Fusion Tables

Fusion Tables, based in Europe has a new concept for dining room tables... Make them convertible.



Featuring a minimalist design, these tables are easily converted into a single slate (!) pool table with hidden pockets. Very cool!

They are based in Belgium, and there are no prices announced. Expect to burn a deep hole in your wallet though.

Making a Better Mobile Phone

The New York Times has an article on how mobile phone companies are trying to meet consumer needs.

I think they could start by making phones that get the basics right. You know it's a sad state of affairs when a $5 home phone can outperform your spanky $300 smart phone. Phone designers should make sure that they live with a phone for a few months before releasing it to manufacturing. To this day, I still can't figure out many of the design choices that Microsoft made with Windows Mobile. Hello! My phone is NOT a computer!

Apple is definitely going in the right direction with the iPhone, although their strategy isn't perfect either. If it weren't for my form factor preferences (sorry, but I really do need a hard keyboard), I probably would be iPhoned right now.

I'm really hoping that the upcoming Android platform is successful, since Google, like Apple, is a company that Gets It.

Michael Geist

Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa and is one of the foremost thinkers on intellectual property law today.

If you have even a fleeting interest in how the law affects your digital life, you'll enjoy reading his blog. His musings are frequently mentioned on all the popular geek sites, including Digg and Slashdot.

Name Mangler - Rename Files Easily on the Mac

Name Mangler is a handy (and free) file renaming application for the Mac, especially if you're a regular user of Panic's Unison newsgroup reader.



The fact that it supports regular expressions is awesome. I was using Automator to clean up file names, but it was a real pain performing a search and replace on multiple characters.

If you're like everyone else, you've probably got more than one instant messaging account on more than one protocol. There are a few decent clients on

If you're like everyone else, you've probably got more than one instant messaging account on more than one protocol. There are a few decent clients on Windows that can consolidate your Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo accounts (among others).

Pidgin is a free, open-source application that lets you do that. It has a nice interface, and works quite nicely.



I tried a few different clients on Windows, and Pidgin and Digsby were the nicest. Digsby is in a semi-closed beta right now, and requires an invite code. Lifehacker and Ars had some invite codes, but may have ran out by now. Miranda, while skinnable, has a Windows 95, ICQish GUI out of the box, which was a bit of a turn-off.

Pidgin supports tabbed browsing, a pile of protocols and has a nice, simple GUI.

Digsby is worth watching out for, however, as it adds social networking (i.e., Facebook and MySpace) as well as e-mail integration. It could just become your one-stop shop for personal communications. But, today, I tend to think that Pidgin is your best instant messaging aggregator.

PDFCreator - Free PDF Generation

For those of you poor souls who still stuck with Windows, PDFCreator is fantastic little Windows app that lets create PDFs without buying Adobe Acrobat.

If you have a network, you can also set up PDFCreator as a shared printer and have your users create PDFs into a network share.

The Swagger of 37signals

Wired has a fascinating article on the boys at 37signals. There's something admirable about their swagger and attitude. If you look at the quality of their product offerings (with Basecamp being their most notable product), perhaps that swagger has been well earned.

It's pretty impressive that the owners have built up a successful business on what was once considered a novelty platform - Ruby on Rails. It's also interesting how they're being criticized for running the company the way they want, especially since they're not a public company.

A quote from the 37signals website:

We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much confusion. We build easy to use web-based products with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features. We’re focused on executing on the basics beautifully.

Amen to that.

FeedJournal - Make Your Own Newspaper

FeedJournal is an interesting approach to RSS feeds. Unlike Google Reader, the presentation takes an old school approach to a new school technology.



Basically, your RSS content gets formatted as a newspaper. A dead tree newspaper, to be precise. It seems ideal for the likes of an electronic reader, iPhone or tablet PC, although an argument can be made that the metaphor is just a little too novel. It will be interesting to see where this goes. I'll stick to Google Reader for now.

Awesome Mario Quilt

BoingBoing has a picture of a gigantic Mario quilt made by some dude's wife.



It's pretty awesome.

Notepad++

One of my favorite scripting tools in Windows is the freeware application Notepad++. It's a fantastic little application at a fantastic price. Some people might prefer SlickEdit, Textpad or EditPlus, but after using Notepad++ for a few days, I'm sure few people will miss the commercial alternatives.



One of the few things I don't like on the Mac is that the text editors are commercial, and highly overrated (um, BBEdit, anyone?). I managed to get TextMate via MacHeist, and it's a solid editor, but it's one of those areas where I just prefer the software on Windows. I do admit that I have been a sucker in terms of trying to find a decent text editing surrogate on the Mac, and yes, I did fork out the big bucks for Coda, but Coda's appeal is really in the integration of text editor, ftp, terminal and coding documentation. In Coda's case, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

Consumerist

The Consumerist is one of the best examples of how the democratization of the web has changed the playing field in terms of how companies and their customers interact. There are no more isolated incidents of corporate bad behaviour. If a big-box store's rogue manager mistreats a customer badly enough,you can bet that tens of thousands of people will have heard about it on the Consumerist. Think of it as the "Fight Back with David Horowitz" of the 21st century.



The Consumerist isn't all bad news, however, they do post rare incidents where a company does go above and beyond in terms of treating their customers. They also post great tips on how to get the most from a company's customer service bureaucracy when you are wronged.

The RSS feed is definitely a worthwhile addition to your Google Reader subscriptions. With so many misdeeds going on, there are a lot of stories in any given day.