A Penguin in the Orchard

The SDK is just a waste of space on your hard drive unless you know the programming language associated with the iPhone. To program on the iPhone, you will need some Cocoa (Objective-C) knowledge. There are a ton of resources available online and in book form — I'll cover these and more in the next post in the series. If you already know a programming language like C/C++/Java, then you should just need a refresher course on the classes, methods, and basic expressions.

If you're currently sharing spreadsheets, documents or presentations using Google Docs, go double-check the permissions settings of those shared docs right now.
Wired.com has discovered a design flaw in the web app's user interface that could lead users to mistakenly open up their docs to editing by anybody on the internet.

Twitter is fun. It's also a powerful research tool. People increasingly use Twitter to share advice, opinions, news, moods, concerns, facts, rumors, and everything else imaginable. Much of that data is public and available for mining.
Here's how to use Twitter to gather useful information about topics, companies, and individuals. (Some call this practice "twittermining.") I'll cover native Twitter features, as well as third-party tools with catchy names, such as 5and2fish, Twitter Venn, TwitterFriends, PeopleBrowsr , Twitturly, Twitter Spectrum, and others.
Most of the techniques mentioned here don't require you to be a registered Twitter user. If you use Twitter, consider what data tidbits you release there, and whether you need to be more careful.

Boxee setup guide.

Building a paper clip stand for the iPhone. Full instructions with PDF dimensions template.

Satellite view of the Obama Inaugural ceremony.

But what if you want to monitor your systems performance remotely? What if you have a Mac server and you want to keep track of the memory and network usage? This is exactly what iStat for the iPhone was designed to address. Bjango (the new venture from part of the iSlayer team) was nice enough to let me try the app before it hits the App Store, and put it through the paces.

It was taken by Pete Souza, the official White House photographer, with a Canon 5D Mark II. According to the EXIF data, it was shot last night at 5:38pm. The settings: 1/125 exposure, F/10.0, 105mm focal length, ISO 100, no flash. You can download the full-sized photo here.