In episode 18 of The B&B Podcast Ben and I talked about my couple of days without Internet earlier this week (thanks to a construction mistake up the road), as well as the HP TouchPad and Google+.

This episode sponsored by Authentic Jobs.

Sometimes the best stuff is in the footnotes. Like this one from Lukas Mathis while discussing the application features of Google+:

Jumping in a Mario game is very simple. You hit a button, Mario jumps. But once you know how to jump, you can use this ability to jump over gaps, jump on top of bricks, kill enemies, destroy bricks, hit coins out of coin bricks, get mushrooms, jump on top of flagpoles to get points, and much more. Learning one simple thing unlocks a very deep array of options. These are the kinds of features you want in your application.

Oliver Reichenstein on the design of the Google+ interface, experience, and information architecture. I agree with Oliver’s thoughts — the UI and UX are perhaps the most compelling elements for me to join Google+ despite the fact that there are not yet a significant amount of people on the network.

Weird name. Weirder icon. Serious redesign of YouTube.

(Side note: I am liking the updated designs Google is rolling out.)

While talking about his iPhone home screen on MacSparky, Kourosh Dini (author of Creating Flow with OmniFocus) answers the question, How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad? Dini’s answer is a very thought-provoking aside about non-reactive working.

One thing I actively work on, and have been actively working on for sometime, is maintaining a non-reactive mode of working. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as technology continues its steady advance promising “convenience”, I believe it’s not really a convenience which it delivers. Rather, it’s a shortening of a distance between thought and action. If I’m not careful, this can lead to a more reactive way of working — checking email, twitter, and the like reflexively.

There’s more. It’s worth clicking through to read the whole post.

Just watched this short film and loved it.

Three big updates: (1) Their web-based cloud player is now “officially” iPad friendly; (2) all past purchase through the Amazon MP3 store can now be stored for free; and (3) you now get unlimited music storage with any paid storage plan of the cloud drive.

In short, for as little as $20/year you can store every single song you’ve ever bought from Amazon as well as any other MP3 and AAC music file you have on your computer. Not a bad deal.

Ian Beck, an indie developer for webOS apps, looks at some of the most-popular uses for tablets and reviews how the TouchPad’s App Catalog stacks up against the iPad’s App Store.

Beck is the developer of TapNote, the best writing app, and one of the best apps period, that I came across during my review of the TouchPad.

I’ve never played Angry Birds so I didn’t even catch this when I wrote about it in my review. I never even downloaded Angry Birds onto my TouchPad, so the easter egg is there even if Angry Birds is not. (Thanks to John Wentworth for the tip.)

Sixty-one photos over at Alan Taylor’s big picture weblog, In Focus, covering the 30-year history of NASA’s Space Shuttle program.

If Keyboard Maestro had an unofficial tagline written by me, it would be this: Keyboard Maestro: Bend Your Mac to Your Will.

Written and signed 235 years ago and certainly worth reading today: “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America…”