Back in December, I made some predictions. The quick recap is, I was completely right about the Powerbook (though I didn’t see the moronic name change coming). I didn’t see the iMac coming. The Mac mini rumor was nice, but ultimately, it wasn’t in the cards. My hope clouded my judgment. iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06: Yawn. Again. I’m surprised at the complete lack of information about Leopard. The prospect of getting surprised is actually exciting. Apple may just sit on the features until after Vista appears. That might slow Microsoft just a bit. ...

I use my Gmail account to manage several mailing lists I’m subscribed to. I also regularly re-evaluate it for use as my main email address. So far, no dice. I just like desktop email clients much more. One of the more compelling things about Gmail is the amount of space allotted for each user (2686 MB at the moment). With most emails being only a few kilobytes big, users aren’t going to fill up that space (particularly because that allotment grows every day). There are exceptions, such as Adam Curry (who receives lots of audio files in his email), but other users aren’t going to have an issue. ...

Macworld’s lab tests of the new intel iMac confirm what I’ve been telling people since the Intel transition was announced. I can summarize the results pretty quickly. Considering that the Intel processor in the new iMac is a dual core, the speed isn’t really that much better. In fact, taking that into account, it’s slower. Also, Rosetta isn’t the panacea that everyone bought into. I knew it wouldn’t be. It doesn’t work with anything that requires precise timing and it’s slow. Slow. ...

Over at Mike’s blog, he’s redirecting all mail from a domain that gets over 3000 pieces of spam a day. I’m really looking forward to his results because he usually puts together pretty visual results that are fun to look at. I’m still waiting for an objective comparison of the various spam filters out there, particularly the ones built into the big webmail services like Yahoo and Hotmail. I’ve found those services perform pretty terribly. Despite trying to “train” their filter, I regularly get mail with similar subjects dropped right into my inbox. I’ve heard Google’s is better, but I’d rather not pollute my own account for experimentation. ...

After recently hinting that I had something big to share, the time has come to let everyone know what it is. Macworld has taken me on as one of two regular contributers to their new MacUser blog. This is an incredible opportunity and I couldn’t be happier to be involved with this project. I’ll be writing extremely regularly over there, though the pieces will be much, much shorter compared with my pieces here. I will be writing the occasional extended rant on MacUser, but nothing compared to here. ...

I regularly SSH into my desktop at home to both run things from the command line and also set up tunnels to connect via VNC. The problem with this has always been knowing your IP address. Consumer broadband connections have no guarantee of retaining an IP for any amount of time. As a result, so called Dynamic DNS services were created. These services allow one to regularly change a domain name to match your current IP. ...

I’d hope that readers of my weblog would be familiar with Planet d00dism. It’s a website run with Planet Planet that uses my various RSS feeds to construct an aggregation of what I’m doing online (stolen wholesale from Erik Benson). There’s even an RSS feed for it. However, installing the software (which still hasn’t had a formal release), is a bit much for most people. Some don’t even have proper web hosting. That’s why I was so excited to read that 43People has added this capability. By default, it includes your 43Things, 43Places, 43People, and All Consuming. ...

Heather noticed that I turned on several of the FeedFlare features for my RSS feed. I fall in love with FeedBurner more and more every day. Email this Send a link to your item to someone via email. Email author Allow subscribers to email you directly. (If there is no email address in your feed, this will be hidden.) Technorati Cosmos Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. (If there are no links, this will be hidden.) ...

I haven’t thought of any resolutions, other than to stop being prematurely mysterious when hinting about announcements. What are yours? Have any suggestions for me? Tags: newyears, resolutions

I’ve become really addicted to Digg. Slashdot has simply become too slow and excludes far too many worthy stories. The unfortunate side effect is that some stories get more attention than they really deserve. This month, it was a whole class of stories: “Best of”. Pseudonyms include “things you didn’t know about”, “things you should download”, and “things for new blank users”. They’re just lists of things that people like. They’re not noteworthy and usually, they’re not even original. ...