancy’s history and review of the new Ubuntu at O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com

As some of you know I have been in search of the perfect syncing tool for a while now. I’ve tried many and none are perfect. In fact, many of them screw up my data in creative ways. Plaxo may be not be an exception, it’s too early to tell, but it’s worth noting here because of a couple of properties. One it is a nicely designed web app. Two it integrates very nicely with iCal.app and Addressbook.app on my Mac. Though I have been too afraid to touch the iCal sync yet. Third, and the most interesting, it does a bit of social networking moves like LinkedIn and Jaiku.

What am I looking for? I would like to keep my Entourage and Mac apps in sync. That’s done nicely through Sync Services which Entourage integrates with. But, I also want to post my calendar to Google’s Calendar for others that use that system. That’s where it get’s wonky.

More on Plaxo later. Check the comments.

FreeMacWare posted RDC Menu the other day. It’s an application stashed in the status bar that holds MS Remote Desktop Connection bookmarks. The interface is very similar to the acutal RDC cleint, and you can choose to use either RDC 1.3 for OS X, or the new 2.0 Beta. RDC Menu lets you quickly launch multiple connections to your favorite Windows computers.

Of course, if you’re using Quicksilver, you can make bookmarks with the actual RDC client, save them somewhere, and then open them and launch RDC with QS.

UPDATE

Quicksilver dominates RDC Menu. RDC Menu is a handy little app and great for any geek, but it’s just not fast enough for my QS trigger fingers. Different (key)strokes for different folks.

Perhaps this is a good thing for the proverbial mother-in-law computer. It’s cheap up front, it runs linux that looks like windows, it comes with gobs of apps and connectivity, and has a subscriber service that does network backup of personal files.

In addition, it is touted as “green” and is certainly low power consumption. If it breaks in the first three years they will send a replacement unit at no charge.

For a $99 start and $155/yr subscription over three years you’ve got $563, or basically the cost of a Mac Mini.

Mac latops draw a very small amount of power while closed (aka “sleeping”) to preserve the contents of its memory. This small draw of power slowly drains the battery. If a Mac were to “hibernate,” like a lot of PC laptops can do, the memory would be saved to the hard disk and then draw no power at all. Apple doesn’t provide a “hibernate” option, so that’s where Deep Sleep comes in handy. Deep Sleep puts a Mac laptop into a hibernated state, writing the memory to the hard disk so that it draws no power while closed.

I tried Deep Sleep out this past weekend. On Friday, with a fully charged battery, I put my MacBook into “deep sleep” and went home. I didn’t open my computer until Sunday night, and when I did it still had a full charge! If I had just put it to sleep, I’m sure the battery would have been in the 70-80% range on Sunday.