...more recent posts
Kinja finally launches (beta.) This is the weblog portal that Nick Denton (gawker, gizmodo, wonkette, micro publishing big wig) and Meg Hourihan (megnut, ex blogger co-founder) have been working on for quite some time.
After a quick look it seems like a web based RSS reader (aggregator?) that has a blog like presentation style. You select the channels (RSS feeds from the blogoshpere) and they are aggragated for you on your Kinja page, called a digest. Sort of like an auto generated weblog that is all pull quotes and links with no commentary.
Here's Jason Kottke's digest.
Why isn't the current (voice) phone system considered a danger to national security? Clearly it fails in any large enough crisis. If the telcos would accelerate their switch to an IP based network (which is going to happen anyway) they could solve the problem by scaling back services in times of huge demand (most likely during some major crisis.) Instead of millions of simultaneous voice calls bringing the whole system to a complete stop, the telcos could just drop voice service during such peak times and people would have to use SMS. Not as good as voice maybe, but infinitely better than nothing (which is what most people had in NYC on 9/11.)
Shouldn't they really do this?
Quicksilver is a launcher application for Mac OS X (10.3). Similar to the hugely popular Launchbar, except Quicksilver is free. A little hard to explain, but if you are the type of Mac user who knows and uses all the keyboard shortcuts (I guess this means "power user" but I hate that phrase) you really should give it a look. Amazingly elegant.
My Treo 600 has been out geeked. Okay, this isn't a phone, so it's not really a fair comparison. But Sharp's new Zaurus SL-6000L is the new definitive high end wireless (802.11b) PDA for people who get excited by remote terminal session and reg ex. Slide out thumbboard. Big screen. Runs linux. Case closed.
Well, assuming you can drop $699 on a PDA and you don't mind getting laughed at by all the cool kids with their iPods...
Bluetooth headset shrinks to 5 grams. Paired with your bluetooth phone you can talk without taking the phone out of your pocket (in other words, it's just like plugging in a traditional headset to a cellphone, except with bluetooth there is no cord.) Still a ways to go, but that's a big improvement over the previous bulky bluetooth headsets.
Google launches unbelievably cool free email service on April 1st, and nobody can figure out if it's a joke or not.
The press release reads like a joke, except it's not really particularly funny. And all the wires picked it up as true, so it seems like there might be some SEC regulations that were violated if it is a joke. But I'm really not sure. I definitely want it, but it does seem too good to be true. 1 Gig of free web based email storage integrated with Google's search engine. Who wouldn't switch to this? But how can they give away a gigabyte of storage?
Please be true, please be true...