• Massive Christmas iPod Touch Sales Boost App Store Downloads
  Apple's new iPod Touch appears to have been a huge hit this holiday season with evidence that the high end iPod has seen massive gains in marketshare.

  The first impact was seen in early sales numbers for App Store applications on Christmas day. The #1 ranked App Store application (iFart Mobile) saw a tripling of sales from 13,000 units a day to almost 39,000 units on Christmas day. This growth in sales, however, was not just isolated to the #1 spot and was seen across the entire App Store. Several game developers on TouchArcade.com reported sales boosts of 3x-4x across all titles, even for titles not in the top 100 listings.

• PS3 unable to hold its own against Wii, Xbox 360 this holiday season
  Considering the way that the Wii flew off shelves last month, this next item probably won't come as a shock to anyone. According to the Wall Street Journal, both Nintendo's console and the Xbox 360 trounced the PS3 in holiday sales, with U.S. sales falling nine percent from this month last year. During this same period, sales doubled for the Wii and rose eight percent for the Xbox 360.

• Comcast expands ultra-fast Internet service
  Comcast Corp. says its new ultra-high-speed Internet service will be coming over the next several weeks to Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore and Ft. Wayne, Ind.

  Comcast says the next-generation Docsis 3.0 technology will include some of the fastest speeds available today, including a tier with download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second.

• SMS Text Messaging for Gchat
• Pastebud Brings Copy and Paste to the iPhone
  Pastebud, a bookmarklet/webapp combo that works around the lack of a copy or paste function in the iPhone and iPod touch, has just gone live. And it's surprisingly elegant and painless, with a few small hitches.

• Microsoft warns of new Windows bug, says attacks under way
  On the same day that Microsoft Corp. released its biggest batch of security patches in more than five years, the company also warned Windows users of a critical bug that it didn't get around to fixing.

  In an advisory posted yesterday, Microsoft said that "limited and targeted" attacks are in progress by hackers exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in the WordPad Text Converter, a tool included with all versions of Windows. The flawed converter handles Microsoft Word 97 files on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4), XP SP2, Server 2003 SP1 and SP2.

• Hidden feature turns iPhone into TV gaming device
  Though largely demonstrative, the game uses the iPhone's accelerometer for input and steering while routing the game's video through a video-out cable to the TV. Freeverse noted that the program ran best on the second-generation iPod touch, which includes a 532MHz processor compared to the iPhone and iPhone 3G's 412MHz chip.

The more you use Firefox the more you love it. The more quality extensions you find and install the more functional, convenient and helpful Firefox becomes.

I was a latecomer to FireFox… I rebelled for a while and stuck with IE7. Firefox felt kind of rogue to me at first. It wasn’t until FireFox 2 that really made the full switch. The thing that really put the final nail in the IE coffin was finding some really useful extensions that made my online tasks easier.

Here’s a list of my top 10 favorite Firefox extensions… in mostly random order.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
This one is a must have for anyone who uses multiple computers. Install it on all of them and it’ll sync your bookmarks across them all. It also backs them up online so you can access them when you’re on someone else’s computer.

Better GMail 2
If you use GMail or Google Apps email (and you should be) then Better GMail 2 is also a must have. This extension gives your GMail interface more functionality and gives you more control over what buttons or modules you see. It also allows you to tweak the interface to your needs.

Hide Menubar
I don’t need the menu bar so why show it. If you do need all you have to do is press [Alt].

Colorful Tabs
Makes your tabs colorful. To me this just helps me visually separate them.

Delicious Bookmarks

I use delicious to for quick posting to this blog. If you use delicious you should have the bookmarklet.

Google Gears
Google Gears lets you store certain data locally which in turn allows webapps to perform faster. I use Gears for Wordpress and Google Reader mainly. It’s also compatible with Google Docs.

IE Tab
For the few sites left that don’t like IE7.

Picnik
Picnik is awesome for taking an image from the web and quickly letting you fancy it up with shadows, borders or effects. It’s an especially great blogging tool.

TwitterFox
TwitterFox is a lightweight little Twitter client that runs in your FireFox tray. New tweets pop up when they come in (configurable of course) and it also lets you tweet.

PDF Download
Gives you more control over what to do with PDF links: download, launch, print. Prevents PDF’s from crashing your browser session.

Let me know what extensions you use or which of these are your favorites.

Here are some interesting links from today:

• Rumor: Apple’s iTunes going DRM-free starting Tuesday
  A report from last week brought to AppleInsider's attention by French technology site ElectronLibre asserts that it's now "clear" Apple will spark new interest in its music store by removing DRM from tracks published by Sony, Universal and Warner on December 9th.
• Gmail Finally Gets A To-Do List
  Someone at Google finally realized how helpful it would be to add a to-do list to Gmail. It is called “Tasks” and is now available in Gmail Labs (click on the beaker icon next to “Settings” on the upper right hand corner of Gmail). When you enable Tasks, it appears as a link in the left-hand column under Contacts. Click on the link and a box pops up in the lower right-hand corner like it does with Gtalk. You can add tasks, reorder them, cross out completed tasks, switch to a new list, or pop out the box to keep on your desktop.
• Wal-Mart to start selling the iPhone this month
  Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will become the second mass-market retail chain to start selling Apple Inc.’s iPhone, with two store representatives saying the world’s largest retailer will carry two models of the Web-surfing handset this month.

