Today’s Wall Street Journal has reviews of some photo organizers and some printers that can produce portrait-sized prints. They compare 2 free photo editing and organizing programs: Picasa for Windows and iPhoto for the Mac. The review commends Picasa’s editing and enhancement options, but gives the over-all nod to iPhoto, largely because of its Virtual Album and Photo Book management features. 
A companion article discusses the trend towards printing ever larger photos at home. Many photo printers can produce 8-by-10 inch prints, and some like the HP Photosmart 8750 are capable of handling 13-by-19 inch digital photos. The article discusses the typical costs of producing an 8×10 photo: 81 cents at home including ink and paper, vs about $3.99 at a retail outlet and $3.19+ at an online photo-developing website.
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Toshiba today announced the development of a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery that recharges in only one minute … to 80% full. A full 100% recharge takes a few minutes. The company states that this is about sixty times faster than typical li-on batteries. The improvement is due to the use of nano-particles at the negative electrode that allow the battery to quickly absorb and store vast amount of lithium ions, without causing any deterioration in the electrode. 
Hitachi released a new version of μVNC a few days ago. μVNC, for ‘Virtual Network Computer’, is desktop software which supports operation of a Personal Computer from a remote device such as a PDA or a mobile phone. On the server side μVNC can support Windows XP/2000/NT/Me/98, Linux/FreeBSD and Mac OS X. On the client side, Hitachi offers versions of μVNC for BREW-enabled CDMA phones, J2ME (MIDP 2.0) phones, as well as phones running on Symbian. 
Telstra, the Australian telco, has commenced a new service that allows customers to send e-mail and text, picture and video messages via Internet-enabled public payphones. The payphones offer a color LCD touch screens and support video messaging via e-mail via a built-in Web camera.
Samsung’s new PDA slider phone, the SPH-M4300, is the first from that company to provide wireless LAN connectivity. The phone works on the Pocket PC 2003 Phone Edition and supports Outlook, Word and Excel. It also features an MP3 player with 3D surround sound, a 1.3M pixel camera and large-ish 2.8-inch LCD display.
Samsung recently unveiled an improved transflective film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) designed for mobile devices. The display is intended for car nav systems and personal media players. Its benefits include a 160 degree viewing angle and a 400:1 contrast ratio. 
The latest issue of NewScientist has an article entitled “13 Things That do not Make Sense”, wherein they list some of the current mysteries in the sci-med universe .. including such staples as dark matter and dark energy. They also make note of the 
ViewSonic says that its VX924 and VX724 LCD monitors are the fastest on the planet .. at a pixel response time of 4 milliseconds. This is a vast improvement over the typical/average figure of about 16ms for LCDs, and now compares reasonably well with the 1ms response time for average CRTs. 
…and if a picture is worth a thousand words, then I just saved you a few minutes of reading. Great looking automobile & congrats to the owner. I’m still trying to figure out how the ‘MAIL’ button operates. 3.8 liter engine, 355 HP, 182 mph maximum speed .. that’s 293 Kph 
