Q: Should everyone commute by bike?
A: Probably Not.

Even though I know the joys and thrills that come with cycling and can not imagine a life without them, I'm also a realist. The bottom line is: most of us live quite a ways from work, our jobs don't have places to park bikes or store our clothes and frankly, most of America is too out of shape to bike to work.

That being what it is, it is great for your health and longevity as well as for environment so if you're considering it but aren't a regular cyclist, here are a few tips to make sure that you don't dive into the deep end and end up swallowing the pool water and swearing off bikes forever:

1: Make sure your bike is in good shape
Squishy tires, rubbing breaks and squeaky chains are a drag, literally. Make sure that your bike is in good condition before taking it out on the road. If your bike has been in storage for a year or more, have your local shop lube the chain and replace the cables for you. Make sure your tires are inflated to their maximum recommended psi.

2: Ride for fun first.
Take a weekend day when the weather is nice and you aren't in a rush to ride around your neighborhood or park and re-familiarize yourself with the joys of biking. Pay attention to how you feel on hills and after riding for a while. If you're finding yourself tiring easily you may need to get a few more miles in before you start doing it on the clock (and under pressure)

3: Do your route on the weekend
Riding your route on the weekend won't give you a feel for navigating traffic, but it will give you a chance to pick the route you want to try. You will also have a chance to time yourself to know what your "best case" scenario is, as well as get a feel for your physical fitness and make sure you'll be able to handle it.

4: Get good equipment
Cycling with your gear is HARD and you don't want to show up at work soggy. Good clothes are expensive but worth every penny; they will keep pools of sweat forming and will allow you to dry quickly when you show up at your destination--often by the time you've walked up to the restroom to change. You may also consider wearing high performance shorts or pants over your aerodynamic cycling bottoms. Even if you're already chiseled like a Michelangelo sculpture nobody at work really wants to see it.

5: Pay attention!
Remember that none of your car driving friends will remember you when you're a cyclist. This means that they will be trying to run you off the road. Remember "defensive driving" from school? This goes double when you're cycling.

6: Take it easy! (on the way to work)
A nice warm shower and dinner are waiting for you after your commute home, but you have nothing but a day of work waiting for you at the office, so ride as if this is the case. Pedal easy. Coast. Ring your bell. Have some fun. Cycling is a great meditative way to get you in a positive frame of mind for work.

7: Have your bail-out plan ready
In the world of cycling, flats happen. If you aren't already an expert at fixing flat tires, at least have a plan in case you get one and can't fix it. Many major cities have bike racks on buses and cities with subways will usually allow bikes in the last car. Have your public transportation card handy (or plan your commuting route so that you pass a bike shop on the way)

8: Please Don't Store your bike outside
It breaks my heart to see bikes chained up on fences. It really does. The first time it rains you will have a rusty chain. The second time your bike is as good as useless as the cables will start to corrode and seize up. Unless you want to spend $80/month on bike shop repairs do yourself a favor and bring the bike inside.

Other notes:
- Panniers (pictured above) are great because they keep the weight off of your shoulders, help to keep your back dry, and aid in organization (eg: put your clothes in one and your office supplies in the other)
- Bike commuting doesn't work well with spikey hairstyles. The more natural the hair, the less likely you'll have "helmet head"

Since the article was so in depth there is not much that we can add other than this summary to throw on the pile of similar experiences from other card owners:

- The stock cooler for the ATI X1900 isn't just bad; it's utterly unusable. Within a half hour of initial installation it overheated and took the entire system down. Cranking up the HDD corridor fans using smcFanControl did nothing as the stock cooler exposes little of it's heat sink and relies entirely on it's own loud, ineffective fan

- After a 4 week backorder at newegg.com we finally received our Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 (rev 2) and found that the directions were, indeed, poorly illustrated and hard to understand. Knowing what the kit will look like when properly assembled helped a great deal. In the end installation was very smooth and linear.

- We are able to run work activities on an Apple 23" Cinema display (sharing the graphics memory between OS X in one "spaces" space and Windows XP Home SP2 on a second space) using the standard fan settings and passive cooling (no turbo module)

- The first run of Guitar Hero III crashed the system pretty hard but we presumed this was heat related and cranked the HDD fans up to 3000rpm (probably higher than needed) using smcFanControl. With these settings you can feel the air blowing out the back of the case and game runs fine at 1280x800 with crowd and lens flare on with the exception of certain camera pans in a few arenas which Aspyr acknowledges as a problem that will be addressed in a forthcoming patch.

