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I’m getting pretty close to buying the Cingular 8125 cell phone, and, in the process, switching from Sprint to Cingular. Advice or input?

The whole world of “Mobile” is about to get much much more exciting in the US in the next 18 months, and I’d like to be with a carrier and on a device that lets me experiement with as much of it as possible. Is this the carries, the device?

I’m moving from an old Treo (the 600), so it’s also a switch from Palm OS to Windows. Any words of advice in that regard?

There are two tweaks I made to my Mozilla Thunderbird client in the last two days.

By default, Thunderbird places “Joe Smith wrote:” at the top of your message when you reply. I’d prefer to have a date stamp there toom like “on 5/12/2006 10:03 AM Joe Smith said the following:”. Firefox is a great browser and Thunderbird is a great email client for more reasons than extensibility, but extensibility sure is nice. The change is nearly-trivial in Thunderbird by modifing the User.js file in your Thunderbird profiles folder, and restarting Thunderbird (not your computer). How? Change Your Thunderbird Response Header

Another nice extensibility feature is Mozilla’s Extensions system which Thunderbird also shares wth Firefox. Returning from another time zone the other day, my POP server got confused and sent me all my recent messages again. Which stinks, because I ended up with about 1800 duplicate messages filtered and spread throughout my inbox folder structure. In the past I’ve just accepted that fate, but this time I looked for an extension.

Sure enough, the perfect tool for removing duplicate messages exists. One tip: switch which message (older or newer) is discarded, lest you delete your metadata (read, flagged) along with the older message. By default it seems to keep newer, but I’d recommend switching that. Aside from that, it’s a blazing fast tool that without fuss does exactly what it advertises.

Thanks, Nate

        Dell is to start offering a 30-inch widescreen digital flat-panel monitor tomorrow. If you didn't get what you wanted for the holidays, or have a year-end bonus to spend, this might be what you've been looking for. It's stats are pretty amazing, beating Apple's Cinema Display in all categories (e.g.; resolution, response time, contrast ratio, etc).

Here’s the promo link for the Dell 30-inch widescreen LCD.

The new version of iTunes, iTunes 5 was release on the 8th of the month. I’ve been using YME primarily lately, so I’m just checking it out now.

iTunes let’s me know that there’s a new version, and asks if I’d like to get it. The problem is, I don’t know what it has to offer. I wish companies would be better about offering change logs clearly detailing what’s new, what’s different, and what all’s happening.

It’s not only because they are sometimes unintended riders on upgrades, or even because newer is not always better, but because it should just be the standard practice.

Communication fosters user learning and understanding. Transparency builds trust. Documentation encourages exploration. Knowledge is comfort.

Things like that.

As I’ve shown before, letting the users know what you’ve done is a great way for them to get excited about your products.

(But please don’t assume that I only want the PR-spun release notes that make it into your marketing. That’s cool, but not comforting, exciting or encouraging.)

Filangy is a personal search engine. There are a few startups and companies playing in this space right now, but Filangy is my early favorite. Other’s have written about it, including John Battelle’s Search Blog, Larry Borsato, and a thorough write-up on Rob’s Blog. (You can always check the latest murmurings by running a Technorati search.

Filangy is an intelligent search tool integrated with a search engine to make searching productive. We offer features that allow users to personalize their search experience. Two of the features that we have launched in our beta products are WebMarks and WebCache.

WebCache

This is a secure, web-enabled archive of all your visited webpages.

WebMarks

These are your portable favorites that are accessible from anywhere.

In other words, Filangy captures every page you visit (while it’s enabled — its’ easy to pause it if you’re feeling secretive), and also allows for instantaneous bookmarking while you’re on a page. When you use Filangy to search, you can limit it to either of these groups: pages you’ve been on before; pages you’ve bookmarked.

I’ve got a few extra invites. Leave a comment or send me an email if you’d like one of them. Please include a sentence or two on the root of your curiosity and why you’ll be a good recipient. (I just want to make sure that, like extra pets, they’re going to good homes.)

Like most of my favorite apps these days, the value of the services is only slowly revealed. The more you use it, the more help it’s able to provide. The more you use it, the more advanced features on the interface become visible… While it’s somewhat counter-intuitive to hide value initially, this wonder and dare-i-say glee of discovery pays huge dividends. Anyways, let me know what you think if you’ve been using it, and like I said, let me know if you need an invite.