0xDECAFBAD - Tag: apple

Upgrades versus Antiques

2008-10-19T16:07:19+00:00

From Greenmonk: The Blog - Cherish The AIR? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should:

...the core idea that should be upheld by companies like Apple should be about making things better and less often. Making things that will be able to evolve, be upgraded, be adaptable, hackable and more fun to use for longer so that as a customer I don’t think that I’m buying version 3.4 of something that will only be as good as it’s last press release. I want to buy “the” quintessential Apple product and cherish it for years, like people would cherish a vintage car.

From De-Scribed: The upgrade treadmill is wearing us out:

Replace "quintessential Apple product" with pretty much "any product" (use your imagination) and you start to get at a shift in both attitude and culture that would solve a lot of problems. Get off the upgrade treadmill. There are already too many others.

When's the last time you upgraded your watch to one with a more reliable chronometer? Bought a new pen with a better ink formulation or superior delivery mechanism? You may, of course, be an exception—but there are a lot of other personal artifacts that have reached similar plateaus for most, where the classic vintage version is every bit as useful as the modern iteration.

I keep wondering when personal computers will hit a flat spot in Moore's Law. Or, failing that, when the capabilities and usability of such a machine meet and surpass any reasonable owner's practical demands to the point where fashion and style become the selling features. I think we're almost there—actually, we're probably there now for most people who aren't me.

Beyond the constantly growing demands of gaming, it seems like most personal computers now can do most of what anyone wants them to do. Even for me, this last-gen MacBook Pro feels like the best computer I've owned to date, and strangely enough I'm hesitant to think about upgrades for awhile this time. I like the product design, performance is very good, and I've got the memory maxed out to the point where I can run several copies of Windows in Parallels—which, itself, I think is a very weird requirement, yet still satisfied by this machine.

Storage media can hold amazing amounts of personal photos and video, and will reach near-incomprehensible levels pretty soon. Screen resolution is just about at a point where most people don't care if it gets better, and the same goes for sound. Barring any sort of Moore's Law for finding new uses for personal computers that require significantly more power, demands for functionality will likely be completely met by even the lowest end laptop soon.

So, how long until the first new personal computer arrives that turns out to be the old beater I still use 15 years from now, or sell to a kid down the block who just got his web learner's permit?

Archived Comments

CiaranG
2008-10-19T18:15:41

For the most part, I'm already there.

I have several PCs around the house in daily use that are at least 8 years old. Drives may have been upgraded and RAM added here and there, but essentially they're still the same. Some run Win2K (there's something that hit a sweet spot and only got worse thereafter) while others run up-to-date Ubuntu or Debian. Whichever, they're perfectly usable for web browsing, document editing, email, and even development.

I'm not claiming my daily workhorse laptop is quite such an antique, but it must be a couple of years old and I have no urge to upgrade it yet.
Jonathan M. Hollin
2008-10-19T19:24:15

I'm running a Power Mac G5 that's a few years old now but, with the latest OS and software revisions, is still perfectly adequate for my computing needs. Sure, I'd love to upgrade to a top-of-the-line Mac Pro but I simply can't justify the expense when the G5 is such a great "antique".

I also still use my Apple MessagePad 2100 every day. It's an extremely reliable and well-featured PDA and I see no need to replace it.

Finally we have an old P4 PC running XP. It's real slow but the kids use it for homework and web browsing and it'll stay for while yet.

So I agree, we may have reached that sweet spot already.
Sean Conner
2008-10-19T20:39:50

I'm just now upgrading my main desktop from a 12 year old AMD-586 (150MHz, 32M RAM, something like 17G drive space) to a dual-core P4 with a gig of RAM and 150G of drive space (I think---it's large compared to what I'm used to).

Why haven't I upgraded before? Because the AMD system met my needs for that long. I do mostly C development, and it's been a good workhorse for all that time. And now that computers have pretty much settled down, my new machine should be good for at least a decade if not more.
grendelkhan
2008-10-20T15:51:43

The problem with screen resolution isn't so much about DPI as it is about size--this is why HDTV is, in its own way, the wrong idea. Users are far more liable to pick a larger display as being more high-quality than they are to pick a higher-resolution display.