So all in all it's a little disappointing that so much tweaking is left to gamers and that consoles seem to continue to be the only "just works" way to play a game. That being said, good results can be had on Mac/PC and the Accelero S1 is quite a bargain for the stability it provides.

A lot, apparently. We've been working with Aspyr recently due to their smash-hit game simply not performing on a very nicely equipped system.

The problem we've run into: Screen Stutter in the Desert Rock Tour and Kaiju Superdome. In particular: the camera views when looking up to the stage from the front row as well as sweeping camera pans from the back row to the stage.

On a quad 2.66 Xeon with 5GB RAM, a 500GB SATA HD, and a GeForce 7300 card with 256MB RAM the stutter in these areas is noticeable and seriously affects gameplay.

To attempt to remedy the situation we:
- obviously shut down all other programs
- made sure GH3 was patched (version 1.1 is the latest at press time)
- made sure we were on the latest OS (Mac 10.5.2 at the time with the "graphics update" package)
- set the game's graphics mode to "boring" (eg: lowest resolution, low crowd**, no special effects) (low crowd is not NO crowd-- they just remove the crowd near the stage and thin the crowd in the back)
- killed the dashboard to remove the last bits of network connectivity (many widgets connect frequently to the internet which can cause hiccups)
- created a new account on the system to use
- upgraded the graphics card to an ATI X1900 with 512MB RAM

Once we hit that last step we knew there was a real problem with the game, which aspyr has finally admitted to. There is a another patch in the works but there is little info as to what exactly they are patching and how so there is not much we can do but wait.

In the meantime, if you are experiencing some performance issues that you think might be related to your widgets this article tells you how to kill them (and restart them later)

www.macworld.com/article/46236/2005/08/disabledashboard.html

Apparently Aspyr is not allowed to mess with the widgets due to some legal issues with Apple but end users have a little more flexibility.

To that end, I've used Automator to create two programs that you can try to see if your performance is improved somewhat:

Rock Out.app sets the dashboard to "off", restarts the dock (making the changes take effect) and launches GH3 (presuming that you've quit your other running applications and that your game is in /Applications/Guitar Hero III folder)


Done Rocking.app sets the dashboard to "on" and restarts the dock to resume normal computer use


You can download them here

Enjoy.

As we take in clients that have brought their own domains and websites we gradually move them all over to goDaddy for registration (we, of course, do our own web hosting because we're control freaks).

It used to be that you could get your money's worth out of your yearly registration by waiting until the day before your domain expired before renewing or migrating, but it appears that those days are behind us.

Addicted to high profits like crack cocaine, Network Solutions has been employing every technique from stalling to stealing to get and retain victims customers. They would rather inconvenience you than lower their prices and compete.

Our recent experience looks something like this:

We had a domain expiring January 15 and started started getting letters early with titles like "FINAL RENEWAL NOTICE" (December 31) and "DEACTIVATION NOTICE ... service(s) listed below will be deactivated and removed if not renewed immediately" (January 8)

In checking their price chart on their second email January 8 we saw that their very cheapest plan was able to match goDaddy's 1-year plan but YOU'D HAVE TO BUY 100 YEARS OF REGISTRATION AT REGISTER.COM TO GET THAT PRICE.

So we decided that we should start a little early, say January 13. On January 13 we logged into network solutions and unlocked the domain and began the transfer process at goDaddy.

The goDaddy half was easy: we confirmed our identity, entered our security code but then had log back into Network Solutions because the transfer stalled. Appears that we needed to request and enter a separate authorization code with them. We filled out the request and received it via email along with some sad message about not leaving them:

"If you are planning to transfer your domain to another registrar, we would like to do whatever it takes to keep your business - please let us know how we can improve our service to you.

Network Solutions Customer Support"

After finally pushing the request through we received the following from Network Solutions:

"We received notification on January 13, 2008 1:24:18 PM EST that you have requested to transfer to another domain name registrar. If you would like to proceed with this transfer you do not need to respond to this message. If you wish to cancel the transfer please contact us before January 17, 2008 1:24:18 PM EST by visiting our secure website https://www.registrar-transfers.com/?h={proprietary code}.

