Oxyfish

I want one of these!

Forbes.com: Hot Wheel

This is pretty cool. Of course, I don’t need it, but maybe for my wife…

Coming soon: car that parks itself – National – theage.com.au

This is kind of like the journal we made when we were traveling.

Hitting the Backcountry Online

Something that might finally wean me from my Blackberry….

Forbes.com: The Next Treo Revealed

Lots of people are playing with these, so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. This Toshiba Portege 3500 won the PC Mag Editor’s Choice award, so I picked it to try. Mostly I like it, although the battery life isn’t that great.

A friend mentioned this Fry’s moment to me: he went to Fry’s last weekend, and emerged with a quarter-terabyte of storage, for $199. I went yesterday and actually beat that on a cost-per-gig basis, buying 200G for $149. Incredible!

Fry’s Electronics

I have been playing with Gallery to put photos up on the web. I really like it, and need to customize it some more.

I also tried out Adobe Photoshop Album as a way to organize pictures on my desktop PC. Overall, I really like it, although there are some incredibly annoying things about it. Most of them stem around the program’s attempts to protect you from having to know anything about a file system.

I wanted to upload pictures to Gallery with the captions accompanying them, so I needed a way to associate captions with pictures. I started with ACDSee which stores the captions in a hidden “descript.ion” file the old 4DOS way. I then hacked the adddir.pl script to read that file and set the captions automatically. That worked okay.

Then I got PS Album, which stores the captions in the EXIF. I found out I needed to write some code to allow Gallery to read them. I had never written PHP before, but my Perl experience made it almost a no-brainer. I also haven’t written much code in a while. It was a fun little one-evening project.