And speaking of the State of the Union speech, President Obama will giving his Address tomorrow night at 9:00 pm EST. If you don’t have a TV, you can watch the live stream on the White House website or iPhone app.

The delivery of the State of the Union Address has come a long way. Did you know it used to be called the Annual Message and was simply delivered as a written letter on paper? It wasn’t until 1913 that the Address was first given as a speech. And then, a decade later, technology entered the scene. The first radio broadcast of the Address was in 1923; the first televised Address was in 1947; Internet webstream in 2002; HD TV in 2004; iPhone and iPod touch in 2010; and (since the White House app runs on iPad, albeit in double-pixel mode…) iPad in 2011.

Many thanks to Useful Fruit software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote Pear Note. Pear Note is a note-taking utility app with a bucket full of useful and well-thought-out features. It’ll recored audio and/or video while you type in your notes. It tracks the timing of what you type with the position of the audio/video track which is great for going back to hear what was said and when, based on the notes that you typed. Pear Note could be especially useful for those who take minutes at meetings. If you take notes or have an assistant who does you may want to get a license.

Download a free trial online, or pick it up in the Mac App Store.

The whole PR pitch scene is a disaster. You either don’t know what the PR is even talking about, or you can tell they don’t really care if you’re interested or not; they’re just spamming you because you have a blog.

I don’t get 50 PR pitches a day like Pogue does — I get about 5 or 10 a week. Usually the email is just text that has obviously been copied-and-pasted from a generic write up, or else it’s just a giant image or PDF attached to an email. And so I just delete 90% of them.

Do they even know they’re sending it to me or are they just using a giant list of “tech blogs” or something? Do they even care if I am interested? I doubt it. They’re just throwing their news out there and hoping for the best… Deleted.

Maybe they’re putting such little effort into their PR pitches because they don’t think it’s worth their time to address me directly. It’s not like shawnblanc.net is a mega site. But by sending annoying PR pitches all they’re actually doing is wasting my time and theirs.

I do, however, get an occasional pitch that I can tell was actually written with intent. And I almost always reply back to say thanks for the heads up. Alas, from there it’s not uncommon to get a generic reply or even no reply. And then, a week or two later, I get a follow-up pitch: “Hey, we just wanted to know if you had a chance to review and post about our app?” Seriously? Deleted.

People should take note of David’s favorite PR Pitches. It’s amazing how far a little bit of thought and some personal connection will go.

It is a rare day when I actually get in contact with someone who cares about the product or service they are pitching. And I wish I could promote and review all of those people’s products and services. But since this weblog is still a part-time gig for me, I simply don’t have the time. Maybe one day that won’t be the case.

Enough is the brand new Minimal Mac podcast, with Patrick Rhone and his co-host Myke Hurley. Congratulations to both of them for kicking this off. I’m subscribed; I have no doubt that it will be fantastic.

Anthony Morelli wrote a python scrip that is grabbing all the links from the #pastblast Twitter hashtags and tossing them into a shared folder on Instapaper. This way you can easily pull in all these articles to your own Instapaper account. And since Instapaper de-dupes automatically you shouldn’t have to worry about seeing the same article over and over again.

Pure genius! Here’s how to get it:

• Log into Instapaper
• On the right-hand side bar click “Add Folder”
• Choose to add “Another user’s Starred items”
• In the text box for Username to subscribe to, type: pastblasting@gmail.com
• Click “Create starred-item subscription folder”
• Enjoy

Thanks, Anthony!

Paul Graham:

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

(This link is for “Blast from the Past Day”.)

John Gruber’s review of the 15-inch PowerBook, and perhaps my favorite DF article of all time.

(This link is for “Blast from the Past Day”.)