This is one of the reasons I totally love Google’s “Chrome” web browser.

Fast, more stable that both IE 8 and the current buggy Firefox (seriously, I love Firefox, but it crashes so often now I’m ready to abandon it entirely), and it protects you, too.  Neither IE8 or Firefox warned me that this site hosted malware … and even if it turns out to be a false alarm, I don’t care.  Better safe than sorry.

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.

How nerdy-furry cool is this?  A digital camera that takes timed exposures from your pet’s eye view so that, at the end of the day, you can plug it into your computer and check out — from your pet’s own point of view — what they did all day.

You can set it to take a picture every 5, 10, or 15 minutes.

Is it just me, or is there a TV show idea in this somewhere?  Fido burying a bone, chasing a cat, snapping at the mailman’s heels and … what’s this?  Smoking cigars and playing pool with the other neighborhood dogs?

Get it for a mere $49 over at ThinkGeek.

Having just bought a Kindle 2, I kind of freaked when I learned it would soon be replaced by a newer model.

That happened when I bought my first iPod – it was obsolete within a week.  The bitterness I felt toward Apple because of that was both ironic and silly, but it was undeniably there.  I wanted to kick Steve Jobs in the balls.  I was pissed.  It didn’t keep me from buying the iPhone, though.

Thankfully Amazon didn’t do that to me.  This isn’t a replacement, it’s just a newer, bigger model.  I have the sports car, and this is the luxury sedan.

And for nearly $500 for the Kindle DX, I don’t feel any kind of buyer’s remorse for having the smaller model.

This is cool, but I remain happy with the DX’s little brother.  Though hopefully the Kindle 2 will have a OS upgrade soon and get native PDF support.

That would make me really happy.

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.

So what does this have to do with groovy gizmos?  Well, it’s … Star Trek!  You know.  Transporters, tricorders, phasers, tractor beams, communicators … dilithium crystals.

I haven’t been this excited about a movie for a long, long time.

I think it’s because these characters are firmly embedded in our culture, and we love them like family.  It’s good to see them out and about again.