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NASA have said that for their next round of lunar missions they’ll be using the metric system.

More Apple news. Apple Computer, Inc. is no more — they’re now just Apple, Inc. They’ve dropped “computer” from their name.

It’s no big secret that Apple unveiled plans for an iPhone at CES overnight. It’s a blend of phone, iPod and handheld internet access (mail, web, mapping, etc).

There’s an interesting post up on 37signals explaining why Apple will succeed. It isn’t about features. It’s actually the opposite.

The mobile phone world is littered with crap. The interfaces are tragic. The materials are cheap. The build quality is marginal. And of course the sound sucks.

These are the things people complain about. They don’t complain that they can’t video conference with their friends. They don’t complain that they don’t have advanced voice recognition. They don’t complain that their phone doesn’t open an Excel spreadsheet and sync with Quickbooks. They complain because the sound sucks, the interface is miserable, and the phone is falling apart.

Apple can change this because that’s what Apple does. They can look at the crisis points of a typical experience and erase them one by one. Not by adding a lot of new things things, but by removing the crap and paying attention to the basics.

Totally, totally true. Couldn’t agree more.

Oh, and if you want a new iPhone, there’s a bit of a wait. US later this year; Europe last quarter, and the rest of us plebs in the third world some time in the next year.

Brad and I went out on the bike this morning. My first ride for many, many months, and I think it was the same for him. I slept in, so we didn’t actually go that far; I did about 20km in total; Brad maybe 30. We hooked up at the velodrome and did laps for a while, then cruised around town. We ended up doing a light upper body workout on the weight set in his garage.

An excellent way to start the day. I’d forgotten how nice (liberating, even) it is cruising around on a bike early in the morning.