Those of you itching to get your hands on an iPod Touch but can’t yet may well settle for the next best thing: an instruction manual.

A detailed, 85-page PDF file has been put online by Apple. Get the 6.8mb Features Guide PDF here.

Been using a new aluminum iMac for a couple of weeks now and been loving it.

I’ve been a Mac user for so long I’ve acquired the hard carapace of a smug veteran who doesn’t know half as much as he thinks he does, and as such, regularly doesn’t even deign to crack open a manual, thinking it’s beneath him. There are piles of immaculate, pristine, never-touched shrink-wrapped manuals from generations of Macs and iPods in a box somewhere in the house. This iMac’s is still in its big box, untouched.

I picked up a new Macworld issue the other day and was leafing through it. I found a review of the new iMac, and wondering if the writer and I had the same observations, read it. Also, I’m writing up one of my own, and was curious to see if I’d missed anything. I haven’t yet, so I was miffed to read something I did - that the new iMac can continue to charge iPods hooked up to the USB ports even if the iMac was asleep, something it couldn’t do before.

Hah. Ok. Something I would’ve know if I regularly RTFM.

So moral of the story? Read the effing manual! And, that the new iMacs can charge iPods off the USB ports even if the iMac is asleep! So there.

I’m a big fan of instruction manuals, and I find a perverse sort of pleasure in reading them - even though I never really do when I get the gadget first. I wing it, trying to see if I could get it to run and at what point I’d actually have to RTFM.

I believe I once actually had a manual for the first Mac, but of course it’s been filed away in the Twilight Zone. If you’d like a chance to see how user’s manuals for the first Macintosh looked like (yes, Virginia, there were paper instruction books back in the day, made of real paper), check out this Flickr album from a guy named Peter Merholz, who found an original manual in a garage sale somewhere. He blogs about it here.

Dated, but still cool, and designed very nicely.