Griffin’s Clarifi is the best iPhone case I have ever seen.

As nice as the iPhone’s little camera is, it’s a bit farsighted.  Close-ups of people’s faces, objects, and especially text, all end up being blurry.

Paul Griffin at Griffin Technology noticed this and asked one of his case designers to see if a corrective lens would help.

Thus the Griffin Clarifi iPhone case was born.

Not only is it a really sleek, tough polycarbonate case for the iPhone, but it has a little monocle that you can slide over the top of the iPhone camera lens, and suddenly the things closer to you become nice and sharp.

Now, here’s the thing.  If this were just any camera phone , the story would end there, and most people would yawn and say, "So what?  Big deal."  But the iPhone is not just another camera phone — it’s a full blown computer in your hand with all sorts of ingenious, web-connected, distributed-processing applications just a screen-touch away.  So not only are your close-up portraits now clear, and the trinkets you sell on eBay now sharply in focus, but the iPhone has — thanks to the Clarifi — become a powerful text scanning device.

So what?  Why is that a big deal?

Add the application Evernote to the picture.  I love Evernote.

Evernote is an external peripheral for your brain.  Not joking — that’s what it is.  It’s a database to help you remember everything, with several ways to enter things into it — from keyboard, via copy-and-paste, via voice, and (here’s where Clarifi comes in) via pictures.  Load the free app up in your iPhone, connect to their website, and start taking pictures.  Every picture is run through very powerful and accurate Optical Character Recognition that can even read your handwriting, so the text is scanned and put into your personal database, where it can be sorted and searched.

Imagine it.  Every business card you come across … every ingredients label … all your napkin-idea scribbles … every recipe … all of it scanned, stored, and available for instant recall.

But not without the corrective lens on the Clarifi.

Another iPhone application that exists only because of Clarifi is the 1D barcode reader produced by Snapper.net.  This fledgling service allows you to snap a picture of a product’s barcode while standing in a store, and it returns comparative pricing information.

According to Jackie Ballinger at Griffin Technologies, the Clarifi is selling really well, and feedback from customers indicate they would be interested in more Clarifi models.  "Many people have requested color options other than black, and a zoom model," she says.  "We’re certainly investigating these ideas, the concept of a case like Clarifi that adds functionality and is more than just a fashion accessory is really appealing to us and something we’re continuing to explore."

Final word: this is one awesome case, adding functionality to the iPhone that greatly expands its capabilities.  I’m a raving fan, and I hereby officially declare the Clarifi a Groovy Gizmo.

Yes, I finally broke down and bought a Kindle.  I figured that I could keep it for a week and if I don’t like it, send it back within Amazon’s 30 day window.

I’m not sending it back.  I’m keeping it. 

It’s awesome. 

And not just because you can buy my novel on it – though you can, and of course I encourage you to do so – but because this has done for reading what the iPod has done for listening to music.

Reading on the device is not a superior experience to reading a traditional paper book.  The background of the screen is a grey that should actually be a brilliant white – technology is going to have to catch up here – but I did find I was able to read comfortably enough to forget I was holding a device instead of paper.

Where the device is superior is the fact that it’s connected, on demand and for free, to the Internet through a build-in cellular link.  And it’s not that surfing the Internet on it is wonderful (I’d much rather do that on my iPhone if I’m out and about) but it’s that you can peruse and read the first chapters of thousand upon thousands of books, at a whim, searching for something that grabs you enough to read the whole book.

That is the genius of this device.

It will never completely replace a paper book, just like a iPod never replaced something with external speakers.  It won’t kill book stores, especially places like Borders (my favorite) because people will always love to go and hang out there.

However, it may force them to evolve.  A book store ten years from now may be a completely different place than what you find today.  It may be more like a Starbucks, more like a hangout, where people who love to read come together and congregate, discuss, and fondle expensive collector’s editions with fancy binding and acid-free paper.

