benbritten.com

The iPad finally arrived in Australia this week. Some of us uber-geeks have had them for awhile now. (i got mine by calling my mom in the states and having her send one out for me, thanks mom!!)

Anyhow, it seems like everyone is showing off their clever and not-so-clever custom stands and cases for the iPad, so to day I figure I would throw mine in the ring :-) (plus it is sunday, and I don't want to work right now)

When I first got the iPad, I had it propped up like how most of the stands work (ie like a picture frame sitting on your desk) However, this put it out past my mouse pad, and was a stretch to reach it. Since I mainly use the iPad to develop games, this solution was not ideal. (After about two hours of going back and forth between Unity, XCode and stretching to tap on the iPad, my shoulders were fooked)

Instead I needed something to get it closer to me. This meant getting it up above my mouse pad. This works well since the mousing area takes up a not insignificant amount of desk space, but not very much height. So I went scrounging in my big piles of junk. looking for a good solution.

Here is what I came up with:

This stand didn't cost me a single cent. However, if you don't have esoteric camera support gear lying about the house, then it might be a wee bit more expensive. (like, prohibitively so :-)

You will need:

1 x Magic arm (Manfrotto makes them)

1 x Super Clamp (also by Manfrotto, altho there are plenty of other similar clamps that work just dandy)

You will also need some way to attach the magic arm to your desk (or in this case the shelf that is just above my desk. )

I have chosen the tried and true method of: find a clamp in the shed, and clamp the bastard to the shelf. However, if you are starting from scratch there are actually many better ways of doing this (for instance, maybe get two super clamps, and just use that. It would definitely look less terrible, but again, this was just what I had around the house)

The last thing you need is some spare bits of wood. I used a bit of 1x2 and some plywood.

The design is very simple, just a single cross piece screwed to the plywood (with a nice groove cut out where the charging cable fits) and a few bits on the back to give me some clamping options.

(note I am lifting the iPad so you can see the groove, it doesnt sit up like that)

(I find the top one give me lots more 'reach' with the arm, but is a bit wobbly. The center clamp point is more stable)

The stand works well in both portrait and landscape mode:

As you can see, it hovers right over the mouseing area. This means I can go from typing/mousing to iPad testing by just lifting my hand. Much more ergonomic! This is a perfect solution to keep the iPad in a useful position for coding and testing. At some point I might go out and spend the extra cash for a better mounting solution (either a mounting plate, or another super clamp)

Cheers!
-Ben

Funny story for the day:

Here is how this works:

Step 1: write an original article on your blog about a useful thing (like OpenAL) (we will call this the 'original post' and the 'original blogger')
Step 2: someone else likes your article and cuts and pastes it into their blog, they change a few words here and there, but mostly it is left identical (errors and everything) (let's call him 'copy blogger', and we will call this the 'copy post')
Step 3: wait a while
Step 4: somebody notices that 'copy post' is very similar to 'original post' and tells 'Copy Blogger' that someone has copied his post! Mon Dieu!
Step 5: Copy Blogger emails Original Blogger and tells him that if he is going to be copying his (plagiarised) posts then Original Blogger should have the common courtesy to provide a linkback to the 'Copy post' from the 'Original post'!
Step 6: Original Blogger laughs and laughs.

If this is all too abstract, then I will simplify it: I wrote a post about OpenAL on the iPhone in 2008, right after the NDA was lifted. This single article is in the top 5 for traffic for my site. Lots of people have seen it. Presumably there are lots of OpenAL codebases out there that have snippets of code from that article, which is great!

That article has a bunch of code snippets and instructions on how to build your own simple OpenAL sound player. (but does not provide a working version, you have to do that yourself :-)

Someone (whom shall remain nameless) took that article and copied it into his website, and claimed authorship of it. This was in early 2009. Now to his credit, he did change a few words here and there, and he took the code snippets and put them into a single file and filled in the gaps. This is exactly what I had hoped people would do! (with the exception of claiming authorship of my words, that is kinda dickish)

I actually noticed that this had happened and made a fleeting mention of it at the top of my post about 'lots of sounds' in OpenAL. But to be honest, I didnt really care all that much about it. Hey, it's the internet, people steal anything that isn't bolted down, and they sometimes steal that stuff too.

However, this morning, I get an email from our random internet plagiarist telling me: (and I quote) "just want to notice that someone told me it seems your article has alot in common with my own article postet on [RADACTED]. If your article is related to that, you should post a linkback or something like that. "

He wasn't a dick about it, he was pretty cool. He is probably a stand-up kinda guy.

