the tweney review

I stopped by the new Apple Store in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, its opening day. Total madness: The place was packed with people, every single product on display had someone playing with it, plus two or three people waiting in line to take a look, and lots of folks were just milling around. Some nice touches–a low table with about 8 iMacs on it, and toddlers (with parents) happily playing kiddie games–but overall it looked just like any other Apple store, except bigger, and more architectural plexiglas. iPods and iPod Minis were flying out the door. I bought nothing: all too expensive.

Note: the store is not “just off Union Square.” It is actually just off Market Street, just across from the big Virgin Megastore. But that sounds so much less posh.

The legions of Cheetos-eating Linux geeks won’t be too happy when they see this review of the Ingineo Eyetop.

I’ll be appearing on CNN Live this coming Saturday, 2/28, at around 4:30pm Eastern / 1:30pm Pacific. Tune in and check out some of the coolest new portable gadgets from the Mobile PC labs: a Microsoft SPOT watch, a couple of cutting-edge handhelds, and a superlight Sony Vaio, and more. Plus yours truly, live via satellite from San Francisco.

I don’t know why I find this so fascinating, but I do. This page shows the results of running grep (a Unix search function) on the Windows 2000 source code. It’s like peeking inside the sausage factory: you get to see the workers chopping meat, spitting, swearing, mixing bugs into the meal, and not cleaning up after themselves. Nevermind security risks: This hints at a gigantic, sloppy, sprawling mess of code filled with debris and cruft. To be fair, every mature operating system’s code probably looks this way. But it’s fascinating to get a glimpse.

This is handy: Teleflip lets you send email to any SMS-enabled mobile phone without knowing anything but the phone number: (your number here)@teleflip.com.

The alternative is to first figure out the phone’s email address.

The folks at Concord Camera won’t be too happy when they see this review of the Concord EyeQ Go Wireless.

“If the government forbids gay men from tying the knot, what’s their alternative?” Bill Maher asks. “They can’t all marry Liza Minnelli.“

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a Woody Guthrie fan.

Some scientists have all the fun: they get to make movies of water balloons popping in zero gravity. Beautiful stuff! (thanks, Mark)

Sony’s NetMD minidisc players require a piece of software called OpenMG before you can transfer MP3 files to them. Despite the “open” name, it’s far from open in any sense of the word. The software isn’t available for download anywhere. It’s got a draconian digital rights management scheme built into it. And Sony has aggressively pursued Web sites that have sought to provide alternatives. No wonder minidiscs never caught on.