Benchmarks like these are coming in from all over the place, proving that Lion’s FileVault does not cause a significant bottleneck to your system’s performance. In fact, it’s likely you won’t even notice that it’s on. The truth is, the benefits of Lion’s disk encryption far outweigh the nearly insignificant drawbacks, especially if you’re talking about a new laptop with an SSD in it.

Several years ago, if you one who needed a portable the conventional wisdom was to buy the best possible desktop you could afford and the cheapest laptop you could get by with. Then, as laptops became more powerful, the general consensus changed to: buy the best possible laptop you can afford and hook it up to an external monitor. And now it seems the pendulum is swinging back to the dual-machine setup — people who were once MacBook Pro-only are going to MacBook Airs plus iMacs.

It took less than 3 weeks for Omni Group customers to reach 30% adoption of Lion. Snow Leopard took 2 months to reach 30% adoption; Leopard took more than 3 months.

This falls in line with the current stats for visitors to shawnblanc.net. Approximately 35% of those using Macs are on Lion.

Kevin Lipe’s review of his family’s first Apple computer, a Performa 578, that they bought 20 years ago:

These were the days of System 7.5, when extensions were extensions and men were men.

(Lipe’s article is the first in a new series that Stephen M. Hackett is starting on his website called, “Old Mac of the Month”. More like this please.)

A new utility from Apple that lets you put Lion Recovery onto an external drive without hacking:

The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.

Let the productive, office-supply aficionado take note: The Levenger Circa (which I love) now comes in Action Method notebooks and inserts.

Nice profile of Kickstarter on The New York Times by Rob Walker. I did not know that when Chen, Adler, and Strickler started Kickstarter they asked their friends to post projects to get things rolling and to set the tone.

The best tech product videos on the Internet.

A great interview with designer, Christian Helms. It’s worth reading for a look at the Frank branding alone.

Rdio’s fantastic iOS app is now universal.

My thanks to Timing for Mac for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Timing is a utility app that runs in your Menu Bar and keeps track of where you’re spending time on your computer.

Something I said in my MacBook Air review was that my office isn’t my office, my laptop is. The vast majority of work I do is done right here on my laptop. I may be in my home office, on the back porch, out of town, on an airplane, or any number of places.

I am always seeking to be focused and intentional about how I spend my time, and that I stay focused. And they say hindsight is 20/20, which is where Timing comes in. I’ve been using this app for the past couple weeks — and by “using it” I mean I installed it and simply let it run in my Menu Bar. The app does all the heavy lifting of tracking what apps I’m active in, what websites I’m spending time on, and more. Then I can bundle those apps into “projects” (or categories, as I consider them) of work.

MarsEdit, Byword, TextEdit, iA Writer, are all in my “writing” category. Mail is it’s own category. And the list goes on. Also you can have the same app in multiple categories / projects.

You have to give Timing a few weeks to really get some good useful stats that you can look over in aggregate to see how you are spending your time, where you’re spending it, and if there are certain apps or websites you need to be more conscious of in order to be more focused and productive.

Timing is on sale in the Mac App Store for a few more days. Highly recommended.