By request of Sarah (who is soon getting her own iTouch), here is an annotated list of my personal favorite iTouch applications, screens by screen. All apps are free (or I got them when they were free, YMMV) unless otherwise noted.

• NetNewsWire: the best RSS reader available, period. Syncs seamlessly with its FeedDemon (desktop) and NewsGator (browser-based) alter egos.
• AppSniper: kind of a meta app which tells you about all new apps as they show up in the App Store, and shows you which ones are on sale. A definite must for crazed app freaks, which you will no doubt soon become. Cost me a whopping 99 cents and has saved me a bundle, by notifying me of sales and of free apps that do the same as paid ones!
• IDB Datamaster Pro: This is kind of a sleeper app. It’s not flashy and doesn’t mke fart noises, so most people wouldn’t notice it at all. But it lets you import CSV-based data (such as many of the kinds of things you may have stored on your old Palm Pilot) into form-based templates, store it into an encrypted database, and back it up directly to your computer as a CSV file (via WiFi). Which means it’s much better for storing, say, all your account passwords and banking info than most of the apps designed for that purpose, because they tend to save it on the web (not perfectly safe) or as backup files on your computer that you can’t read in an emergency. This was one of my few “big ticket” apps…it cost $12, I think. Get the free version first and play with it to see if you like it…it’s pretty well designed, but not well marketed.
• Mobile News: great for keeping up with local, US, or world news right off the AP wire.

What Your ISP Doesn’t Want You to Know

As no doubt everyone knows by now (except maybe Barack Obama, who had better things to do tonight), Comcast has announced an upcoming 250 GB/month bandwidth cap on its residential broadband cable Internet customers, all of whom have signed up for unlimited service based on Comcast’s own advertising.

Before I get to reaming them out, I’d like to state for the record that (a) I’m a Comcast customer, (b) I’m more or less a satisfied Comcast customer, (c) I’m also a captive Comcast customer, since our county commissioners saw fit to make a monopoly deal with Comcast, no doubt in exchange for lots of money promises of excellent service. So if they should happen to cut me off for what they call “excessive use” or even for writing this article, I will have nowhere to go but dialup or satellite, which is to say: hell.

First of all, let us not look at Comcast or any particular broadband ISP, but all of them. Because as American taxpayers, we’ve already paid $200 billion to upgrade our country’s Internet infrastructure to a 45 Mbps fiber optic network. And we paid this money more or less directly to the telecoms: the giant companies that run everyone’s landline telephone service. And we don’t have this system yet, in spite of the fact that we were supposed to have it running years ago.

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Liveblogging at the iPhone API presentation on my iPod Touch, with an iPhone-aware site…how cool is that?