Apple Address Book Exporter is a little utility that does one thing, and one thing only: it will let you export your Mac OS X Address Book as a tab-delimited plain text file. Apple doesn’t include this feature in its application, though you may want to have it to create mailing lists, upload address books to webmail servers, or whatever…

via Gwenhiver.net – Applications – Address Book Exporter.

Five trends that will shape business technology in 2009

The year 2009 will be challenging for CIOs. Here’s how to play your hand.

via Five trends that will shape business technology in 2009 – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Strategic Thinking.

Stephen Miller: “xFruits – As far as out of the box mixing and mashing, xFruits probably has the most features. This one has also been around for a while. I remember checking it out in the past. Their service features an RSS aggregator, RSS to web, RSS to mobile, post to RSS (I guess for creating a blog that only has a feed?), RSS to mail, RSS to OPML, OPML  to mobile, mail to RSS, RSS to voice and finally RSS to your blog.”

via Feed Consolidation for Niche Blogs | Stephan Miller.

The later though only due to both a unique and essential 3rd party add-on: Reply Butler from the German company ITSTH. Essentially, Reply Butler automates the repetitive part of emails, the ‘Deas’s’ and ‘Kind regards’s’ etc., and stores your preferences per contact  (e.g. Language, formal vs informal etc.). Now, one actually can focus on the message of the email.

Well, on the Microsoft Office Suite item, the Mac versions simply always seem one generation behind the Windows versions, which is quite annoying! Running Microsoft Office through Parallels gives full access to latest Microsoft functionality on a Mac… great, the best of the two!

Fascinating article by Gottfried Schatz on bonics, the field of engineering ‘which tries to copy living materials’, describing also where science stands in terms of synthesizing living organisms and ethical implications.

Another insightfult article about longevity written by Rolf M. Zinkernagel, stating that ‘in evolutionary terms humans are built to survive 25 years’ or that humans consume ‘over last 12 – 18 months of life’ around 60% of healt costs’. He forms his main conclusion that ‘major overall factors affectign mortality and morvidity improvements will come from behavioural adjustments’.

Furthermore, Urs Widmer confirms in his article on the discovery of genes controlling longevity what all of us already knew, that ‘restricting calorie intake’ … ‘is the most widely accepted intervention to extend life span’ – and even more:  calories intake should be lowered by 40% below normal to maximise lifespans. Well, this although this is in line with my new year’s resolution for 2010, I will see how far I can take it this year.

http://tinyurl.com/yj2gulp