If we do not hear from you by January 17, 2008 1:24:18 PM EST, this transfer will proceed.
We are committed to providing you with the solutions, services, and support to help you succeed online. We hope to continue serving you in the future."

Notice the problem there? The only way to proceed is to NOT answer them and by NOT answering them the transfer will go through on the 17th, two days AFTER the domain expires, meaning that Network Solutions can put a lock on it pretty much ruining any chances for transferring this year.

So we write to their customer support explaining that we actually wanted to transfer the domain IMMEDIATELY to which they responded to us by saying they needed to verify our email account which we did by responding to their response.

The next response goes like this:

"Thank you for contacting Network Solutions. We are committed to creating the best customer experience possible. One of the first ways we can demonstrate our commitment to this goal is to quickly and efficiently handle your recent request.

Please be advised that the transfer will push through on the 17h of January. To avoid any transfer interruption, we will be putting a 15-day special activation for your domain name, starting today, free of charge. This means that your domain name will be active with Network Solutions until January 29, 2008, or until you have successfully transferred your domain name to another registrar."

Really? A SPECIAL activation for us AT NO CHARGE so that we can do what we have the right to do, and that we were trying to do early so as to avoid this entire hassle? Infinitely generous. I mean, how could we have ever considered leaving them as they are clearly here for us and have our best interests in mind.

Say, for example, you already found your free weather program and want to get your daily horoscope in as few clicks as possible. You'd search high and low but you would find that the only programs that are available are kind of expensive and don't provide a fully-functional trial version, thus removing them from the "consider" list.

The solution here might be to fill in this gap with information you know you can get on the web. Using the free program called Sharklinks you can create a web shortcut that appears in your launcher as if it were an actual application. This saves at least 3 of your 4 clicks to get to your info and you also can add a nice new icon to boot:

Using sharklinks to create a new launcher shortcut. Make sure to check "unique app" to make it appear with the other applications.

Using the techniques laid out in our previous post on customizing your Palm OS launcher you can then assign your web shortcut it's own custom icon. Cool.

At home or work we are looking at much larger screens (often as large as a television) and have plenty of room for 4 column layouts for newspapers and blogs and fast enough processors to handle large flash movies and rich media. We are also sitting down and have more time available for browsing.

On the road we are most likely searching for something specific and want to get it as quickly as possible: directions to a restaurant, news or weather updates, or a wikipedia definition to a word you're arguing with someone about.

We don't need to be scrolling all over creation to get to the answer (even if it is fun) -- we need it presented quickly and plainly.

As such the Blazer browser still isn't that bad for reaching these goals but in order to do so you need to actually turn off a few factory defaults. First, here is an example of the problem in action: Websites that have not made a mobile style sheet often render poorly in Blazer:

Other problems include errors from sites that deliver content via AJAX or JavaScript that require multiple clicks to dismiss (ahem, twit.tv, cough...).

All of the fixes can be found on the General tab of your browser preferences:

Reloading our sample wikipedia page shows it now is quite readable (and loads quickly!):

Announced Sept 11, 2007, Released December 11 and patched December 20, Guitar Hero III has finally landed on the Mac platform.

Being the furthest tentacle out on this gaming franchise (with xBox 360, PS2, Wii and Windows generally taking priority) there are a few questions that don't seem to have easy-to-find answers.

Bronzefinger shall attempt to answer what it has learned thus far:

Q: Will Guitar Hero III run smoothly on my iBook/iMac/MacBook/etc.?
A: I know a lot of us are in a state of denial about this game's system requirements because they are so slap-you-in-the-face high. In fact, many people are disregarding these and buying the game anyway and then experiencing the pain of lags and stutters. Don't believe me? read the reviews at Apple.com and weep.

The MINIMUM system requirements:

• Operating System: 10.4.10 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard)
• CPU Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo
• CPU Speed: 2 GHz
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Hard Disk Space: 5.1 GB + 1 GB Swap File
• Video Card (ATI): Radeon X1600
• Video Card (NVidia): Geforce 7300
• Video Memory (VRam): 128 MB
• Media Required: DVD-ROM
• Macintosh mouse and keyboard
• Official Guitar Hero X-Plorer Guitar Controller

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• CPU Speed: 2.33 GHz
• Memory:2 GB RAM
• Video Memory (VRam): 256 MB

The key here is really the graphics card -- most MacBooks, MacBook Pros and early Mac Pros video cards DO NOT MEET THE MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENT and they WILL cause the game to stutter.

