If you’ve ever tried to get work done in an environment that prevents you from doing so, you may appreciate this photo essay from The Guardian, showing the rooms various writers write in.

Themes seem to be a lot of books, and a modicum of clutter.

[via Lifehacker]

If you’re tired of wrangling broadcast times for television out of tv.yahoo.com or tvguide, I’ve finally found a simple, decent television calendar site. CAT allows you to display only a whitelist of the programs you’re interested, as well as simple nomenclature for episode numbers, mouse-over synopses, and correct time display for your time zone. All this in a clean, text based table.

There is a debate about whether students should be ‘brought into the future’, and educated with tests such as “find this information on the internet”, instead of rote memorization, for instance espoused in this Seth Godin post.

While we want students to be able to find information on the internet or in a library, I don’t think relying on this exclusively is a great idea. This is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to the “x% of students can’t find Atlantic Ocean on a map” issue. Basic knowledge about the world is something you don’t always have time to go and look up. I think one of the important inputs to finding information quickly is already having a significant base of knowledge to draw on for context and understanding.

Wired has an article about the increased importance of design to manufacturers like HP and Dell, and area Apple has historically been strong in. A lot of traditional engineering business are rapidly turning into fashion businesses.  Technology is not enough.