Apart from that, I think we'll see a lot more throwing away of the various hacks and optimization that let us do what we wanted on lesser hardware. Smooth video playback is a solved problem? Let's funnel low-quality video through a proprietary browser plugin that chews so much CPU that you can't watch it even in a tiny window without skipping and juddering! Mmm, Flash. You make me party like it's 1999. Of course, using something like youtube-dl and playing the video with a dedicated player works fine. Perhaps the Flash folks are part of a massive conspiracy to keep us juicing up our hardware, eh?

I do think that some components can't be reasonably manufactured to last for fifteen years of continuous use, like power supplies and hard drives, but that's more of a corner case.

And if you'd like to consider a field moving from a tradition of finely-manufactured heirloom objects that you could leave to your grandkids, to the upgrade treadmill of the eighteen-month semiconductor manufacturing cycle, consider photography. Yes, the marginal cost of a digital photo is nil, but instead of buying new film, you have to buy a new camera every year or two. People who work in the field have written on this.

I have a (roughly?) five year old DSLR, and I can't tell if it feels ancient because I'm used to electronics aging like that, or because it was one of the first non-professional (i.e., affordable by mere mortals) models. If I could afford it, I'd have probably bought a new one by now.
Bill Tozier
2008-10-21T12:32:27

Unlike pens and watches, computers ("computing infrastructure") are still expanding to fill cultural niches, still breaking out into the wave of creative destruction. Phones and computers and smart dust and sensor-laden clothes are all still vying for resources like weed species colonizing an empty continent.

But like weed species, they have limited lifetimes. They're depending on r-selection, still. Not K-selection, which is what you want. I expect r-selection is part of the marketing culture surrounding all this tech.

And now I think about it, I wonder if maybe it works the other way around: you can't "market" something that's long-lived, especially something you interact with communicatively and increasingly like a peer (unlike your pen or your watch).

I think it's time for a new shade tree in the back yard. That cow is looking kindof slow compared to these new cows they have, maybe we should replace it. I was thinking of a new left hand; what do you think of yours?

That'll be the real Andy Clark moment, by the way. And the counterpoint to the one you're waiting for.

Frustrations in using iTunes and iPod to capture podcast listening behavior

2007-03-09T20:13:04+00:00

Update (15 Mar 2007): So, long rant, but I may have found my problem - I had set podcasts in iTunes to sync only "unplayed episodes" to the iPod, which also seems to imply that they never sync / record data about having been played. Or ratings from the iPod, for that matter. I just changed that setting to "all episodes", and podcasts seem to be showing up in my Recently Played smart playlist again. Hopefully this gets me back to where I want to be.

Update (19 Mar 2007): Hmm, nope. Recently Played playlist seems to be updating now, but the iScrobbler-to-last.fm bit seems to be ignoring my iPod-played podcasts. Bah.

Is it just me, or has iTunes been gradually losing podcast tuner functionality with respect to the iPod?

I'm seriously thinking of ditching it for Juice or something else. Recently, the podcasts were completely segregated from the rest of the audio files, stuck into a much harder-to-manage interface. Related to that, my main gripe at the moment is that I just can't seem to get my podcast listening behavior posted to last.fm. Maybe I'm weird, but I like to capture and publish that attention data from myself.

I listen to a lot of podcasts on the commute to and from work, which is part walking and part bus. In fact, I probably listened to about a dozen episodes of various serials yesterday — but none of them show up in my iPod's Recently Played smart playlist. So, subsequently, none made it to last.fm.

On the (increasingly rare) occasions I happened to listen to music on my iPod this week, those tracks showed up just fine. And while at my desk, in iTunes itself, I don't seem to have these issues. I seem to remember this working better in the past year or so. For what it's worth, my podcasts are auto-synced with iTunes, but the rest of my library is manually managed — because I don't want 20GB of music on my iPod duplicated on my laptop.