Perhaps customers will buy eBooks for their Kindle (or equivalent) on little cards that have codes on the back.  Or maybe there will be big wall-mounted touch screens where you scroll through them and press “Buy Now” – after which it gets downloaded immediately to your device.

One thing for sure, is that with the advent of the Kindle 2, the eBook reader has finally become a fixture instead of a curiosity.  One can only guess at the improvements on the Kindle 3, and also the rumors are flying that Apple will be coming out with something that, while not a dedicated eBook reader, can be used as one. 

Here’s a bit of irony.  High praise for the Kindle coming from none other than Bill Gates:  "Lately, Jeff’s [Bezos] pioneering spirit has taken him in some new directions. He would like nothing more than to be the first to provide a cheap and safe way for anyone to fly into space and started a company called Blue Origin to devise the technology. That’s pretty cool, but his biggest legacy of all might be more down to earth — a modest-looking white-and-silver digital device called the Kindle. This electronic book is Jeff’s brainchild and may well revolutionize not only how we acquire books and periodicals but also how bookworms like me actually read them. That would put him in the same ranks as Johannes Gutenberg."

Why is this ironic?  Because under the hood, the Kindle is running Linux.

This is just squishy-cool:

Not only does it fold up like a wallet, but it’s actually powered by human interaction via an array of tiny piezoelectric generators.

Finally, a cell phone you don’t have to worry about cracking the screen when you sit on it!  Not to mention that you never have to worry about a dead battery.

Full details on the Inhabitat Blog.

From back when I was active in the Dallas Area Rocket Society.

(Right now I’m playing with MobiDVD, ripping old movies off of disks I had transferred from tape using a 1st generation DVD recorder.  Ugh.)

If you’re into trance, ambient, Goa, or any number of trippy kinds of music, RjDj is a must have app for your iPhone.

It actually generates music from the sounds it samples — in real time — from your iPhone’s mic (note, though, that is has to be the one on your headphones).  The various styles of music generation are grouped in "scenes" which you can choose depending upon your mood.

What’s really cool is you can record and play back the music you generate.

I recently put this on and walked around downtown Helsinki, having left a restaurant, walked across a public square, and down into a train station.  The result was a very trippy 10 minute recording that only gives you a glimpse of what it’s like to use this software.  It really is like being on a hallucinogen, walking around listening to the world filtered through its music.  Strange, tranquil, and at the same time, exciting.

One thing that is different between this and, say, LSD, is if you start to have a bad trip, you can turn RjDj off.

Here’s my recording:  Evening in Helsinki.mp3

In the next release of the iPhone operating system, we’ve been promised native recording capabilities. If you want to record with it now, though, you have to install a third party app.

My favorite is called, simply, “The iPhone Recorder” by Retronyms.

It features a clean, simple interface, high quality recording, and the ability to pull your recordings off the iPhone either by emailing them or via a built-in WiFi webserver.

Here’s a sample of a recording I made using this software:  Music from Black Door Pub, Helsinki

Update:  Their Google Notebook importing feature is now live.

I’d discovered a wonderful service called Evernote.com through my iPhone. It came to me as an app recommended by a friend.

My first thought was, “Oh, look, another Google Notebook with added features.” Handy as it is, I’m already entrenched in Google Notebook, so even though I’ve added Evernote.com to my list of tools, I’ve never really done anything besides play with the iPhone app.

Today I learned that Google is abandoning it’s Notebook feature. Two things went through my mind:

• Google, you suck.  I came to depend on something of yours and you’re pulling the plug on me.
• Thank God I’d discovered Evernote!

And, as Andrew Sinkov of Evernote.com told me today, they are building a tool to allow Google Notebook users to import everything they have in Notebook over to Evernote.

I’d already done it manually, simply by using Notebook’s export feature (I displayed each notebook as a HTML page and then captured it from there into Evernote … it took about an hour to grab everything, but in the process I ended up skimming through some of the things I’d captured — that I’d forgotten about — and now have lots of ideas for articles).  That being said, I’m looking forward to their import feature, as it may pull things over more dynamically.

