The future is now with e-ink. It looks like a Palm or PDA, but in actuality it’s an e-book. Not an ordinary e-book reader, but one that looks like paper. Newspapers will be read on it. Every profession will get a hold of this new device. Sporting at approximately $600 (street), Philips has news of soon releasing the IRex. Sony will release one at half the price (street) soon as well. Will this replace paper? We will see…

Is Microsoft planning to enter the iPod playing field? It wouldn’t surprise me if they did. If there is a company out there with the skill set needed to enter this market is Microsoft. One only needs to look at the XBox and XBox 360 to see that Microsoft is fully capable of swooping into a market many considered impenetrable and gobbling up a nice share for itself. It has the brains and the cash to do just about anything they want. So what if Mr. Gates is not going to be retiring. Do you really think he is going to be totally hands off from his $250 billion dollar baby? Personally, I have always been a MS fan, even if its not a popular thing to do. I love my XBox(es) and my XP!

Moo.fx is pretty slick. For a tiny little javascript library, moo.fx has monster potential. With what they are developing, you are only going to be limited by imagination and know-how to turn your static website into an online hard core app with real juice. If you check out the moo.fx forum at http://moofx.mad4milk.net/forum/ you’ll see a number of great looking real world examples, beta effects and a number of ideas in the hopper. My personal favorite? The accordion effect. It’s applicable to navigation, instantaneous interaction and site compression. Rock on moo.fx!

Transfer large files by email for free. Most service providers and webmail providers limit email attachments to 10 Meg or so. What do you do if you want to send someone a larger file like a digital video? Well, just go to www.yousendit.com and use their free service. With it, you can send a file up to 1 GB in size. The transfer is accomplished by temporarily storing the your uploaded file on the YouSendIt server. The recipient is then sent an email saying that your file is waiting for him and is given a link to it. The file remains on the YouSendIt server for 7 days giving the recipient plenty of time to download it.

With PDAs and Smartphones growing more and more powerful, mobile video is looking much more attractive. The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) plays anything you can throw at it including DivX and XviD. Comes in Palm flavour as well as Windows Mobile/PPC. Video podcasting for mobile devices is increasing in popularity, but sometimes, you just need to “do it yourself”. Encode your video files with PocketDivXEncoder to reduce playback lag and file sizes. PocketDivXEncoder will produce resized and optimized files for playback on your mobile device.

Family Tree Maker is one of the best genealogical software programs on the market today. Since its first release over 10 years ago the creators have continually updated and improved it to fit the needs of amateur genealogists. It is possible to purchase just the program itself, or bundled with supplemental disks to use for research. Books, charts and a link to research through www.ancestry.com are standard on the 2006 edition. When they are notified, users can also upgrade to the latest version by clicking on a link within the program which affords them a worthwhile discount.