Cables 25 years ago when a parallel cable was only available as a hand made item from the United States, it cost $40. These days, mass produced in China, even the best are under $10. So it amazes me that stores would charge (and get) $29.99 for a USB 2 cable, when they are also available at your local 99 Cent store for 99 cents.

FOLLOWUP: For 99 cents, its an "Office Essentials USB 2.0 Device Cable"; fine print on the back of the package says "Manufactured by Belkin Corporation", the very same folks who make the $29.99 cables others sell.

HAPPY FESTIVUS - If you forgot about Festivus remind yourself here.

DirecTv rollout of their own DVR - It's not going so well. Story here . DirecTv could break their arms patting themselves on their backs as they try to spin it that its going well, when even the DVR newbies are complaining. It's gotten so bad that if you buy the unit on their website it's now FREE. How good can it be if they have to give it away to get people to take it. Smart folks still ask for TiVo.

Problem with Apple Powerbook screens : New 15 inch screens on Powerbooks are (in a word) defective. Story here. I assume Apple will do their usual stonewall, and then after a month capitulate and do the right thing. I had the identical problem with a Sony 19 inch standalone LCD monitor and ClubMac took it back and gave me full credit.

New use for Cell Phones - As a wireless pong paddle. It's called Gesture-based technology.
Georgia Tech folks developed it using the cell phone's camera as a motion detector. Their link is here.

BellSouth uses strong arm tactics to try to stop New Orleans WiFi - The only way I know how to protest is to complain to Cingular, since I do not live in "BellSouth" territory. Story here.

BETTER THAN THE BEST - I've already decided that Firefox 1.5 is the best browser out there. I can finally check email at mail.com without the myriad pop-under ads they have appearing. hurrah! But now if you own a G5 Apple Macintosh, there is a "G5 optimized version" available here.

64 Bit Windows grief: Those on the bleeding edge of Windows technology with the 64 bit version of Windows XP Pro have been complaining about the lack of hardware drivers. Some help is available. An excellent compatibility chart is here.

JUST LIKE TiVo - The Houston Office a a Major DISH Network supplier now has radio ads incorrectly (and illegally) describing the DISH DVR as just like TiVo. We'll see what TiVo has to say about that. They already have a pending lawsuit against Echostar for patent infrongement.

No Christmas for Sony, they've been very bad : is what some people say after what Sony/BMG did with CD copy protection. They have an image here. Sony has yet to deliver the promised simple uninstaller for their rootkit.