I've been looking for an adapter plug for my HTC PocketPC Phone Edition. I need something that lets me plug in a stereo headset, and I think I found a Pocket PC Phone Edition web site that reviews all my options. Looks like the Radio Shack 2740373 is what I need.

Kevin Kelly says Sureglow is the best place to buy
Glow Bracelets.

They cost on the order of 10 cents each, or $10 per hundred. Might be fun to have a few hundred for a kid party sometime.

One of my favorite Blogs, Engadget, has this great tutorial on how to make Make 3-D photos with an ordinary digital camera.

The concept is pretty simple: take two photos from slightly different angles, then lay them on top of each other after changing the color channel info in each. You can do it by yourself in Photoshop or other editing programs, or use the free .Net software app called Callipygian that does the work automatically.

NASA publishes an amazing photo of Earth at Night, a composite of hundreds of satellite photo that clearly show cities and developed regions of the earth's surface.



The Eastern United States, Western Europe, and Japan are thick with lights, while most of Africa, Australia, Siberia, and the interior of South America are dark.

CRAIGSLIST %2F On the record%3A Craig Newmark from SFGate tells about Craig Newmark and his successful business. He touts the "moral compass".

CRAIGSLIST %2F On the record%3A Craig Newmark from SFGate tells about Craig Newmark and his successful business. He touts the "moral compass".

CRAIGSLIST %2F On the record%3A Craig Newmark from SFGate tells about Craig Newmark and his successful business. He touts the "moral compass".

[subscription required]WSJ.com - Venture Capitalists Revive Tech-Sector Duds: "Venture capitalists backed 8,101 new companies between the start of 1998 and the first half of this year, according to VentureOne, a Dow Jones & Co. publication that tracks the industry. (Dow Jones also publishes The Wall Street Journal.) Excluding companies that were acquired or went public, 1,924 were shut down by venture capitalists or went out of business, costing investors at least $36.4 billion, according to VentureOne.
Of the 4,672 that still are alive, about half initially were funded at the top of the market in 1999 and 2000. Many now are being recapitalized or relaunched with a new business model as 'restarts' as venture capitalists pick through those with the most promising technology -- and least risk -- to see if they can turn a profit. They often can get a larger stake in a company on the cheap."

One of my VC friends points out that VCs typically don't like to reinvest in failed startups, on the assumption that there are enough new ideas out there that it's not worthwhile to go after the old ones twice. If it failed, assume the idea was bad and move on.

But I never agreed with that. Companies fail for lots of reasons besides "bad or unworkable idea". The Bubble failures especially--how many of those companies went under purely because they were associated with the general bad feelings about "dot com bombs"?

The NYTimes quotes The New York Times > Technology > Seeing Google With the Eyes of Forrest Gump: "Tim Loughran, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies initial public offerings", on the price of Apple stock over time. If you had bought AAPL at its IPO and held it five years, you would have lost 30%. If you held it to the mid-90s, you'd have merely doubled your money -- while the S&P 500 beat you.

Scoble gives several reasons why Blogs provide great feedback to a product team. Anytime you really want to know what users are doing, set up a blog and collect comments.

Theresa Heinz Kerry speaks five languages! But as this WSJ [subscription required] article chides, they're the romance languages that don't really count. If you know Spanish, you're most of the way to French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Now Japanese, on the other hand...

Looks like Japanese is cool! The Wall Street Journal [subscription required]has a front-page article on the growing numbers of people who study Japanese for fun, not business.

In the fall of 2002, the number of students studying Japanese in U.S. institutions of higher education rose to 52,238, a jump of 21% over 1998, when the previous survey was conducted. There were 34,153 students studying Chinese, an increase of 20%

Lots of reporting on Microsoft's new dividend announcement, but today's WSJ.com - Ahead of the Tape: points to a paper last year from AQR Capital Management managing principal Cliff Asness and First Quadrant Chairman Robert Arnott who claim that that "earnings are stronger following periods when dividend yields for U.S. stocks are high than when the yields are low. "

Proof that economists will study just about anything that has numbers attached: The Independent Institute | A Brief Report on Economic Research on Obesity, by Alexander Tabarrok

This report summarizes economic literature on the causes of obesity, trying to show how it might related to income or food prices.

Hey check this out! The New York Times Link Generator lets you get around the NYTimes expiring archive problem. Normally if you link to the normal NY Times reference, a few weeks later that reference will expire and direct you instead to the paid archive, where the full text will cost you $3. This site creates a new link for you, one that won't expire.

Check out Oddpost , a fancy email site that was recently acquired by Yahoo!

The late Phil Goldman would have been all over this new interest in email sites spurred by Gmail and now the new plans for larger storage spaces at Yahoo and MSN.

I've known about HomePlug for a while, but an article by James Fallows in The New York Times (Your Money > Techno Files: Is Broadband Out of a Wall Socket the Next Big Thing?) reminds me that this might be the perfect way to pump video and sound into my home theatre. I was worrying that WiFi-G might have too much interference, but if HomePlug works well at high speeds, that would be the way to go...

MoneyChimp: learn Stock Investing, Index Funds, Valuation Models, and more. is an interesting site that teaches about investments.

VOIP changes everything in some non-obvious ways, and one of them reported in today's WSJ [subscription required] is the new ability to pick your own area code--regardless of location. Wouldn't it be nice to have a company located in the middle of nowhere, but with a Manhattan-sounding 212 area code? You can do that with Vonage's new VOIP service.

Apple Computer is running a contest where they give away an iPod to a certain number of people on the way to the 100 millionth song download on their iTunes service. My favorite Gadget site, Engadget.com, has a cheat sheet for how to enter the iTunes contest for free.

Instead of actually buying a song, you click on the "tell a friend" button and email to itunes100@apple.com.