The Furrygoat Experience: Mini-Itx Epia P4 – Steve points to the latest mini-itx boards. Awesome stuff. I still don’t understand why the entire desktop pc market hasn’t flopped over to the shuttle/mini-itx form factor.

a lot of this goes right over my head – Beyond3D - Which was nice. – but i am struck by the amount of useful innovation happening in graphics processing. Seems like people have lots of ideas to soak up many more iterations of Moore’s Law on the graphics side of my PC. Whereas the future for my CPU MIPs doesn’t seem quite as innovative.

Exclusive Resorts :: A Lifestyle Investment – via ventureblog and wsj. Doesn’t fit our lifestyle right now but fun to look at.

Good article on the role of a board for a startup (pdf). Via Scott, thanks.

Kevin expects the laptop market to collapse – VentureBlog: The End Of The Laptop? – a view I empathize with, tho for different reasons. Personally I have quit buying laptops because a) their price/performance is dreadful compared to desktops; b) they suck for playing games; c) i don’t really want to haul all my data around all the time, i want it to be ubiquitously available (kevin’s server idea); d) they are fragile as hell and expensive to keep running; e) my blackberry is good enough for computing when i am out and about. I can see buying a super-blackberry that can do more, but I will never go back to a laptop.

From Always On: “I think that jealousy has driven my competitors to more mistakes than any other factor I can name.”

Wi-Fi Networking News: Supply Chain Management for the Home? – hmm, interesting. Obviously homes don’t need enterprise-quality SCM but I think we would all agree – finding and managing vendors and service providers for the home is a PITA. Maybe I am just the worst records manager in the world, but when my garage door opener died recently, it was a major effort to find the piece of paper with the installer’s name from 5 years ago. And when you sell a home, all that info generally is lost.

It would be cool if, at the neighborhood level, we could all easily share referrals on service providers, see comments, etc.

The Official Gary Turner™ Weblog / Moblog: Impromptu Strategies Incorporated. Great idea. Would save the world a lot of time and trouble.

Last night’s homework was on Pendulums – good site here – Period of a Pendulum – I had forgotten that, for simple pendulums, the period is basically independent of the mass – cool! Overall this is a high quality site for basic physics info.

Simon Willison: HTML entities for email addresses: don’t bother – good read. I downloaded the mentioned tool myself and found a surprising number of email addresses, some in very obscure places on my site.

Joe Beda’s EightyPercent.Net

I’ve wanted to try this for a while – a little ludwig goes a long way: HP DVD Movie Writer – and so finally bought one and tried it out.

Net impression – I am a little disappointed. This is basically a usb-attached dvd burner with some bundled software. It has a few features to automate the transfer of a vhs tape to dvd – notably a bundled set of video in ports. But I was under the impression that a PC was hardly needed to transfer VHS tapes to DVD – the hp site says “Transfer your home video to long-lasting DVDs … all without additional hardware or software.” and “Transfer, edit and preserve your home video ? even print DVD case covers ? with one easy-to-use device.” and “automatic, unattended conversion of your home movies”.

Well that is all a little over the top. The device is non-functional without an attached PC driving it. And you have to interact a lot with the “Wizard” to get it to capture your tapes. And I am pretty sure you need at least two other devices – a pc and a printer – to print the dvd case covers. The bundled software is the normal set of bundled shlock you will find with a PC or dvd burner these days. Perhaps slightly more automated but the same basic crud.

Now, it did create playable DVDs which is something, this can be hard to do. I didn’t create a single coaster. So I guess it got some things right. But nowhere near as automated and trouble-free as implied.

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Best Site for Consumer Broadband Communications: DSL Reports – Jeff points to the VOIP forum on DSL reports, great source of details on consumer VOIP services.