I have have seen (and installed) the Golden Light, the Grail (for now) — Phone Disk – it mounts your iThing as a drive! And what is crazy is you can download a fully licensed version for free until December 1st. If you have an iThing, stop reading my stuff, and download a copy now! Do it!

What it does is mount your phone (it can be automatic or you can set it in motion) when you connect it with the USB cable. There is a menu tool that you can control it with, but it mounts the iDevice as a drive.

By default you get the root drive of your Media directory.

You can navigate the directories and find files like your photos. Each application essentially has its own root directory, so with the menu tool, I can change the mount point from the Media root to that of an app, say my Goodreader root (documents)

If I had files here, I could copy them to my hard drive, but I can also load files from my hard drive INTO the GoodReader documents directory on my Phone Disk. Here I am dragging a PDF of Vannervar Bush’s As We May Think essay (still a classic, 55 years later!) onto my phone.

Woah, Neo Directory access to AND from my files on the phone. I hope Uncle Steve does not stomp on this app!

And here the document is now ready for my to read on my iPhone.

This is heady, I may be getting dizzy, but this is the biggest thing since sliced sex. Whatever, I am so happy my metaphors are crossed.

What are you waiting for? I cannot thing of an iThing user that would not want this app.

I had liked over the last year how they updated their ATMs to scan checks for deposits negating the need for deposit slips and envelopes. This is one more step.

I already had the Chase app, and sure enough it is in there– well I did have to generate a new security code (shows you how much I use the app)…

So it looks like you have to do photos of the front and back of the check, and there are limits to the service (no more than $1000 per deposit or $3000 per week).

For you urbanites who have a bank branch for every Starbucks it may not be a big deal, but I am more than 20 miles from a branch, and each time I get a travel expense or other check in the mail, it means a drive into town. Not anymore.

And yes, I can hear all of the weeping and moaning about security. Sure its more secure to shove a piece of paper representing money into a metal box, there is no way that ATMs can be burgled, eh?

I’m game to try,. If anyone wants to mail me $100 I’ll let you know if it works ;-)

One more.

A day or so ago, on scanning the flow of tweets, I saw this message from Roland Tanglao

Who knows why one tweet grabs your mouse as opposed to another? But with that I was fallen into a fun time of exploring the noticings site which taps into many of my interests- flickrs+daily photos+geolocation+a bit of gaming, with a simple premise “the game of noticing the world around you”

The elegant aspect of noticin.gs is that it has cleverly simple rules. Your goal is to notice details, objects, interesting things, lost items in your surroundings. Take a photo, post to flickr, geo-tag the location, and tag the photo “noticings”– the web site does all the rest. Every 24 hours, the site crawls flickr and awards points based in criteria like:

• Noticing something near someone else’s noticing.
• Noticing something.
• Your first noticing in a neighbourhood.
• Being first player to notice something in a neighbourhood.
• Noticing something every lunchtime for a working week.
• Noticing something every day for a week.
• Noticing something that’s been lost by someone.

plus the teaser

Of course, there may be hidden rules, which can only be discovered by earning them.

And it amps up the challenge by making scores public. I just started so only have 50 http://noticin.gs/players/cogdog

So for me, I saw a lot of ties of this and the noticing I do when finding my daily 2009/365 photo.

I wanted to share this back in twitter, and thanks Roland, and mentioned something about the parallels (me) of doing the daily 2009/365 photos. The joy of this crazy web is that we see things differently, for Roland, he sees one as self induglent and one as with others, in his case Your Mileage May Vary

I have to respect that, since Roland has long been one of the prolific flickr photo posters (he must have 9 gazillion pictures on flickr)– and he’s just a nice guy, too.

But I find that remark curious, as I see a lot of “indulging with others” happening in our 2009/365 space- people regularly comment (some as soon as I post), there is an active community -I don’t fell alone at all. This was the gist of my 2009 Northern Voice preso on Say/Blog it in Pictures – it is one of the most informal, unstructured, yet appropriately bounded in structure groups I’ve been in.

So i don’t agree with Roland at all– for me, MMDV- My Mileage Does Vary.

And all of this is besides the point- it is all about playing the noticings game- start noticing today! rack up some points.

And its part of the newly arranged area on flickr called the App Garden- a place to find those clever apps people outside of flickr create with the API- where noticin.gs has a nice corner garden spot