Today is the annual Comic Book Fonts sale. All of their fonts (even the ones that sometimes sell for >$400 are $20.11. Some of my favorites are Hedge Backwards (used above) and Comicrazy. So go ahead and start the new year in true nerd fashion: watch some football and browse fonts.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Since the very first iPhone, we have all been wondering when Apple will finally turn the switch and let us sync iCal to-do items directly to our iPhones. Indeed, an entire cottage industry of to-do applications has grown up around this void. For those of you still waiting for this sync, your prayers have been answered, not by our friends in Cupertino but instead the coding wizards at BusyMac.

BusyToDo is a $5 trouble-free, lickety-split syncing solution to get your iCal to-do items on your iPhone. I played with it through beta and had no troubles.

Sam England put together a fun site including several internet nerds and their christmas wishes, including yours truly.

One of my only complaints in the iPad OmniFocus review was its inability to process an e-mail inbox as easily as the Mac OS X version does. This is a limitation of the current iteration of iOS. I posted recently about using a mail rule to get around this. Today the Omni Group made this even easier unveiling the Send to OmniFocus Service.
Using this new feature you can take any mail message and forward it to send-to-omnifocus@omnigroup.com. For this purpose I created a new contact in Address Book called OmniFocus with the magic e-mail address so this will be easier from the iPad and iPhone.

The Omni elves will then apply their secret sauce to your e-mail and send it straight back to the originating e-mail address. The returned mail will have a Send to OmniFocus button that, when pushed, opens a new inbox item in OmniFocus with the message subject as the task title and the message content as the task note.

This works great for adding tasks from an iOS device or (gasp) Microsoft Outlook on your work PC. This works nearly as well as Omni’s Clip-O-Tron 3000, which also embeds a link to the original e-mail in the task so you can call it back up with one click.

While not perfect, this solution certainly lowers the barrier of entry for getting tasks into OmniFocus. I’m looking forward to see where Omni goes with this next.

Merlin Mann recently turned me onto Nebulous Notes, an iOS text editor and, after using it for just a few days, I’m hooked.

Nebulous Notes is another Dropbox linked text editor. It lets you access any folder in your Dropbox to open and save files. Now this is all fine and dandy, but there are several apps that do this. What separates Nebulous Notes are the extra features.

Specifically, macros. The top line of the keyboard includes a list of macro keys that you customize. It includes several useful pre-built macros, like a date and time stamp, but you don’t have to stop there. If you are coder, add curly brackets. Markdown nerd? Add square brackets and parenthesis. It is all user customizable
so figure out what you need and go nuts.

There is also support for TextExpander. Between my mushrooming TextExpander snippet library and custom-built Nebulous macros, I have no excuse to do anything in the app but write. You can see why Nebulous Notes has quickly found its way to my heart and iPad home screen.

Additionally, the writing experience is very comfortable. There are several fonts, including an assortment of easily read monospaced fonts and you can adjust the text size. (Why is that suddenly becoming important to me?) There are several writing themes, my favorite of which is Matrix Coder providing the green text on black screen typing experience of my Apple II days. Once you have everything just right, hit the full screen button and go to town.

You can save your finished text to Dropbox or mail it off. Nebulous includes AirPrint support and works nicely with my Printopia enabled printers.

Nebulous Notes is $2 and universal, working on both the iPhone and iPad. Go get it.

It’s official. I’m guessing they’ll suck us all in with new iWork apps the same day.

Patrick Rhone loves his and so does John Chandler. With the generation 2 improvements, I believe the MacBook Air is going to have a lot more staying power than generation 1 did. The explanations of how they are getting by with just 64GB hard drives are fascinating although I’m not sure I’d want to slim down that much.

Eddie hits another homer at Practically Efficient.

As explained in my review of the Audioengine P4][p4] passive speakers, Audioengine has recently expanded their products to include unpowered speakers. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that they also now sell the N22 Amplifier to power your passive spearkers.

The $199 N22 looks like something from a Kubric movie, monolithic with a single dial in the middle. It looks great next to your Mac, on a shelf, or beside your TV.

The N22 measures in 7”(H) x 2.75”(W) x 5.5”(D) and weighs about 3 1/2 pounds. The back of the N22 includes several connections including gold plated connections for two speakers, and inputs for RCA and mini-jack connectors. There is also a powered USB port that can be used to turn your N22 wireless amplifier (with the optional W1 Wireless transmitter) or charge your iDevice. There is also a variable line out that accommodates a subwoofer or external amplifier.

Both audio inputs are active at the same time so you can run two sources simultaneously. I did this with a Garage Band audio filie and my WX-11 wind controller (a sort of midi saxophone) and it worked great.

The N22 delivers 22 watts per channel and cools through passive convection. The unit runs remarkably cool. There is a discreet headphone amplifier that works well with your headphones of choice.

With all of our digital media migrating to just a few devices, we no longer need the complexity of amplifiers that we had when there was a phonograph, CD player, tape deck and (gasp) 8-track plugged in. The N22 offers a legitimate light-weight option to the traditional receiver/amplifier without the compromises you’d expect.

Audioengine provides the same 30 day trial policy for the N22 that it has for its speakers. So long as you don’t damage it and keep the original shipping materials, you can return it within the first 30 days for a full refund.