“And I think it turned out that the Playstation 3 leap day bug was caused by the same clock chip that was used in the Zune — the one that broke every Zune in the world for 24 hours a while back.”

“What’s a Zune?”

I am one of those Dock-on-the-right weirdos and I hate that my desktop icons gradually drift out of alignment around the screen all day due to the changing size of the Dock. So I spent 30 seconds making cleanupd

Download it, customize the timeout if you like. Do a release build (or use the pre-compiled binary in builds). Copy it into /usr/local/bin. Run it backgrounded from the terminal: /usr/local/bin/cleanupd &

Hey presto, automatic desktop snap-to-grid clean up every so often, using whatever grid the Finder happens to be using this second.

Uh, enjoy?

My brother-in-law Dan is getting 2010 off to a positive start by running a charity marathon to benefit leukemia and lymphoma research. He had a tragic 2009 where he lost not one but five loved ones to various diseases. If you can afford to donate to his cause, it would be most welcome.

A homebrew app for the Palm Pre reboots your phone according to a schedule.

This is such a perfectly encapsulated nutshell of exactly why Apple does not allow third-party background processes on the iPhone.

On the other hand, a Pre can play music from Pandora in the background while you do something else.

This gets right to the very heart of the old world / new world schism.

Microsoft has done at least two things right with Windows Mobile 7.

First: Recognized that they needed to start over.

Second: Not ripping off Apple’s UI style as every other vendor has been content to do.

Whether the new UI holds up in real world usage remains to be seen. As does whether Microsoft’s traditionally change-resistant customer culture will embrace it.

But if nothing else, kudos for having the huevos to try something new and unique.

I forked the excellent (open source!) Notational Velocity app, and hacked in a third pane that shows you the note you’re viewing as rendered by Markdown.

My fork can be found here.

I would like to also eventually add W2 style note-linking syntax. Then NV + Simplenote will be a rather capable replacement for W2.

In case you thought I was exaggerating when I said that the computer infrastructures of 2010 were too hard to understand for a vast number of people.

It’s easy to read this and be cynical about “how dumb everyone is”. But there are some seriously deep issues to analyze here for anyone interested in HCI.