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Catherine Winters on note taking:

A really simple and good description about taking notes in an efficient way with Notational Velocity and Simplenote. She also mentions Notes as an alternative for Notational Velocity for Windows.

The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals:

I try not to grab my phone and check e-mails first thing. I used to do that, and it’s just not good for you. Instead, I’ll go and brew some tea and try and relax a little bit. But the computer’s always kind of pulling me toward it, so I end up looking at e-mail sooner than I’d like to…

The Bauhaus Chessmen, designed by Josef Hartwig all the way back in 1923, are a great example about minimalism and simplicity in design, but above all a perfect example of applied symbolism.

Each piece is shaped as a combination of cubes, cylinders and balls, representing the way they move on the board. For example, the queen is shaped with a big cube with a ball on representing it can move on any direction.

Another touch of minimalism: the board itself does not have a frame: it’s just the checked field.

The Bauhaus Chessmen is part of the MoMA Collection.

What? That? Up there? The picture? Well, I’ll tell you about that in a second. First, a story…

Before my wife, Princess Bethany, and I got married, we took a course on money management for couples. The course was led by Ruth Hayden, author of the very excellent book For Richer, Not Poorer: The Money Book for Couples. You should buy it. Seriously. You see, money differences and problems are one of the leading causes of breakups and divorce. Anyway, one of the strategies she advocates is to figure out how much money you need every month for your day to day stuff beyond bills, divide it by 31 to find your daily budget, and then get that amount in cash (yes, the dead tree, smokable kind). Spending cash makes you very conscious of exactly how much you have to spend. The rule is that when it’s gone, it’s gone, and you have to do without.

It’s a killer idea and one I don’t do often enough. Largely because getting and dealing with cash these debit card days is kind of a pain. Online purchases in iTunes, Amazon orders, software purchases - there are plenty of things you can’t easily pay for in cash. Which brings me to the screenshot above. It’s an iPhone app called Left to Spend (iTunes link). Here is how the developer describes it:

To use ‘Left to spend’, all you need to do is set up a daily allowance that you KNOW won’t break your budget. Every day this amount will be added to your total allowance. Whenever you spend money you simply open ‘Left to spend’ and enter the amount, which is then subtracted from your total allowance. If your total allowance is running low, you need to slow down your spending and wait for your allowances to accumulate. As long as you never get below 0, you’ll never have to worry about money again.

Yep, a solution to the problem. Cash, or no cash, track spending just the way it was recommended in my story above. It’s an elegant little app that does one thing well (Paging Mr. Mottram!). Not only that but it is an excellent first project for a struggling student abroad so help him out with a few cents from your daily budget.

(Submitted to Minimal Mac by the developer, Lauge Jepsen. Full disclosure; He did give me a freebie code to check it out. Doing so did not guarantee a review – positive or otherwise.)

We’ve seen quite a few iPad stands since it hit the market, but the Padfoot by Dutch designer Michiel Cornelissen is just a bit better than what I’ve seen so far.

It’s just so simple: a piece of polyamide with a slot. It’s lightweight and impossible to break. Perfect! (Thx, Pawel)

Clothing that makes me simplify:

An old post but worth mentioning the subject again. Follow up here.

“If no one releases a popular web browsing platform that lacks Flash support, then web sites that already publish Flash content are never going to move away from it. I think the web would be a far better place without Flash, or, at least, with Flash relegated to a position like that of Java applets: there if you want it, but not a major foundation.”

- John Gruber on Getting there from here.