Catherine Price wrote an awesome article for Slate about the Vitamix 5200:

When you first buy a Vitamix 5200, the so-called Ferrari of blenders, two thoughts are likely to pass through your mind. The first is “Did I really just spend more than $400 on a blender?” And the second is “This machine is going to change my life.”

Anna and I have this very same blender in our kitchen. We bought it two years ago — at the recommendation of about 13.4 different friends of ours who also own Vitamixes — so we could save money by making our own baby food (my wife was pregnant with our oldest at the time). Little did we know how awesome it would be. Did you know the Vitamix can make homemade whipped cream in about 7 seconds? It literally takes longer to get all the ingredients into the blender than it does to turn them into a dessert topping.

This season’s Productive Macs software bundle has some excellent Mac apps.

Keyboard Maestro is one of the most indispensable apps on my Mac. And I know a lot of people nerd out over Default Folder X as well, but I never got in to it. The rest of the apps in the bundle are new to me.

You can get al 7 apps for $30, making it worth the price of admission for Keyboard Maestro alone.

This is an excellent piece by Kyle Baxter. I linked to it in my article last night about the iPad Air being the first iPad without compromise, but Kyle’s article deserves a link all its own.

The Doxie Flip is a new, battery powered, small flatbed scanner. It’s just the right size to scan your Field Notes pages (or anything else that size), and then tote around with you or keep in your desk drawer.

The folks at Doxie were generous enough to send me a Flip last week and I’ve been using it to scan in some of my own Field Notes pages and saving them to Day One. The Flip scans to an SD card — which easily pops into my MacBook Air — and the scan quality is very high. My first question about the Flip was to wonder why the scanning bed wasn’t big enough to scan in a spread of Field Notes pages. But as I’ve looked through my own Field Notes notebooks, I realize none of them have related spreads — every page is its own island of scribbles.

The Flip is $150 on Amazon. Also, Brad Dowdy has much more in-depth review (as well as having much better handwriting than I).

CJ Chilvers:

Marketing phrases like “personal brand” come and go, and are mostly the work of marketers who believe to own something, you must re-name it.

Go back decades before such buzzwords pervaded our lives and you’ll find the foundation of this concept was more simply called your “reputation.”

Very sad to hear this news. Everpix was the best alternative-slash-replacement to Apple’s wimpy Photo Stream. I loved that Everpix would upload all the photos from my iPhone, my wife’s iPhone, and the shots from my E-PL5, and then have those available from any of our iOS devices and on the Web.

Apple’s photo stream stinks in comparison. It maxes out at 1,000 pics and doesn’t automatically include any of the shots I take with my E-PL5 and put on my Mac.

I’ll be checking out Loom and PictureLife — as those seem to be the only other real services in this space — but with a significant amount of caution. If Everpix was the best and they couldn’t make it work who knows how Loom or PictureLife will fare in the months and years to come.

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Kerry Dawson:

It is probably one of the most exciting devices to have emerged from Apple for a while. Although the iPad Air has predecessors and nobody can say it doesn’t have a great lineage to call its own, it stands unique in its line.

Agreed. (Via Ben Brooks.)

David Chartier:

I’ve used an iPad 1, 2, and 3 for writing, creating media, and reading, but last year I switched to an iPad mini and gave up that glorious retina display for a single reason: weight. […] After spending a weekend with a 128GB silver iPad Air (T-Mobile), I think this is the quintessential iPad.

The iPad Air is a great improvement overall but, by and large, the dramatic weight loss and thinner bezel are the stars this year. These things are so important, Apple changed the device’s name so you can’t miss them.

After a few days, the iPad Air still feels shockingly light. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s funny how “huge” my iPad 3 feels now compared to the iPad Air.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out once the Retina iPad mini ships and people have had a chance to use and compare both. I am extremely impressed with the iPad Air, but I’m going to try and hold off from making any definitive statements until I’ve had a chance to use the new mini as well. I have a feeling it will be equally if not more impressive than the iPad Air.

Here’s an excerpt from article I wrote about a year ago:

For a maker, uninterrupted work time is valuable because it allows us uninterrupted thought. Large blocks of free time so we can focus, freely (or not so freely, because, well, you know how it goes sometimes).

But when we interrupt our own time with habitual checking of email, Facebook, Twitter, et al. then it’s like having micro meetings all day long.

Unfollowing everyone, unsubscribing from everything, and setting up auto-responders in our email seem mostly seem like band-aid fixes. They help in some regard (I’m trying something similar myself with Twitter) but underneath the problem is still there. Yes, apply the band aid, but that alone does not mean the “problem” is “healed”.

Because it comes down to our own choices. Are we going to spend our time the way we want to or not? Are we going to do the work we say we want to do or not? Intentions are dandy, but real men get to work.

Ouch. Seems to get more and more relevant every passing day.

Speaking of creative genius and the Internet in our pocket, here’s a great piece by Mat Honan discussing something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. That if technology is distracting us so much that we are always feeling the need to disconnect, maybe what we really need is some good old fashioned self control.

A short NPR segment with Oliver Burkeman from The Guardian, talking about some of the highlight points found in Mason Currey’s new book, Daily Rituals. (Via my sister.)

Things like time management, focus, the tyranny of the urgent, ego depletion, etc., seem to endlessly fascinate me. I haven’t read Currey’s book yet — I just learned of it this morning — but I’ve added it to my Kindle queue.

But you’ve got to wonder about some of these habits, right? I mean most of these studies and conversations are about the habits, rituals, and “tricks of the trade” of creative guys who never had the internet in their pocket. Hemingway never had a Twitter account.

Not to imply that being a morning person is no longer the secret to creative genius. Nor that you shouldn’t have a set time to do your work regardless of if you feel inspired or not. Nor that you shouldn’t take breaks during the day to let your mind and body wander away from your creative work. In fact, I’m personally quite an advocate of these very same habits.

However, I can’t help but wonder what these types of studies and conversations will look like 50 years from now. When the most creative artists of our generation are studied. Surely there’ll be something in there about how they didn’t check their email or Twitter accounts and how they used an AeroPress.

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My thanks to MightyDeals for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.