Instapaper

I frequently find a long article while browsing the web for something else that interests me, but I just don’t have the time to read at that moment. Instapaper was designed for this problem. One nice feature is that you don’t even have to sign up to use it: it can keep track of your list of articles based on cookies in your browser. If you plan to use it from more than one browser, it is quick and easy to sign up for an userid. The developer of the site said he was motivated because he wants to encourage people to write longer articles for the web.

Keybr

The Flash application keybr.com just informed me that I type 57 words a minute. Since the words are nonsense words that don’t make grammatical sense, I assume that means I would type faster if the sample was in English.

Vista Performance (not)

I have had almost no personal experience of Windows Vista, and having watched my manager struggle with it on her laptop, I am quite content to keep it that way. Randall C Kennedy of InfoWorld decided to compare Vista versus XP and Windows 2000 on the same hardware and produced this chart.

Not only is Vista and Office 2007 the most bloated desktop software stack ever to emerge from Redmond, its system requirements are so out of proportion with recent hardware trends that only the latest and greatest from Intel or AMD can support its epically porcine girth.

Read the complete article.