A hundred dollar laptop must be a piece of shit, right? Actually, there’s some impressive technology in the One Laptop per Child machine being hawked by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte. He discussed it last night on 60 Minutes.

For one thing, it’s the first laptop with a screen you can use outdoors in full sunlight. It’s also built to withstand harsh weather (“You can pour water on the keyboard…You can dip the base into a bathtub. You can carry it the rain. It’s more robust than your normal laptop. It doesn’t even have holes in the side of it. If you look at it: dirt, sand, I mean, there’s no place for it to go into the machine.”)

Other features: A built-in camera that takes stills and video, a stylus area, ear-like radio antennas that give the computer 2-3 times better Wi-Fi range than a regular laptop, the battery lasts 10-12 hours with heavy use, and you can charge it up with a crank or a salad spinner (a minute or two of spinning gets you get 10-20 minutes of reading).

This weekend we pushed a new view in Basecamp called the List view. You’ll find this new view in the messages section.

List view makes scanning multiple message titles a lot easier (one of the top requests we’ve had). It also does a great job of showing you which messages are seeing a lot of comment activity (another top request).

• New messages or messages with new comments are marked green.
• Messages/comments you’ve already viewed are marked grey.
• The number of comments per message are listed at the front of each row.
• The last commenter (if any) is listed in the right column.
• Messages with file attachments have a paperclip icon after the subject.
• Private messages are marked with the red private flag.

The Standard view, which was the only view until we released List view, remains the default. You can toggle between the views at will. Basecamp will remember which view you last looked at and keep you in that view until you switch to the other view. This is a per-user setting.

We hope you like it as much as we do!

Our next Fireside Chat (on Tuesday) will bring together three innovative designer/artists who build engaging interactive experiences:

Jonathan Harris (Daylife, We Feel Fine, etc.)
Aaron Koblin (The Sheep Market, Flight Patterns, etc.)
Marcos Weskamp (Flickrgraph, Newsmap, etc.)

What question(s) would you like to see us ask them?

Our little ad network that could is growing up. We’ve just added Matt Haughey’s brand new site Fortuitous to The Deck. Fortuitous is where Matt documents his “new career in professionally screwing around on the web.” Few people have screwed around as successfully as Matt, so his experience and wisdom is especially valuable.

These sites are The Deck: A List Apart, Daring Fireball, 37signals, Waxy.org, YayHooray!, The Morning News, Design Observer, Kottke.org, IconBuffet, Helvetica: The Film, Computerlove, Vitamin, Fortuitous, Zeldman, Subtraction, swissmiss, Airbag, & Coudal.

If you have a product or service that could benefit by being in front of millions of creative, web and design professionals, check out The Deck. June-August inventory is now available.

Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog describes how some small-scale recording artists are succeeding on the web. One interesting bit mentions the “pay what you can policy” used by Jane Siberry. The result: People wind up paying more than they would at iTunes.

The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a clever system: she has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.

Choose an option and you see stats on what other customers chose:

Her store provides an open letter that explains the policy:

Like many, I’m restless and impatient with living in a world where people are made to feel like shoplifters rather than intelligent peoples with a good sense of balance. I want to treat people the way I’d like to be treated. ‘Dumbing UP’ (as opposed to ‘dumbing down’)....You decide what feels right to your gut. If you download for free, perhaps you’ll buy an extra CD at an indie band’s concert. Or if you don’t go with your gut feeling, you might sleep poorly, wake up grumpy, put your shoes on backwards and fall over. Whatever. You’ll know what to do…This is not a guilt trip. Feel no pressure. The most important thing is that the music flow out to where it could bring enjoyment. And THAT is the best thing you could give me.

The current pricing statistics listed at the site:
18% Gift from Artist
18% Standard
05% Pay Now
58% Pay Later

Avg Price/Song $1.17
07% Paid Below Suggested
80% Paid At Suggested
14% Paid Above Suggested

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying out Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks weekly Fresh Picks Box delivery. You can order a box for 1, 2, or the family size.

Fresh Picks offers year-round home delivery in the Chicago area of local and organic produce, meat, dairy and eggs. They work with local sustainable farms and know the farmers by name.

What’s great about the Fresh Picks Box isn’t just the produce, or the freshness, or the locality, or the great story. It’s all of those things plus on big thing: The surprise. Every week something new based on what’s in season. It’s a really great way to eat better (eat with the seasons), and try new stuff all the time. This last week my box included Burdock Root and Black Spanish Radishes—two things I’ve never had and probably never would have purchased on my own accord.

