The Griffin PowerBlock - Sweet and simple

I picked up the Griffin Technology PowerBlock on a whim. Good impulse purchase! It's a very compact, well built, folding plug USB charger with a compact iPod USB cable. It'll charge any relatively modern iPod. It's much more compact and portable than Apple's USB charger, it's less expensive, and it comes with a iPod cable as well.

Since my phone also charges via USB, this device replaced my phone charger and an awkward old firewire charger. Sweet.

See also: Griffin does me wrong, then makes up.

Add an h-card to your web page

The h-card is an XML implementation of the V-card spec. Create yours, put it on your home page. Of course, don't publish anything you're not ready for spammers to abuse. I'll give it a try. (It didn't display well when posted into this blog post).

Open identity management and data formats

whobar.org supports the alternatives to Google or Microsoft's identity management: OpenID, InfoCard, i-names. Big stuff.

See also microformats.

Above leads courtesy of a web 2.0 post.

Windows can do that?!

Wow, there are one or two XP tips here even a geek like me didn't know about (ok, I knew most of them):

The Joel on Software Discussion Group - Best tips that no one seems to know about?

cd p*\Skype
to cd into c:\program files\skype

Really? That I HAVE to test ...

Also

People that navigate through explorer or the registry with the mouse expanding each node, one by one by one....drives me nuts!
arrow keys + quickly typing the name of the node you want gets you home sooner.

And to open an Explorer window from a directory - start .

Google's 12V standard power supply

USB is the closest thing to a standard DC power supply, but it's only 5V. Firewire is 12V -- much nicer. A Firewire power supply would charge a camera nicely, whereas USB doesn't cut it. Maybe coincidentally, 12V is the output Google wants to see for a universal power supply in cars and buildings... (Is 12V what auto electrical outlets provide?)

Google adds dynamic calendar events

Dynamic updates to shared date-specific data, including the weather. Now if only I could sync Google calendar with Outlook, or the OS X calendar, or even my (yech) PalmOS PDA.

Update 9/27/06: I got a link from Jacob Reider's blog to an ultimate sync post and to ScheduleWorld. Wow. That sync guy is one serious geek (that's a compliment coming from me). I'll have to decipher it and see if this could really work ... I wonder if Jacob posted that one after seeing my post -- I know he reads this sometimes (though Gordon's Tech doesn't go to Jacob's medlogs site).

Incorporating Google's AJAX Search API into a blog

This is something I’d like to do:

Blogger Buzz: AJAX Search API Hackery

... the sidebar's "Google Search" field searches multiple indexes (Web and BlogSearch), as well as individual site-restricts (in this case the AJAX Search API blog, the Google blog and www.blogger.com) - you can customize any of these ...

If I get it into my blogs I’ll update this post with details.

Update 9/26: I haven't had time to play with this, but see the comment from Marc Lucovsky about dong this. Marc has a topic-specific blog on AJAX search as well as a quite interesting personal blog. I've added both to my Bloglines list. BTW, I'm a fan of topic-specific blogs, which often have well defined lifespans. Ideally when they reach retirement they should be replaced by a summative web page, but that life-cycle completion is probably overkill for many resources. As I was told by a former boss (repeatedly, evidently I didn't get it the first time), don't let the perfect defeat the sufficient.