If you haven’t discovered Evernote.com, it’s actually lightyears ahead of Google’s Notebook.  More ambitious.  Their stated mission is to become the external extension of your brain.  How they’re doing it is to create a free form database that is accessible via the web, and via a mobile device, as well as having software you can download (for free) and load on your main computer.  Everything connects through the Evernote.com website and syncs up.  So if you take a note one place, it’s available everywhere.

Also, it’s much more than just screen captures from the web.  Using their apps for various devices (iPhone, Smartphones, etc.) you can record voice notes and snap pictures.  Once synced up to Evernote.com, OCR software actually reads your pictures, capturing any next therein, and indexing it in your database for easy retrieval.

That means you don’t have to jot something down, or type it, you can just take a picture of it.  Say, for instance, notes on a class chalkboard.  Bing!  Instant class notes in your database.

How cool is that?

Anyway, that’s why I’m saying “Goodbye and Farewell” to Google Notebook, and “Welcome Home” to Evernote.

I don’t know why I’m shocked that this happened, and I’m sure it’s old news.  But I don’t use Windows Media Player, though just this morning I needed it for listening to something that I didn’t want to run through iTunes, and it popped up with a notice saying it needed to update aspects of version 9.  I thought it was a security update so I said yes, go ahead, update it – keeping in mind it still stated it was updating version 9.  I didn’t want any of the newer versions on my machine.

And this is what happened…

Everything says version nine until it actually begins downloading version ELEVEN…

When it was done, it insisted I reboot the computer.

After I rebooted the computer, Microsoft Windows wouldn’t start.  I had to go back and set windows to use “Last known Good Configuration.”

Things like this make me want to switch to Linux or a Mac.

I’ve been using Google’s browser, which is now in open beta (available here) and this morning I finally decided I like it even more than Firefox.  It’s much more nimble, it takes less RAM, and the interface is so clean and simple … I’ve fallen in love with it.  So much so I decided I had to come out here and rewrite this posted article.

When they first came out with it, my initial reaction was, “WTF?  Why another freaking browser?”  But then I read the story behind it, about why they decided to create a new browser from the ground up, and … wow.  It made complete sense.

Who knows if it will catch on or not, but it has the potential to change everything.

Here’s the main advantage:  They designed it from scratch for how we use the Internet now, as opposed to how we used the Internet ten years ago.  All the other browsers, you see, are struggling to accommodate what they were never designed to do in the first place.

Think of it.  The browser has become the universal application.  We use it for everything.  It was never designed to do that — it was supposed to display passive HTML.  Everything else browsers do now is because of features tacked on to the original design and concept.

The Google browser is designed from the ground up to be the universal application, almost — if you will — an operating system.  They designed it with the features of an operating system.  It’s built to run programs.

For me it won’t completely replace Firefox, because I’m addicted to the Firefox plugins … but if Chrome starts using plugins…

That would be groovy.

While trying to decide what to do with my poor crushed iPhone, I bought a brand new Motorola F3 off of eBay for a whole $29 (unlocked, with no contract and no strings attached).  I’d been looking at these with avid curiosity since they came out in 2006 and, after finding a place on eBay called Monster Cellular, I plunked down my PayPal and within two days was holding one in my hand.

It took my AT&T SIM and logged right into the network.  I was making phone calls within a minute.

This little phone is as Zen as you can get.  Running a tiny Linux kernel and using e-ink for display, I’ve had it over four days now and it’s still running on the initial charge.  The reception is excellent.  The sound quality isn’t the best, but it’s definitely good enough, especially considering the cost.  It features a phone book and and an alarm, and while it will do text messaging I wouldn’t recommend it because of the display.  This is a phone and nothing but a phone.

Like I said, it’s very Zen.

And the cost — at least from Monster Cellular — it included a house and a car charger, as well as a little belt clip carrying case.

You can bet, however, I will not be using the belt clip carrying case.  I’ve had some extremely bad luck with those.

My conclusion: this Zen little phone is hereby officially proclaimed groovy.