To be honest, it has been a looooong time since I noticed that he had copied me, and I had basically forgotten about it. I dutifully went to his site and had a look (because I was curious, and had forgotten about the whole thing, and frankly OpenAL isn't that complicated, and there are only so many ways to do it, so really most articles on OpenAL on the iphone could be considered 'similar' on many ways, and if his site was good, then I would link to it anyway) and when I saw my own words staring back at me I remembered the whole thing from last year and I laughed and laughed.

Then I sent him a kinda shitty reply, sorry about that internet plagiarist dude, I probably should have waited till I had breakfast before replying to your email.

At the end of the day, I post stuff here so that people hopefully get something out of it. If you want to copy all the code here and all the txt here and post it on your site, well, that is perfectly possible, and not illegal. But taking ownership of my words is a bit of a douchebag move. At least have the common courtesy to re-word it.

Cheers!
-Ben

I usually try to keep my posts confined to the code and geek realm and keep them out of the "please read about the boring minutia of my day" kinds of posts. This one is on the border, but I think it has a high enough geek-quotient to be let through.

I have a dual monitor setup, two 23" cinemas. This is not to brag or make you go "oh wow!" it is just to say, that is what I have. If you do any significant amount of work on a computer and you have never tried a dual monitor (or more) setup, then you really should because it is amazing how much time you actually spend on any given day just shuffling through windows and applications on your desktop. Having everything right in front of you is great (this is especially true if you do what I do, which is to say: write software. It probably doubles my productivity to have enough screen real-estate to be able to see the application running, the console, the debugger, and the source all at once).

Anyway, I am getting off on a bit of a tangent. I recently decided that my desk was a cluttered hole (which it was, and probably will be again soon) and once thing that would make it much easier to deal with this is if I moved my displays onto VESA arms. I did a ton of research (which consisted of asking my buddies at Fatlab Music which arms they had for their setup, knowing that they did all the relevant research to pick the best) and decided on the Ergotron LX which are a bit spendy-er than some of the others, but absolutely worth it.

I am not going to go into detail about the install, it is pretty easy, if a bit tedious at times. The design of the Ergotron arms is pretty frakking brilliant so they are very easy to install and attach to your monitors. (note for apple display owners: you have 100mm VESA mounts, but actually you dont, you need to buy a separate VESA adaptor, which is a 100mm mount. But dont fret, the Ergotron comes with a 75mm - 100mm adaptor so all you need is Arm + Apple VESA Adaptor)

So now I can easily access the area under my displays. Before, if I wanted to clear off some desk space so I could sketch on my big A3 pad (for the hell of it, or for actual UI designing) I had to clear off a whole raft of crap and slide the second display out of the way and well, lets just say I hardly ever sketched on my big A3 pad. Also, using my wacom tablet was another big pain in the ass. The wacom requires quite a bit of desktop space. (you can hold it in your lap, which works OK, but you still have to put it down on the desk somewhere. Previously it lived on a shelf above my computer and I rarely used it, now it can live right on the desk, always plugged in and I just have to push my keyboard back and put the wacom in from and voila!

I am not totally convinced I like the vertical orientation of the second monitor, but it is growing on me. If i decide I dont like it, 10 seconds of adjusting and changing display prefs and it is back to horizontal, so no worries.

The only downside I have found so far is that I tend to adjust the display heights depending on how I am sitting. It is almost too easy. Right now I am slouched down a bit so I have the monitor a bit lower than normal. A few minutes ago I was doing some coding and was sitting up much straighter and so I had the monitor a few inches higher to accommodate my better posture. How is this bad you ask? Because I tend to only adjust the main monitor and so my display arrangement gets out of whack (ie when i move my mouse from monitor to monitor i dont want it to jump up or down a few inches as it goes across the border, that annoys me.) So Apple needs to come out with some sort of live sensors that can just _know_ where they are in space relative to each other so I dont have to adjust my display prefs every time I move my monitor up two inches. :-)

Ok, I have been self-indulgent long enough, I promise the next few posts will contain code or some equally nerd-liscious content.

Thanks to Brent at FatLab for fixing up my new wordpress install. Now my whole site is unified into a wordpress install instead of just the blog bits. The old site was getting long in the tooth anyway, and I really need to add a page featuring all the new iPhone projects and things I am working on. Hopefully I will find a few minutes in a row in the next week or two to get the content all updated.

Anyway, wordpress geeks who want to know more details can read Brent's note about it:

http://fatlabmusic.com/blog/2009/08/11/new-site-design-launched-at-benbritten-com/

Cheers!
-B

Ooops. I just noticed that my sidebar had vanished along with all the handy links to all the code and other various things.. Presumably this happened when i updated to the most recent wordpress and I somehow didnt notice.. Anyway.. fixed now..