Behringer iPad docking mixers

Behringer iPad docking mixers.
The iPad is used for screen and storage.
Sounds pretty neato. Though they keep it a deep secret what this thing actually costs, so I can't share that, sorry. I can well understand why they will hide the price so well, it's so the competitors don't find out, of course. (Oh, there goes my finely tuned sarcasm again, golly.)

Apple education event

Apple has posted the video of their big Education Event today 19.1.2011. They introduced iBooks 2, which is centered around rich, advanced textbooks for schools.

There is a new Apple app, iBooks Author, to help people create these multimedia books (not only for textbooks). And it's free, but the books will only work with the iBooks store, where Apple gets 30% of sales. It's a pity it's one-store-only, particularly since iBooks only has a minority bite of the market. It's a Mac app and requires the Lion (10.7) OS. (Unfortunately. I still have not replace all my non-Lion-compatible apps.)

And a new iTunes U expands the often-free iTunes-delivered education programs.

TidBITS has an article with an overview of these things.
A more speculative question is what will happen — particularly in certain subjects where collaborative scenarios or access to specialized equipment aren’t important — to higher education n general if it becomes possible to take most courses online in this fashion. Will the intangibles of a college education — maturation, networking, exposure to opportunities — and the eventual diploma be seen as worth the skyrocketing tuition costs?
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3rd generation cameras are the future?

DSLRs are a dying breed – 3rd gen cameras are the future, article.

Look, I hate to say it! I’ve spent loads of money on DSLRs and lenses for my Nikon. I’m not going to be using any of it in five years.
This is why the first decision is always a big one.  Canon or Nikon.  I don’t really get into that argument.  But, I do agree that once you commit to one, you’ll be buying a lot of lenses and just swapping out the body.  That’s why that first decision is so key — and it is the reason that I won’t buy any more Nikon bodies or lenses — because I won’t be using any of them in the future.

I think he has a lot of good arguments, even if, as he admits, generally the "mirrorless" cameras are not quite up to pro standards in some respects yet. (The Fuji X-Pro1 is a strong move in this direction though.) And it will take some time before such cameras, for example, has the richness of lenses available to them that traditional (D)SLRs have, it's very expensive to develop new lenses, obviously.

It hurts to think of the wonderful and expensive Canon glass I have becoming obsolote at some point. But times and technology march on, and actually Canon L lenses are no longer as exceptional as they used to be, in image quality terms. And they and the cameras are awful chunks to transport.

"Filesharing bugs me"

The Other Side of SOPA and PIPA, TidBITS article.

Similarly, “stealing” doesn’t precisely fit the act of making a digital copy — no one loses anything other than the opportunity to make a sale when digital content is copied, if the party who made a copy would have otherwise purchased it.
All that said, I hate it when I see our ebooks show up on file sharing sites for anyone to download in their entirety. I can’t measure whether it hurts our business and thus our authors. Nor can I say that it helps in any way. But I can say that it bugs the hell out of me...

I find that very interesting. Most people, when something bugs them, justify it immediately and forever. For example: if filesharing scares them, it must be because it hurts their business, and so they will go to alarming lengths (like trying to change laws) to stop it. Mr. Engst here has an exceptionally big perspective: he can see that rationally, it probably neither hurts nor helps his business any when their books are shared for free, but he just hates to see it. That is sound and honest.

One might say, if he could just handle his emotions on the thing, it would save him much time and aggravation with no downside. But that's all speculation, it's not trivial to change emotions, though it is sometimes done successfully. What's important here is that we all gain when we can separate emotional responses from facts. Which also is a surprisingly difficult matter, as witnessed by soooo many things, for instance that public nudity is illegal in most of the world, with no evidence whatever that it has ever hurt anybody.

diFeltro Fold, Italian handcrafted bag for iPad

diFeltro Fold, Italian handcrafted bag for iPad. (And one for iPhone.)

This is clearly a luxury item, but I think it's tasteful and nice looking. Simple design. Felt and leather, nice materials. Four colors.

Mac download tip

A tip for when a file won't download in a Mac browser.

SJ comic

A Steve Jobs bio in comic book form.

I suspected I wouldn’t like it, and I don’t think I did. No surprise, it’s virtually impossible to make a photo-realistic comic and do it well. Even if the artist is perfect, photo-realistic drawings look frozen in time, which works against the time-flow of the comics medium.

Gender swap is common in Japanese comics, so here's one artist's version of the Real Steve Jobs:

I like hir. At least it would take the edge off when s/he would be chewing your ass.
Thanks, Stephen. 

The TekChick

[Thanks to TMO]

TekChick designs. The founder is thirteen years old, but has been in business all her life. Taylor makes art and jewelry from recycled computers. Very kool.

