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.