iPad hanger v0.1

INGREDIENTS:

• One wire coat hanger. (30c)
• Your bare hands. (free?)
• One tablet computer. ($150-$1000)

TIME REQUIRED:
About 3 minutes, but it really depends on how quickly you can bend stuff.


METHOD:

1. Take the coathanger and bend it into a vague rectangle. 
2. Make a few extra bends in it to stop the iPad falling out the bottom
3. Make a slight concave bend towards the top. This is just to make the iPad lean backwards so it's more structurally stable if you knock it.
4. Just look at these pictures.

I know my lighting and camera work sucks. Pro cameras are wasted on coat hangers.

If  you use fancy tools like 'pliers' you can probably make it way more attractive to look at.

RESULT:

You now have a flexible, mouldable tablet stand that works surprisingly well and can hang off damn near anything in your vicinity. If you're in a room doing something, chances are you can hang your iPad somewhere.

Watch TV while cooking!

Use the Verge Collection Map while driving!

Also a great way to keep up with facebook on the drive to work. 

And of course, look up recipes in the shower.

For demonstration purposes only. You should use a ziploc bag when actually showering with an iPad.

Entirely seriously though; I have half a dozen home made and bought tablet stands at home and at work. The coathanger now gets more use than all of them, cost a grand total of 30c, and can be quickly remodelled on the fly to fit whatever you need it to do.

This is also just the prototype. With a pair of pliers and a ruler you can hide that metal bar at the base, even up the bends on either side, and do pretty much whatever else you can imagine. It's weirdly stable and I haven't managed to knock it loose once (despite my clumsy showering technique).

Make one. 

If you want a job done right

It's great when a phone company wants your business. Whether or not you're considering changing over, they offer nice perks. The latest company gave me an iPad and a playbook for a few days, to 'test out their network'. (Summary: the iPad is built better and more polished, but I love some of the playbook UI choices. After swiping from outside the screen to switch apps, double-tapping the iPad's home button felt clunky and wrong. But I digress.)

Before The Salesman handed over the iPad, he made a point of spending a few minutes clearing user data - it had just come from another company  Okay, he's not doing a secure wipe, but a quick wipe in each app is enough. At least they care about confidentiality.

This was the first sign they hadn't been thorough.

The best way to test out hardware is to buy miniskirts. Try it sometime. 

I've hidden one entry to protect The Salesman (who we might end up dealing with), but the search history is interesting regardless - mens fashion and porn. Later on I poked around to see if there was more.

I didn't investigate too much, but there's a good mix: email, mens clothing, ASX announcements, straight porn, gay porn, email again, and finally cruise ships. From this we can deduce he's an open minded young man who takes care of his looks, has a solid financial basis, and keeps track of his investments.

And since The Salesman didn't know how to clear all the pics, the man with the interesting browsing habits works with these guys:

It looks like he works in a car sales yard, but you can't tell much else. Most of the other key apps are clear of data, so the privacy violation should stop here.

Except the apps he installed require his account to upgrade.

This is getting awkward. The email is his full name including initials and there's only one guy in this city with that name. So that leads straight to his facebook account, which leads to his 500+ friends, his girlfriend, his family, and so on. I've never met this guy, but from an iPad he used for one day we can link his porn habits all the way back to his family and workplace, even after someone tried to wipe it.. Imagine what the phone you use every day has?

The moral of this story: Your personal data is important. Don't trust others to handle it for you if you can handle it yourself.
And Wipe your test devices when you're done with them. 




UPDATE:
Somebody pointed out that I hadn't checked to see if the photos had the GPS location they were taken stored. And hey, what do you know?

So in addition to everything else, we've been provided with the very building he works in. Awesome.