Did I mention that I got an iPod classic for Christmas, so now I watch video podcasts on my iPod? Well I did. It's fantastic, and it also plays Phase by Harmonix. :-)
Anyway the fact that podcasts are listed in reverse chronological order is very annoying. I finally got annoyed enough to look up a work-around. Here's the trick:
When you pick Podcasts from the menu you get a list of podcast feeds, showing how many episodes you have of each feed. Select a feed and press Play, not Select. If you do this it plays the episodes in chronological order. As a bonus, it will seamlessly segue to the next track in the list when it finishes. That sounds sort of obvious, but it's NOT the way it works when you play individual podcasts from the reverse chronological list.
I don't know how extensive the support for this is. It works on my iPod classic.
Edit 2/15/08 I forgot to mention that this only works if you have shuffle turned off. Sorry for any confusion!
Read moreThe Macworld Analysis
So what do I think about the new Macworld announcements? A lot of good stuff overall, but I think only one thing that for me is a will-buy.
Read more- iTunes Rentals. Shrug. The marketplace wants this I think. I don't think I do. I guess I MIGHT rent a movie and throw it on my iPod before a plane flight. But I'm much more likely to rip a DVD. Still, almost certainly a big deal for iTunes. In theory I have this already on my 360 and I don't ever use it.
- Apple TV 2. Meh. I think it's a nice bit of kit overall, but it doesn't seem to offer anything over a Mac Mini connected to the TV. (Actually, according to Daring Fireball the HD rentals are only on Apple TV, likely due to HDCP issues.) Since I've already moved Horton into the living room I don't see buying an Apple TV. Still, nice price drop and it seems like a good feature set if you don't want a Mac Mini for some reason or another.
- iPhone & iPod Touch Update. Well, nothing that makes me scream "Oh, NOW I need an iPhone." Seems like good stuff, but until the iPhone has the SDK, a working To-Do list and some sort of reasonable note-taking functionality then it's still not for me. Anything else is just unneeded glitter.
- Time Capsule. Oh yes please. I'll almost certainly pre-order one of these in the next few days. Fantastic upgrade to the Airport Extreme and it's a great price. I'll convert all the machines to using a 1TB version for Time Machine and use the current TM drives for more capacity. And this makes Time Machine something useful for a laptop.
- MacBook Air. This is the tricky one. I've come to the conclusion that I don't really like the 17" form factor - it's just too damn big. The number of times I'm excited by all the screen space is overwhelmed by the amount of time I find it too big to use on the train or a plane, or even just a pain to carry around. I thought I really wanted one until I realized they hadn't said *anything* about the graphics chip. There's a reason for it - it's crap. A fair tradeoff I suppose, but it won't run World of Warcraft or Spore. Heck, I sort of doubt it would even run Warcraft III very well, but maybe that would be OK. One primary reason I'd like to upgrade Kool-Aid would be to get the ability to code in Windows, and I probably want at least a half-decent graphics chip for that. On the other hand that kicks me all the way over to a 15" MacBook Pro at almost double the weight and about 38% more cost. This is not unreasonable - if I'm going to try to claim I want to code on my laptop saying "Well get the damn MBP then" is more than reasonable. But still . . . . The bigger problem is that the new wider "gesture-enabled" trackpad on the Air looks awesome. I'd certainly want that on any laptop I was buying moving forward. I think I'm not quite the target market for the Air, but I'll probably hold off for a Pro refresh to the new trackpad before buying. But damn it's a sexy piece of hardware!
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Mouse Advice
Does anybody know of a mouse that has the little 2-way "nipple" scroll thingie on the top? Like a Mighty Mouse, and yet not a Mighty Mouse? Here's the thing. I really like the Mighty Mouse but Apple's form-over-function has bit them on the ass with this thing. The nipple is basically a very small mouse ball. And just like a old-school mouse it gets crudded up and stops working right. But Apple didn't make the Mighty Mouse user-serviceable - you have to BREAK parts of the case in order to open it. So far I've managed to avoid breaking it apart but cleaning the ball becomes increasingly difficult.
So what I really want is the Mighty Mouse nipple/wheel/button, but with a seam somewhere so I could crack the thing open when it's time to clean out the wheels. While we're at it, I'd quite like to get real mouse buttons as well. I hate the way the whole mouse clicks and it uses conductance to determine which side was clicks. I'd much rather have two physical buttons, thanks much.
I use the 2d a little bit (for horizontal scrolling), but what I REALLY use is the fact that it spins faster than a traditional scroll-wheel with clicky detents. I quick like the fact that I can whip it down a vertical scroll and it gets a little momentum going.
