Also overpriced and underpowered, but isn’t that always the way for sexy young things?

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I like buttons.

I know you think buttons and cables and ports are all bad things, and should be hidden from the user whenever possible, but you’re going too far again. The new Macbook Pro that you can’t plug two even slightly oversized USB cords into, even on the 17-inch model that has acres of free space along the one side you permit ports to appear on? Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.

And the new Shuffle that can’t be controlled without the supplied button-starved remote control that apparently has difficulty registering its array of clicks-and-holds when operated with sweaty fingers? Yeah, that’s looking pretty stupid too.

Now, I have to admit that you’re not alone in your hatred for visible controls. See that picture up above? Way back when, the retailer almost begged me to take it off his hands, because no one had ever bought one, and since they’d been discontinued, he couldn’t get it out of the store fast enough. Customers walked in, looked at the sea of buttons, and bought something else.

I, on the other hand, walked in, looked at the device, and said “Look, look! Logically different operations on different buttons! It must be mine!”.

The Roku set-top box is supposed to be pretty cool. And you may be aware that in addition to their Netflix Watch Instantly support, they’ve just added Amazon’s Video On Demand service. If you hadn’t heard about any of that, then gosh-golly-wow, doesn’t it sound just spiffy?

And doesn’t this sound like a paraphrased press release that includes a sponsored link to buy the product on Amazon? It should, because that’s what it is! I just got email from Amazon this morning letting me know that I should take advantage of the buzz and earn money for every Roku Digital Video Player that I help them sell.

So, you know: $99 bucks; streaming video on your TV set; apparently doesn’t suck. Let me know how it works out for you.

I’m not sure, but I think you’re trying to sell some sort of consumer electronics device in this picture. Power strip? Remote control? What is it?

From the nice folks at Lexus, on their new in-car control system:

Remote Touch is as natural to the driver's hand as a computer mouse.

So, expect to hear about a lot of car-pool tunnel injuries in a few years.

The folks at Akihabara News pass on the good word.

Here, for instance, is the deer park in Nara. And here’s Togetsukyou, the bridge that crosses the river in Arashiyama. How about Kyoto Tower, and the much more interesting Tokyo Tower. This could be fun…

[it looks like they went through Akihabara before all the stores opened in the morning.]

So, my mother has a shiny new Amazon Kindle, and before they continued on the next leg of their vacation, I helped fill it up with free e-books from Mobipocket’s web site. I also played with it for a while.

Notes:

1. Every time I picked it up, I hit a button by accident.
2. There's no reliable way to void a pending button-press, and it keeps a queue at least five clicks deep.
3. The "like a book" way of holding it with the cover makes the "previous page" button awkward to use.
4. Western European/American font support only. I didn't really expect it to have kanji, but I was surprised that it was also missing things like "ō", affecting things like the English-language Wikipedia entry for Toshirō Mifune.
5. Web sites that can't be rendered are falsely reported as down. I was all set to rush into the co-lo to reboot dotclue.org when I checked from my laptop and discovered that it was fine. The Kindle just refused to render it, because of the Japanese text.
6. It always took a long time to connect to Whispernet, leaving me wondering if our hotel was in a cellular dead zone. No, it's just that slow.
7. Frequent ghosting on the display, something that's less of a problem with newer e-paper displays and ones that do a full erase before a full redraw.
8. Unlike the early photos they showed off of it, it's not hideous to look at. It definitely needs some work in the human-factors department, but it looks much cleaner than I expected.
9. The sidebar-slider UI is a reasonable compromise between clarity and responsiveness, but takes some getting used to.

Net result: I’ll hold off until Kindle 2.0, at least.

I like Google Earth. I even pay for the faster performance and enhanced features. A few things, though:

• Why can't I keep North at the top of the screen? I hate constantly double-clicking the "N" in the gaudy navigation scroll-wheel.
• Why do you auto-enable new layers in my view, so that, for instance, I suddenly see every golf course on the planet, even though I had that entire category disabled?
• Why can't I switch between different sets of enabled layers?
• Why is the "Google Earth Community" layer such a dumping ground of unsorted crap? For instance, what value does this have to anyone who's not an airline pilot? Or this, where points scattered around the globe are all labeled, "here's my collection of 4,728 placemarks".

I’m sure I can come up with more if I think about it for a bit…

[update: ah, press ‘n’ for north, ‘r’ for a total view reset, and then figure out how to fix all of the KMZ files that were broken by the upgrade]