September 2006 Archives

I heard a story on NPR while driving in yesterday about Apple's plans to announce new iPods that will target selling videos through the Music Store that one downloads and can then play on a home TV.

Here are two news stories you can visit to read more. "Apple Plans to Inhabit Living Room," in the NY Times Technology section, and Starnet's business section has "Apple launches movie service, device to watch them on TV." The Starnet article has a convenient sidebar summarizes some of the key upgrades to iPods.

There has been talk among industry observers for some months that after Apple released the video iPods last year, it was going to be redesigning the video iPods and changing its strategy. Today we hear the plans. Also of interest to me is that it appears Apple is finally addressing the problems us consumers have had to deal with because of the horrendous batteries they've put in iPods. The Starnet article includes mention of "A 24-hour battery life on a thinner, aluminum-cased iPod Nano, which stores media files on flash memory chips."

Students have asked about a way to check spelling in the entry body and extended entry in the form we use in these blogs. This morning I happened to use my MS IE browser instead of my trusted Firefox and noticed that I have, at home, the Google Toolbar installed on my browser. Low and behold, it has a spellcheck option that checks the spelling in forms. The entry boxes you type in when creating a blog entry, use HTML forms.

I ran the Google spellcheck on my previous entry and it worked very well. It highlighted in red the words it did not recognize in its dictionary and I could correct them or add them to the dictionary and it no longer highlighted them.

You can download the Google toolbar from Google's more section. I also see that it works with Firefox versions 1.5 and higher. I'll be adding this to my Firefox today too.