You like your iPod a little too much when...

This is just sad. What makes it even more sad is that this "impulse buy" wasn't at some flea market or craft store, or something along those lines. It actually had to be purchased online... (via Lee)


Gateway closing all retail stores

The beleagured computer maker announced today that it would be closing all 188 of its retail stores, putting 2,500 people out of work. Boo. Hoo. Maybe if Ted Waitt stopped talking to cows and buying rivals that Dell was going to put out of business anyway, he wouldn't be putting 2,500 people in the unemployment lines.


Who needs satellite radio?

Lee linked to the Alpine iPod Ready in-dash receivers in a recent post. I must say I am very interested, though I will probably hold off on anything like this until we figure out my vehicle situation later this year.


ATPM 10.04

The April issue of About This Particular Macintosh is out. Yours truly contributed desktop pictures for this month's issue. Of note is Evan's Soundsticks review, Ted's announcement of a new outliner, and would someone please send Wes some feedback so he'll stop whining? Geez, you'd think Tom was writing again...


Perfect PDAs

Still leaning toward the Treo 600 myself, I wholeheartedly agree with Steven Frank's latest perfect PDA ponderings.


USB micro/mini drives

It seems like more and more vendors are jumping in to the USB micro/mini-drive game these days. Iomega has a hip-looking USB 2.0 version, but for the money I think I would prefer the versatility of Victorinox's USB Swiss Army Knife. With my total mailbox currently over 600 MB, it's not like I can take my e-mail around with me on either one anyway. And it is just me, or does anyone else think that USB flash memory drives are still too expensive for the capacity you get? Especially in light of what you can get in the form of SD or CF cards. I know, the USB drives don't require a reader like the aforementioned cards, but I still think they should be cheaper for what you get in storage space.


Just say no to Internet taxes

No taxes on Internet access (in the U.S.) is something I believe even the left-minded of my geek brethren would agree is a good thing. From the 04-10 Digest of The Federalist: bq. In the Senate, current legislation intended to extend the moratorium on Internet-access taxes remains stalled in the Senate. Apparently deciding that the free exchange of goods and services on the Internet has been doing a bit too well on its own, some in the government feel that nagging urge to tax. We would again remind our representatives in Washington of the effects of new taxes: lower GDP, higher unemployment, and lower disposable income. It seems to be lost on some Swampsters that money doesn't fall off trees. Wealth must be created. Increasing the cost of Internet access and thereby stifling a large sector of the economy is not the way to increase revenues. In many ways, the Internet is a symbol of the success of a free-market economy; its freedom ought to be jealously guarded. I encourage you to seek out your Senators and voice your opinion. (Which hopefully is one of no Internet taxation!)


Memory on your wrist

Get your Dick Tracy on with the new LaCie Data Watch, which jams 128 MB of flash memory in to a decent-looking, black analog watch for 70 bucks. Works with Mac OS 9 and up, but the only version of Windows you can use is XP. I'm tempted. (via MacMinute)


Marginalizing IE

The Mac Marginalization report at MacInTouch has seen a spurt of activity in recent days, notably about certain web sites not working with Safari or other non-IE browsers. In today's postings, MacInTouch reader "Steve" suggests:

Safari users often are subjected to annoying web page redirection to inform them that their browser is not supported. Microsoft's subversion of web standards deserves a similar tactic: "Your browser does not adhere to international web standards. Please contact Microsoft support to request standards compliance so that we can provide a better web experience for everyone. You will be redirected to our non-standard pages momentarily..."

If every web page handled MSIE this way, the stream of customer support inquiries might eventually annoy Microsoft enough that they would clean up their act. While I highly doubt the latter would ever happen, it is amusing to consider the former nonetheless. Windoze users reading this, and other web standards-composing web sites, would do well to look to Firefox/Mozilla.


On browser window size

I wholeheartedly agree with Lee. And the n3rdling tells us in the comments that Firefox has a pref to prevent this occurrence from happening. I hope this is something Dave & Co. can cook in to a future rev of Safari.