Here are a few real-world examples from the Bronzefinger stable:

Guitar Hero III for Mac, patch 1.1 installed, all other programs off:

MacBook Pro (dual 2.16Ghz, 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, 64MB Graphics Card (BELOW SPEC!)): 
Plays the first two levels up to the prison just fine with effects off. Then songs will fairly regularly suffer from visual slowdowns that are bad enough to not be able to play through them "by ear"

Mac Pro (quad 2.66Ghz Xeon, 5GB RAM, 500GB SATA HD, 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT (Aspyr support says this card is below spec but their website says it's supported)):

No visual difference between screen resolutions so play widescreen at the lower resolution. All effects on and mostly smooth gameplay but when panning through the crowd in the Japanese Superdome and the Desert Rock tour the screen will stutter slightly.

Q: Are there downloadable songs for this game like the PS2 version?
A: No.

Q: Can I play my friends online?
A: RedOctane states in their online F.A.Q. that online game play is NOT available between consoles, so you can NOT play online with your xBox or Wii friends.

Q: Since this came with an XBox USB guitar can I use the XBox wireless guitar or PS2 Guitar (since it uses a USB adapter)?
A: No. The official word from Aspyre is:
"The Guitar that we support for this game is the X-Plorer USB Guitar Controller. The Playstation 2 controllers will not work properly, even with the adapter. There have been many reports of compatibility problems with the PS2 controller. So, the X-Plorer (wired) USB Guitar Controller is the only controller that we support for GH3.

You can, however, dress your guitar up a bit with vinyl covers from a variety of sources including iStyles.com.

For owners of GH3 on other systems you can find a handy chart of guitar compatibility in the scorehero forums

Q: What does "NOTICE: This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some disk and virtual disk drives." mean?
A: In an act of customer loathing Aspyr has employed some kind of copy protection that requires that your install DVD be inserted into your machine in order to run the game. It appears that it is only used as a check to prove you "own" the game and is not used to play the actual game -- so you don't have to worry about it decreasing performance due to the slower read speeds of optical drives.

This does, however, create quite a few opportunities to scratch your disc (either by the drive mechanism or general storing/retrieving). If this happens you're off to the Activision/RedOctane/Asypre maze to figure out how to get a replacement disk all the while you're w/o the game you purchased.

It appears that this software can tell if you've made a local .dmg or .iso copy and similarly can tell if you have inserted a copy of the disk into your optical drive meaning that you can ONLY play your game by validating it with the actual DVD that came in the box from the store -- you can not use a copy even if it was an exact disc-to-disc copy.

Update 28 March 2008: The "unofficial" way to protect your original Guitar Hero III Disc is to not use it at all. For as long as it is available you can check on this thread for instructions. They would be post #7, #20, #25 and #33, roughly in that order.

Q: Is GH3 insanely fun?
A: After making sure you're comfortably within the recommended spec and come to peace with all of the above: yes.

There is a system-wide fix that you can apply using Terminal in OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

Drawing on Almaer.com's suggestion here is what I discovered:

• enable your root user (sudo passwd root) and su -
• open the file /etc/ssh_config in a text editor like pico
• Add this line to your config file: ServerAliveInterval 300

keywords: Keepalive, timeout, ssh, os x tiger, os x leopard, Terminal, Transmit, Fetch, MacSFTP Carbon, Fugu

Launcher Before (possibly the ugliest screen I've seen on any mobile device)

Launcher After (If you have a high-res screen use it!)

STEP ONE: back up your data using Disk Utility

Make a disk image of your existing SD card. You can use a USB card reader or Palm software that mounts the SD card on your desktop. You can see my disk was called RICOCHET and I made my backup selection after single clicking on that disk in the left column. Disk Utility created a new .dmg of my SD card called disk4s1.dmg. You can choose to name this anything you like.

STEP TWO: format your new card

You can use the Card Info program on your Treo or you can use Disk Utility on your mac. If you use Disk Utility you need to choose "MS-DOS File System" so that it will use the FAT32 format.

