In the past year I have come to realise that I no longer need a laptop, or a telephone, or an MP3 player. Micro-device technology is advancing so quickly that it is able to match functionality of much larger ‘workhorses’. With a full-size folding keyboard, headphones and a PDA, one can be most productive anywhere at any time.

Would you believe that 1 gram SD cards hold half a gig a gig of memory?

Cited by: PalmAddict

I have installed Firefox on 4 computers that I use at different locations. Each time I went through the procedure of converting it into a powerful tool by doing the following:

• Got the Noia theme which I wrote about previously.
• Set up the Google toolbar and built onto it the PageRank extension.
• Got a mouse gestures extension and added an extra simple gesture to load my portal.

I usually hide all the toolbars apart from the Google toolbar and I occasionally work in full screen mode (F11 does this quickly) on my dual-head 21″ and 19″.

Dvorak has published a little item about the growth of the Web browser Mozilla Firefox. Here is a snippet:

…Firefox is gaining marketshare by a lot. But more interesting is the fact that unlike with other browsers the Firefox users almost all quickly converted to the latest version. This shift is very noteworthy as it shows that the Firefox users are proactive. Note this is the International market where you find a lot of Opera users. And they usually have Opera report that it’s MSIE to fool certain MSFT websites…

He inspired me to take a closer look at Webalizer (I prefer AWStats, but I have used Webalizer for 3 years and it is more popular) to provide some proof that Firefox has become rather dominant on this site (see below).

According to AWStats (Web site): MS Internet Explorer (49.4 %); Firefox Mozilla (40.7 %); Unknown (3.2 %); Safari (1.5 %); Netscape (1.4 %); Opera (1.4 %); Konqueror (1.2 %); Camino (0.3 %); WebTV browser (0.1 %); Others (0.1 %).

In terms of operating systems: Windows (67.2 %); Linux (27.2 %); Unknown (5.7 %); Macintosh (2.8 %); Sun Solaris (2.4 %); WebTV (0 %); CPM (0 %); AmigaOS (0 %); FreeBSD (0 %); NetBSD (0 %); Others (0 %).

This morning I worked on enriching the quality of my sites’ icons. For those with no experience in this area, the problem under consideration is generation of a 16×16 pixel bitmap of one particular form. Since there are Window$-related requirements, I once used Visual Studio to do this task. I have just read about two alternatives:

• Irfanview which is light-weight and free.
• An on-line tool which has thus far not worked for me.

Once the icon is ready, it should be uploaded to root level ('/' or top-level directory for Window$ hosting) and the metatag

<link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/favicon.ico">

added to the relevant HTML files.

I have finally gone past the point of 10,000 downloads in MATLAB Central. Also by coincidence, I have gone past 10,000 Google AdSense page impressions since I joined the program in September.

As some of you may know, MÂ¥cro$o£t store mail in DBX files. This may seem like a benign format, but it can cause great trouble if you intend to keep a maintainable mail archive (one of my pet peeves). I decided to try the highly recommended Thunderbird which is expected to replace the Outlook family just as Firefox begins to nudge Internet Explorer out of the game. I was amazed by the ease of this migration. I now have:

• A mail archive that is open format.
• Spellchecker that does not require Office.
• A whole new set of features which I have never conceived (and neither have MÂ¥cro$o£t).

The bottom line is that if you do not download Thunderbird now, you’ll be missing out…

My game/program Othello Master has just been moved to its independent new domain. You can now find it at othellomaster.com.