At one point, I remember that the "Last Played" criteria changed from just starting a podcast to completely playing it through. This made clean up of old podcasts nicer, such that partially-played episodes didn't get clobbered when I still intended to finish them. But lately, I've stopped podcasts before they finish, because many have lengthy themes at the end or runs of promos I've already heard during the day. So, there go the "Last Played" and "Play Count" fields.

But, I just tried manually fast-forwarding a few podcast episodes to the end on the iPod. I tried playing the last few seconds in an attempt to force the play count to trip. It seemed to work on the iPod itself - but when I reconnected to iTunes, no dice. The "Recently Played" playlist shows nothing new, and the episode itself reflects no play counts in iTunes. I'm either very confused, or things are getting more broken.

So, I thought, maybe I'll just rate the podcasts about which I want to publish my listening behavior. Kind of like giving a "digg". Seems hackish and not as effortless as simply capturing my behavior - but, nope, I can't rate podcasts on the iPod. There goes that idea, and another feature missing.

Ugh. So yeah, this is an semi-inarticulate rant about a problem whose issues and solution I don't quite yet have a handle on. It's just frustrating that I don't seem to be able to easily track my own podcast listening behavior with iTunes and the iPod the way I thought I used to be able to do.

Archived Comments

dschwarz
2007-03-09T22:29:17

As long as you're ranting about iTunes' podcast management problems, let me mention one of my pet peeves: I subscribe to a mix of time-sensitive podcasts (news programs) and other podcasts that are not time sensitive. If I don't listen to today's news podcast today, I'm not going to listen to it tomorrow. I would prefer to have my news programs 'expire' after a day or two and get removed from my iPod, while the non-time-sensitive podcasts stay on my iPod forever waiting for me to listen to them. Unfortunately, iTunes only allows you to set a global expiration policy for podcasts.

This is the single thing that is going to push me over the edge to try non-iTunes solutions for podcast management. If you find a good one, please blog about it.
Craig Maloney
2007-03-10T02:45:47

Damn, you must be waiting for the new Rush album with baited breath. :)
l.m.orchard
2007-03-10T03:12:26

"Damn, you must be waiting for the new Rush album with baited breath. :)"

Why, yes, yes I am. I guess I have had Rush on heavy rotation this week. :)
Pete Prodoehl
2007-03-10T03:44:25

I recently switch to trying to use iTunes for all podcast subscriptions, bit yeah, it's got some issues, yours seems far worse than mine though. I do remember reading that when you connect the iPod you need to do the Last.fm sync first before doing anything else, or it won't work. I feel like it's all very close to just falling over and not working at all sometimes...
g.
2007-03-10T04:03:36

Maybe you implied that with the mention of the other field names, but I needed to update my smart playlists with the "Skip Count" field in order to have the old behaviour I achieved with "Play Count" earlier. I also remember downgrading the iPod firmware from a friend a while ago, because with the latest Firmware the iPod forgot how to rate songs and dynamically make smart lists.
Mike
2007-03-10T13:04:56

Not sure I have a handle on this either, but it sounds more like an audio scrobbler rant than an iTunes rant to me. I think the point of preventing the fast-forward trick is to avoid gaming your last.fm counts.

My recollection is that when uploading from the iPod the recently played must have a time block sufficient to have listened to the whole track, while when you're listening in iTunes it uses some other metric - perhaps uploading when you've played half the track?
Len Lynch
2007-03-11T00:44:45

I see Mike's point, but it may not be all last.fm's fault either.

Do you have some additional gripes with the iTunes podcast behavior changes that you haven't voiced yet? I'm not seeing features in Juice that will help in this instance. I can't help with iSproggler, not a user. I use the iTunes Agent to manage syncs of smart playlists to non-iPod devices. So I'm no help on the iPod firmware issues either.