STEP THREE: Use disk utility to "restore" your old disk image to your new SD card

In the "restore" tab of the Disk Utility dialogue you will simply drag-and-drop your freshly formatted SD card into the "Destination" box and your .dmg backup (disk4s1.dmg in my case) to the "Source" box and click "Restore"

Once the process is done you can eject the disk and you're set to go.

Notes:
- If you have an old Treo 700p you may need to update your firmware to allow it to recognize SDHC cards of 4GB and greater.
- Not all SDHC cards are created equal. I picked up a Kingston Class 6 SDHC card and it would freeze up half way through copying files to it and completely crashed my mac when accessing it via Disk Utility. An off-the-shelf SanDisk 4GB SDHC card was plug and play and worked immediately without a fuss. It is apparently only a "class 2" so we'll see how the speed holds up while playing TV on it.

- Updated Chatter
- Installed new Card Reader app
- Installed new USB Modem app
- Installed new kMeteo app
- Rearranged categories
- Renamed infrequently updated applications (thanks to Resco Explorer)

After making all of these changes I picked up a new battery and swapped it out. In doing so the phone obviously had to reboot. When it did you can imagine my surprise when it went into an infinite reboot loop.

Various soft resets didn't work -- the only answer was a hard reset which meant wiping all the data, prefs, etc. off the phone. Game over? Not quite, but it took a fair amount of science to bring it back to life where it should have been.

Thanks to Resco Explorer I had a backup from a few weeks prior (though it reminded me I should do weekly backups of the phone like I do my computer). So here was the methodical walk-through to identify what the problem was in the stack of possibilities above.

1. Restored phone from most recent backup on SD card
2. Set desktop sync software to overwrite handheld with important info like calendar and addy book (to make sure it's all fresh and the sync doesn't go awry
3. Make a new backup (backup #1 -- after Resco Explorer makes a backup it soft resets the phone so this also acts as a test of whether or not the changes affected the phone. If they did I would have to do a "hard reset" again and restore the phone from a previous backup.)
4. Set new categories (backup #2)
5. Install kMeteo and Chatter update (backup #3)
6. Install Treo Launcher (but don't configure) (backup #4)
7. Configure Treo Launcher to be default plus all prefs, backgrounds and icons ( backup #5)
8. Name all icons properly so the phone, as a whole, works (but doesn't have preferred app names) (backup #6)
9. Rename pssh to Terminal (replacement icon wouldn't show with default name) (backup #7)
10. Rename remaining apps and icons (backup #8) (phone crashed and previous backup did not work, revert to version 6)
11. Rename just DictionaryToGo to Dictionary (backup #8.1)
12. Rename just LJP to Nintendo (backup #8.2)
13. Rename kMeteo to Weather (backup #8.3) (confirmed crash, kMeteo the culprit. restore to 8.2 and do not rename)
14. Perform final desktop sync, make backup (#9), and run with it

The moral of the story:
- Keep regular backups of anything important!
- Do not update too many things at once or it will complicate the troubleshooting process. This goes for all electronics.

Much like Microsoft, Apple is now breaking your computer with each and every software release. The big difference between the two is that Microsoft tries (in vain) not to break things while Apple relentlessly exploits new hardware rendering all old versions obsolete.

After growing accustomed to being productive I've decided to sit this round out for a few months and have someone else compile a list of everything that doesn't work and then make a calculated move into the future. Regular consumers have become such a great test lab that they're unwittingly included in "beta testing" for pretty much any new technology that hits the market.

And this is the very reason I realized that it was time to give my Treo one last booster shot to get me through the release of the Palm Linux, not to it.

Though Palm promises an Apple-like experience in the migration (there will be a "classic environment" in which to run old Palm Garnet apps) this kind of strategy is a crutch and we shouldn't have anything to do with it. Instead we'll need to watch and wait (some more) for new applications to come along and fill our launcher back up to it's previous glory.

So until then, Garnet works but needs to look a little better. I set out on a mission this week to find a way to display some wallpaper on the startup screen thinking that would be a quick and easy way to pretty it up a bit. It almost immediately (d?)evolved into a OS X-iPhone-KDE mash-up which not only made my phone look really slick but it also revealed one of the beautiful things about the rev 1 iPhone: if you are forced to simplify your launch screen you find the OS gets out of your way and you end up using your phone and tools more and tweaking it less.

