I have only begun to appreciate the intricacies of phone-touch-screen web navigation in the last couple months of carrying one myself, and thus am perhaps a little late to this game. Still, it can be nice to wait long enough that a really elegant solution has time to come along.

That solution is WPTouch, a WordPress them from BraveNewCode that automagically makes my WordPress-powered blog slim, sleek and touch-able when viewed on my iPhone (and yours). So there you go, iPhone visitors – I am one of you now, I feel your pain, I have responded.

Download Squad: WPTouch makes WordPress blogs look better on touch mobile devices.

Where was this when I was packing a bag to London? Unfortunately it’s just a concept right now, but this slick idea folds the bulky UK power adapter into a slim three-prong wonder that packs better, and – with a modified power strip – could potentially reduce under-the-desk clutter. This is the kind of simple invention that you hope will get adopted by every electronics manufacturer post-haste, but which sadly will probably end up an obscure adapter in a few hundred British geeks’ toolboxes.

Courtesy of Engadget, who has a video of it in action: UK Folding Plug concept could flatten that bulky British adapter.

Like I needed another reason to spend money I don’t have on shiny things from that Amazon “recommended for Brian” page, they’ve announced “frustration-free” packaging on select products, with a hopefully-growing list of items sold in simple (and recyclable) cardboard containers. No more tearing open those evil blister packs with my teeth, or risking death and/or amputation by wrestling them apart with a kitchen knife, can opener, or pair of dull scissors. Something I’ve been dreaming of for years has finally arrived – hooray!

Amazon issued a press release today announcing the beginning of this effort, and have created an alternate storefront (at amazon.com/packaging ) to browse items available this way. The list looked pretty short today but I’ll definitely be revisiting it.

As you can expect, this is a popular effort, both with frustrated consumers and the environmentally-aware media. In fact, the only ones who aren’t embracing the change are consumers who had previously invested in their own solution:

Is it a little scary that I’ve had 6 complete redesigns of this site? Someday I’ll dig them up for you in the internet archive – maybe for my 10th blogging anniversary. ;) Anyway, welcome to the new fully-wordpress-integrated look. I’ve been using WordPress on the backend for over a year, since I took a weekend and migrated all my legacy posts and comments into it. The site’s been a little clunky since then, so I’m happy to present a more unified, consolidated experience now that I’m taking full advantage of the flexibility of this platform.

Some of the hot new features I’m excited about:

• The Post Tags cloud on the left, showing the topics I talk about the most – bigger ones are more frequent.
• Twitter integration – also on the left, my latest random thought (ie: tweet), thanks to the slick Twitter Tools plugin. As these are now linked with WordPress I’ll have the option for future integration, and the same one-liners are also becoming my Facebook status as of late, too. I love killing many birds with one stone… haha, a twitter pun.
• Check out the Links tab up top for my del.icio.us tag cloud – like the Post Tags cloud but a collection of my bookmarks grouped by relative topic. There’s some good stuff in there.
• In case you missed my post about the British Auto Show, check out the new photo gallery format in use there. I’m still working to migrate old photos into this but new galleries will be this way and somewhere I’ll come up with a list of all the galleries that’s easy to navigate.
• And this is a gimme, but comments work properly now – you can log in and it will remember you next time, you can subscribe to a post and get RSS updates when someone replies to your comment – all the things everyone else using WordPress takes for granted that my visitors have been suffering without. So enjoy that, it’s been long overdue.

Feedback is welcome, as always, and thanks to the internet and all of you for listening to me for the last 8 years. :)

I had long ago completely written off Napster as a company that wanted me to 1) rent my music instead of buy it, 2) download music in Windows Media format that wouldn’t play on an iPod, and 3) volunteer to lock my purchases in the Windows Media DRM fortress. Yet today, they joined the ranks of iTunes Plus, Amazon and even Sony BMG when they announced they’ll be selling DRM-free MP3 downloads starting in Q2 of this year. They didn’t specify the scope of this move but I think they understand the industry enough to know that their entire catalog will sell better as MP3′s that are compatible with the millions of iPods filling pockets, purses and fuzzy “iPod socks” around the world. What a damaging blow to Microsoft’s Zune business, however, as Windows-only download services like this are a significant sales channel where the lack of competition makes them actually competitive (sound like a familiar Microsoft strategy?).

I’m happy to see the music business waking up and smelling 2002, finally. We’ve all been saying “consumers want a better experience and more for their money, not the converse” and it’s taken this long for business models to start to change. Of all the brands that it seems should have seen this coming, it’s Napster, but at least they’re arriving to the party while it’s still a party. I’ve got a 60GB iPod that’s only half full; Napster, I’ll be making a download account on March 1.