Bi-fold PDA

I love this bi-fold PDA that is shown towards the end of Microsoft's excellent A Glimpse Ahead Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019. Apple, I want this for my next iPhone in 2010.

Re: Looking for a better iPhone camera application

Ten apps for taking photos and editing images on the iPhone

Re: Speaking and writing webscale identifiers

A comment on Jon Udell's Speaking and writing webscale identifiers.

Adding content hints to identifiers degrades into the case where you have several variations of the identifiers in the wild. For automation to help us it needs to know which identifiers are for the same thing. If all identifiers used the same syntax then it would be possible to automatically do this. Using the same syntax does not seem likely to happen given the number of global identification systems we already have, eg Handle (RFC 3650), DOI, URL, ISSN, ISBN, LOC, etc...

The core of the problem is not coming up with another identification system but coming up with a identification relationship system. This would address not only the same thing with multiple identifiers but also the relationships of parts to whole and variations, such as revisions or translations. Let's work on that for a while (independent of the larger semantic-web stuff).

Looking for tool to show all windows of an application in miniature

I am looking for a tool for Macintosh that when you Cmd-Tab to an application all the application's windows are briefly displayed in miniature at the top of the screen even if the window has been minimized to the dock. If, during the time the miniatures are displayed, if you click on a screen it is brought to the front and un-minimized when necessary. Has any one seen such a tool?

Narrow cars

Since Toyota bought back my truck a few months ago the family has had only one vehicle. For the most part, having one vehicle has not been an inconvenience. Chris and I have to coordinate more but so far we have not needed to be in two distant and different places at the same time. I have also been riding my bike more.

However, we do need a second vehicle and so I keep looking. Sometimes I think about getting a very small car but every time I look at them I keep on thinking "why the hell are they so narrow?" Brunel in the mid 1800's demonstrated that wider vehicles had a superior level of safety, speed, and comfort. So why do car manufactures continue to sell us narrow small cars?

Update: Geoffrey's response was "Narrow streets." Most of these cars are designed for non-US markets where cities and towns have historical centers that have narrow streets.

-- Andrew

Misc about desktop

There is a lot of talk over at Minimal Mac about a spartan desktop. I do recommend Minimal Mac for its links to invaluable OS X tools. However, I frankly don't understand the whole fuss over an empty desktop. I never see my desktop as it is always covered with windows. Nevertheless, I do have a desktop background image that I took from the fantastic set of images of textures at Bittbox. Every now and then I see it because I press F11 to show the calendar I have embeded on the desktop using GeekTool.