DIY web site Instructables details how to keep your plants healthy by building a self-watering planter from a couple of plastic IKEA storage boxes. The concept is simple. Two boxes are nested inside one another; the bottom box holds the water, and wicks made from string carry the water into the top portion, where the soil and plants live. All you need to do is make sure the bottom portion has enough water, and the rest should take care of itself. If your forgetful green thumb tends to turn things brown, this self-watering planter might be the perfect project. If you’re looking to go really advanced, check out how to build an automated drip watering system. Self Watering Mini Garden [Instructables]
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Free, cross-platform note-taking application Evernote offers a handful of tools for clipping content into your Evernote account, including the newly released Web Clipper Firefox extension. Aside from a Clip to Evernote entry in the right-click menu and a new toolbar button, the extension works just like the Clip to Evernote bookmarklet (perfect in its own right if you don’t want to install another extension). The inline dialog autocompletes tags and adds the item to your Evernote account without interrupting anything you’re doing. A Web Clipper keyboard shortcut would be nice, too, but the extension or bookmarklet are a must-have for anyone getting started with one of the best note-taking tools available.
Evernote Web Clipper [Evernote]Mac users who like to keep their workspace free of shortcuts and folders will love this “oh, duh!” tip for removing your hard drive from the Desktop. In Finder’s Preferences pane, in the General tab, uncheck “Hard disks” under “Show these items on the Desktop” to clear away the icon. (You can do the same for external or optical disks and network servers, too.) Combine this with the Ejector utility for one-click external disk ejection and you’ll have reached clear desktop Nirvana. Leopard: Hide Your Hard Disk from the Desktop [Tech-Recipes.com]
Windows only: Free application Minimem reduces the memory usage of individual running applications on demand. Similar applications which promise to make your computer run faster by freeing up RAM are a dime a dozen, and many of them aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. After giving Minimen a try on my PC and reading FreewareGenius’s detailed review (along with the author’s comments on that post), Minimem appears to be the real deal under the right circumstances. Minimem removes unnecessary memory pages from running processes you tell it to optimise. The program isn’t the most useful for applications that already have great memory management of their own, but it seems to work well on many applications—both small and large—that have a larger footprint than they should.
If all the methodology of the best GTD applications loses you in the productivity shuffle, there’s nothing like a classic, simple to-do list to keep you on track. You’ve never had more options—both simple and robust—for managing your to-do list as you do today. Today we’ve rounded up our readers’ five most popular to-do list managers. Photo by elusive.
Thoughtful blogger Merlin Mann publishes a three-part series of posts on the constant battle creative people face between making things and making themselves available to others. Mann writes: If the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you’d originally thought you were. [...]Do you generate more IMs than comic panels? Have you drafted more web comments than scenes in your screenplay? Or, for that matter, do you find you’re taking more meetings than photos these days?
Reading this, one suspects Mann is talking to himself as much as anyone; I for one am thrilled when he makes time to write about the topic of attention. Part 1: Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence [43 Folders] Part 2: Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have [43 Folders] Part 3: Making Time to Make: One Clear Line [43 Folders]
Find out when events in your favourite sport are going down in a single Google search: Simply enter the event name and “Olympics” into the Google search box to see upcoming dates and times, like tennis Olympics, or diving Olympics.
Google’s Olympics Onebox [Google Blogoscoped via Garett Rogers]