If there is more to your comment on switching to Juice than emotion: I did switch from iTunes to Juice about 6 months ago for most of my podcasts. I kept a couple of feeds behind so I could keep tabs on the changes in behavior. Since I'm not an iPod owner, I switched to get per feed archive management and preprocessing before import into iTunes. The default behavior of Juice is to import podcasts into the Music portion of the Library, not the Podcast portion. That may or may not be a feature for you. But most of this is likely no news to you.

You're not alone at feeling like there are changes going on behind the scenes in iTunes/iPod. Since we all know that Apple can/will change behavior regularly, and some of the behavior changes are subtle, we get spooked easier/more often?

OT: Over on the PlayListMag forums there are folks swearing that the changes in behavior for iTunes 7.1, in the CoverFlow viewing mode, that play-selection navigation is not consistent...

Emotion is good, use the energy...
John Manoogian III (jm3)
2007-03-27T05:49:40

i don't speak from experience, here, but would songbird help the podcast situation at all?
megalar
2007-03-31T13:50:39

I have had nothing but headaches from itunes, thats why i switched to juice for podcasts. It still doesn't do everything i want but it lacks all the other itunes related headaches so i think im coming out way ahead. b.t.w dude I love your blog. Started reading it a few months ago and i just cant get enough. keep up the great work. hasta.
thesvelteone
2007-04-20T15:24:31

Wow, are you me? I've been ranting about this exact thing and trying the same workarounds for months now, and stumbled across this blog entry whilst searching for a solution, or at least some proof that I wasn't alone in this universe.

I just people on last.fm to appreciate that I'm an intellectual, doncha know?

tso - listener to many, many Radio 4 podcasts.

the iphone will not be your new mobile computer

2007-01-12T16:01:54+00:00

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

Source: Steve Jobs Walks the Tightrope Again - New York Times

I understand what Apple's after here - a mobile environment is a whole lot less palatable when it's got crashes and glitches like the desktop and laptop world. But, I have been known to run Linux on my iPod, so I like to crack the closed shell on devices that go in my pockets. Hopefully the iPhone's lockdown is more of a "keep out" sign, rather than a sealed vault.

Archived Comments

Sencer
2007-01-12T16:11:07

Of course there are hardware manufacturers that build smartphones which are interested in an open platform and a software eco-system. Like the greenphone (trolltech) or the FIC Neo 1973, which I am personally more excited about, because all of the phones software will be opensourced (and the first gen has a more affordable price, too). Iin fact the software of the phone is more like a platform (openmoko) that will in the long term hopefully run on all kinds of hardware, and it decidedly different than all the other platforms, because it is not restricted to a sandbox, but allows access to all the software and hardware.
Steven
2007-01-12T19:35:44

I haven't heard of a major crisis being caused by user-installed software on (1) Symbian phones, (2) Palm phones, (3) Java phones, (4) Windows phones. A smartphone is supposed to be a productivity device, unlike an iPod.

macbook pro volume settings are aware of headphone presence

2006-11-17T18:19:52+00:00

Something very cool I just noticed on my MacBook Pro: There's separate volume settings for headphones versus built-in speakers. I had the sound muted for external speakers last night. But, when I plugged my headphones in at work this morning, the volume jumped back to exactly where I'd left it yesterday. When I realized it happened, I tried alternately plugging and unplugging the headphones, marvelling at the volume icon going back and forth.

Has it always done this? Is this something new? Do other laptops do this? Am I on crack?

Archived Comments

Patrick
2006-11-17T18:42:24

I noticed this by first thinking it was some kind of bug - whenever I'd use my laptop after having it plugged into the TV/stereo the sound was muted. Then after some experimentation I realised it really is remembering. It's a great feature - as with my wireless headphones plugged in I want max volume for maximum goodness through the wireless transmitter, but obviously when I unplug them I usually don't want the laptop at max volume.
Steve Kirks
2006-11-17T18:52:26

No, you're not on crack. I've noticed it too and it's very handy--another Apple design touch that "just works".
pwilcox
2006-11-17T18:59:51

Mmm. Noticed it on my intel iMac a couple of days ago, too. Nice feature.
Tamara
2006-11-17T19:47:39

