Digital Camera Software by Electric Shoebox – must try.

Going Commercial: Airline Economics: Fasten Your Seat Belt – good article about airline economics and the fact that as an industry, airlines have been a net money loser over their entire existence. I wonder if this is not typical of any capital-intensive industry, I seem to remember seeing the same analysis of the pulp and paper industry at one point tho I can’t lay my finger on it now. I don’t think this necessarily means a lot for society, society will still find a way to fund these industries as they have a lot of utility. As an individual investor or employee though, it certainly suggests that you should run away from these industries.

I tried a couple years ago to rip all my software cds and just mount their images as virtual CDs. It kind of worked tho it was frustrating. Here are some new pointers that make it worth looking at again – ComputerZen.com points to a driver from MSFT that mounts an ISO file as a virtual CD. Cdfreaks has a lot of great posts about Ripping of CDs – for instance here and here. I don’t care about making copies of CDs but I would love the convenience of not having to have all my game CDs on my desk.

Good set of links at Instapundit.com: covering recent debate about feasability and safety of nanotech.

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.