shall attempt to explain why your bookmarks are sometimes better in flat HTML form rather than in hierarchical menus.

Mozilla Firefox has a powerful “find as you type” feature. If you open Firefox Preferences → Advanced → Accessibility, you will find [Begin finding when you begin typing], which ought to be enabled. You can then begin entering keywords, hitting F3 if multiple matches are found. In Firefox 1.0.4 (unlike previous versions), text highlighted is also in focus, so on we move to a…

Practical example: If you are in a page that contains your bookmark/s (e.g. exported as HTML and includes a link to Google), type in the letters g o o g followed by ENTER and you should find yourself in Google. No mouse actions are involved and the entire process takes only a second or two.

Yahoo may not do so directly, but…

Om Malik said:

Flickr is making money off Google AdSense even though it is a Yahoo company. There are Adsense text ads appearing on your photo albums etc.

I have always suspected that Google make a larger profit than that of their clients, who happen to be Flickr (Yahoo) in this case. After the initial “Welcome to AdSense” E-mail, one only communicates with the Google server. All the placement chores are left to the client. Have we become Google’s peons? Verging evil perhaps? I doubt it, but here is some comic relief.

We are not truly peons to Google’s founder, Sergei Brin,
shown in this very genuine photo from 1996.

Nevertheless, many of us are peons to the man below.

Bill Gates posing for a teen magazine in 1985
with a Mac at the back, from which he nicked the GUI

The latter photo had to be posted to balance this discussion.

It now appears to be true, inevitably. After much gossip this morning, Google have unleashed a beta of AdSense (their content-driven advertisement program) for RSS feeds. This means that adverts will occupy (supposedly) lightwight site summaries and ad blocking in feeds comes to mind.

A bunch of hilarious amateur posters making fun of major Linux distributions. UNIX fanatics will find it amusing.

PalmOne have released LifeDrive after much leakage of information. Their site presents a very marketbale device, yet in my opinion, a poorly made demo is delivered. When initially glancing at the details yesterday morning, I was appalled to find a Flash clip that incorporated every possible usability flaw. I could never get what I actually wanted — a large gallery of pictures. (UPDATE: They seemed to have realised it by now and changed)

The 4 GB capacity on this Palm-powered devices is useful for large media files. MP3 files come to mind in particular.

It is not good news all around though. In UseNet, people have raised concerns about bettery life (ironic if you think of the name of the device), weight, and size. Here are a few snippets from comp.sys.palmtops.pilot:

AaronJ: But to get that it seems that you also get a bloated (big and heavy), warm to the touch, $100 more expensive PDA that takes several seconds to load apps. Is this really progress?

Lone Bard: Where am I going to carry this thing? my Man-Purse?

Other things that suck…

• Battery Life
• Heat Issues
• Slow Ass HardDrive
• Mesh on back (can anyone say “dirt collector”?)

AaronJ: I found some battery tests here:

http://www.bargainpda.com/discussion/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8987

Looks like 4+ hours max.

• Some of the earliest reviews to come out: Brighthand

The Public Wiki section on this domain

In a newly-added page I explain why have I moved correspondence from E-mail and IM to Wikis.

E-mail just did not seem like a natural form for exchange of messages. Long tails of quoted text appeared in messages and one could easily lose track of the conversation, which had intervals of hours or days in between. What’s more, backup, archiving and searching capabilities were poor.

This approach has more advantages, e.g. password-protected access which prevents spam, offers better customisation abilities, compactness, and inter-operability. Installation details have been included.

This short publication about the History of PDA‘s presents a nice pictorial collage of devices, from the very early days until the emergence of the Palm Pilot.
 
 

• Also mentioned in PalmAddict