The issue with web mail

"Hacked!" article.
Did you know that Gmail accounts are attacked a few thousand times... per day!?

Did you know that if you don't use an email app but rely on your web browser for email, in the worst case all your past mail could be lost? (An actual email app (examples: Outlook or Apple Mail.app) will store the emails locally on your computer too.)

My pal Adam from Tidbits uses Gmail and I knew he uses the web interface (it has some advantages I'm a bit hazy on), so I asked him how he makes local backups. He said: "I launch Apple Mail at least once a week and let it download."

Web mail has advantages, of course, it's very handy to be able to access your email from any device with a web browser, and it is much better at getting rid of spam (I'm not sure of the technical reason, something about being able to check links and see if they lead to spam sites).

Cracking the Apple iTV

From the Jobs bio:
“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote. Isaacson continued: “‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

I got it from this forum, and the comments again demonstrate just how stupid people are:

"Yeah - its called a TV with internet access. No walled garden required. I cracked it too."

So many people just don't see the difference between what the garden-variety company does, and what Apple does. If not for that difference, tablets would have been mainstream for ten years instead of two. And If the secret of the iTV was simply a TV with Internet access, then the living room would already be revolutionized, because we have that, my boxes have had iNet access for a couple of years. But nothing worthwhile to connect them to, and lousy interface. In short, worthless.
I'll bet that will be the differences, some of the main ones for sure.

BookGem holder

Thanks to Len. I wish I'd had this BookGem holder back in the days (seems so long ago now) when I was reading paper books alda time. For example I loved to do that over lunch in cafés, but holding a book flat while eating is tricky.



It really does seem like a very good piece of engineering, and lo the reviews back it up.
I can't believe either that they sell it at fifteen bucks.
... Huh, that's interesting: on Amazon US, it's almost all five-star reviews. But on Amazon UK, there's only three reviews and they are all cold or lukewarm. Trés strange.

another tablet arm

Here's a new arm for holding the iPad.

I've mentioned my book holder. I think it would be a boon if we get a greater variety of such devices in the future, because they really enhance the enjoyment of reading.

Tick Tock Dock

Thanks to AppMinute podcast, I found the Tick Tock Dock.

It has surprisingly good sound for the size (good enough for most music use, and great for podcasts and audiobooks), and it ads physical control buttons to the iPod Touch and iPhone, something I like when in bed. They especially help with scrolling a little bit back in an audiobook, which is dang hard with only screen controls.

It also has FM radio and alarm clock, but that's of less interest to myself.

It's also small/light enough to be a good sound system to bring on the road for hotel rooms and such. (It also has an audio plug for other kinds of sources, and the iPod dock can be swivelled away and when there's no iPod's on it, there's a time/alarm display in the middle.)

A small suggestion to the company: make the start/pause button a bit easier to feel without looking, so one doesn't have to feel around in order to not hit Next by accident.

Pano made in iPhone

This was made in AutoStitch, a cheap app for iPhone. It stitched together about six photos taken by hand with the iPhone. I am very impressed by the seamlessness of this panorama, especially considering the extremely uneven lighting in the room, and that it was made on full auto on a friggin’ phone. (And also that I had to try to rotate around the phone, not myself, and probably didn’t do all that good a job of that.) 

AutoStitch makes pretty small pictures by default, but you can change the setting to make them larger.  (I have cropped and scaled this one down in Photoshop, but it was about 5,400 px by 1500 px and about 1.7MB.) 

(Click for big.)

By the way, showing just how uneven the light was, I can tell you that *all* the light in the room comes only from the floor lamp on the left! It's amazing how the software evened all that out. (The camera of course made very different exposures of each part, which would normally give quite high-contrast sharp edges.)
(Normally I have that lamp at a lower setting, I thin it goes up to 300 Watts. But theoretically the picture would look the same if I turned it down.)

The astonishing smartphone

2025, tOP article.
An actual iPhone simply wouldn't have worked as futurism in the 1960s when I was a kid: it would have been far too outlandish. No one would have believed it, even if someone could have imagined it. And that seems unlikely: I don't think anyone could have imagined an iPhone in 1990, if we're being honest. At least not in detail. Maybe not even 1999. Assuming continuing progress, it makes you curious about 2025, doesn't it?

Well said. I keep being astounded by this progress.
Some people aren't. I think that either they have much, much more imagination than I have, and so have seen these things coming, or they have much less imagination than I, and so just take for granted whatever is in front of them instead of putting it in perspective.

I'll be frank, when trying to imagine tech in 2025, my mind goes blank, I just give up. This may be good or bad. I know that if, 20 or 30 years ago, I would have heard of Photoshop, the Internet, and my new Fuji X10, I would probably have killed myself in frustration that I couldn't get my hands on them.