The starting premise here is: most speakers sold to work with the iPod and other DAPs are crap. They have fragile plastic cases, pointless stereo, and little 1" speakers that “deliver surprisingly good sound quality” or whatever euphemism one uses when trying to rationalize spending $100+ on something that sounds like a telephone receiver.

I’ve pitched my idea for a better approach to my cool product designer friends, but they’re busy working on magnesium snowboard bindings, electric mountain bikes, and military-spec safety glasses.

Flock, a Firefox-based browser with special features for bloggers, is now available in “Developer Preview” form. Because it’s based on Firefox, stability and performance are pretty well ironed out. The interesting stuff, in brief, is:

• bookmark/favorite storage via del.icio.us
• fulltext searching of all pages in your history
• integrated “blog this” tool (supporting the common APIs) that works not just with URLs but with text selections within pages

Those are the ones that struck me the most, but there’s more; read the intro pages that appear by default when you launch Flock.

For reasons that will remain mysterious, I was asked about the possibility of an OS X program or script that would allow you to quickly rotate the contents of any window 180 degrees. I had written some image processing scripts before, but nothing involving screen capture, so I got interested. I came up with this Applescript, View180, which if nothing else is a neat demo of a couple of undeservedly obscure OS X commands, sips and screencapture.

This is nifty – Locomotive, from Ryan Raaum, a complete Ruby on Rails environment in a self-contained 30MB bundle. And when I say complete, I mean complete: Locomotive contains not only Rails itself, but the Ruby interpreter, RubyGems, the LightTPD webserver with FastCGI, the SQLite database engine, bindings for MySQL and PostgreSQL (though not the server binaries, wisely), and all the other bits and pieces needed for turnkey Rails. There’s also an expanded version of the package with even more goodies. If you have an existing Rails installation, Locomotive will run politely alongside it without messing anything up.

I found out about the amazing Pop!Tech conference last year when browsing through the archives at ITConversations. I was surprised that a full set of recordings of this fascinating (and expensive) conference were available for free. I still remember listening to Malcolm Gladwell telling stories taken from his then-unpublished book, Blink.

This year, if you want to be one of the first to get the audio files, you have to pay for them; $5 per session or $100 for the whole set. Otherwise, you can wait as they post them to their free archives over the next few months.

Readers, I know you’re out there. At this early stage in my blog’s life I’m getting about a thousand unique visitors a day – not big by any means, but when I watch my logs I do get a bit of that hosting-a-party sensation. I know only a tiny fraction of visitors will ever comment, and that’s as it should be. But I really enjoy getting comments.

So, don’t be shy.

OK, no more grousing from the FUD department about how OpenDocument isn’t actually supported by any shipping applications. OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released yesterday, making it the first office suite which uses OpenDocument as a native format.

(KOffice, which reads and writes OpenDocument via filters, says native support is coming in its 1.5 release in a few months.)

For us Mac users, there’s a bit of a lag – NeoOffice/J is still at 1.1, and even the X11 builds for Mac OS X have not caught up to the release yet.