What the web needs: A site with comparative feature matrices for various types of products. It is hard to wade thru and find what you need. I end up finding out about missing features by reading Amazon reviews ("you wouldn't believe it but this unit lacks a back-up battery"). Seems inefficient.

For example, I want to find a CD Clock Radio that can:

• Wake me up to the CD track of my choice.
• Has battery back-up so settings aren't lost on power outages (beware lots of Sony clock radios lack this feature)
• Has a clock that glows very dimly at night. I don't want a night light clock.
• Can connect with an MP3 player (or, better yet, even be an MP3 player).
• Has an aerial that lets you extend it for good reception.
• Date aware: Automatically handles leap days and daylight savings time.
• Good quality speakers and durable CD drive and generally good quality construction. I don't need low price.
• Shows the time even while playing music (beware they don't all do this).

Finding verification that any given CD clock radio product even can do the first two items on my list is hard to do. I don't expect to find a product that has all the items listed above. But I absolutely want a back-up battery and ability to choose the CD track to wake to.

The Steripen JourneyLCD and other Steripen products seem like just the idea for people who travel in countries which are a threat to your bowels.

TRAVELERS who don’t trust the water from a mountain stream or a hotel-room faucet have often used chemicals or filters to purify it. Now they have a high-tech option as well: swirl the water with a portable, lightweight wand that beams rays of ultraviolet light.

The wand can clean up a quart of water that is clear — but could harbor stomach-wrecking microorganisms — in 90 seconds. The high-frequency light damages the DNA of bacteria, viruses and protozoa in the water like giardia and cryptosporidium so they can’t reproduce and create havoc.

To make the disinfection process easier for users to monitor, one new device on the market, the Steripen JourneyLCD($129.95) has a liquid-crystal display that shows a countdown during purification (48 seconds for 16 ounces, 90 seconds for 32 ounces) and a smiley face at the end to signal that the job is done.

Steripen also has the Adventurer Handheld Water Purifier which appears to be an earlier model without the LCD display. It is about $30 cheaper. If you can trust yourself to wait a full minute to do the sterilization it could do the job for you. They've even got a solar recharger. So take it into the wilderness and purify water from mountain streams.

Note that floating pieces of leaves and other matter will prevent the UV light from penetrating and killing all the bacteria. You still have to filter the water. Also, the water can't be colored as the material that gives it color will also absorb the UV. You need clear water to use this device.

The title says it all. The practice of programming spam filters in POP servers to take email that is classified as junk spam and to "return" it back to the supposed sending email address is incredibly stupid.

Have you ever gotten junk emails "returned" to you that you never sent in the first place? I get them all the time. My web sites have email contact addresses that get used in spammer emailings. The spammers do not use my pop server. They use other pop servers and just put one of my email addresses as a return address. Actually, they usually do not even do that. They use the @futurepundit.com domain and put some string in front of that domain to create what looks like an email address. Then they send out spam with a fake return address that uses a known legal registered domain.

Oh the irony. The spam filter POP servers that bounce the spammer emails are themselves generating spam by bouncing the spam messages back to email addresses that do not exist. My pop server routes those spams to my default email address and I get dozens or even hundreds of bounced emails on some days.

POP server administrators and spam filtering software developers should not configure filtering software to bounce spam. They should just delete it and stop contributing to the problem.

The popularity of the iPod is creating a backlash of resentment as the iPod becomes too ubiquitous to be chic.

The Zandl Group, a New York-based trends forecaster which regularly interviews a panel of 3,000 consumers aged 25-35, recently picked up its first significant criticisms. 'The iPod is far and away the most popular tech gadget with our panellists - however, for the first time we are hearing negative feedback about the iPod from some panellists,' said the organisation's spokeswoman, Carla Avruch. 'Panellists cite that the batteries are not replaceable, so when they die the entire player must be replaced,' she said. 'We have heard from some conspiracy theorists that the batteries are made to die soon after the warranty ends.

Certainly other companies can develop devices that equal or surpass the iPod in functionality. The technological challenges are not very high.

Sales have peaked.

From its launch five years ago its sales graph showed a consistent upward curve, culminating in a period around last Christmas that saw a record 14 million sold. But sales fell to 8.5 million in the following quarter, and down to 8.1 million in the most recent three-month period.

Apple may have saturated its target market. However, the success of the iPod might have spawned so many competitors that the peak might be due to sales by the competition. Anyone know of a source for industry sales of MP3 players?

Mac Daily News thinks the original article paints far too pessimistic a picture.

This is a semi-annual article that's dusted from time to time for republication. The formula: Ignore cyclical holiday buying patterns to show "declines" in iPod sales, dig up some out-of-context focus group lines that iPod is "losing its cool," and insert this year's "threats" to iPod+iTunes (oh, David, basic iPod FUD 101: you forgot "iPod scratches," dummy).

But cell phones are beginning to get built-in MP3 players. Cell phones have already caused a peak in PDA (personal digital assistant) sales. Apple is responding by planning to bring out an iPod model can play downloadable movies. But when walking around people have less time to watch movies than to listen to music or converse on a phone. Though I can imagine people watching part of a movie or a favorite TV show when on a work lunch break or while stuck in a car waiting to pick up a kid from school or sports practice.

Are there better portable music players for MP3, WMA, and other formats? Anyone have suggestions on better value propositions or more richly featured portable music devices?

Apple will be far from first in the paid video download business. Amazon has begun a movie download service that can only work with Microsoft Windows XP PCs.

While Amazon's service carries thousands of TV shows and movies from more than 30 studios and networks here and abroad, it has many of the same prohibitive features that impede other movie-download services.

With a typical DSL/cable home Internet connection, it takes 55 minutes to download a hourlong TV episode and one hour and 50 minutes to download a two-hour movie, although Amazon has a feature that allows customers to watch a video during the process.

The Amazon Unbox video player works solely on Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP — not on Macs or older versions of Windows. The system is not compatible with the iPod, the center of a technological ecosystem that Apple strictly controls.

You could download a video onto a laptop and then watch it on an air flight instead of the standard in-flight movie - at least until anti-terrorism measures lead to a ban on carry-on laptops.

For years now I've wanted a browser to provide a way to search inside of list boxes. Why? When writing web log entries the ability to search in a list box can make it a lot faster to go fix typos I see on my web site posts. I just updated Mozilla SeaMonkey (which is patterned after the suite approach of classic Netscape with the email built into the browser) to v1.0.1. Well, by accident I wasn't paying attention and tried to search on a web page where I had a list box with lots of text in it and low and behold. The search took me to a line in the listbox. Great!

Anyway, check out the latest version of SeaMonkey. It keeps getting better. If you have been using classic Mozilla v1.7.x or earlier SeaMonkey is basically the upgrade to that.