I’m lovin’ my recent birthday present from my wife: a shiny new iPod Touch. It’s quite a step-up from my 2nd gen iPod (which served me well for six years, despite its monochrome display, bulky form, dwindled battery life and lack of a dock connector).

It’s handy to check email, news feeds or the weather from (almost) anywhere, in addition to having music, pictures and movies at my fingertips. Browsing for music and apps without needing my laptop is also convenient, albeit a temptation to splurge (since I buy much of my music from Amazon MP3 rather than iTunes these days, it’s not quite a one-stop-shopping experience).

Some of the free apps I’ve found useful so far: Facebook, Exposure, Evernote, Twitterific, Remote, WeatherBug, Othello, Wordpress, BoxOffice, Last.fm, Pandora Radio.

Someday I hope to get an iPhone 3G, but for now the iPod Touch is my perfect PDA.

• Todd Selby photographs people and their possessions in their NYC homes
• Indie Game Developers Enlist Algorithms to Do the World-Building for Them
• Neo2 Magazine Free Experimental Fonts
• Circos visualizing genomes and genomic data
• History of Debt in America
• A Brief History of Money

• Winners of 2008 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA)
  
• Beatmaker - The first music creation studio for the iPhone and iPod Touch
• Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known - from the author of Bit Literacy
• Rickshaw Commuter Messenger Bags - from former Timbuk2 designers
• Time Travel Posters - interesting work
• Visualizing On The Road as a literary organism
• The early days: How 37signals built buzz out of the gate

• The Printable CEO™ Series - a series of printable forms that help manage the day-to-day chore of achieving your goals
• Walking the Line When You Work from Home
• 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth
• Beautiful Monsters - the first in a series of articles intended to serve as an ongoing conversation about how interaction designers can move the industry toward an Ecosystem Centered Design
• making research actionable: an introduction to design criteria
• It’s Cosmic man…it’s on my Mac…whoah - CosmicPainter from garageCube
• Polish Stamps of 1963 - I’ve always loved two color printing
• Zeus Jones - Less Talk, More Action - nice identity work
• Get out of your own way - Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves.

I am pleased to announce my 2008 Summer mix podcast (1hr05min, 74.9Mb MP3) of original music for your consideration. It’s equal parts reflective, chilled-out, lazy. A suitable soundtrack for your morning cuppa, yard and crafting projects, reading on the couch, afternoon coding sessions and breezy evenings on the front porch.

Track order:

1. Lost Things (Cascade dub)
2. La Palma (1984 CIA Factbook mix)
3. BASIC language
4. Departure Lounge, Pan-Am
5. 3mb (2008 Tabla revisit)
6. Circular Object (Sunset Island dub)
7. Dexu (2008 defenestration)
8. Aguadulce