Before:

What I was originally thinking: A simple wallpaper, though the problem of clutter still remains.

What it turned into: An all-out launcher replacement with wallpaper and custom icons:

Going back to large icons (which were always available on Palm) and having the ability to use the 5-way button to go left and right through categories forced me to rethink my applications. Now instead of having 5 categories, everything I do regularly is on the first screen, useful but less frequently used tools are on the 2nd screen and everything else is hidden. All of a sudden everything is a quick touch away, not multiple clicks and presses.

So how did we do it? Unfortunately it's not an installer package (partially due to potential copyright issues and also because I'm not a programmer) but here is a brief overview:

STEP ONE: FIND BACKGROUNDS
I found this page with 28 Mac OS X backgrounds on google. The Treo 700's screen resolution is 320x320 but 320x480 will work fine as the extra height will be cropped off. Below is the one I picked:

STEP TWO: FIND A NEW LAUNCHER
Sadly the built in launcher does not seem to support wallpapers on any screen but the phone screen (weird) and I couldn't find a way to "hack" one in via Resco Explorer so an outright launcher replacement was in order. ZLauncher, Silverscreen, VisualArts and others seemed really clunky and I was very happy to have found Treo Launcher ($12.95 Shareware). Out of the gates it's kind of ugly but it can be customized with wallpaper and custom icons if you have an external SD card to store them on (no internal storage right now...)

Note about wallpaper: Apparently the pnoJpegLib.prc is required to use a .jpg as a background image. It comes with TreoLauncher so you don't need to get it separately. The two advantages of .jpegs are:

1: most wallpapers you find will already be jpegs and won't require conversion and
2: They are a LOT smaller. My example .jpeg above is 16kb wheras a bmp of the same dimensions will be 528kb. Size still matters on small devices like this one.

STEP FOUR: FIND OR MAKE SOME ICONS
The option to use custom icons is particularly great because there are a handful of very popular apps out there (like pssh and Toccer) that don't have an icon and use a generic 3D blue box. By adding your own icon you can add that level of polish to the interface that should have been there from the beginning.

Speaking of polish, most Palm icons are pretty horrendous to begin with so it might be worthwhile replacing them all if you have the time.

If you are going to keep text beneath the icon you'll want to make a 57x57px photoshop file and only use the top-middle 48x48px square to get the effect illustrated above. You will want to save the icons as transparent .gif images with no background and follow the naming and filing instructions provided with TreoLauncher.

TreoLauncher also allows you to turn off the text giving you room for full iPhone-like 57x57px icons.

Most icons these days are getting shiny thanks to Apple's lead with OS X. I pulled a collection of photos from all over including forums, product pages, linux icon sets and google searches.

Here are a few of the main problems you'll run into with Palm icons:

Since you're making transparent .gif images you will run into the problems of a white haze showing around soft, anti-aliased edges. You'll want to trim your icons down as tightly as you can and save them with a matte color as close to your wallpaper as possible. Monochromatic wallpapers work best with this effect.

Any icon that has pure white in it will need to have a "replace color" done on it so that it's a few shades into light gray. For some reason pure white renders as clear even though it is not. The Treo's have very bright screens and the light gray will be solid and will still look white.

Once you're done and organized you can use the left-and-right buttons on the 5-way navigator to flick between screens:

IF YOU'RE GOING TO GO ALL OUT...: Check out the "For a laptop look and feel" section of an earlier article on the Treo 700p. It links to:
- Palm Revolt. Interface skins including OS X "Aqua"
- pTunes iTunes skin

Join the discussion about this and other Treo Launcher topics.

These custom icons, wallpapers, skins and interfaces seem to work with most Palm Treos including the Treo 600, Treo 650, Treo 700p and Palm Centro

Related: A Hands-on comparison of coffee bean grinders

The gist: Engadget has done, I feel, a wonderful job of summarizing Palm's victories in bringing useful and innovative products to market only to lose touch with what people want today. The company is still a favorite of many of us but seems like it is dooming itself to a slow and painful death while competitors slowly but steadily take the very market away that Palm invented.

This was discovered while upgrading the HD to a 250GB model that had a different case configuration so there are no longer any blocked holes -- at least on this computer.