CHRISdotTODD

Apple announces a revolutionary product, the keyboard-less laptop.

Thanks to Digg , I found an interesting website, Cool Material. Specifically, Digg had a link to Ultra-Minimalism: 19 Cool Products That Are Almost Impossible to Use . If you like new and unique ways to design products, this list is for you -- a tank-less toilet, an unrecognizable table, a hidden vacuum cleaner, and 16 others. After that, check the many interesting categories including Tech, Media, and Travel. You would think that everything would be expensive, but surprisingly some things are actually reasonable priced. For example, the Vroom Tire Tread iPhone Case is only $15 and available through Amazon. Or there's the Laser Parking System for only $25. Many, many surprisingly good values here.

Do you like using the Apple environment of iPod/iPhone and iTunes, but hate that you have to get DRM music? Using Adventageous mp3 , you no longer have to. After installing Adventageous mp3, find your Artist or Album in iTunes like you always do, but then instead of purchasing, click on Adventageous mp3 to be directed to the equivalent on Amazon. Here you can make your purchase for the same music without the DRM.

By now we've all had a chance to read the many tech predictions for 2009. If not, Wired has a good summary of predictions . This time of year also lends itself to reminding us of all the less insightful tech predictions of years gone past. Checkout this post at PC World for The 7 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time . My predictions? I may have 2 or 3... Apple will become less popular. This is driven primarily out of my frustration for the buggy iPhone and AppleTV. Also influencing my thoughts are Rafe Needleman's struggle to get used to his Mac (as posted by him on Twitter ). TWiT will lose its spot as the top tech podcast. I love what Leo Laporte has done for podcasting, but the quality of TWiT has really declined over the last 4 to 5 months, while others continue to enter this space. Of course if you read Jason Hiner of Tech Repuplic last February, TWiT already lost to Buzz Out Loud -- my favorite daily tech podcast. One last one... Nateli Del Conte , the video podcaster o

Many of us find ourselves in the car or on the bus bored, as we travel to and from work every day. If we're lucky, we've got an audio player and listen to podcasts and/or audio books. If you like audio books though, they can become rather expensive leaving you back to finding an alternative. This is where podiobooks.com comes in. Using podiobooks.com, you can subscribe to books of your choosing, and have the chapters delivered to you at a specified interval, for free. For example, you might want a new chapter a day; subscribe using your podcatcher and each night when you sync your audio player, the next chapter will download to your device. Downloading at an interval you specified is great for people who have audio players with a small amount of memory -- you don't need to store the files until you're ready to listen to them. Podiobooks has over 270 titles and is being used by over 50,000 listeners. Categories include: Fantasy, History, Romance, and Thriller, just to

I was reading Webware's Seth Rosenblatt's post, Futzing with features: Firefox add-ons in 2008 , and it made me think about the Add-ons in Firefox that I use on a daily basis. Here my top 10, in ranked in order of value to me: RoboForm : More than an Add-on, more like a toolbar in itself, RoboForm stores all my passwords. If I could only have 1 Add-on, this one would be it. Read my blog post from January 14, 2007 , to learn about the powerful features of RoboForm. NoScript : When visiting a new site, you never know what you might find. NoScript allows me to view the site first without Javascript, first -- letting me decide whether I want scripts to run or not. This is definately a tedious way to surf; on the otherhand my browser and desktop are much more secure, too. IE Tab : Sometimes you just have to look at a page using Internet Explorer -- for those times, I use IE Tab. Download Statusbar : With download status bar, I don't have to bother with a pop-up window everytime

The iPhone is the phone that everyone wants to love. Unfortunately, Apple makes that difficult at times. The 2.2 upgrade was the first error free upgrade I've had. But now I ran into another problem. I had added a new, 2nd drive to my PC as my media was consuming so much space. With that, I moved my photos and videos to the new drive. With photos, it was easy to point iTunes to the new location, but unfortunately for the videos it wasn't. iTunes uses a custom database (itl file) to store its media index and creates an xml file for a backup. If the itl file should become corrupt, it will rebuild with the xml file. If the itl file is non-existant, it will start over. Based on some various guides I found online, I used search and replace and updated the location for all the videos, and then I caused the itl file to be corrupt. iTunes read my updated xml file and rebuild the itl database file and I seemed to be back in business. Ahh, not so fast. Apparently iTunes does not back up

The BBC and other news outlets reported yesterday on the latest security vulnerabilities within Microsoft's Internet Explorer. What makes this report different than a lot of others is that we finally are hearing recommendations to actually switch browsers. Right now it sounds worse than it is, but nevertheless, the risk is there. Experts claim that 10,000 websites have been exploited but that is only 0.02% of all Internet sites. The typical warning is to stay away from potentially nefarious sites such as bit torrent indexes and pornography, but as you may recall we have seen threats show up on more popular social sites such as Facebook and MySpace (see Worm virus from Facebook and MySpace ). Bottom line, no browser is completely safe all the time, but you can reduce your own risk by choosing your websites carefully, and by using a more secure browser such as Firefox or Opera . Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari are also options, though I don't believe they are as

Remember collecting names and drawing for your holiday gift exchange? And when you got your own name, you had to pick again. Of course if you were last, then it was even more of a problem. Or how about the last potluck where you had 12 desserts and no salads or appetizers. Good thing everyone likes dessert. Well with a new crop of online planning tools, these problems don't need to keep repeating themselves. For your next gift exchange, try Elfster ; and that potluck, try LuckPotluck . These are just two of many new planning tools available in this web 2.0 world. Enjoy!.

With the low cost of color ink jet printers, most of us have one. I like to buy the manufacturers photo paper and collage frames, to display some of the better pictures I have of my family. Often in this process I print more photos than end up in the collage; I've now found a use for those extra photos. Take your refrigerator magnets and tape them to the back of the photos. Now instead of the tacky magnets (or throwing them out), I have more photos of the family. Using a scissors, you can cut the magnets to place at either side of a larger 4 x 6 or, cut the photo to better fit the magnet.