JOST A MON

During our recent trip to the US, we purchased an iPad. Since then the wife hasn't been seen in society. She lurks constantly in the dark, obsessively surfing for high-graphics content, and, when thirsty, using the coffee app that enables her to pretend she's giving herself her dose of caffeine.

A couple of days ago, the UK app store opened up for iPads. When the wife wasn't looking, I surreptitiously downloaded a couple of programs that I found interesting. One was a finger-painting tool. Rather nice (observe my creativity in attached picture).

The other was the iBookshelf or whatever it's called, using which I browsed the Gutenberg free book catalogue and saw for myself the beauty of this application. Not that I will be reading much on this device. I like the idea of multiple e-books on a device, but not so much the activity of reading on it.

Entirely accidentally, I downloaded the Harbour Master game, and now the wife is completely lost to society. The thrust of the game is to control a myriad of ships and boats - each moving at a different speed and carrying different container loads - to get them to dock, unload and depart without crashing into each other. This morning, while she chatted on the phone with her mum, I achieved the princely score of 51. Believe you me, this took some doing. Feeling mighty chuffed, I looked at the all-time honours list. The top score is 3400-odd.

Now the boy is beginning to obsess about the game. His intent is to crash boats as soon as possible. He enjoys the sound of the bubbles as the boats sink. The wife and I have to fight him off constantly. Then the wife fights me off.

Which is why I'm blogging and she hasn't been heard from for yonks.

Now that I have had an iPod for almost two years, I am consumed by worries of its incipient demise. Everybody knows that Apple has made it rather difficult for the consumer to make any changes to its products (try adding more disk-space to an iBook to see what I mean), so what is one to do after the iPod battery dies? Luckily, Sonnet Tech have come to the rescue. Will they ship to the UK? Is there an equivalent UK-based solution? More questions to exercise my mind.

Part of Apple's diabolicity (or is diabolisation?) is that iTunes doesn't let you move music out of your iPod onto your computer. But fret not, my friends. iPodRip enables you to do this in a manner most subtle. Even better, it syncs irrespective of what operating system the iPod was formatted on, and doesn't care if your PC works on Windows or Mac OS. This is shareware (licence costs $14.95, which is reasonable enough) allowing up to 10 syncs, so should be ample for the most finicky trial user.