In part 9 of “My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs,” Macworld founder David Bunnell tells how he shouted “Steve Jobs is a fucking genius!” in front of a bunch of kids at a Super Bowl party.

Hewlett-Packard is buying Palm for $1.2 billion, the company has announced. Of all the potential suitors, I don’t think HP was mentioned as a candidate. Looks like HP will be making smartphones running Palm’s WebOS, which it may or may not rebrand. The company currently makes Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs. Looks like it wants to manage its own hardware and software, à la Apple.

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein is expected to carry on, the HP statement says. Minor note: Rubinstein started his career at HP before working for Steve Jobs at NeXT and then Apple.

Well, would-be iPad 3G owners. Your long, long wait is finally coming to an end. According to 9to5Mac, pre-orders of the iPad 3G are finally starting to ship, and should be in your hands by Friday. If you didn’t pre-order one, you may be able to snag an iPad 3G at an Apple Store if you swing by after 5PM.

Got your shipping confirmation? Brag about it to us poor suckers in the comments.

Update: Reader Chris Wanja says, “I see you pulled it from the 9to5Mac article. In the mass of the 130+ comments, I added to a lot of them. We… have come to the conclusion that the image is Photoshopped due to NO one else having a shipping confirmation via email or order status. Several people confirm with other blogs and forums that they have not yet shipped, but are “prepared for shipment”.

Seems like a rather pedestrian use of Photoshop, personally. Have any of our readers received shipping confirmation yet?

In the last tip, we showed you three standard views for looking at files in a Finder window.

There’s a fourth view, though. It’s called Cover Flow, and we’ve given it a tip all of its own because you’re likely to see it in many different places.

We start off with a new batch of lower prices on some App Store items, including “Guerrilla Bob,” a third-person shooter. Everyone has their 15 minutes of fame, and I guess it’s Gray Powell’s turn. Don’t know the name? Powell is reportedly the Apple engineer that helped exposed the iPhone 4G prototype. Get a t-shirt and become part of the “in” crowd. (Woz even has one.) Also on tap is a deal on a family pack of Apple’s MobileMe “cloud” services.

We also check out other items, including “Super Turbo Action Pig,” and iPhone game where a pig gets his revenge, tracking down the butcher. There are other Mac-related bargains, of course, such as MYOB’s AccountEdge and more. As always, details on everything is available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after the jump.

Unless you have a Mac Mini or Mac Pro, there’s not a lot of reason to buy a third-party webcam if you’re on a modern Apple machine, but Telcast’s latest webcam, the W900, does one thing your built-in iSight won’t: it’s a wireless web cam that can transmit 5 megapixel video and images at distances up to 200 meters.

A welcome advance in webcam technology that should prevent at least a few MacBooks from vibrating off the lubricated bedside table top on anniversary night. The Telcast W900 costs $117.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Steam for Mac since it was first announced back in early March, but Valve has continued to be mum about their games delivery platform’s Mac-specific details. An informative thread on the official Steam forums, though, has a lot of information about what Mac gamers can expect when Steam for Mac lands in May.

Google’s Android Marketplace, a rival to Apple’s iPhone App Store, reached the 50,000 mark over the weekend, according to one company tracking cell phone application sites. Although a far cry from Apple’s nearly 200,000 apps, Android may be on pace to hit the 100,000 milestone by September, according to reports.

About a month ago, the Android Market, the nearest competitor to the App Store, reached the 40,000 mark. The 50,000 figure comes from AndroLib, which tracks 10 smartphone marketplaces.

Apple’s own iPad dock gives an easy and handy way to use a physical keyboard with your tablet, but one annoyance is the official dock’s inability to allow you to type when the device is in a landscape position.

It’s slightly irritating, but the Book of Joe has an easy-to-follow instruction manual on how to dock your iPad in a landscape position.

Essentially, you prop up your iPad (in Joe’s case, with the official iPad case) and use an iPod cable extender to connect the iPad to the dock connector. It’s a lot more of a kludge than it has to be, and I imagine a bluetooth keyboard and a sixty-nine cent business card holder would be a better solution for the price. Still, if you’ve got this stuff lying around already, it’s not a bad hack… at least until a third-party accessory maker comes out with a dock that allows typing in both landscape and vertical orientations.

Tumblr’s Topher Chris uses the possibly illegal seizure of editor Jason Chen’s computers on Friday night to effortlessly skewer Gizmodo’s own next generation iPhone teardown.

“You are looking at Jason Chen’s computers. They were found lost at the San Mateo Country Police Headqaurters. We got them. We disassembled them. They’re the real thing, and here are all the details.”

A Dell XPS!? An Acer tower?!? Oh, Jason… a gadget blogger should know better.