For whatever reason, the background wallpaper for my iPod changes frequently. So, for those interested, I will – from time to time – post some of them here. They are all provided under the Creative Commons License (posted on ‘privacy‘ page of this blog).

My eye doctor told me that one day, my near sightedness would have it’s up-side. She was referring to the aging process of the human eye and that at some point (when many people are considering bifocals) my nearsightedness would start to shift. It’s started.

While this could be a bummer, I’ve found a distinct opportunity – stereoscopy.

It turns out that the iPod is a great platform for viewing stereo images because of its horizontal size when in landscape mode. For a very nearsighted person, just take off your glasses, let your eyes relax, and you will be able to focus on the image without converging your eye’s sight lines. I use a free app called ColorIris for finding images and viewing them on the full screen.

Here are some good examples that work well on the iPhone (and iPod Touch) … architecture, woman with mirrors, Edison, ISU, path in the woods, boy and the rooster.

image credit: The grammar of graphics (L. Wilkinson)

I’ve become one of those "smoker bigots" – you know the kind … they quit smoking and *THEN* start preaching all the bad things that smoking does. My conversion was not that I was a smoker; it was the "mobile browser".

I am blogger and user of the web but until about 6 months ago I was mostly on my computer. I now read blogs, feeds, news, and more using my iPod and/or my Blackberry. I use if for Facebook, the weather, Twitter (a little), and most of my personal email. I realized my blog was not as friendly to these mobile devices as it could / should / and eventually would be.

So, I set about to add support for mobile devices and mobile users. It was easy for my blog since it uses WordPress and there is the WPTouch plug-in that makes it nearly automatic. It added support for the devcies I use most often and I even added support for the Androids of the world. (If you have a mobile device and it is not working with my blog, add a comment and I’ll do my best).

So, now I grumble whenever I hit a website that *does not* have special support for mobile devices. I realize I am being zealous but that has not stopped me from small internal unseen spurts of frustration. Oh well. I guess I could seek counseling.

I get no compensation for what I say about the Etymotic ER4 earphones. I was turned on to these by a motorcycle rider (thanks Ed). They are not so much “earbuds” as they are in-ear monitors. All I can say is that after more than four years with these, I have never thought once about replacing them. They are *that* close to perfection. I’ve used them on airplanes, in convertibles rushing down the highway, and in noisy hotels, venues, and airports. They have never let me down, always giving me stunning, emotionally rich music, and blocking out the haste and waist of the real world.

If you want to make an investment in your music; making your iPhone or iPod or even your XYZZY an audiofile source; these are they way to go. Cheap ? no. Affordable ? depends ? Worth a year’s worth of latti-dah coffee ? definitely.

Relishing in the brass section accompanying Nat King Coles’ L-O-V-E … followed closely by the double bass of Eliane Elias’ Segrados …. ahhhhh

Some of you got an error today trying to get to the blog, it’s because I was doing some house cleaning to consolidate the work and personal blog designs. I got sidetracked buy work – hate when that happens – so theSalmonFarm was half down for most of the day.

If you look at the work blog at communicat.us and here, you’ll now see common theming.

(BTW: the errors in this post were caused by unexpected limitations with the mail client on the iPhone – who’d have thought!)

The Network Media Tank community has come together and through Niels has generated a significant upgrade to the Popcorn Hour iPod app.

Performance is great and it has a lot of changes. I did rearrange the buttons and did a bit of add/delete. Here is the control screen. The real advantage is the music, video, image navigation – both on an internal HDD as well as a network sources via explicit connection (SAMBA, NFS, etc.) as well as interrogation (like a UPnP).