It looks like the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS will finally be available June 4th in the U.S., and the Pokemon Pearl/Diamond sets will ship with a headset that could potentially be used as a WiFi headset. This isn’t quite on the level of a PDA, but it might make for an interesting personal communicator.

Unfortunately, the really compact HD cameras have been getting bad reviews. Sony has a new camera that has gotten decent reviews, for example. This seems somewhat like the way harddrives have been going. For years, they were getting cheaper, but at some point, they kind of leveled off in price and simply grew bigger for the same price. Cameras have been getting cheaper, but for the really cheap cameras, you get what you pay for. I think this is pointing me back towards the Canon SD600, which has gotten good reviews. I will have to figure out a separate camera for video, but stick with my old trusty Sony DV camera for now.

The longer you are online, the more bookmarks you can accumulate. Using sites like del.icio.us makes it even worse. Although I don’t have enough ambition to really clean up my bookmarks (it’s hard for me to throw some away), I have recently searched for software to help me out. For browser-based bookmarks (IE, Firefox, Opera), AM-Deadlink works really well. It asked me where my bookmarks were loaded for Firefox and it quickly weeded out my dead links and duplicate links. For del.icio.us, I needed something else. A quick search led me to Fresh Del.icio.us. All it required was a current JVM. I downloaded the zip file and extracted the lib directory and jar file. Upon starting, the program asked for my name and password for del.icio.us, then quickly weeded out dead and duplicate entries online. That takes care of what software can do right now. The reason I use del.icio.us in the first place is the tagging support. Although it’s still easier to wrap my brain around the folder concept of organization, tags make a lot of sense for something like a bookmark categorization. Obviously a site like IBM could fit into a bunch of categories such as hardware, software, services, etc. My company does a lot of business with IBM so I have a lot of links into their site. Software links could be tagged as ‘OS’ as well as ‘Security’. It quickly becomes hard to make a folder hierarchy that fits the possible multiple category choices, thus tags win the day.

I woke up dreaming about Palm Pilots. I have been looking for the ultimate PDA for several years now, but still haven’t found it. Of course as technology fixes the old wants, new ones come up. When I started looking, bluetooth wasn’t even an option. I bought my first Palm Pilot back in 1998. I read today that the hardware part of the company is ripe for a buyout. The software part was sold already. What would you look for if you could have your pick of what’s available today?

I love almost all the people I work with, so I have to question what went wrong. When I started with my current employer, I was young and eager, but lately work is best summed up by this post. It’s not so much that my job sucks, but that the overall atmosphere is mediocre. I could be mediocre anywhere, but I would rather excel at a job that I like. I want to challenge and be challenged, not flattened out into some compromised shapeless mass of a “resource”. I want to work at the equivalent of a hometown grocer and cater to the customer, not become a faceless chain, which it feels like my employer is becoming.