You can spend quite a lot of money on a notebook stand, but here's an idea that costs a lot less: use a $0.95 Bokis bookend from IKEA. Something to bear in mind when summer approaches and you need some air circulating around your beloved PC. (If you're in the mood for saving money, the same post at IKEA Hacker also looks at how you can use a cheap shoe rack as a monitor stand.) [Eganz via IKEA Hacker]

Adding another internal hard drive to your desktop computer isn't difficult, but a notebook is a whole other ball of wax. Still, blogger Fewt details how he got the job done and came out the other side with a second 100GB hard drive in his laptop. The process requires an extra notebook drive, a toggle switch, some elbow grease, and a good dose of soldering, but the results are impressive. Granted, a simple external hard drive is a lot easier if you're willing to carry it around in your laptop bag. If not, check out the details of how Fewt did it.

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Dell's new Studio notebooks are pretty spunky, but from a productivity point of view they have an even bigger benefit: support for wireless broadband from both Telstra and Vodafone. While building in a 3G modem is not unusual, most notebooks tend to be tied to a single carrier, which is bad news if you live in the wrong reception area or already have a long-term contract with another provider.
The flexibility is welcome, but it isn't absolute. You have to select the carrier you want at the time of purchase, and the machine will then ship with a new SIM card, leaving you to contact the provider and select a plan. And if you already have a Telstra or Vodafone 3G data account, you're seemingly out of luck: the official word from Dell is that only the provided SIM is supported and there's no scheme for using an existing subscription. So it's fiddlier than a "one modem fits all" solution, but a useful step forward nonetheless.

Something about the simplicity of this make your own leather-bound notebook project really appeals to me. Firstly, it's aimed at beginning level DIYers. Secondly, when you fill it up you can add more pages or remove the old pages and add new ones to start the book afresh.
Note that it's a soft leather cover, not a hardback. It can fit between 50 and 250 pages.
The ArmorGeek tutorial includes a list of the leatherworking tools and materials you'll need , and a downloadable pattern.
Suitably customised, this looks like it could make a wonderful gift as well. Nice!

Softback Leather Book [ArmorGeek via MAKE]

Whether you're adding notes inside a book or sticking a request to your co-worker's monitor, you can automatically keep a copy for yourself with Rediform 2-Part Self-Stick Message Pads. These wallet-sized notepads keep one copy of your notes in the book, and let you tear off a sticky version for placement elsewhere—in short, they're Post-It's with carbon copies built in for easy follow up. Office Depot's got a pack of six of these pads for $8.

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The latte-sipping hipster sitting next to you at the cafe just pulled out his Moleskine to start jotting, and your buddy rolls her eyes and says the Moleskine's totally jumped the shark. Productivity enthusiasts love their overpriced designer notebooks, and being office supply fetishists ourselves, we've featured quite a few here. But which ones inspire the most pen-to-paper lust in you? After the jump, vote for your favourite fancy-pants notebook.

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The new Chronotebook day planner takes a different approach to laying out your tasks and events—instead of representing your day in a boring sequence of lines or on a grid, it displays time on an axis, like an analogue clock. Each page represents either the AM or PM, and you write your plans like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Check out more photos of the notebook after the jump.

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Noteclipping web service Evernote got an interesting writeup over at the Wired Compiler blog today. You may have used it before - it originally launched as a Windows app - but it's now available in Mac web and mobile versions. I was intrigued because it looks like it has some very cool image recognition capabilities - for example the ability to read handwriting or recognise words in pictures (so searching for the word Ninja will turn up a photo of a billboard with "Ninja" on it, for example). Another cool thing is that the service gives you a unique email address for uploading content to your Evernote account - anything you email will be automatically added to your default notebook.

You can see some of the cool features in the video above. I've applied for the beta - so if I get in I'll write up some more detailed notes on what it's like.

Evernote offers a backup for your brain [Wired Compiler blog]

The how to details are a little sketchy, but the results of this DIY speak for themselves - it's a pretty slick looking laptop sleeve made from an old wetsuit.
Creator Alex says you can use any old neoprene wetsuit, as long as the piece of fabric which covers your back is big enough to fold over the laptop.
Because neoprene tends to be on the thick side, one thing you'd want to work out (which isn't covered in his post) is how fat a needle you need to use in your sewing machine (or maybe Alex should have asked his mum, since she did the sewing). :)

Neoprene Macbook Sleeve [Tinkerlog via MAKE]