The prices of plane tickets go up and down more often than a commuter shuttle. But now there’s Farecast.com, which predicts whether the price of your flight is likely to rise or fall before your travel date and tells you to buy or wait. The site achieves its 70 to 75 percent accuracy rate–high for a market so volatile–by using data mining to analyze past flights and determining which factors most affect ticket prices. The service is available on more than 2,000 popular routes. Free;

From Popular Science Best of 2006

You probably know a lot of them, and some are for Windows programs you probably don’t use, but it’s still a good list. Skim the comments, because they have a few more shortcuts that aren’t in the list.

The Best of What’s New 2006 has loads of interesting stuff. This isn’t just for geeks: one of their items is a better nail for hurricanes and earthquakes. Another is a cap that stiffens on impact to act like a helmet, but doesn’t feel like one the rest of the time.

The full title is really “Disgruntled Dell customer finds crafty path to lawsuit settlement”. It’s a fun article about how some guy sued Dell for his unresolved computer issues by serving the papers to a Dell shopping mall kiosk.

I wonder if HP has any kiosks? I finished reinstalling my programs and was having the same problems again, infrequently at first, then more and more. HP’s response was, “It must be one of the programs you installed causing the problems. We don’t know which one, and can’t help you.” Essentially, if you do anything other than use the computer in the factory provided state, you’re on your own from a support standpoint when you get an HP.