Beer. Dinner. Wine.
Game of poker. (I lose.) More wine.
Another game of poker. Some more wine. I win!
Finishing the evening with JD & Coke, having completed a house of cards with every card in the pack. Horrah!
The full set of photos, including an action shot of me placing the last cards is over on Flickr.
Heard in conversation today: “Why don’t we just fdisk that?”
Yes, that’s right, fdisk as a verb. He meant throw it away, destroy it, or otherwise get rid of something. And I thought verbing Google was bad.
Don’t let the Apple hype fool you, OS X will crash, break, screw up and infuriate you in just as many ways as Windows can. For example, the Software Update feature has taken to hanging recently - to the extent that I need to force quit it. I wasn’t that bothered as there weren’t any updates I felt I particularly needed, but recently Apple updated iTunes and Quicktime. Now, unless you upgrade to iTunes 6, you can’t buy anything from the store. But my machine won’t do the automatic updates.
No problem, thinks I, I’ll just download the iTunes package installer and run that instead. Bzzzzt. ‘fraid not. The image above shows the volumes OS X thinks it can install to. Now I’ve got three volumes - the 160Gb system disk, which has about 20Gb free, and two 1Tb storage disks for data. As you can see from the graphic it doesn’t think it can install anywhere - doesn’t even *see* the volumes. Gah!
I’ve given up for now and instead downloaded the tunes I wanted to buy from iTunes on my PC, which despite it’s many flaws has never had an installer fail to find a hard disc. Grrr argh.
So it is the much mooted and debated video iPod. That surprised me, given that in several recent interviews Steve Jobs has basically poo-pooed the entire idea of video on the iPod. “I don’t get it.” he had said. And it genuinely seemed like he didn’t grok the concept of video on a portable device. It looks like someone changed his mind - and Apple have put serious planning into this, already with deals to show big TV shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost on the new iTunes.
This whole video in iTunes thing ties quite nicely into FrontRow - a new bit of software which will get bundled with today’s other Apple release: the G5 iMac. This would explain why the supply lines to Apple retailers have been drying up recently… FrontRow, with built-in iSight camera, and handy remote control gives you an out of the box multimedia experience. It’ll play the content you download from iTunes on it’s lovely display, while you sit back and relax using the very cute, very simple remote control.
It’s nice kit, as always, but the jury’s out on the appeal of video on the move. Apple have brought down the price and launched legal content that people will want, but do you want to watch TV on a 2.5″ screen? Outside of the “cool” factor with which to wow your friends, how often are you going to want to sit down and watch Lost on a tiny screen, when you can stick it on your 42″ plasma when you get home?
I suppose there are commuters who would love to sit on the train and catch up with the TV they missed - the fact that iTunes will sync TV shows to your iPod the day after the show airs just as automagically as with PodCasts is very cool. But then attention to detail like that is Apple’s hallmark.
The iPod can’t compete with the Archos and it’s ilk in terms of screen size - and a hacked PSP has a far better screen for watching video - but in creating a legal market for downloadable TV shows Apple have raised the bar for every other player in the media space, on portable devices and in the home. If I can download legal copies of my favourite shows for a couple of dollars, I’ll do that rather than fight with a BitTorrent client to download a file of dubious provenance. Of course the likelihood is that Apple will be forced to restrict video downloads to certain territories, so a UK iTunes member won’t be able to download this weeks Lost, for example. That isn’t Apple’s fault though, and until the media publishers realise that they can’t control how small the (virtual) world has become people will still “steal” television to get round idiotic territorial controls.
Next step: agreements with Tivo and other PVR manufacturers to transfer TV shows from Tivo to the iPod. Again, that’ll take huge negotiations with publishers and rights owners - and while the lawyers get rich off that some bright geek in open source land will write a script that does it for you… just wait!
Now this is cool - check out the QOOP flickr Photo Printer. If you’ve got a load of photos in your Flickr account (and I know several people who have some fantastic photos) this might be worth a look.
It’ll take your digital images, pull them out of Flickr and create a beautifuly printed photo album. Lovely! If I had more pictures I’d create a photo book myself. They’re in the States, but appear to ship worldwide.
Neat!
To quote Peter Griffin: Holy Crap, this stuff is freaking great…
If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone about music where you’ve said “Oh, if you like them, you should listen to…” then you will love this new service. Borne out of the Music Genome Project, it uses the “DNA of music” to work out which tracks you’ll like based on minimal input from you and then generate your own personal radio station.
Check it out at pandora.com. I gave it Orbital’s “Impact the Earth is Burning” as a starting point, and the playlist it generated gave me a load of fantastic tunes, some I knew, some I’d never heard before - but all were well worth listening to! It started out by playing another Orbital track that had similar themes to Impact, then started jumping around through various interesting artists: Agnelli & Nelson, James T Cotton, Mandalay, Fatboy Slim, Jamiroquai, The KLF and even Depeche Mode.
I just created a second station, giving it Colin Hay’s “Overkill” as the starting point. (Scrubs fans will recognise the track.) It’s first response is to play something other than Overkill - Two-Headed Boy by Neutra Milk Hotel, which also features mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality, acoustic sonority, acoustic rhythm guitars and many other similarities identified in the music genome project. It’s next suggestion was Fake Plastic Trees (Acoustic) by Radiohead. Interesting eh?
You’ll often see two artists played next to each other where you would never think they’d go together. This happens because the Music Genome Project takes great care to treat each track individually - they don’t categorise based on the artist, as most artists will cross genres often. It’s surprisingly effective.
This isn’t just generating a playlist for you to search out tunes, or pointing you to iTunes/Amazon for CDs (although it does that too) it streams, via a Flash applet, 128kbps audio. It’s like having a personal DJ available whereever you have a an Internet connection. And if you disagree with the DJ, you can click the thumbs down button and in true Tivo fashion it’ll adjust the entire “station” for you - weighting all future tracks according to what it thinks you didn’t like - and never playing that track again.
They’ll let you play with it for free for 10 hours and then it costs a very reasonably $36 per year. If they can keep up the quality of the service for that then I’ll definitely subscribe!
Doug is off to Japan today to wrestle his way across the land for the next three and a half weeks. We thought it would be a good idea if, in his quite moments, he could blog for his website so the fans could see what he was up to.
So last night, after spending the afternoon with Doug, I set up a new blog for The Anarchist. Hopefully Doug will find time to update it while he’s touring Japan, and keep going with it once he’s back. We’ll see!
Watch this space. Well, this space actually…
I love this quote from George Carlin’s latest audio book (heard on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast):
Please… save me from people who are told what to like and then like it. In my opinion if you’re over 6 years of age and you’re still getting your music from the radio, something is desperately wrong with you. I can only hope that somehow mp3 players and file sharing will destroy FM radio the way they’re destroying record companies. Then, even though the air will probably never be safe to breathe again maybe it will be safer to listen to.
I think Phil would approve. 
Robert is having monkey issues. This amused me more than it had any right to.
I like monkeys.
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