Saturday, October 27, 2007
While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).
While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder - what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?
I just got done blogging the rollout out their new Starbucks WiFi Music Store here in Seattle and I’m aquiver with coffee as a result. This morning I happened to stop into the Starbucks for a latte when I remembered that the new partnership for free iTunes access at Starbucks retail locations was lighting up in Seattle this morning so I whipped out my iPhone to check it out. The new Starbucks review is a good sister article to they soon to be posted in-depth review I did of the new iTunes WiFi Music Store.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me in the morning so I had to come back to review it over lunch about 90 minutes later. Between the quad shot earlier, and a triple over lunch I’m completely wired. *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzt* *Bzzzzzzt*
Luckily I don’t have anything left on my to-do list for today so I’m pretty much free to lay on my couch watching movies with Skype. Finally getting a long weekend is really helping me feel a lot more relaxed from all the activity at work recently. Now for the rest of The Matrix Revolutions and then perhaps a little Lord of the Rings to continue on with the epic feel.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Yesterday was media storage solution deployment day. As noted in the new media page on Futurist Now my DVD collection is starting to get out of hand. I went to Ikea with Brien and picked up a few black and white patterned Bennos to augment my DVD storage capabilities. I used to use this Billy bookshelf (also from Ikea - go figure), and as you can see from how many DVD’s got moved to the Bennos in the reorganization shuffle it was previously stuffed to the gills.
I really like the Benno because it’s smaller - it holds only 80 DVD’s. This small size allows me to slowly buy more of them as my collection expands and always have ‘just enough’ storage. They are brain dead simple to assemble to boot. The Bennos only need a screwdriver to assemble, and each one only take about 10 minutes to put together into a surprisingly solid construction with easy to adjust shelf height.
“benno” by sparktography
Sunday, September 30, 2007
I’ve allowed my obsession with Smart Playlists in iTunes to get a little out of hand. After spending the last month combing through my media collection, tweaking ID3 tags, and rating as I go I’m learning how to create personalized radio experiences from my library that are easy to manage and sync/update automatically with my iPhone. By making a series of smart playlists with size limits limited by least recently played I can keep both my iPhone and my Apple TV stocked to the brim with a great music selection that gradually changes as I listen to it.
While the Smart Playlists feature is amazingly powerful I have unfortunately discovered a few pieces of highly useful metadata that are not exposed as options for the creation of iTunes Smart Playlists. These all seem like simple things to add, and would enable some really cool Smart Playlist scenarios. Here are the things I think iTunes is missing on this one:
- A purchased flag - a simple true/false bit to indicate if the track was purchased from the iTunes store or imported from media (CD or HDD).
- An iTunes Plus flag - again a true/false bit to indicate if the track is an iTunes Plus track or not. This flag could easily be combined with the purchased flag as a dropdown.
- A kind field - a field to select the kind of media from video; audio booklet, music, podcast, etc. Adding this field would make it much easier to keep iTunes TV shows and podcasts from leaking into music-only playlists.
- Ringtone flag - another true/false bit to indicate if the track is eligible for creating ringtones from.
If anyone at Apple is listening please, PLEASE get these added to the next version of iTunes! They all look reasonably simple to implement and would make me one happy iTunes geek!
Thursday, September 27, 2007
This morning Apple released updates for the iPhone bringing forth a bevy of new features including the slick new WiFi music store, better iPod controls, your choice of incoming SMS alerts, and other minor tweaks and refinements throughout the iPhone. The iPhone gained a few features already introduced in the iPod Touch like bringing up media controls when the home button is double tapped and a cool trick where double tapping the space bar inserts a period and a space to help cut down on finger taps.
The WiFi music store lets users purchase songs on-the-go using any WiFi hotspot which essentially puts the entire multi-million track library of iTunes in your pocket - perfect for a quick impulse buy from time to time. It would be perfect for the impulse-heavy consumer like me - if it worked on my iPhone!
I’m having store authorization problems so I can’t actually buy anything right now. It’s rejecting my credentials to the point of locking my account, when I know I’m entering them correctly. I even verified my credentials on a desktop just to make sure I wasn’t having a senior moment.
I wrote up up a more detailed report of my WiFi Music Store experience for Gear Live if you want to know more. For now I’ll have to sulk about with my existing library while on-the-go and be content with the other features released today.
Friday, September 21, 2007
I am pleased to announce my triumphant return to the professional blogging scene at Gear Live. I’ve been busy with other things in my life the last 6 months or so and haven’t had a chance to write up articles and reviews, but now that things have settled down a little bit I plan to be writing weekly columns again and reviewing more gadgets and technology. I’m close to finishing up some final details to confirm I’ll be going CES again next year with the Gear Live crew - yay!
The re-launch of my Gear Live writing career starts with an in-depth review of the V-Moda Vibe Duos. There are a lot more exciting things coming to the site (including a fantastic new site design launching soon) so bookmark Gear Live and stay tuned for more announcements! If you just want to see the posts I’ve written you can always look at the filtered view of my posts on Gear Live.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
I’ve barely had my V-Moda Vibe Duos four days and I’m already starting to develop a bit of a love/hate relationship with them. As stated in my mini-review of the Vibe Duos I love how great sounding and comfortable they are when paired with my iPhone, but what I don’t like is a manufacturing flaw that I’ve encountered on a pair of otherwise fabulously constructed headphones: faulty glue on part of the cable.
After buying my Vibe Duos on Friday I enjoyed them through the weekend until they broke Monday morning while at work. The faulty glue (or perhaps a faulty glue job in the factory) caused the the sheath protecting the connection between the headphone jack and the cable leading to the earbuds to come undone and travel freely up the cable.
I immediately took them back to the Apple store who apologized for the problem and promptly replaced them without even asking to see my receipt. I was willing to chalk it up to a single faulty pair of earbuds until the replacement pair suffered the same fate the very next day. Either the Apple store in the University Village had a bad batch, or the Vibe Duos suffer a design or manufacturing flaw leading to this unfortunate condition. If the Vibe Duos were a bit cheaper I wouldn’t mind having to DIY repair them myself, but at $100 a pop and considering how high the build quality is otherwise I’m a little disappointed with V-Moda.
Luckily there is an easy fix for this problem. This evening at home after quickly whittling away some of the old adhesive with an exacto knife I re-glued it myself with seemly better results. A few drops of super-glue spread evenly over the plug with a synthetic Q-tip (the cotton ones would have left fibers) and quickly dropping the sheath back into place have locked it into place quite tightly.
Any other Vibe Duo owners out there suffering from this problem?
