From the Now-We’ve-Seen-Everything Department:

If you hate smudges on that beautiful iPhone or iPod Touch screen, some folk at the imaginatively named company Phone Fingers have come up with a latex solution.

Literally, these are latex finger sleeves that keep your multi-touch screen clean and sparkling despite heavy use. They come in black, in bags of 25, in small, medium, large and extra-large, and cost about 9.90 Euros.

If you can stand the riducule and vaguely fetishistic nature of the product, then by all means, get a set. Me, nothing a hankie can’t fix. Whatever you choose, live long and prosper.

A blogger posted a big thank you to Apple for making him switch from Vista to Mac, then back to Vista. While on the surface this sounds like a back-handed compliment, it actually makes sense - I think.

Aviv Eyal, co-founder and VP of Grouper Networks (which was eventually acquired by Sony), and co-founder of Friskit, wrote in his blog that Macs made him appreciate Windows Vista, which had previously confounded him no end:

I was getting very frustrated with Vista on several of my PCs and laptops on a daily basis to a point that I stopped enjoying working on computers. On a clean Vista Pro install with just IE, Outlook and Office on strong Dell workstations and on a Vaio laptop, I kept getting hangs and crashes left and right. I now run Vista using the excellent Parallels Desktop for Mac software. It is worth every penny.

Eyal calls Windows the “light” side of the force, and Macs and OS X the “dark” side. He expounds further on this odd compliment:

With 4GB of RAM on a 2.4ghz Intel core 2 duo MacBook Pro laptop, I get very decent performance from Vista running virtually in Parallels, in full-screen mode it is easy to forget that you are not running Vista natively, so if I need to use word or powerpoint I just switch back to the dark side virtually on Parallels and if Vista hangs crashes I just quickly restore the virtual machine to a previous state while I keep working on my Mac apps.

Uh …ok. I think. At least this underscores that fact that there is no reason not to buy a Mac these days. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

Check out Eyal’s post on his blog here.

iPod with an iPhone error message.

Amazing how Apple can tweak the software so that Linux and other operating systems that don’t natively run iTunes are SOL where the new iPods are concerned, or tweak an app or hardware for the iPod so that it doesn’t compete with an iPhone and artificially and self-servingly segment the market (such as pulling out the ability to enter new events in iCal, or pull the Bluetooth out) — but are so lazy they can’t even seem to clean up the iPhone software code they’re recycling to use in the iPod.

Sheesh.

I thought the whole point of the shuffle was to make the most affordable, minimalist digital music player around, but apparently some folk think otherwise.

See the Heyerdahl special edition diamond-encrusted, pink and white gold iPod shuffle called the iDiamond. Currently on display in Oslo until October 1, the not-for-sale, one-of-a-kind digital music player’s casing and  earbuds are made of white and pink gold and are studded with 430 diamonds (they’d have fitted it with more, I think, but it was too small.) It’s currently valued at US$41,000, or almost PHP1.9M.

Would be a mighty shame to load this up with pirated MP3.

More details here.

I’ve always wondered where Apple got that symbol for the Command key. Now I know. It’s called, variously, the Cross of St. John, or St. Hans’ Cross. It’s an ancient sign used for a lot of things, from Cabbalistic mysticism to traffic signs. And of course, computer keys.

Check out symbols.com for more.