I just had to link to this clever iPad stand made of pencils. Extra clever for using pencils instead of pens; the erasers provide grip and don’t scratch the iPad.

I was waiting for both of these:

First off, the National Film Board of Canada, NFB now has an iPad version of their excellent iPhone app out. You get a nice UI with which to access NFB’s big archive of documentaries, animation films and others, and you can download and keep films for 48 hours for offline use. I would have liked to see it work for more than 48 hours, but the offline feature is still nice.

The other is an app that acts as a front end for the always-excellent search engine Duck Duck Go. There’s a very reasonably priced paid version as well as an ad-supported free version.

The app provides a lot of what Duck Duck Go calls Zero-click info. See an example here, the box above the search results is where the search engine tries to give you more information about your search term without you having to click through to a web page to see it.

Very nicely executed in an app, and it sort of acts like a giant brain you can consult without having to surf web pages to find what you’re looking for – inching the iPad a step closer to a Star Trek like future of being able to look up anything by asking your computer to just figure it out for you.

AmpliTube iRig is pretty cool: plug your electric guitar into your iPhone and get a full effects rig for practice on headphones.

The system actually consists of two parts: a jack adapter with a headphone plug, and an app. You have a choice of three different apps, ranging from the free version to the more expensive AmpliTube. The effects doesn’t sound like they’re the best ever, but as a practice device this must be very handy.

The app should work without the iRig plug too, if you can find a suitable Y-cable from somewhere else.

For those of you subscribed to the feed, I apologise for the repeated content. I moved back to WordPress over the weekend and that regenerates the feed unfortunately.

I might write more about WordPress and blog engines at some point, but as a quick recap, I started out on Movable Type, moved to WordPress, then to Chyrp and now I’m back on WordPress.

The move this time just happened to coincide with the launch of WordPress 3.0, but was prompted more by the lead developer on of Chyrp abandoning the project. Not that I needed to move right away, my Chyrp-installation was working fine, but it seemed a good time.

More about that later. Possibly.

How can you make such beautiful sounding headsets with such a shoddy build quality? I appreciate the retro looks and seemingly low key operations you run, and I can’t say enough good things about the sound of my SR80′s (I’d link to them but your website uses frames). They make any kind of music sound amazing, from Tool to Keith Jarrett.

But when soldering joints fall off because of crappy glueing, jack plugs fail from normal use, the cable gets stiff as a tree trunk in any weather below 10 celsius (I know they’re not meant for the great outdoors but come on) and said cable always feel like a mess I have to twist into its right position because it’s so thick and unwieldy, it’s easy to lose patience.

The cable is of course too thick to fit into any standard replacement mini-jack, so I’ve had to expand the entry hole of a Neutrik jack to fit the cable.

Still, I solder away, and glue stuff back together with patience, because any other headset is a disappointment after a pair of Grados. I do wish though, that you got this building stuff figured out, and made your headsets as good as they sound.

NPR has a site up with streams from shows from the Bonnaroo Festival. Check out ISIS or the ever charming John Prine.

This is actually the first time I can remember seeing a License Agreement when starting an app I’ve installed on an iPhone or iPad:

What you are looking at is the Betty Crocker® Cookbook for iPad. Yes, it includes the trademark symbol in the app title, just to add a little more corporate fun to your app experience. What’s worse though, is the License Agreement that I can only refer to as draconian. Agreeing to it means they can send whatever information they want about you to General Mills. An app is sandboxed to a reasonable degree so I don’t think there’s that much they can get hold of but this is a matter of principle, damnit!

Uninstalled.

My guess is that someone thought this message would never be shown. And yet here we are, one APIEpicFail later. The usually very helpful iPhone Configuration Utility had a bit of a hiccup:

An unknown error message ‘APIEpicFail’, was received from the device.

Video from Steve Jobs Keynote speech from the 2010 Apple World Wide Developer Conference is up. Nice walk-through of what’s new in iOS 4 and the new iPhone.

The release of Safari 5 almost got lost amidst all the iPhone 4 hubbub, but it’s worth mentioning. Of the more exciting new features are Bing being added as a search engine option. Just kidding, still using Glims to force Duck Duck Go to be one of the options.

No, the most exciting new feature for me is a new feature called Reader. The before and after pictures of this cluttered Norwegian newspaper page speaks volumes:

Page before using Safari Reader

Page shown in Safari Reader

If you’ve ever used Instapaper for the iPhone or iPad you’ll recognise the look, a clean, serif, text-only look free of all the crap. In the first screenshot you can just about see the lead text on the bottom of the page before having to start scrolling.

In the second screenshot, you’ve read quite a bit of the article before you have to start scrolling. Beautiful!

The other new features are exciting too, HTML5 stuff like GeoLocation, more semantic elements such as ruby, and supposedly a faster rendering engine.