What gets me about this video is that it sums it up by saying, “Pretty impressive for a bunch of plastic blocks.” What? Who cares about the Legos! That’s pretty impressive as a piece of technology designed OVER 2000 YEARS AGO! That’s what blows MY mind.

Dolls house for iPad from happyMedium on Vimeo.

Okay this is a cute little iPad app for kids but … check out what happens when she puts parents into their bedroom. Brilliant. Now kids will know that when they hear squeaky mattress sounds coming from mom and dad’s room … it’s because they’re jumping on the bed.

Of course. What else would it be? Right?

More info: Dolls House by happyMedium

I’ve actually seen the Nook Color, which has been out for a while, but never the new touch-screen Nook monochrome. I’m sitting at a B&N right now and have had a chance to play with them (and see how my new novel looks on them: excellent) and I think I’ve met the Nook that would cause me to switch from the Kindle.

I’ve heard that the screens aren’t that responsive, but I didn’t find that to be true. They worked fine. The controls are awesomely intuitive, responsive, and well thought out. The screen refresh on the monochrome version is nice and fast.

I am exceedingly impressed. So much so that you might find my Kindle up for sale on eBay soon.

There’s a lot of people I know in the marketing side of the world who are getting quite excited and perhaps even infatuated with these QR codes. I find myself resisting them, though, because my perception is the people who they’re generally aimed at find them annoying — at least here in the United States.

Am I wrong?

How do you feel about these things?

Get them here: http://goo.gl/RZfm5

This is what I get when I try to pull photos off my work-issued Blackberry Bold onto my iPad.

No problem, though. I have the MicroSD adapter. I’ll just pop the card out and use the iPad camera connecting kit’s SD card reader.

Nope. Wouldn’t work. The Blackberry is too ‘Windows’ for the iPad. Wrong file structure, so iOS wouldn’t see it as camera data, and so refused to even acknowledge I’d plugged it in.

Apple: FAIL

Okay, this is just so silly that it’s cool. This is on Neatorama via Make… I present to you probably the first of many Apple accessories made for Klingons.

I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with iPods, too. In fact I would think it would be better with iPods because all this metal (that is metal, isn’t it?) would mess with the iPhone’s antenna signal.

This is clever, charming, and I felt I must share it.

Here’s one from the Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out To Get You Department:

“An examination of 101 popular smartphone “apps”—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone’s unique device ID to other companies without users’ awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone’s location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.”

This is from a recent Wall Street Journal investigation.  It goes on to say:

“Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone’s unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone’s zip code, along with the user’s age and gender, to two of them.

Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.”

You can read the full story at the WSJ (subscription required).