Inspired by the latest iPod commercials, I thought that WALL•E looked like the iPod type.  He is in fact created by Pixar, Apple’s BFF in the movie industry.  So I put together an Apple like WALL•E desktop wallpaper; complete with iPod.

What do you think?  Is WALL•E jammin’ or what?

A few weeks ago I took control over my email.  Not only did I clean out my inboxes, but I also converted everything over to Gmail.  Why would I do this?

1. Always online and availabe to me.
2. Doesn’t take up space on my webserver.
3. The labeling system is fantastic.  I didn’t really know this until I really started using it.
4. Integrated nicely with Mail.app or other email applications like Thunderbird and Outlook.
5. I can send and receive email from multiple accounts via one Gmail account.
6. iPhone ready.
7. Email is up even if website is down.

I’ve been an iPod Touch owner since Christmas and I’ve been very happy.  However, there are still a few things that I just don’t quite get.  Maybe someone can help explain.

1. Coverflow - It’s a really sweet feature, but the album art seems to only match the song that was playing when Coverflow as activated.  It doesn’t seem to update when the song changes.  Why not?
2. Google Search - Google has a great iPhone friendly versions of Google Search, yet Safari’s built in search doesn’t use it on my iPod.  It sends you to the regular Google Search results instead, which are hard to read.

Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

So what do you use that magnet on the side of your iMac for? I know my remote isn’t hanging on it. Who knows where that is. However, Scott sent me a video of his iLEVL Copy Holder. It’s a simple metal paper holder that sticks to that magnet in your iMac.

That got me thinking, what would be even cooler? I work in a paperless office, so a paper holder isn’t exactly what I need. What about…

• iPod/iPhone Cradle - With charging capabilities of course.
• A cell phone holder.
• Pencil holder. Kinda lame, but I always loose my pen.

I gave Entourage 2008 a go for a few weeks, but have since switched back to Thunderbird. It was really a lot of little things that just kept adding up.

Here are the top 5 reasons why I dropped Entourage 2008.

1. No Hyperlink Support - You can’t link a few words in emails. This was one that really gets me. I’m always linking phrases to tutorials or additional resources so that people know what I’m talking about.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: This function is not available.

We’ll I’ve been on Entourage 2008 for about three weeks now and the ride has had its ups and downs. I’m happy with Entourage for the most part, but it’s flaws are hard to ignore.

Things I love:

• Projects - Projects are cool in the fact that I can group emails together, file them away, yet have easy access to them. I need to dig into this more and use it.
• Full Calendar Support - No more Outlook meeting request issues or confusion. This was a big factor in changing to Entourage at work.

Since I’ve made the switch from Thunderbird to Entourage 2008, one of my missing features is the ability to sync with Google calendar.

I tried using Plaxo, but they sync to your main Google calendar and not any others. This may work well if you only have one Google calendar to sync with, but that wasn’t my case.

I thought about some of the tools like Spanning Sync and gSync but Spanning says it doesn’t work right with Entourage and gSync doesn’t say anything. You’d think that since Entourage syncs with iCal, that it wouldn’t be that hard.

I’ve been a big fan of Thunderbird for a while now, but I’m moving on. Entourage 2008 is calling my name at work and I’m listening. I’m a bit sad to say goodbye to Thunderbird, but yet excited at the same time. So why the switch?

In the past, I’ve talked about how to open Facebook in the sidebar of Firefox. Now, I’ve taken that idea one step farther and created a Firefox extension.

The iPhone Facebook Sidebar extension opens Facebook’s iPhone page and allows you to keep tabs on your friends, update your status, message people and accept friend requests.

Features include:

• Seeing friend’s updates.
• Updating our status.
• Viewing Friends
• Writing on friends wall.
• Viewing inbox.
• Sending messages.
• Other miscellaneous Facebook fun.
• Works on Mac and Windows. Possibly Linux too.