I'm reasonably certain that Brett Terpstra is made of flesh and blood like you and me. I've seen photos of him with real people. I've bothered him quite a bit via email. I've even chatted with him over Skype.

He looks human. He sounds human. But with increasing regularity, he goes and does things that aren’t within the realm of a mortal Mac user’s abilities.

Marked.app is the latest bit of demigod-esque Markdown magic to escape from Brett’s workshop. It’s a clever little thing with a simple purpose. It shows you an HTML preview of a Markdown text file—any text file in any editor.

Just drag a text file onto the Marked.app icon, and it starts doing its thing. I was also able to send a Markdown text file to Marked using LaunchBar:

1. Navigate to file
2. TAB, then launch Marked

Or, from Finder:

1. Select file in Finder
2. Invoke LaunchBar
3. ⌘G, TAB, then launch Marked

If you like writing in Markdown, Marked is well worth your hard earned $3. Get it from the Mac App Store, or learn about other (very cool) features I didn’t even mention at markedapp.com, a gorgeous website worth visiting anyway.

To search your Gmail archives from LaunchBar, go to Mailplane, then press space.

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*** Central air conditioning and heat. Electronic security gates. Well lit areas. 24-hour video recordings. ***

The typical ad for self-storage promises better living conditions than those enjoyed by most of the world’s human population.

Suburbs of stuff are everywhere. You can hardly drive a mile in most cities without seeing their brightly colored rooftops.

Even though the average square footage of American homes has more than doubled since the 1950s, we, the people who own more than we can use, still have to rent apartments for our shit.

We’re simply out of room. Out of room for grandma’s dresser, junior’s nightstand, Uncle Johnny’s faux wood paneled floor speakers. And especially, out of room for reason.

The savings fallacy

Most people (that I know) who cosign their material possessions’ rent check are people who think that it’s cheaper to keep their shhhhtuff in storage than “waste it.” Put objectively, they’d rather waste their money than their stuff.

Landlords of stuff are happy to oblige the misguided judgement of the chronically possessive. $20 billion dollars a year happy.

A flat for your furniture can easily run $100 per month or more. That’s $1,200+ a year to you and me. Is the crap that no longer belongs in your home but will look great in Billy’s college apartment in five years worth $6,000? I sure as hell hope so. Because that’s what you’re paying for the privilege of pack-ratting it.

Nutty idea: Donate that dust-coated assemblage of particle board and staples. Take the tax deduction. Buy something that actually fits Billy’s apartment in five years. And put that $6,000 toward his tuition. You’ll need it.

Evict

Before you tacitly enter a long-term contract to subsidize the sedentary lifestyle of your inanimate dependents, question whether they’re really worth the cost. I think you know the answer.

In his inaugural post at Disruptive Economics, Timothy Lee captures the essence of technological disruption:

What makes a technology disruptive is that it’s dramatically simpler and cheaper than the technology it replaced. To users of incumbent technologies, disruptive technologies almost always look like toys. Think, for example, of how a $1000 PC in the late 1970s looked to someone used to using a mainframe or minicomputer that cost tens or hundreds of times as much.

But while disruptive technologies often start out looking dramatically inferior to incumbent technologies, this tends to change rapidly. In the late 1970s, thousands of hobbyists who couldn’t afford “real” computers bought PCs and began playing around with them. Most of them didn’t produce anything especially groundbreaking. But those who did, like spreadsheet inventor Dan Bricklin, found a large market for their innovations.

I’m seeing exactly the same sort of thing play out in PC-centric environments with the iPad—a shiny, Applely thing that many viewed (still view) as a toy. I mean, somewhere toward the end of the seventh day, God ordained that real work requires a Microsoft Office logo somewhere on the screen, right? Right?

Nope. It turns out that workplace technology innovation didn’t end in the 1990s with Word and Excel after all.

But there’s an even more important message in the chunk I tore out of Timothy’s article: Spreadsheets probably wouldn’t have been born without PC experimentation. Someone had to play with those then-toys to create applications. And the applications, in turn, cast the toy—the PC—in a productive role.

The same is true for mobile app markets today—a pretty damn huge adjacent possibility found tangential to smudgy, played-with touch screens.

Maybe chickens didn't start making eggs until people played with them. I don't know. But long live toys, and long live those who play with toys, I say.

(h/t to Andy Howard for showing me Timothy Lee’s new gig.)

Companies love selling shortcuts because people love buying shortcuts, no matter how illusory.

Five minutes to a flatter stomach. Take a pill, lose twenty pounds. Buy a kit, make $50,000 a month in real estate.

Timothy Ferris wrote a whole book about bypassing work, The 4-Hour Workweek. The gist: outsource your workweek down to a little nub so you can maximize playtime.

All of these baits appeal to a very basic human impulse: “I want their reward, their dessert.” It’s an insatiable sweet tooth that grows longer every day in the decadently consumer-centric First World.

I think life is too short not to enjoy as much of it as reasonably possible. But people who focus only on dessert implicitly make the assumption that fun can’t be found in work.

So they work very hard at avoiding work. And they buy gimmicks sold by smart people who, ironically, worked very hard to achieve their ostensibly cherry-topped lifestyle.

But just imagine for a moment that there exists some path of work that doesn’t suck. Imagine that it is possible to enjoy making things, not just consuming things.

If you could only figure out how to sweeten work with play, you’d find enjoyment in the pursuit itself, not in coveting the thing you pursue.

Most of life happens between desserts anyway. Not during.

