Standards like MP3? Nope, web standards. Go to the iPod sub-site and toggle your stylesheets using a favelet. Notice anything? Now check out the source; still crufty in places, but a giant step forward from Apple’s old code, which is still viewable on other parts of their site. Great!

I noticed this because I was on the site to check out the iPod Mini. Yes, I know that for $50 more I get 11 more gigabytes, but even the largest iPod still wouldn’t hold all my music. Realistically, I don’t 10,000 songs in my pocket. About a thousand should hold me for a few days between syncing. I thought the Minis were pretty silly until Elissa dragged me into an Apple store the other day and I saw one up close. My goodness those things are small, making the iPod feel gargantuan in comparison. Size does matter, a lesson I learned from my old 16.1″ Sony laptop, bulky digital camera, and the Visor Prism. My only concern about the Mini is I wouldn’t be able to use accesories like this voice recorder. That’s probably for the best though, as I need to stop recording concerts and such on hardware not meant for it and break down and get (another) MiniDisc recorder and a decent microphone.

While at the site I noticed the rollovers were so fast they had to be CSS, and checking under the hood I found not only a mostly-CSS layout, but pages just a few simple mistakes away from validating. It’s good to see a company that “gets it” in many other areas finally maturing in their web presence.

UPDATE: Apple properties which seem to be on the bandwagon:

• iPod
• iPod Mini
• Hardware
• iLife and all its sub-pages
• Xserve (so-so)
• Software
• Apple Pro (so-so)
• OS X (so-so)

This is obviously a work in progress becuase you have pages like this antivirus page which is very much old-school markup. Can’t wait to hear more about this, or an official word from Apple with more information about their new-generation markup. Are there any bloggers inside of Apple?

The Jay-Z Construction Set is a toolkit with all of the necessary software and raw material to create a new remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album. It includes nine different variations on the Black Album, over 1200 clip art images, and a couple hundred meg of classic samples and breaks.

It’s the Jay-Z Construction set, as featured in the New York Times. Taking Grey Tuesday to its natural conclusion. I came across this via Mr Haughey, who should be ostracized for mixing Kenny G with anything. Wasn’t the Louis Armstrong incident bad enough?

Oh, and their hype blog runs WordPress.

Just in case anyone has seen this one going around yet, it is the most clever and well-done spoof I’ve seen in a long time. I have been getting dozens of these and they are humorous because I run my own email systems, so the email just doesn’t make any sense. However I’ve gotten several questions from people I host asking what this means. Here’s what the email looks like:

To: m@wordpress.org
Subject: Email account utilization warning.
From: management@wordpress.org

Dear user, the management of WordPress.org mailing system wants to let you know that,

Our antivirus software has detected a large ammount of viruses outgoing
from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up
your computer software.

Please, read the attach for further details.

Attached file protected with the password for security reasons. Password is 88315.

Cheers,
The WordPress.org team       http://www.wordpress.org

So if you get this, please ignore it like you ignore all attachments that you aren’t expecting.

Downhill Battle is a great website with tons of interesting information, and they are also the people behind Grey Tuesday. I don’t agree with everything they’re saying, but it’s all educational. Did you know label and Apple take 89 cents of every song sold on iTunes? Oh, and shhhh.

QRIO, our new robot overlords friends. Hat tip: Robert. Some videos in Windows Media format:

• Video 1
• Video 2
• Video 3
• Video 4
• Video 5
• Video 6 (You’ve got to watch this one.)

I’m really at a loss for words.

QRIO knows your face. It’s equipped with a camera and the ability to analyze the images it sees. It detects faces and identifies who they are. It can even learn the faces of people it just met. And it responds to specific people individually, adding to the fun.

QRIO is equipped with wireless networking equipment, and can connect to your home wireless network out of the box. There might even come a day when it serves as a guide between people and information technology.

We made QRIO as quiet as possible when it moves to help it fit in pleasantly in a home. Its motors and gears turn when it walks or moves, but the vibration-resistant frame dampens the noise. You’ll be amazed to see it move so silently.

Or not.

Lars Holst, who has a beautiful WordPress-powered blog, has been doing a bit he calls Well-Designed Weblogs. I have been pretty disappointed with the second round (and to some extent the first round) of “Well-Designed Weblogs.” It is subjective, but quite frankly there are some sites I don’t see anything in. To me some look plain, unimaginative, squished — overall badly designed.

For the list to be a useful Lars should put a blurb about why a site was chosen so if there is some nugget of inspiration there that I’m missing, I can be enlightened. It would also shed some light on the subjective process he’s going through, which would be interesting. Round 2 has 37 entries — some great, some mediocre, some bad. If it could be distilled to the five or six very best, in Lars’ opinion, it would be a lot more meaningful than the catalog it is now.

But if it’s just a list with screenshots, there are better places to go.

I love it when I get forwards that, several people back in the forward chain, have something like the following:

This communication, including any attachments, is intended solely for the confidential use of the person(s) named above and is the property of [name removed]. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete/destroy the original. Any reader other than the intended recipient is hereby notified that any review, dessemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited.

While the post has fallen down on the page, the comments on my previous post “Apple In My Eye” are generally excellent all around and deserve some attention. As an update to some of the problems, Apple has released a new version of iTunes for Windows which fixes the random crashing problem and has allowed me to import the rest of my collection and it didn’t move any of my files around or discard any metadata. On my laptop I don’t use it because it tends to be a bit demanding on resources, however on my desktop which is sometimes just a glorified jukebox it’s running pretty much full time. The album art feature is really intuitive and easy to use, and I burned a CD the other day using it (instead of Nero or Easy CD Creator like normally) and it was a piece of cake. On my laptop I’m using a great little program called foobar2000 which is very small and does the job well.

In judging Apple as a company I’m going to be watching this memo very closely:

This memo is written for two reasons. First, to request that Apple officially recognize that LiteSwitch X played a role in the formation of Panther’s switcher. For tens of thousands of users the feature has existed since May 2002. A developer at Proteron first conceived of it. Proteron developed and published it. Now Apple has made it their own, an “Apple innovation,” without recognizing Proteron.

Update: Dan Benjamin weighs in. John Gruber weighs in. I withdraw completely.

Still waiting for something from the PDC to knock my socks off. For a good filter use everyone’s favorite human aggregator, Robert Scoble.

Nothing brightens a long day (or night) like fun new business cards. If you’re in to this sort of thing, here’s mine:

If you’d like one (or two, one to pass on) let me know. In other news I heard a rumor that there may be navigation at the top of the page sometime soon. We shall see.