  Employees in the cell-phone departments at five California stores, contacted by phone today, said Wal-Mart will offer iPhones by the end of December. Employees are currently being trained on how to sell the device, all five said.

• HD streaming added to Netflix-compatible Samsung Blu-ray decks
  Samsung has added support for HD streaming of Netflix video to its BD-P2500 and BD-P2550 players. The upgrade is available as a free firmware update (players should automatically prompt users to install the software update, or DIYers can download it from Samsung's support site and burn it to disc).
• Live TV on the iPhone
  On Thursday Livestation will preview a development application for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Perhaps it will be the making of the platform? Who knows. But the irony to all this is that in 2006 Microsoft and Skinkers signed a technology for equity deal in 2006, a first for Microsoft in Europe at the time. So Microsoft will have a stake in bringing live TV to the iPhone. Nice.

• Businesses warming up to the iPhone
  the iPhone is making a guerrilla attack on the business world, brought into the corporate world by influential executives, CIOs rethinking their approach to deploying technology, and younger workers who move seamlessly between their personal and business lives.

  There are several high-profile businesses, such as Genentech and Disney (both with strong ties to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, of course), that have declared their intentions to work with Apple on deploying iPhones inside their corporations. That seems to be having the effect of increasing the overall number of business smartphone users, however, rather than turning the iPhone into any kind of "BlackBerry killer."

• Silicon Mountain Allio HDTV Has Built-in PC, Blu-ray, More
  That new HD LCD TV is great, but you know it really needs? A DVD/Blu-ray player, for starters. Also, if you could toss in an Intel Core2Duo processor and a terabyte of storage, that would be nice. And while we’re at it, I’m going to need a wireless keyboard and mouse, plus a split-screen feature, so I can multi-task. Got all that? Good.
• iPhone twice as reliable as BlackBerry? Dream on
  I love my iPhone and have never felt tempted to return to the BlackBerry, but I was still rolling my eyes at TechCrunch’s report of the iPhone being “twice as reliable as the BlackBerry”. After all, my iPhone crashed in four different applications in a 45-minute period this afternoon.Of course, the referenced SquareTrade study covers hardware malfunctions, not software malfunctions. In this, perhaps it is true that the malfunction rate for Apple’s smartphones after one year is only 5.6 percent, while Research In Motion’s phones crap out 11.2 percent of the time.

  But in day-to-day usage, I’ve found my iPhone software to be far less stable than the ugly-but-reliable BlackBerry software.

• Google can now OCR all PDFs
  Google has a new system that scans Acrobat PDFs on the web for words using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Similar to its process for using OCR to detect words in PDFs that have already been OCR processed, the new system will do the same for scanned documents posted online that haven’t yet undergone OCR.If you have scanned PDFs and are interested in having them converted into text, you can upload the images to your website and take advantage of this service.

  Simply follow the instructions for how to use Google OCR from the Digital Inspiration website

• Top 10 Things to Look Forward to in Windows 7
  While the next iteration of the ubiquitous Microsoft desktop operating system, Windows 7, isn’t a dramatic overhaul of its predecessor Windows Vista, it does fix several sore spots and add a few welcome features. Rumor has it that Windows 7 will drop in the middle of next year, but last month Microsoft released a “preview” tester build of Windows 7. After living in the Windows 7 Preview for a week now, several features and niceties jumped out at me which promise to make Windows a better place to work come 2009. Let’s take a look.

Here are some interesting links from yesterday:

• YouTube to post full-length MGM films
  YouTube, the largest video-sharing website, will show full-length television shows and films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s archives in its latest step to boost advertising revenue by adding professional programing, the company told Reuters on Sunday.The site, owned by Google Inc, plans to make the announcement about the new partnership on Monday.MGM Studios will kick off the partnership by posting episodes of its decade-old “American Gladiators” program to YouTube on one channel.
• iPhone trumps RAZR as most purchased US consumer handset
  Apple’s iPhone 3G dethroned the top-ranked Motorola RAZR as the leading handset purchased by adult consumers in the U.S. during the third quarter of the year, according to market research firm NPD.The shift puts an end to the RAZR’s three-year run atop the market, with the Motorola handset falling to the second slot, followed by Research in Motion’s Blackberry Curve, LG’s Rumor, and LG’s enV2, respectively.
• iPhones Twice As Reliable As BlackBerries
  The iPhone is twice as reliable as the Blackberry after one year of ownership, a new study by SquareTrade finds. SquareTrade, which sells extra warranties for cell phones and other devices, looked at the failure rates of 15,000 phones covered under its plans. The malfunction rate for iPhones after one year is 5.6 percent, compared to 11.2 percent for the Blackberry and 16.2 percent for the Treo.

• AT&T-sanctioned 3G tethering on the way for iPhone
  In an interview with Michael Arrington at the Web 2.0 Summit, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega let it be known that an official, AT&T sanctioned method of using the iPhone as a 3G modem for a laptop is on the way “soon”.
• Search Engine Optimization Training
  If you’re looking for some SEO teaching and have a spare 30 minutes you might find this video presentation by Stephan Spencer at a recent WordPress event.