My new Instacast habit has made perusing podcast archives way easier. I just stumbled across this Merlin nugget in 5by5’s The Pipeline, episode 7:

Everything you do in life has an opportunity cost… You don’t want to obsess so much over opportunity cost that you’re always calculating fake money, but at the same time, every time you agree to do something, you tacitly agree not to do ten thousand other things.

So practical, I could hug that paragraph.

To create a new PDF from pages in an existing PDF, select the desired pages in the sidebar, copy (⌘C), then File > New from Clipboard (⌘N).

Related: Create images in Preview

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On this day in 1776, some very brave people had the larger-than-life stones to declare independence from an oppressive empire. They wanted freedom so badly they were willing to risk every security they possessed—their wealth, their land, their blood, their children's blood.

Kinda makes the idea of freeing yourself from the oppressors in your life not such a big deal, doesn’t it?

Celebrate independence, especially that which you win for yourself.

I love plain text. But I also love me some checkboxes.

Listary is a very cool app with a simple purpose: Add checkboxes to plain text lists stored in Simplenote.

For me, Listary solved a very specific and very persistent problem. At irregular but recurring moments, I need to create checklists when I’m away from my Mac.

Of course, I would love to do it all in OmniFocus, but I don’t know of a way to paste a text list into OmniFocus on my iPhone and have it become checkbox-atized.

Example: the mobile grocery list

When my wife emails me a grocery list, I copy it into a Simplenote file called ‘groceryx’1. I used to check off items by putting an “x” in front of each item.

This system worked sorta okay for short lists, but longer lists required hair pulling and damning inanimate objects, specifically my iPhone.

I had to position the cursor carefully to type an “x”, words often got overwritten, re-ordering items was tedious, and it didn’t hide checked off items.

All those problems are history now that I sync groceryx with Listary, which makes it look like this:

You can even re-order items by dragging them up and down. (Very useful for putting yogurt next to milk instead of next to broccoli.)

As you check off items, Listary edits the plain text file like so:

Peanut butter
Bread

/ Yogurt
/ Milk
/ Cereal

The beauty of Listary, of course, is that it adds a nice checkbox UI on top of a plain text file. Since everything stays in plain text, you can edit it anywhere—like in nvALT, Simplenote, or any of the other bazillion plain text apps for iOS and OS X.

My already-very-affordable Arq S3 backup solution just got even cheaper: AWS transfers in are now free. (via Shawn Blanc)

If you’re bored at work, you probably waste a lot of your day on Twitter, Facebook, and other time accelerators. Instead, try wasting time planning your escape. Waste time on your product, your ideas, or simply waste time looking for another job.

Goal-oriented time wasting helps “the man,” too. The sooner you move on to better things, the sooner he gets to replace you with someone willing to work during the time they’ve sold.

Sven Fechner on boundless contexts:

Today, where ever you are, most of your tools are always available. Your smartphone travels with you and allows you not only to do phone calls, but read and respond to email, browse the web, access collaboration and corporate tools and do your banking. Most of the time we also either carry a laptop or a tablet computer with us, which provides even more tools and possibilities. And with 3G networks and WiFi hotspots being available at nearly every street corner, internet connectivity has long moved away from the static office or home environment.

It’s an excellent point. I find myself confronting the "everywhere context" problem more and more often. My solution has been to pare down the number of contexts I use.

Sven went so far as to rebuild his entire OmniFocus system using a more cerebral set of contexts. Definitely check out his post if your OmniFocus contexts have become a little too omnipresent.

I really believe that decisions about security are about

1. accepting that there are no risk-free options,
2. maximizing value and practicality given the level of risk you're willing to accept, and especially
3. eliminating needless risk.

When it comes to passwords, there's a lot of needless risk-taking out there.

Troy Hunt:

Sony’s breach is Sony’s fault, no doubt, but a whole bunch of people have made the situation far worse than it needs to be through [password] reuse.

Troy found that 92 percent of passwords were identical between two separate Sony systems. Perhaps even worse, two thirds of people that had accounts at both Sony and Gawker used the same password.

Given that 90 percent of companies (90!) have had some sort of security breach in the last 12 months, I'd say there is little "risk" left when it comes to wondering whether your passwords will be exposed. It's nearly certain they will be at some point.

But you can at least “sandbox” the damage by using a different password for each account.

I would have more sympathy for you if maintaining lots of unmemorable, unique passwords were hard. But it’s not. 1Password makes it really easy.

Until companies figure out how to better operate in the password-dependent world we've created, it's up to you to protect yourself.

To add a new action between two existing actions in a project, copy/paste an action on top of itself, then change the name of the duplicate.

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Whether you’re an app developer biting your nails at a WWDC keynote, a teacher in a contracting school district, or a cubicle worker waiting on a Friday 5 PM email announcing the sale of your division, it’s coming.

Change is in the cosmic mail.

Since the economy took an extended leave to Shitsville in 2008, I’ve seen a lot of disruptive change. The idea that you go to college, settle down, and work in the same job or make the same product for the next three decades is an idea that now belongs in a museum of 20th century Americana.

I don't care who you work for, stop thinking of them as a boss or a company. Think of them as a client. Think of yourself as a business. And start thinking like that right now.

One day—maybe soon—your client will tell you they no longer need your services. When that happens, the business of you had better be ready.  Businesses usually need more than one client in their lifetimes after all.

Even if you can't diversify your client base now, at least diversify your portfolio of interests. Focus is more important than ever, but you have to be ready to focus on something else.