Some nice participation again on this one. It’s always fun to hear which books are people’s favorites. Thanks to all who particpated. Huge thanks also to Karen and the folks at Oceanhouse Media who generously provided the codes offered up here.
And … our winners are:
- Tito Salgado
- Jen
- Matt
- Big Pun
Winners – congratulations, and please keep an eye on your Inboxes and spam folders, as we’ll be sending out your codes very soon.
Look out for more contests here soon.

Image Source: barcodenerds
Wired recently published a good article covering iPhone app review sites that request, and in some cases demand, money to review an app, or to deliver an ‘expedited’ review.
Several websites dedicated to iPhone app reviews are requesting payments from developers in exchange for writeups of their apps, Wired.com has learned. Those payments are not always clearly disclosed to readers, and the practice hasn’t received much discussion outside of gaming blogs.
This is a subject that I feel very strongly about. Accepting or demanding money for reviews is something we have never done and something we are dead set against. So I’d like to talk about this site’s stance on this, my thoughts on the arguments that the pay to play sites use to defend their policies, and what your thoughts are on all of this.
Read more …

These are photos taken hand held with an iPhone held over the eyepiece of my telescope last night. Now my scope is a pretty good one – a 16 inch reflector, almost 7 foot long, with an excellent eyepiece (Pentax). The scope is a Meade Starfinder with a Dobsonian mount.
I don’t get a lot of emails talking about iPhone camera shots of stellar objects and telescope setups. So this one from Terry this morning grabbed my attention. I was lost right after the words ‘pretty good one’ in the description of the scope above, so I’m no judge at all on whether these are real / fake / good / bad / mediocre shots. Giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming they’re real, very nice idea and good looking images – especially the one of the moon.
Any telescope / stargazing experts care to weigh in with opinions on these?

The idea of jailbreaking your iPhone can be intimidating if you’ve not done so before or are very new to it. As the long-running cat and mouse game between Apple and those who create jailbreak tools has heated up over recent months, it has become more complicated to figure out if you can jailbreak your iPhone.
The jailbreak process required can vary by which iPhone or iPod Touch model you have, as well as by which OS / firmware version your device is running. If you are running a newer model device and / or the very latest 3.1.3 firmware, you may find you can only do a ‘tethered’ jailbreak (one that requires you to re-jailbreak the iPhone each time you have to reboot it).
Jailbreakmatrix.com is a site that aims to take a lot of the pain and confusion out of figuring out if – and how – you can jailbreak your iPhone.
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*** Guest post – Joshua Schnell is the Founder of Macgasm.net, a website dedicated to providing tips and tricks to Mac users.
When the iPhone came out, I had a long list of worries. My worries were serious enough that I almost didn’t purchase the 3G model when it finally came out up here in Canada (We didn’t get the EDGE version). But now I realize a lot of my concerns were pretty misguided. Maybe Steve really does know us better than we know ourselves.
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