Thank god for my wife. Really. If it weren’t for her patient, gentle fashion influence over the last four years, I would probably be wearing a utility belt today. Or worse, a Utilikilt.

The two of us will go into a store and I’ll see, let’s say, a cool vest with lots of pockets, or perhaps a techno-fanny-pack, and I’ll make a beeline for it like I don’t have to walk in public with normal people. Deftly, my better half will steer me away from such geekbait and toward a handy distraction, like a shiny button, or confetti.

Naturally, I read Cool Tools, and I purchase probably half their recommendations. Often, I’m left with something that works great at doing what it does, but does something I didn’t need to do.

I buy and toss a lot of gadgets, but it hasn’t all been fruitless. A precious few actually save me time and effort and money. Unfortunately, all those savings were lost in the search for more and better gadgets. C’est la vie.

To help you avoid my fate, here are tools that, for me, were actually less trouble than they’re worth:

• Alphasmart Neo A godsend for anyone who works with type. The Neo is a bare-bones text editor designed for educational use. It can go hundreds of hours on AA batteries, and it has a big, chunky keyboard that’s a pleasure to type on. The screen is a teeny black-and-white number out of the late 80s, which is good, because it makes editing yourself basically impossible. Typing hasn’t been this effortless and distraction-free since my Dad’s old GRiD laptop. When you’re done typing, you plug it in via USB and dump the text into the editor of your choice. As Steve Jobs would say, “Boom!”

• Casio Data Bank 300 I bought this to supplement my Polder timer. I wish it vibrated, but the fact is I can quickly plug in my day’s schedule first thing in the morning and rest confident that, no matter how crazed things get, I’ll get a little ping just in time to move on to what’s next. Surprisingly, my wife thinks having a small Atari strapped to my wrist actually looks good! The Data Bank 300 features the very latest in digital technology, circa the Reagan administration, with the capacity to hold 300 events and contacts, as long as they’re a dozen characters long each. But it works great for my purposes.

• Brother P-Touch Home & Hobby Labeler Whether or not you worship at the shrine of GTD, this small, reliable, battery-powered labeler is an incredibly handy thing to have around home and office. It’ll help you organize your filing cabinet, sure, but the uses don’t end there. For instance, my wife was interrupted by a couple of friendly Jehovah’s Witnesses this afternoon, who buzzed our apartment, making the dog bark like crazy. Solution? A label reading “Do Not Buzz!” where our apartment number used to be.

• Levenger International Pocket Briefcase + Pilot G2 minis The International Pocket Briefcase works great for me because it can hold a bunch of index cards on one side, and an array of color-coded shorties on the other. As for the pens, well, that’s an extremely emotional subject for most productivity geeks. I would never presume to tell you that my choice of pocket pen is better than yours, even if it is.

• Tide to Go Stick I spilled wine on my tie shortly before proposing to my wife. A future in-law quickly produced one of these magic wands and saved the day. I still managed to knock over a poker by the fireplace when I went down on one knee, but at least the stain was gone. Got one of these in every bag I own.

• Staples Black Plastic Rotating Desk Organizer Forget that mammoth desk thingy from The Apprentice. This sucker is just big enough to provide easy access to pens, ruler, scissors, paper clips, etc., without sucking up all the desk-estate. Got one on every desk.

• Handmade pocket tissue holder For Larry David, a real man should have mints, tissues, and a pen on him at all times. Problem is, when I carry one of those Kleenex packs in my jacket pocket, it gets all shredded and linty after a while. So I asked my wife to sew a pocket tissue holder for me, and it’s awesome, all the way down to the embroidered initials. Unfortunately, she’s my wife, so you’ll have to troll Etsy for one of your own, but I highly recommend the effort. Nothing like pristine tissues.

Photo by revjim5000.

Hate spending time keeping track of where your money goes? Check out Mint, a new and free money management tool for people who hate managing money.

Mint allows you to view all of your banking and credit card transactions side-by-side, making identifying all of your transactions much easier and faster than ever before.

How does this help you? We make it easy for you to track down erroneous charges or bank fees, and keep a closer eye on your money.

Mint even lets you label your transactions so you know what bills you need to split with your friends or roommates, know which ones need to be reimbursed for your company, and more.

I’ve been in the private beta for two weeks (it’s now public), and it’s become my favorite financial tool.

The setup is simple. Just enter the login information for your financial accounts and Mint aggregates all the data, presenting you with an easy-to-read dashboard of your finances. It’ll even suggest ways you can save money based on your spending habits.

Mint’s off to a great start, but it needs a few missing features to really round-out the service. For example, I’d love to see a bill-pay system and a way to track stock portfolios.

Note: This is not a paid review, but they did interview me in June. Click here to check it out.

Coda is a new web development tool that combines a text editor, FTP client, css editor, web browser, terminal, and reference library into one killer app. I haven’t had a chance to fully play with it yet, but this looks like one beauty of a program.

If you like hand coding your sites, you know the pain of switching back and forth between multiple applications. Coda simplifies the web development workflow and makes the process of site creation easier and more efficient.

We build websites by hand, with code, and we’ve long since dreamed of streamlining the experience, bringing together all of the tools that we needed into a single, elegant window. While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.

Some screenshots:

For more, check out the Coda homepage.

If you’re color-challenged like me, you’ll find inspiration in kuler’s growing library of user-submitted themes. Better yet, you can create your own themes for others to rate, download, and critique.

A well-designed interface of color wheels, swatches, and sliders makes it easy and joyous to make perfect color combinations. Once done, you can download your theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange files (.ASE) to use in your Adobe apps.

Like many new web-apps, kuler is a “technology preview” (beta), so beware of bugs and downtime. Adobe implies it may charge for using the tool later. If Adobe wants the love of designers and color enthusiasts, it’d better keep it free.

Thanks to Mark Roudebush for sending this to me.

Check out the free widget with funny British spelling, ColourMod. This handy widget lets you pick colors and automatic convert their values into CYMK, RGB, HSV, and Hex. All at a glance.

It’s available for both Dashboard (Mac) and Yahoo! Widget Engine, formerly known as Konfabulator (PC & Mac).

Despite the hideous renaming of Konfabulator, it’s still worth the download:

ColourMod (Mac)
ColourMod (PC & Mac, requires Yahoo! Widget Engine)

I get weirdly excited about such geekery, so I hopped over to OfficeMax and bought a 12-pack to test them. Here are my impressions:

What I like

My two favorite features are the magnetic body and built-in eraser caps. Both help ease the problem of losing markers and having to hunt for erasers. The triangular body is also a nice touch, preventing the markers from rolling off flat services.

In addition to functional enhancements, TUL’s also made some thoughtful aesthetic considerations. The visual design of both the packaging and markers is clean and restrained, avoiding garish logos and decoration. The color palette includes designer-friendly colors such as Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK). If they’re gonna stick to the whiteboard, they might as well look good, right?

At $18, the price for a 12-pack is also reasonable, just $5 more than a standard 12-pack of Expo markers.

What I don’t like

While the packaging was easy to open, the markers fall out too easily. Once it’s out of the box, it’s difficult to put it back in.

On a freshly cleaned whiteboard, l also noticed one marker didn’t stick so well to the whiteboard. It might have been a defect, but it’d be nice if future versions use slightly stronger magnets.

The bottom line

Despite very minor flaws, TUL Dry Erase Markers combine style and functional features to put traditional markers to shame. Instead of feeling shame, you’d be proud to show off these markers.