Each hand delivery comes with a description of what’s in the box, the farm it came from, and some suggested cooking/preparation instructions. A handwritten thank you is included sometimes. It’s really folksy and nice. Irv himself delivered my first order.

So if you’re in Chicago and looking for some good wholesome local organic produce (or meat, dairy and eggs), give Irv and Shelly a try. Yes, you can order online.

Listing problems instead of solutions

“Between the time I write a particular to-do item and the time I finally get around to executing it, I may significantly change the code in that area. Or I may learn something about the code and where it wants to go next. Or the problem may disappear, as a side-effect of some other change. Either way, the solution I might have on my to-do list has a chance of being inappropriate now that the code and I have moved on. So by listing the problem as I originally saw it, I’m giving myself a much better chance of creating the right solution for it – because I’m deciding on that solution in the presence of the full facts.”

Chessboxing

“The basic idea in chessboxing is to combine the #1 thinking sport and the #1 fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most of its competitors – both mentally and physically. In a chessboxing fight two opponents play alternating rounds of chess and boxing. The contest starts with a round of chess, followed by a boxing round, followed by another round of chess and so on.”

See what your site looks like to people who are color blind

“Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see…Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairement.”

Internet radio in danger

“The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). If the increased rates remain unchanged, the majority of webcasters will go bankrupt and silent on this date. Internet radio needs your help!”

Keys to Lean Development

“1. eliminate waste – do only what adds value to the end product 2. amplify learning – when in trouble, increase feedback 3. decide as late as possible – by keeping your options open, you are free to change 4. deliver as fast as possible – because you want feedback as soon as possible 5. empower the team – enable the team members to make the decisions themselves, locally 6. build integrity in – integrity must be cared for from the start 7. avoid sub-optimization – overall success is what’s important – not success or failure of individual tasks.”

The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an “empty” state.

When bits are infinite, the only way to thrive is to pick up the eraser. This is letting the bits go: always looking for reasons to delete, defer, or filter bits that come our way. Anything else allow the bits to pile up…Bit literacy is the constant attempt, in a world of bits, to achieve emptiness.

Emptiness is at the heart of bit literacy, and that may be an unsettling idea. Emptiness often has negative connotations…We prefer to have something. We live in a culture, after all, where more is better. The symbol of success is abundance…Things are different in the bit world, where size and quantity don’t mean much. Bits are abundantly available to anyone with Internet access…The challenge isn’t getting more; it’s making sense of it all, in spite of the glut. The scarce resource is not the bits but our time and attention to deal with them.

Hurst offers practical, opinionated advice on how to get to zero. Just like in his Uncle Mark’s shopping guides, he doesn’t shy away from taking a stand. It’s nice to read someone who says “do it this way” instead of being wishy-washy.

Get email to zero
For starters, empty your e-mail inbox – get it to a message count of zero – at least once a day. I’ve started doing this and it really is a breath of fresh air each time you get to this screen:

Use a bit lit to do list
Hurst advises using Gootodo for your bit-literate to do list but I can’t get enough of the conveyor belt time-sequencing of Highrise’s Tasks list. Either way, a to do list that gets “hibernated” tasks out of your way until you actually need to deal with them is a real game changer.

Prune sources ruthlessly
You have to prune your RSS feeds and other sources ruthlessly. (Hurst cites Richard Saul Wurman who wrote, “One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all. Realizing your own limitations becomes essential to surveying an information avalanche; you cannot or should not absorb or even pay attention to everything.”) So question everything.

Maintaining a healthy media diet requires vigilance about what you’re consuming. Thus it’s important to constantly ask the question, “Is this worth my time?” at every level: the source (“Is this source worth my time?”), a particular issue of the source, an article, even down to the paragraph or section of an article you’re in. If the answer is “no” to any of these, skip it. Move to the next article, or trash the entire issue; and if it happens too often with one source, consider removing it from the lineup altogether.

I was set to speak tonight in NYC at an AIGA Small Talk event, but I had to cancel due to illness. You don’t want what I’ve got unless you have a coughing fetish.

The event has been rescheduled for May 31. Sorry I wasn’t able to make it tonight. I’m glad the AIGA was so cool about it and they were able to reschedule. Special thanks to Khoi for being so accommodating.