Rebecca Kelley has gotten what she has always wanted.  To make it to the popular section on the popular news website Digg.  She posted a rant recently on her blog about how she will never make it to the front page because she has a life and is not a power user that sits on the computer at 4 in the morning waiting for a story to appear.  She has a little list of things she goes on about and she has finally gotten the spot she deserves.

[Why I'll Never Make Digg Popular ]

Today Apple has released their latest installment in their iPhone/iTouch lineup.  It hasn’t added any new features, but mainly bug fixes to the 1.1.3 update and is probably helping to get ready for the SDK that will be here anytime now.  You can directly download the iPod Touch update and the iPhone update from their website.

It doesn’t take a genius to expose the fact that America’s youth is lazier to read anything insightful from an actual book (or even participate in physical activities) now than they were ten or more years ago. Much of that is to be blamed on the inception of the internet that we’ve grown to love with such useless sites as YouTube and MySpace that don’t do much but actually make you dumber at times. Another reason is obviously the greater exposure to video games in recent years. Well, how do we fix this growing American epidemic? We give them more video games, of course!

Wait… What? We give the kids more video games in hopes to curb their addiction to video games so they exchange their plastic hand pacifiers for paperback books? Who in the right mind would actually institute this madness?

Oh, right… Leave it to the people of the Clinton-Macomb Public Library in Rochester Hills, Michigan to encourage illiteracy… The funny thing about this whole thing is that the original article from ABC News never once mentions the game tournaments and rentals from the library having a positive affect on book rentals. Genius. Pure Genius.

Source: ABC News

The FCC has set February 19, 2009 as the day your analog TV will no longer work and you’ll get the dreaded black screen. The government has offered a refund to people that want to make the switch to the digital era, but a group of secret shoppers have found that large electronic retailers don’t really understand whats happening.

According to the group, sales clerks at the stores they visited routinely gave inaccurate information about digital TV converter boxes and the coupon program sponsored by the U.S. government to offset the cost of the converters for consumers.

I can’t really blame the clerks though. Most of them are probably in their first year of college looking for a job to pay of tuition and don’t really know what they are talking about. It should be the employers responsibility to get their workers up to date on what will be happening so they can inform customers as to what will need to change.

[bostonherald]

The much anticipated Windows Vista SP1 has made its way to customers, and a certain few were given copies before the rest for testing purposes. Microsoft promised that the new and anticipated update would bring performance enhancements and overall a better user experience. But trials at CNET have shown mixed results.

The overall thought is…. your average user won’t notice a change at all if they are someone who keeps up to date with the regular windows updates. The single most important performance change was in file copying. In Windows XP, it used cached I/O mode to improve write times. This was not the case with the previous release of Vista. It used a slower and insufficient method. With the SP1 update, it has now gotten the cached I/O mode which greatly improves performance in that area.

Some got a completely different reaction to the new copying mode. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes claimed that it in fact made it go even slower before with greater performance lost.

The testers have said that Microsoft fixed a lot of bugs, so you don’t have many of the little kinks that you had before. Overall, users opinions vary from tester to tester and you’ll have to make your own assumption once you get a hold of it.

[dailytech]

It seem the cool kids are all going into the mobile phone department, and rumor has it so will Sony. Sony may be in works on making an Alienware cell phone of their own that would run Googles Android GUI, but will it work? Apple has had great success moving into the cell phone market with their ever popular iPhone, and HP has also created a number of hand held devices. Sony has attempted the mobile phone market once before with a line of PDAs, but they turned out to be a total flop and were discontinued soon after. They recently aquired the gaming platform Alienware, which may be the answer to all their problems.

The Image above is a mockup that was created to show what it may look like. I’m sure their won’t be the drastic ridges as, that wouldn’t be so comfortable in your pocket, but the concept is what many would believe an Alienware cellphone to look like.

[dialaphone, via gadgetell]

Car logos are some of the best representations of the auto manufacturers past and symbolize who they are.  Did you know that BMW’s logo symbolized a propeller because they originally built aircraft during the WWII era?  Or that Porsche’s logo symbolized a coat of arms (that ones kind of obvious)?  There are great tales about how these logos came to be, and where they originated.  Very interesting look at the world of automakers.

[History behind the Car Logos]

I saw this on the Discovery Channel a while back when they did their “Future Car” special. But this is truely a great concept.

Going to a Gas Station… I mean… errr… Air station would change the way you drive.  With this new Air Car design, by none other than a French man we may just have that option in the future.  The car is a revolutionary device that runs completely on compressed air.  It is very easy and time saving to fill up one of these cars, which take about 3 minutes to fill completely.  They are looking to put them on the market later this year with a pretty heafty price tag, so don’t expect to go to your local dealer to pick one up.  With a top speed of about eighty, you will still be able ot get a speeding ticket on the way to your destination.  Follow the link for a video of it in action.

[Car that Runs on 'air']