Whoa. The U2 iPod is drool-worthy no doubt, but it can’t touch the iPod Photo. Wow. Just…. just wow. I can’t imagine how cool it would be to carry hundreds of slideshows with you everywhere you go, and display them (with music, of course) anywhere someone has a TV. That would be so fun. Plus, an iPod with a color screen is an upgrade no matter how you look at it.

That right there is the ultimate geek toy.

Update: If you want to see the press conference in QuickTime, it’s right here.

Resistance is futile.

The iPod had an 82 percent share of the market in U.S. retail stores in the 12 months ended in August, up from 64 percent in the same period a year earlier, and 33 percent two years ago, according to Port Washington, New York-based NPD Group Inc.

I’m glad that at least once in technology’s history it’s actually about having a better product.

It’s here! So who’s going to send one to my house? 🙂

How to pick up and carry your iMac G5.

Mmmm… that’s good tech-help!

I just can’t get enough of this stuff. So you may have heard that Real has figured out how to make music in their too-little-too-late music store work with the iPod (login required, sorry), and Apple wasn’t thrilled about the idea.

Real is calling the initiative Freedom Of Music Choice. They put up a petition, but it turns out people voiced their actual opinions of Real, and Real didn’t like that, so they made a new petition with comments turned off. Still, after wading through the comments on the first petition, I found this gem:

I thought I would[BUFFERING…10%] voice my opinion using[BUFFERING…12%]the messag[BUFFERING…40%]ing client built into REAL’s[BUFFERING…50%] [BUFFERING…60%]media center[BUFFERING…75%]I think REAL has some[BUFFERING…80%] of the [BUFFERING…82%] [BUFFERING…85%] [BUFFERING…90%] products ever[CONNECTION LOST… REAL_ERROR32XKernel]

To top it off, there’s a counter-petition online now that has far more signatures than Real’s crappy attempt at a grassroots movement. Man, I love geeks.

I don’t know what this guy is thinking, but in a way, I respect him. Maybe the guys who work on Internet Explorer have, within the last 24 hours, wised up to the fact that their browser might blow chunks. Either way they’re taking a cue from Dave Hyatt’s Safari blog (and others) and making their own blog for IE, namely IEBlog, which is hosted on Microsoft’s own servers. It’s official and everything.

The idea, as Scott Stearns, the Test Manager of IE (what does this guy do?) puts it, is this:

We’ve heard loud and clear that many people want a better connection with the IE Team. We’re happy to do something about it.

Our goal in this blog is to be a good place, direct from the source, for information about IE. What are we working on? How do we make decisions? Why does some part of IE work the way it does? What keeps us up late at night? What are we thinking of around security, extensibility, and other key areas? Hey, any good tips and tricks?

But when he posts a rather-loaded entry called I Love This Browser!, he tempts fate a little too much, and gets dozens of comments like this from random strangers who know IE quite well:

As a web developer, I’m doing everything in my power to get people to switch away from Internet Explorer. This is because, when developing websites, I author to standards, it takes a few minutes to tweak things to get everything perfect in browsers like Firefox and Safari, and then ages to work around all of Internet Explorer’s bugs and shortcomings…

PNG is almost eight years old and Microsoft promised PNG support for Internet Explorer 4.0. Given that Microsoft are the world’s biggest software company, it looks very much like standards are deliberately being sabotaged. Is it any wonder web developers are starting to get royally pissed off with Microsoft?

Man, this is gonna be so fun.

Holy ones and zeroes, you’re not going to believe this. A few weeks ago I signed up with Vonage as a part of the shake up everything I know about phones effort I’ve been having recently. But I never thought it was going to be this cool.

I got the little kit Vonage sent a couple weeks ago and didn’t have time to hook it up, so it sat in my den, looking at me with those I’m-technology-why-aren’t-you-playing-with-me-immediately eyes. I broke down tonight and followed the eight-step instructions to install the thing. I guess I was scared it would break my Airport or something. Foolish, groundless concerns. It was installed in 10 minutes, and it would have been 5 if I hadn’t been cautious and read everything through even though I already knew how it was supposed to work. Let me tell you something: it’s unexpectedly eerie to pick up your phone and hear a dial tone when it’s not plugged into the wall. The wall jack is just sitting there empty with no cord in it. It’s like the horror scene in the movie where the doll plays its little recorded message when they push the button, and then they turn it over and there’s no battery in the back.

On the list of nifty features Vonage offers, I notice that you can email your voicemail to yourself. This is like a geek dream, people, so you know I’m not going to pass this up. I set it to email a mailing list that will automatically send the voice mail message (in WAV format, but no one is perfect) to a mailing list at joshlewis.org that Stephanie and I (and obviously only Stephanie and I) are on. Then I called my number (my temporary fake number since the phone company hasn’t let go of my landline yet) with my cell phone and I left a very brief, stupid, testing one-two-three message.

I got this in my email ten seconds later. Ten! Seconds! Later!!! It’s crystal clear! It’s beautiful! It’s my voicemail! My cell phone reception isn’t even that good in this area.

Have you ever been at work and wished that you could find out easily if you missed a call at home without dialing your phone number, waiting for your voicemail to answer, putting your pass code in, listening to the lady tell you which numbers to push, blah blah, on and on? Well, this is the solution.

I would highly encourage you all to look into Vonage if you’ve got broadband already. I mean, you get up-to-the-second usage reports of both incoming and outgoing calls, how many minutes they lasted, what numbers they were to, you can forward your calls to other numbers, do the voicemail thing, set up virtual phone numbers… the list is endless. Yes, I realize there are probably quirks and bad points, but this is so much more for so much less. I’ll take it in stride, and kiss my landline goodbye for a stream of bits.

The phone is dead. Long live the phone.