With Technology Figit

July 23, 2008 Timothy Sanders

Good Lord, I've been as criminally negligent of this blog as it's possible to be criminally negligent of a personal blog. It's time for Technology Catch-Up(tm). Part the first: I bought Wii - I've had it about a month now. One part the Penny Arcade guys gushing over Boom Blox, one part some other technology fooling about making me realize that if I reconfigured the home theater just *SO* I could squeeze a Wii to the existing input and cables, and one part it finally being in a local store when I called and asked them. Verdict? Well, it turns out I can improve the sloppy control I complained so much about - set the sensitivity to "5" (the max) and it helps a lot. I still feel very strongly that you don't feel like you're pointing at the screen due to the ergonomics of the remote and you're driving a pointer around. The visceral "I'm pointing at the screen" doesn't work right, and whenever you need to do that it seems like there's a fair amount of "Just wave the remote until you get a cursor and then adjust from there." Boom Blox is a lot of fun despite that, and I've played an awful lot of Super Mario Galaxy in the last month. I still think it's a gimmick overall and I can't see it ever dethroning my 360 as my main console. But as I said in the comments here I don't think they are even competing really. I don't regret buying one, but I don't regret not having one for the last 1.5 years either. I haven't bought Zelda yet, but by the end of the summer I'll have blown through the back catalog and then the Wii will be like the Gamecube - hardly ever used except when Nintendo released a game every six months or so. That's not all on the technology parade. I'm going on vacation next week and I decided I wanted a new laptop before I went, so I got a 15" Macbook Pro. It's smaller and lighter than Kool-Aid, both of which will make it more airplane friendly. Kool-Aid needed at least a new battery, and it couldn't run the iPhone development software (needs an Intel Mac), and it was just getting a bit old for what I wanted to do. I'm still installing and configuring software but I like it a lot. As an odd aside Karin bought it with her educator discount and we got a free iPod touch in the bargain. Which brings us to the iPhone 2.0 software. I don't have any real desire to upgrade to the iPhone 3G as I already own a GPS and most of my iPhone network usage is via WiFi anyway. But the new software is full of awesome. The App Store is great and a lot of new applications are fantastic. I should post more about this. My biggest surprise so far is to realize I actively prefer reading RSS feeds on my phone and I opt for it even when I'm at home and could use Tiny God and the twin 24" screens. The phone forces me to triage more from article title and so far I'm not missing anything but getting through more items in less time. There's a lot of good stuff in the App Store. A metric shit-ton of crap as well, but there it is. The phone seems much less stable as well. I crash it several times a day now, as opposed to less than once a month. Most crashes seem to be right around app launch and it recovers gracefully but it's still a sour note.

Look, there's random and then there's too random

March 20, 2008 Timothy Sanders

So my iPhone has a fair chunk of my music, but it can't hold anywhere near all of it. I've been preparing for a "small" iPod for a while, rating songs and getting comfortable with Smart Playlists so I had an easy way to tag "here is the best stuff". My iPhone has a few key artists - everything I have by the Beatles or Jonathan Coulton, plus a few "by hand" playlists that incorporate most of my Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan and a few others. It also has everything in the "My Top Rated" smart list which is anything with 4 or 5 stars in iTunes. As of right now I have 6913 tracks in iTunes, 5088 of which are unrated. Of the 1825 rated tracks 226 are in "My Top Rated". I let the phone take "My Top Rated" out for a shuffle spin today. It led off with Bugs Bunny from the Bugs Bunny on Broadway CD - What's Opera, Doc? OK, that's a bit eclectic but I'll defend the four star rating there, this is a classic piece of culture. Even as the final Looney Tunes sting fades away it launches into … Roger Waters playing Another Brick in the Wall Part Two live from the In the Flesh set. This is not a segue you can take smoothly. Fine though, I can roll with the Pink Floyd or it wouldn't be on there. After that it switched to Aqua's Barbie Girl. Now this is really stretching the definition of coherent playlist well past breaking. I mean Bugs Bunny to Pink Floyd to Aqua in three songs? That's not eclectic, that's psychotic. After that it settled down and played Depeche Mode with Black Celebration, which it followed up with MC Frontalot's It is Pitch Dark. OK, that's spanning like 20 years of my life, but I can see that I likely played Infocom games while listening to DM. The last track on this little odyssey was Oingo Boingo's Gray Matter, which again, I can go from a song about Zork to a song about brains with a minimum of twitching. Shuffle mode, you have redeemed yourself. FOR NOW! But the double secret probation mode will remain in effect until further improvement is observed.

iPod/Podcast Tip

February 12, 2008 Timothy Sanders

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!