Clean RSS 2.0 from MT

I don't think anyone's not going to cop to the fact that as great as Movable Type is, its RSS 2.0 templates fairly suck. I took up Steven Frank's challenge to improve my RSS feeds, and used a template provided by Horst Prillinger. I'm now using the RSS 2.0 feeds for all of my sites in my preferred RSS aggregator, and would appreciate feedback from any non-NetNewsWire-using readers out there.


2004 March of Dimes WalkAmerica

Next month, my wife will be leading her firm at the annual March of Dimes WalkAmerica in Dallas. She has registered to raise money for the event, and we're asking for donations, which you can contribute by going to the web site set up just for her: http://www.walkamerica.org/KLTTX. Our son, now a healthy 7-month old, was born 9 weeks premature and spent 6 weeks in the Neonatal ICU. During that time, we witnessed the good things done by the March of Dimes first hand. We'd appreciate any support you can give to this great event. Thanks!


Second Initial

Lee has suspended blogging at dtpbylee.com, and has opened Second Initial. He has a kick-butt layout thanks to our favorite code babe, Raena, and guessing is now open on the significance of the domain name. Congrats, my friend!


ATPM 10.03

The March issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available, in leaded, unleaded, and diesel flavors.


Development halts on VLC Mac client

ATPM staffer Chris Lawson informs us that the the former OS X maintainer, Derk-Jan Hartman, has stepped down from the VideoLAN Client project. So far, no OS X developer has stepped up to take his place. So if you're a Mac OS X developer looking to contribute to a worthy open source project, give VLC a look.


Archives updated

So in the course of waiting on a myriad of things to happen at work today, I decided to get off my duff and fix up the main archives page the way I had been wanting to. Mucho gracias to my amigos, Michael, Raena, and Michael, for the coding assistance.


iPod mini thoughts

I stopped by the Willow Bend Apple Store last week for two reasons. First, I needed to pick up a couple of extra FireWire-to-Dock cables for iPod use. Second, I wanted to see how the Genius Bar LCD retrofit turned out, since that has been my principal project at work for the past month. While there, I also played around with the new iPod mini. If I didn't already have the 40 GB iPod, and was still using the original 5 GB one, I would jump on the mini. I love how they're using Espy Sans for the screen font; I hope that carries over to the next-gen full-size Pods. Likewise, I hope to see the combination mechanical/capacitance-sensitive scroll wheel with the built-in buttons on the next-gen full-size Pod. It make navigation so much simpler. Of course, with my 40 GB iPod, I use it 50-50 as a music player and as an external hard drive. Every day, I back up my Mailsmith and Entourage mail folders to it to shuffle to and from work. Between the two, I've got about 1.3 GB of stuff, not to mention anything I may have downloaded during the day that I want to take home. So from that usage standpoint, a mini is not in my future. Then again, by the time I'm ready to upgrade again, the mini may just have the storage capacity to suit my habits.


ATPM Chicago outing

The boys in and around the Windy City who volunteer on ATPM decided on a get-together last weekend. Wes Meltzer has the complete story, along with a photo of the gang in front of the North Michigan Avenue Apple Store. One of the things I love about ATPM is getting to see pictures of folks who I only correspond with via e-mail. Now Evan and I have been pals for a while; we've even spoken on the phone once or twice. I've seen pictures of him, to boot, and trust me, his looks haven't improved with age. ;-) It was good to see Chris L. and Paul, though, of course, they looked nothing like I imagined they would. I don't know why, but I always figured Paul would be more of a clean-cut sort of fellow, and thought that Chris would be shorter. Wes, on the other hand, pretty much looked like what I thought he might. Isn't the Internet cool? And we'll have to work on Wes's Cajun-French; it's actually "les bon temps roulez." I also can't imagine anything north of the Louisiana border being remotely close to real Cajun/Creole-style food...


Kirk's latest

ATPM staffer Kirk McElhearn's latest book, How To Do Everything With Mac OS X Panther, has been released.

cover

Congrats, Kirk!


Your very own spy drone

Sweetie, can I have one? I promise to use it and my other powers only for good...