I just read on engadget.com about the new iPod touch. New iPod Touch is essentially an iPhone minus the phone part, but it adds in WiFi so you can connect to 802.11b/g networks. It includes Safari and a special icon for YouTube specifically. Battery life is claimed to be 22 hours for audio and 5 hours for video.

iPod Touch can also buy songs directly through WiFi without the need to be hooked into a computer but it will sync songs back to iTunes when the two are connected.

Interesting new product coming from Microsoft called Surface. It allows you to interact with a computer using nothing more than the screen itself. I’m not quite sure yet if Surface is the OS itself or the entire experience from machine to OS but videos of the product show some interesting ideas. Being something entirely new, there is no telling what people will come up with for this thing.

When it comes to the products/service my wife and I buy/get we almost always get the short end of the stick. Let me share a few examples.

  • This past weekend we bought a new storm door for our house. I was nearly done getting it installed and I reached the point where I had to install the latch and handle hardware. This is when I finally notice, the door doesn’t have the hole stamped out for the latch hardware. There are holes for the handles, but not the latch. After some phone calls and a trip back to where I bought the door, it turns out they had received a bad batch of doors. Luckily they were able to find a good one and back home I went.
  • I just bought a projector off of woot.com. It is a refurbished unit so I know that I’m taking my chances. I should have known that with our track record, there was no way I’d luck out and get a “good” used one. No, instead I take out the lamp to find that the fans are incredibly dirty and caked with dust. This thing has some SERIOUS hours on it. I contacted InFocus and I guess we’ll see.
  • We usually get forgotten about when we go out to eat, or the person just generally doesn’t seem to care or says strange things. Like, “you came in at a bad time, we’re really busy.” As if we care. Well not only have we been forgotten about while out to eat, we were forgotten about when we went in to the hospital for the birth of our first little one. We were brought to our room and no less than 20 minutes went by before we finally thought it was a bit strange and I went asking. Yep, they admitted it, we were forgotten about.

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I found this on Digg.com and it’s completely beyond me how people can be so clueless and still make comments. It’s people like this that create false fear, false assumptions and everything else that is dragging technology and fair use down.

While reading a debate on a ZDNet blog concerning Linux vs. Windows, this “interesting” character came along. I figured everyone could use a good chuckle and a reminder of some of the thinking we are up against. Enjoy.

read more | digg story

The Linux community has been saying it for years, “this is the year of Linux on the desktop” and each time I wrote it off as wishful thinking. For a number of years I felt Linux had never really made any real progress, just changes. I said things like, the things that were good in Linux 5 years ago are still good now, and everything that sucked about Linux 5 years ago still sucks today. You have your old timer applications and services like Apache that are just as rock solid today as they’ve ever been but then some projects like GNOME have felt unfinished.

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