Kevin Kelly:

Everything, without exception, requires additional energy and order to maintain itself. Not just living things, but the most inanimate things we know of: stone gravemarkers, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper. None will last very long without attention and fixing, and the loan of additional order. Life is maintenance.

Most surprising to me has been the amount of sheer maintenance that software requires. Keeping a website or a software program afloat is like keep a yacht afloat. It is a black hole for attention. I can kind of understand why a mechanical device would break down after a while — moisture rusts metal, or the air oxidizes membranes, or lubricants evaporate — all of which require repair. But I wasn’t thinking that the intangible world of bits would also degrade. What’s to break? Apparently everything.

Frank Chimero’s setup:

For writing, I use TextMate or TextEdit. No frills: just give me a blinking cursor. I’ve tried things that create a “distraction-free” writing environment, but I found that switching and fiddling just became another distraction for me.

CaféTimer is the quintessential example of an app that does just one thing well. It’s a coffee timer for people who make French Press. That’s it. You launch CaféTimer and it immediately starts counting down from 4 minutes.

Ben and I talk about Tweetbot. Also we talk about Seattle and how it is, in a way, not unlike Narnia was during the days when the White Witch had her way.

Just wanted to say that Elliot has been killing it on his blog the past several weeks. Recent examples include his article about allowing yourself a sick day — a good reminder for those of us who work for ourselves, and his piece about a cloud-centric Mac setup which I found to be interesting and entertaining.

In short, go to Mail → Preferences → Accounts → Advanced → “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” and select: “Don’t keep copies of any messages”.

I just freed up 15 GB of storage by changing this one setting.

But I didn’t stop there. I then decided to go prying to see what else I could free up. I went into ~/Library/Mail/ and saw that the folder was still 15 GB. So I began checking the size of each folder, and discovered that ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Recovered Messages (for my old work email account) had 9 GBs worth of emails and their attachments. I looked through these messages to see they were mostly old emails with hefty attachments. So I selected all the messages, covered my eyes, and hit Delete. (Naturally I backed it all up just in case. Also, I don’t recommend trying this at home.)

All in all, I just cleaned up 25 GB worth of unnecessary email files that were being automatically saved and archived on my local drive.

I already keep a local Archive folder with the emails I want to keep and the rest I delete. Giving up 25 GBs of disc space isn’t worth the option to have a local copy of all my emails. What you lose here is the ability to do a local search of every single email you’ve ever received or sent. But I rarely am in need of one of those locally archived emails. I am, however, daily in need of that 25 GB.

(Via Chris Herbert. Thank you, Chris!)

Many, many thanks to Macminicolo.net for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Macminicolo.net is the industry leader in providing world-class hosting and data center services exclusively for your Mac mini server. They host over 750 Macs minis, they’re located at one of the most advanced data centers in the world, and plans start at just $35/month.

Should fix that odd and creepy FaceTime bug.

A very cool iPhone app that I never used (simply because I rarely listen to music on my iPhone) is now a very cool Mac app that I actually do use.