A heated thread in Slashdot discusses why (or why not) the iPod is a better music player than a Palm. Here is a snippet:

Many people don’t need PDA functions, and even for those of us who do the standalones have advantages:

• Price – a 4GB SD card will cost much more than a flash based 4GB MP3 player.
• Size – iPod minis and shuffles are smaller than any PDA on the market and even the biggest current iPod Photos compare favourably on pocket real estate.
• Capacity – 60GB SD card or even CF microdrive? I don’t think so. Fair enough, most people don’t need the full 60, but even the sensible 20GB capacity doesn’t have any real competition from publically available cards, and plenty of people like to have their whole music collection with them to choose whatever they feel like hearing.
• Ease of use – iPods are set out (extremely nicely) to play and organise music. PDAs are not, and as such have loading times, fiddly small buttons and touchscreens that are hard to use one handed.
• Battery life – big fat backlit colour touchscreen or small, clear, functional monochrome display.

Cited by: PalmAddict

According to the Army Physical Fitness Research Institute, increased consumption of caffeine causes:

• increase in blood pressure
• heart rhythms change
• nervousness
• worse quality of sleep
• headaches and migraines

Think carefully before taking that extra cup of coffee to your desk…

If you are not familiar with syndication and aggregators, now is a good time to find out. Content is delivered to you, rather than you chasing content.

I am apprehensive of promoting MSN search, but their beta version has a nice feature that I am excited about. You can get common searches delivered to your RSS aggregator. The idea is very simple. Just replace the text in red with your favourite search query and replace whitespaces with a +.

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=othello+master&format=rss

Wal-Mart break a barrier by selling a Linux-based laptop for under $500. According to CNET:

The computer, dubbed Balance, comes loaded with the Linspire operating system and the OpenOffice.org office suite, the companies said.

The companies said Balance is the lowest-priced laptop currently available with an operating system and an office suite. It features a VIA C3 1-GHz processor, 128MB RAM, a 30GB hard drive, a CD-ROM drive and a 14.1-inch liquid crystal display…

Plenty of free music is distributed over the Internet by artists who wish to promote themselves and share their work. UNIX/Linux users can use wget to mass-download that music without any manual intervention. This means that hundreds of songs can potentially be downloaded to your hard-drive automatically and on a daily basis. This method (which personally I consider unethical) is exposed in Jeff Veen’s item where you can pick up the simple instructions.

Sample files are located on this domain although they do not reflect on personal preference.

Also see the newer item which expands on this method and gives a clearer background.

Changes are expected in the way high-bandwidth entertainment is delivered. It sounds as if M¥¢ro$o£t have concrete plans of entering the world of television and maybe even broadcast. It might, of course, take us some time to discover if TV will absorb the PC or vice versa. In either case, it’s unlikely that the two will remain separate for the next decade to come. Time will tell.

From Slashdot:

…Verizon joins other baby bells SBC and Bellsouth in choosing Microsoft to provide TV content over high speed internet. IPTV, whose technology will deliver TV content in much the same way as VOIP delivers phone service, relys heavily on fiber optic speeds. According to SBC, Microsoft’s IPTV technology will allow a home to receive 3 standard TV signals, 1 HD channel, and high-speed Internet access all at the same time…

S⁵ is a token that explains its essence: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. Alternatively, it can be perceived as a tool which constructs presentations for a modern Web browser to interpret. The author, Eric Meyer, has incorporated yet another improvement. At midday today I will present my work using S⁵:

• Version with no videos
• Version with videos