Honda's Personal Mobility Device ... or A Unicycle By Any Other Name Would Scare Me As Much

I just have visions of falling off ... yes, I know that's probably next to impossible but I'm just sayin'. Also does anyone else flash on the Wall-E humans in their personal chairs when they see this?

Read all about it at Engadget. Thanks to Tom, my personal tech-alert guru, for the scoop.

Nine Thumbs Up for iTunes 9

Finally, iTunes did an update that cared about me, the podcast junky.

If I've listened to part of a podcast, it now marked the little "new" dot as half gone instead of just erasing it as if it's been listened to all the way.

ALSO, if you have audiobook files or something you've imported and that wound up in music ... they now let you turn it into a podcast.

AND IT SHOWS UP IN THE PODCAST LISTINGS!

Whoever pushed through that change, I could kiss you!

(Hey, I told you I was a junky! That's the only sort of fanatic that would notice or need these changes.)

I'm not the only one noticing the myriad improvements. Tom's pretty excited about the improved Home Sharing feature. His favorite technology writer, Walt Mossberg, noticed that too and has his own grateful litany. Here's a little:

To me, the two biggest new features in iTunes 9 are something called Home Sharing and a new, easier way to organize the apps on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

For years, iTunes users have been able to wirelessly stream music from nearby computers running iTunes whose owners chose to share their music. But Home Sharing takes this one step further, allowing users to actually copy the song files from one computer to another.

Right inside iTunes, you can simply peer into the shared library on another computer set up to allow this, and then select the song you want and drag it into your own library. It doesn't delete the original from the other computer.

Now This is What I Call a Keyboard!

Why have this?

When you could have this?

There's just somethin' about steampunk, isn't there? Ahhh ...

(I must stop here and thank Tony at StarShipSofa podcast for hosting the series of nonfiction segments. In one of those, I was introduced to the whole steampunk concept ... thereby enabling me to get one up on the girls, who hadn't heard of it at all.)

The original steampunk keyboard can be seen here.

If you'd like your own, this enterprising gentleman will be happy to produce one for you.

Though perhaps you will want to wait for him to finish developing ... The Archbishop!

Playing Around with Google Reader

At long last taking The Curt Jester's advice, I'm touring around Google Reader ... specifically I wanted an easy way to let y'all know all the great stuff I'm finding ... without making you wait around for me to write it up. Not that it would stop me from commenting on some of them ...

Here's the test:


I like it ... this has real possibilities.