The biggest complaint about the Palm Pre is the battery. Here are some tips to not find yourself with a dead battery before you are ready to go to bed:

1. Sign out of messaging, especially if you are at your computer. Having that always-on connection to AIM and Google Talk will really tap your battery.
2. Turn off the GPS. The navigation app is nice enough to turn it on for you should you forget before you launch it.
3. Disable notifications that you don’t really need. If you want score notifications for an NFL team, don’t leave the app looking for score notifications all week for something that happens in a four hour window on Sunday. Also consider that receiving SMS notifications is less battery-intensive than application notifications (and on Sprint Simply Everything, those are unlimited). Use Twitter/Facebook SMS notifications, score notifications through services like 4info, etc.
4. Close cards that you aren’t using. An active card is an active application. You could unknowingly have a web page that is auto-updating or some other process going on unnecessarily.
5. Choose only calendars that you really need. I know I have a lot of calendars myself, but many of them are ones that I don’t really need to see on my everyday view. If you have 20 calendars like me, choose the 5 that you really want to see.
6. Use WiFi when you can. It uses a lot less power to do data operations over WiFi than Evdo.
7. Use a TouchStone. These things are kind of expensive, but even with the above I don’t think I could get through the day without one. Besides being a handy way to keep the phone charged, it really is a nice functional addition to the phone by making it into a desk clock and making it even easier to answer calls (auto-answer when you pick phone off of stone).
8. Get a bigger battery. There are some after-market batteries available. Unfortunately, except for one made my Seidio that only provides about 20% more life than the stock battery, they require alternative back hatches that make the Pre bigger (and they don’t work with the TouchStone).
9. Get a portable battery charger. While this isn’t a great way on a normal day to stay charged it may be very handy if you’d like to use your pre on a trip and are afraid that you might get to your destination without a charge. There are many of these on the market now that are basically a battery with a USB port that you can plug anything into to get a little charge.

It’s unfortunate that such a great phone otherwise is hampered by this less than adequate battery. If you are not one that uses the phone much to do web browsing/twitter/etc, you may find no issues. My wife has a Pre and while she does some smart-phony stuff with it, she mostly uses the phone and the text messaging and is able to pull almost two days out of the battery.

NPR.org site redesigned

I love it when high profile sites launch new versions. Today NPR launched a new version of their own site. Here are some of the notable points from a development/design standpoint:

• The site is 980 pixels wide. This is pretty normal for sites being released right now.
• The front page is divided into three columns. Every layout is a combination or subdivision of these three columns. Oddly, the three columns are of equal widths. I really like the look. In a brief lookaround, ABC News and ESPN do a similar thing with 3 equal width columns, but neither as confidently as NPR does.
• NPR is using Georgia as it’s named header font, but then using sans-serif as it’s fall back. Arial/sans-serif is used for the body text.
• Font sizes are h3:16px, h4:14px, body:12px. It’s interesting to me that they specified pixel sizes for the fonts. I need to look at some recent specs on Internet Explorer to see if Microsoft has changed the way it treats specified sizes like that.
• PHP is being used to process pages, but I do not see evidence of a content management system. Without a doubt one is being used, but I would guess that it is homegrown or perhaps backended by a commercial system.

Some great stuff I starred in Google Reader this week:

• Photo of Golden Cow-nose rays migrating off the coast of the yucatan peninsula.
• Jon Stewart is most trusted newscaster in america. I agree… and that makes me sad.
• The Taco Bell Chihuahua is Dead at 15
• Five remoting tips for those times when you aren’t working at your desk. Good ones.
• People tweet about relieving themselves… a lot.
• Web Worker Daily provides some nice tips about posting to your blog.
• Tom Brokaw reflected on Cronkite in Time
• “Web Fonts—Where are we?” is a discussion of the state of delivering custom fonts to clients for use in web pages
• Need some coffee stain images for a project? Here’s 10 free ones.
• HTML 5 is here! …and here are 23 resources to get you up to speed. I recommend the cheat sheet.
• CSS 3 is also here. Here are 30 resources.

What would happen if this new orion capsule would need to abort halfway through it’s ascent? This cool animation demonstrates.

There wasn’t much to take pictures of at the conference, but here are a few. Mostly they are some DC shots. I also took a little bit of video that I’ll post when I get it off the camera. Sorry about the quality. I took the good camera, then shot everything with my phone. Nice.