A retrospective item from 76-year-old Harvey Tobkes led me to making some predictions for the future. In 20 years from now our children will raise an eyebrow at:

• how people used to walk around in supermarkets, which have now become warehouses controlled by robotics.
• how we used to type in data using an odd device called a ‘keyboard’.
• the fact people used to go to work.
• the way information was recorded on paper and later binned.

A second top headline from the BBC is dedicated to blogs and their effects on cyberspace. It has been only hours since the last dominant blog-related headline from the BBC. A closer look revealed a ‘pagefull’ of headlines of this nature and I began to ponder Jacken’s opinion:

I can really see that big companies could feel threatened by the blogging phenomena. If I am thinking of buying a new expensive product, I always do a google search to check out what people have to say.

Thunderbird, Firefox and… RSSOwl!?!?!? Yes, an RSS aggregator that I recently started using. Personally, I do not think it has matured sufficiently; I still use a beta version in fact.

At present it is slow, a little difficult to work with, but on the positive side, it is trivial to install (there is an RPM package too). Only its name and logo, which attempt to associate it with the Mozilla family, had me inclined to give it a go. I would rate it ’7 out of 10′.

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.