C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe -new-window about:blank

Stikkit makes organizing your daily details as simple as jotting down a note or firing off email. Stikkit’s “little yellow notes that think” talk to the productivity applications you already use, as well as to friends, coworkers and family, giving you a universal remote for your life.

After spending an hour reading up on the service, I was excited about the possibilities and started creating some basic “stikkits” as a test case. A trip to the Stikkit forums a day later revealed the unfortunate truth: Stikkit, one of the SXSW 2007 winners for Technical Achievement and widely applauded by Web Worker Daily, Michael Calore (Wired blog writer), Lifehacker, TechCrunch UK, O’Reilly Radar, and many others… is unofficially mothballed.

The signs are all there in the forums:

No, they haven’t killed it at all — but they have said that they will not develop it any further, and it’s obvious from the developers’ complete silence on these forums — and from the non-response to emails that I’ve sent to Values of N about Stikkit — that they are not supporting it. This certainly means that none of the existing bugs and glitches will be fixed, but it also makes me a little nervous about investing too much of my life in Stikkit. It’s a small step from “we’re not developing or supporting this any further” to “we’re pulling the plug on this.” So I for one am looking for other apps that will do what Stikkit does for me, but haven’t found anything yet.

and

I moved all my data into an OmniOutliner document. It seems hopeless asking unresponsive developers for features the program needs or to fix bugs that make it hardly usable. Any day now I expect Stikkit to go offline, or maybe it will remain perpetually in its buggy state - I’m not sure which would be worse.

and

That’s it. I’m gone. I thought Value of n was working on Sandy and I just had to be patient. But the support for Sandy has been next to non-existent too and Stikkit doesn’t work well enough to use so I’m ‘outta here’.

The last post in the admin-controlled “Announcements” forum is dated September 10, 2007 and the “Bugs” forum is strewn with unanswered bug reports.

Google Calendar : Dates and times I need pop-up or email reminders for. Incredibly important even for scheduling a quick reminder to call someone in 2 hours.

Google Notebook : I mostly interact with the clunky iGoogle Gadget interface to this and use it to take down, well, notes. License numbers for software I own, project ideas for down the road, random musings, product ideas for my side company, tracking money owed to me by a certain person, etc. Your basic notepad.

Remember The Milk : My todo list for my many items that just need to be done sometime.

Why can’t I have a calendar, todo list, and notepad in one free web-based application? Or perhaps a $20/year plan? Backpack from 37Signals is $60/year for their basic plan.

I hope someone points me to something in the comments of this post.

I’ve looked but can’t find the Thunderbird bug report where I added my “I hate this too!” comment a few months ago, but I’m pleased to report that I’ve found a workaround.

Your specific mail filtering details will likely differ from mine, but the basic idea should be the same. For the sake of following what is below, here’s how I filter my mail.

1. On my mail server I use Spamassassin which scores messages and inserts various message header lines before delivering them to you. One of these header lines is X-Spam-Flag: with a value of either YES or NO.
2. In Thunderbird, I filter “all messages with a X-Spam-Flag YES” into a folder called Spam. Traditionally this has caused a new mail alert (in my case sound).

The solution:

1. Edit the existing filter mentioned above.
2. In addition to the action for filing the message into the Spam folder, add another action for “Mark As Read”

That’s it! Bear in mind that you will no longer see a “new message count” next to the folder you’re filing into. That is, Spam will end up in the Spam folder but you’ll have no notice that there are messages in there until you select and view the contents of the folder.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is.

Continue reading if you dare.

1. The now-defunct shareware editor “Lemmy” which I’d licensed
2. The port of Elvis to Windows
3. and finally, when I’ve been able to tolerate it for very long, Vim

I’ve always been ecstatic that Vim exists. I’m more ecstatic lately that I stumbled across Cream (for Vim).

The name was inspired by the convergence of several ideas. The initial thought came from my coffee drinking habits as I usually don’t prefer my coffee “black.” It reminded me of my opinion of Vim at the time–despite its inherent sophistication–I needed something to soften it.

Vim has a steep learning curve. It was not primarily designed to be easy to use, favoring performance and technical flexibility instead. Because it is so different, learning to use Vim takes time.

Cream shapes Vim into an interface you probably already know (sometimes called Common User Access [ext.link] ). Whether you are writing emails or developing large software applications, Cream saves you time and gets you up and running quickly.

If you, like me, are just looking for a vi clone for Windows that has syntax highlighting, I highly recommend Cream instead of plain Vim. Just download, install, configure your preferences (they auto-save), and get to it. You should note that Cream’s default behavior is not like traditional vi (insert/command modes), but it’s easily changed so don’t freak out.

OneLook’s reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.

Check out the example’s at OneLook’s reverse dictionary page to see the useful stuff you can do there (Found at Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site.)

I found myself back at Lucida Console, again, until today when I came across Bitstream Vera Sans Mono in 100% TrueType format. If you’re looking for a nice monospaced font for programming and such, give it a look.

1. If you don’t already have your “Bookmarks Toolbar” visible, make it visible by selecting the View menu, then Toolbars, then Bookmarks Toolbar.
2. Go to Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks, and create a folder under “Personal Toolbar” named “Ongoing” (or whatever you’d like).
3. As you come across things you’ll likely only need to hang onto for a little bit, just drag the Firefox tab in question up to the “Ongoing” folder shown in your Bookmarks Toolbar.

That’s it. Simple. I never said it was complicated.

Cleanup is easy, too. Just click your “Ongoing” folder in the toolbar, then right-click on any old bookmark and select Delete from the menu.

If you want to check the status of all bookmarks at once, just click your “Ongoing” folder and select “Open in Tabs” from the menu.

I have no idea what you’d do in Internet Explorer to do the same thing.