Truthfully I'd dig on some slightly better ergonomics than the Mighty Mouse as well.
technorati tags:mouse, MightyMouse, hardware, ScrollWheel
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Treo Upgrade
My three-year old Treo 600 has been increasingly wonky - it's started to drop calls and lately about 90% of the time when somebody calls me it doesn't actually ring - until it says "You missed a call" - for some reason that ring always happens.
So I reupped with Sprint and got a Treo 700p. Bluetooth, EVDO speeds, and generally better stuff. I tried to take pictures to show the difference in the built in camera:
Damn if the 600 didn't take the best picture I've ever seen. I mean - it's not as good as the 700, but it's not embarrassing and there are hardly any blue pixels. So I took another set with a different mirror, at night:
There we go! That looks like a Treo 600 pic!
I like the 700 so far. And maybe in three years when it dies then Apple will have a phone that A) isn't exclusive to Cingular and B) doesn't cost $600.
technorati tags:Treo
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Überremote - the Third Generation
Way back in mmm 1995 or 1996 I gave up on running my home theater with the coffee table of remotes, and don't even start me on trying to convince Karin it was functional. So I went out and spent some ridiculous amount of money (I can't recall if it was $200 or $300 - I have a suspicion it was the latter.) on a Marantz RC-2000 universal remote. This sucker was a monster and it had macros that you program very painstakingly on the remote itself.
Later when i bought my first Dolby Digital receiver (that was in 1997) it came with a Marantz RC-2000, so I had two for a while. The next receiver (my current receiver) came with a touchscreen universal remote that you could connect to a PC via USB and program from a Windows app. That lasted us until November 2006. But the new house has hardwood floors and every so often the remote gets dropped and . . . well the LCD layer started being wonky. it built up to the bottom half of the screen being blank (luckily the touchscreen still worked but you had to know which button was where.)
So I purchased a Logitech Harmony 880 remote from Amazon. It took some fiddling, but I quite like it. It has a color screen with 8 buttons that change function as needed, as well as hard buttons for transport controls, arrow keys, 10-key keypad, channel and volume. It does have a learning function if you need it, but the key bit is supposed to be that this connects to a PC (or a Mac) and downloads remote codes from the internet.
The big new function for the 880 is that it has internal models of the system state. On the last remote I had a double set of macros - one set that turned on the TV, the receiver and the desired source component, and a second set of macros that assumed the TV and receiver were already on and only turned on the source component and set the input. In contrast the 880 has "Activities" where you push the "Watch HD TiVo" button and it thinks to itself and says "Well I think the TV, the receiver, and the DVD player are on. So turn off the DVD player, switch inputs on the receiver and TV and hit the "List" button on the HD TiVo". This works pretty damn well and it actually quite shortens the macro duration (since it only issues needed commands). The Logitech code database seems quite robust - it knows buttons that my original remotes don't have (such as the direct input codes for my TV set - I used a silly hack to cycle inputs in the past.) Even more importantly, it seems to know all the delay figures for the hardware - which is a painful trial-and-error process. See if you turn on a component it may be a half second or so before it's ready to accept commands. And shifing the TV input may take a noticeable lag before it will accept another command. With the Marantz and the Denon remote you could insert delays but it was a terrible trial-and-error process to figure out what was needed.
There's only one thing I don't like about the 880 and that is the remote programming application is some crazy Flash/web based program and the data is actually stored on Logitech's web site. This means if Logitech ever went out of business or decided to stop supporting the remote I'm just shit-out-of-luck on the programming front. The Denon remote stored it's information in a local file so I can always restore it if I need to. There is one potential upside to this storage which is that I've read stories where the tech support people tweak a remote command on somebody's account and gets them to redownload to fix a problem. That's a neat trick, but I'd feel a lot better if I had some way of locally storing a backup of the programming.
The 880 also has a built-in rechargeable battery and comes with a charging cradle so it's much less battery-consumptive than the Denon remote which ate 4 AA's every couple of months. All in all I give it a thumbs-up.
Well, actually I'm not wild about the silly blue ring of light on the charger, but I can live it I suppose. That's a minor nit.
If you've got more than one or two remotes on your coffee table, I'd highly suggest getting an überremote to replace them. And the Harmony seems to be a nice sweet spot in terms of price/performance and with the necessary user-friendliness to simplify a complex home theater down to "push this button to watch a DVD" level.
technorati tags:remote, LogitechHarmony, HomeTheater
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