Brian Caulfield on Forbes:

Does the gigantic iPod iPad have USB ports? No. Flash support? No. HDMI output? No. SD Card slot? No. Can it run several different third-party apps at once? No. Will you ever need to clean the registry and defragment the hard drive? No. The iPad sounds silly if you’re shopping based on features and specifications.

Add to that no viruses, no malware, no complex anything. The money quote:

Make a PC really small and it kind of sucks. Make an iPod really big, however, and it’s kind of great.

Nicholson Baker, book reviewer for The New Yorker on the best ebook reader. He bought an Amazon Kindle but has a different recommendation.

Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it.

Take the advice with a grain of salt. He also recommends sleeping with an iPod touch under your pillow.

So, you didn’t get in on the Fed’s Cash for Clunkers program? Try this one. It’s the Cash for Refrigerators program.

Not surprisingly, appliance makers cheered the news. Electrolux spokesman Tony Evans calls the federal program a “great opportunity to encourage consumers to replace their old appliances.”

How about a Federal stimulus program like this? Cash for Clunky PCs. Trade in your old Windows PC for a new, energy efficient, long-lasting Mac.

From Agile Web Solutions comes the long awaited 1Password update. I’ve been testing version 3.0 for months and it’s a worthy upgrade, even at a healthy price. 1Password makes it trivial to manage login IDs and passwords, but does even more by handling serial numbers, licenses, credit card information, and does easy synchronization with my iPhone. From Jeffrey Mincey on Mac360:

There are less expensive ways to manage and secure information on a Mac, but none make managing login IDs, passwords, license information, or serial numbers so seamless between Mac, iPhone, and the web as 1Password.

My favorite new feature is 1PasswordAnywhere. Remotely view your keychain in any modern browser.

Apple has been in court for a year trying to squash a tiny Mac cloner operating in Florida. Now they’ve popped up in Russia. Again.

Historically the Soviet Union used a lot of Apple gear. Well, it was not badged with the Apple logo. It was cloned and manufactured in Bulgaria. In those days Apple could not complain because the only way Bulgaria was going to stop making the machines was if the USA started World War Three.

We may well see hell freeze over, or, WW III before Apple stops the Russian clones.