Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to speed on the markup we’re about to be writing.

Get Ready for HTML 5 Via A List Apart

Think about it like a river of information. When you have a few minutes, you can dip your toes into the water for a little break, but you don’t need to spend the entire day swimming in it. Participating in social web sites is like a huge chat room. You participate when you can, but you don’t need to catch up on the conversations that you missed during the times when you weren’t in the chat.

Do You Need to Keep Up With Social Media? Via GigaOm

It’s almost here! Bell Mobility announced today that Palm Pre will be available at its retail locations in Canada on August 27 for $199.95 (on a three-year contract with a minimum 500MB data plan). If you want to be sure to get your hands on Palm Pre ASAP, you can place an order online now at www.bell.ca/pre, at Bell stores and at Bell retail partners Best Buy, Future Shop, The Telephone Booth/La Cabine Téléphonique, WIRELESS etc. and Wireless Wave.

Bell smartphone clients can choose from a wide variety of voice and data plans, including Smartphone Combos that offer unlimited Internet browsing, personal email and text messaging. More details are available at Bell Mobility’s website.

Palm Pre available in Canada August 27 at Bell Mobility stores Via Palm blog

The public beta of NetNewsWire 3.2b6 is on nnwbeta.com. Includes Google Reader syncing, send to Instapaper, and a new app icon.

Via inessential.com

People Emit Visible Light: “An Anonymous Reader writes ‘The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Japanese researchers have shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.’

Via Slashdot

While it would take 70 normal windows to max out the 512MB of video memory on a GeForce GT 120 at 2560 x 1600, it would take less than nine 12MP images open in Photoshop to do the same. And once again, you don’t get that memory back when you close your images – only after you exit Photoshop. Most other windows in OS X will give you your GPU memory back as soon as you close the window.

The post is a snippet of his full review of EVGA’s GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition video card. He’s published it ahead of his full review to gather feedback on this new approach. I prefer the whole article instead of little snippets.

How Much Video Memory Do You Need in OS X? via AnandTech

We’re all blindsiding ourselves and one another with trivial obligations.

Excuse me while I go and post this to Twitter

Hehe.

A Good Day’s Busy Work Via Subtraction

Pukka 1.8: now with search! Via Code Sorcery

Getting things done with Linux to-do list programs Via Ars Technica

Google accounts on Twitter via Google Blog