I've worked at a summer science daycamp for the past few years, and this was one of the projects the kids did. It's especially cool if you mix seeds into the paper - then when your top-secret spy note is received (because, clearly, you are a top-secret spy) it can be crumped up and...planted.

I thought maybe it was just referring to the tick of the clock. Y'know...time is of the essence, and all that.

I definitely have a window with http://dictionary.reference.com open at all times when writing something like that...though more often than not it's easier to just have a gmail window open and hit "spellcheck" :P

"Conky" for Linux will allow you to do much the same thing, and of course you can write your own scripts and output to a file so Conky can display it on your screen :)

As someone who has used Digg since its infancy, I was a bit disappointed with v3. Feature wise, it's great. It gives users more options like which topics they'd like to track, better searching, and improved friend features. However from a design perspective, I feel its moving in the wrong direction.