Natural Swimming pools

These look brilliant. They provide natural clean water, chemical free "with lasting beauty year round". Who wouldn't want a crystal clear swimming pools that uses natural aquaculture.

Sanarfil say:

Pools and Ponds | Natural Swimming Ponds - Guaranteed pleasure
The natural swimming pond is the ideal synthesis of the element water and an enchanting plant world. Joy, simple pleasures, and quiet moments await you here in the midst of nature. Your own natural swimming pond is the perfect place.

Amazon has this amazing book on it (click on the cover on the left) which I found after a spotted this photo of a simple design on flickr which then also led me to Pond Doctor Daves web site (which has a few links and pics).

If you work in travel in SA, please consider where someone could build one. I have no doubt it will attract a great deal of attention, great marketing idea.

Nokia E70 review (it's got 3G, wifi and Mac OS X)

After 6 months of contemplating, 6 weeks of writing letters, many forms, phone calls and sending faxes, I finally received my new E70 last week. After a day I was as pleased as I still am now. Great phone albeit slower than my previous. On a 'Talk120' package I also received a free Nokia bluetooth headset which works surprisingly well.

My first hour wasn't a happy one, I was trying to connect to a wifi network (that required a static IP). One needs to select the tools, settings, network and then a 'hidden' option called 'advanced settings' in order to find out how to set DNS and (static) IP address options. If you know this then you need not have any frustration at all. In order to sync my contacts and calendars all I had to do was pair the phone with my Mac (Macbook Pro OS X running an updated 10.4.8) fire up isync - make the basic settings as per my previous phone - and press sync. It worked first time and within 20 minutes my phone was fully loaded with all my appointments and (mobile) contacts. It also put my todo list on - which I am not sure I wanted and I don't know how to remove - and now I'm thinking to just load all my contacts.
I'll leave the letter of escalation to ICASA regards MNP related stoppages, and the headset for another post and stick to the phone here.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

Usability is a definite interest of mine, and something I'm passionate about including in any web project. Jakob says this year "many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be" and published his 10 top mistakes...

Keeping in mind that Jakob is an academic on usability and in reality usability experts can never be as good as the user (and hence real user testing is an important phase), he makes some interesting and important points. Search - does anyone not use Google? (Even Sekamo (a local version made through google co-op) counts as Google), PDF - is an interessting one... "Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow". Good point, although publishers (and product pushers) want to 'leave behind' something for you to refer to. Hmm, worth keeping in mind. The rest, take a look on your own, I can't see anything glaring but definitely worth the scan.

Added 10 Jan: Keeping in mind that there are no hard rules, there are some exceptions to these 'mistakes', it's worth also seeing Vincent Flanders Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015