Published on October 26, 2004
Everyone’s reporting on the announcement of the Special Edition U2 iPod, and the new iPod Photo. However, I hadn’t heard of another new Apple product until my friend linked me to a story at www.macobserver.com about the iPod Socks.
$30 gets you a pack of 5, each a different color. These are supposed to be used to “keep your iPod warm” according to Jobs. If you want to use them as footwear it will set you back $60 to have matching colors on your feet. I don’t find the idea very attractive personally. I’d much rather have a form fitting case, or a custom solution, like a certain girl I know made.
Published on October 25, 2004
This is a test of flickr
Flickr is an online image hosting service that has direct integration with many of the major blogging services, including Blogger and Livejournal.
I just ran out of disk quota in my Earthlink account, so I need new places to store my images. Photobucket just started limiting it’s free accounts to 25 megs, so I figured I could get Flickr a shot (recommended specifically by Blogger). It has already beaten out Photobucket with it’s Blog post integration. Awesome!
Edit:
Well… I’ve done some more digging, and I’m a bit less excited. This DOES look like an awesome service. There’s an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, and upload tools for both Windows and OSX. However, this is not a free service. It is in beta right now, but once out of beta the free version will have a montly upload limit of 10megs, however it still looks like it’s unlimited storage. For $59.99 a year, you get 1gig of upload a month, and unlimited storage. If you buy during the beta period, it’s $41. That’s cheaper than a .Mac account, but still about the same price as getting 2-5gig of shared hosting space. Of course, with hosting space, you can use it for ANYTHING, not just pictures.
Check it out at www.flickr.com
Anyone have any thoughts on this service, or can anyone recommend others like it?
Published on October 24, 2004
I haven’t been carrying my Sony Clie NX80V around as much as I used to. Why? Because it’s fairly large. Throughout the day, I carry a LG VX6000 cell phone, a Rio Karma Digital Audio Player (DAP), keys, a wallet, and my PDA. I usually wear jeans, giving me 4 pockets and 5 objects. Two of those pockets cannot hold 4 of the objects, because I have to sit down. So I’m looking at replacing my Clie with something slimmer.
Well now PalmOne has officially announced the Treo 650, and it got me thinking… why just make my PDA smaller when I can merge two devices into one? I used to not be a fan of convergence between phone and PDA in my own personal world, because I was such a power user of my PDA. This summer I got my first laptop, the 12″ Powerbook, and my reliance on a powerfull PDA has diminished. Now my paper-writing, news reading, IM chatting, e-mail reading, and graphic viewing duties are taken care of on my very portable laptop. This leaves my PDA as a way to quickly retrive information. As mentioned, my pockets are getting crowded, and unfortunately my PDA often stays behind as I can take limited notes and photos with my cell phone.
Treo 650
The odds of me getting a Treo 650 are pretty slim because of two factors. First of all, the price isn’t cheap. Second, I’ll have to wait for Verizon to pick the model up, which could take a great deal of time. I imagine I’ll end up getting a Tungsten T5… but I keep dreaming of the day I’ve got one of these awesome new Treos.
Published on October 14, 2004
Google has yet another tool out, currently in beta. Google Desktop is a program that indexes files and information on your personal computer, and makes it easy to search through. Windows currently lets you search for file names, but Google Desktop lets you search for the contents of files, e-mail, AIM conversations, and visited web pages. One big negative for me right now is that Google Desktop will not support Mozilla based browsers, but hopefully this will change quickly as the beta progresses. I haven’t been able to try it out yet because I’m away from my dorm room and all I have is my Powerbook which already has this functionality built into OSX 
The indexing of information for quick searching is a feature that Microsoft initially touted as a main feature of the upcoming Longhorn operating system, the successor to Windows XP. However, Microsoft has fallen behind on development, and have now moved the file indexing system back to be released as an update after the release of Longhorn. From the looks of this, it appears that Google is offering these advanced search features for you in Windows XP today. Of course, there are people who are afraid of privacy issues and abuse of power by Google… Personally, I still trust Google. They surely haven’t let me down yet. So far they have provided the best web search, a great IE browser bar that hasn’t resorted to dirty tactics to get installed, and Gmail, which while still in beta, currently serves as my main e-mail service. Maybe I’m setting myself up for trouble, but until Google shows that it has any ill-intentions I am going to trust them.
If you want to try out Google Desktop, you can download the beta for free from http://desktop.google.com/
If you have/do try it out, post some comments here on your experience.
Published on October 14, 2004
After a couple of years I’ve ditched my old template for a nice, shiny, new template. This one allows comments on individual posts, so I can get rid of the forum no one used. I should be making quite a few changes in the near future, but right now it’s time for Diff EQ class.
