After 2 years and several hundred hours of feeding podcasts into my ears, my Creative Muvo mp3 player broke. Looking for a new one, the new iPod nano with video was one of the options. At first I decided against it because like the iPod Shuffle it requires Apple’s proprietary music player to store files on it, and a powered USB connection to charge it. Several weeks ago I wrote about the iPod Shuffle manager. If something like this would be available for the iPod nano, I might buy one. In fact I found a piece of freeware called Floola. It works like the Shuffle Manager but doesn’t break compatibility with iTunes. So I gave the nano a try. I also bought a USB power adapter, one third the price of Apple’s, that lets me charge it anywhere. No computer USB connection needed, and no iTunes. Nice…. using Apple’s high quality products without getting locked in.

A black Google home page! At first I thought there must be a problem with my monitor. But then I noticed the link to explain why it’s black. Google Germany joined the “Licht aus für unser Klima” campaign, showing their support for the idea that turning out the light on the evening of December 8 for for minutes would send a clear signal to the participants of the Bali climate conference.

This is not Google’s first campaign involving black home pages. They supported similar campaigns with a black home page before. Google adds a statement to explain why they will not change it to black permanently. This is in response to a discussion in the blogosphere about the potential energy savings that could be achieved.