I don't know about always, but Macs, laptops at least, have done that for a while. My iBook G4 did it, and my current MacBook. It's slick. No idea if other laptops do it, haven't used a non-Mac one in a while.
Matthew
2006-11-17T20:29:06

Awesome I was just wishing for this feature the other evening after I almost deafened myself using headphones on my Powerbook. I hope the Macbooks have this feature.
Tom
2006-11-18T05:47:44

My laptop has done this in Linux since I bought it, although I haven't gotten it to do the same thing in Windows yet.
Edwin
2006-11-18T09:57:30

It depends on the audio mixer that's in your laptop. My Dell Windows laptop does it, too, because it has two output volume settings.
Chu Yeow
2006-11-19T16:12:20

Yep it's like this, you're not on crack. I noticed this too on my MBP awhile ago and a confirmed I wasn't hearing things.
Chu Yeow
2006-11-19T16:13:14

Ahh bad HTML tag, I meant to link to the http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2006/11/intelphonevol/index.php MacWorld article.
Abe
2006-11-19T18:39:38

Matthew, I have a regular (non-Pro) MacBook and it does have this nice feature.
Nick Fitzsimons
2006-11-21T17:34:33

I noticed this on my MacBook a month or so ago; it's a very nice feature.

You can see what's going on if you open the Sound preference pane and switch to the output tab; with the headphones unplugged the display will refer to "Internal speakers" and you can set the volume for them; plug in the headphones and it switches to "Headphones", and you can set a different volume (and, indeed, balance). Presumably, if you use (say) a USB audio output device, you could also have separate volume and balance settings for that.

It's cool that, while you retain explicit control over these settings via the System Preferences, the system just behaves in a sensible way so that you never need to think about it. That's Apple for you.

I mentioned it to a long-time (15+ years) Mac user who is also a usability consultant, and even he was impressed. We agreed that, on Windows, the likely consequence of plugging in a set of headphones would be a notification balloon saying "You have inserted an alternative Audio Signal Output Device. Click here to open Control Panel and configure your new settings." :-)
Ken Mills
2008-02-10T01:25:31

I hit my Apple (Command?) key with my cursor over the battery status icon on the system tray at the top of my new Macbook pro and it went "poof" complete with cloud and sound effects. In trying to retrieve it I then eliminated my volume icon as well. How can I get these indicators back? Any help is appreciated, even just an email. Thanks! Ken Mills

iPod go thud then click, click, click.

2005-10-25T17:28:40+00:00

Man, color me peeved: The girl just got me a new LCD-equipped iTrip for my 4G iPod 20GB, and what happens? I fumble it from chest level, from which it fell to land flat on its back on a marble floor. No obvious external or cosmetic damage, but I'm hearing an old familiar noise from the hard drive inside.

I guess it's time to exercise the AppleCare on this thing now, too. Are these things all meant to be this fragile? Maybe next time I'll leave it in one of those "iCondom" cases I bought but never use.

Archived Comments

Andrew Heaton
2005-10-26T15:15:29

I HATE the way an iPod will break so easily.

When my last one broke, the "genius" at the apple store actually told me "they're meant to be disposable"

yes, like a hamster or a lighter.

I've banned the Apple Store
l.m.orchard
2005-10-26T16:53:15

Well you know, I regularly light my $1,000,000 cigars with $500 bills and swim in my vault of gold coins. So I can totally see where the genius bar drone was coming from.

Could an iPod and AV cable fit in a DVD case?

2005-10-21T18:05:54+00:00

Being able to listen to audio while in the “natural” places you listen to audio (in the car, while walking/running, on the couch, etc.) is what accelerated audio Podcasts to the phenomenon it is today. Now that there is a way to view video the same way ... that’s going to accelerate that new type of user generated content as well. I’m positive. It’s a no brainer.

Source: Russell Beattie Notebook » My New iPod: Video Podcasting Is Going to Be BIG

I've been gradually easing into subscribing to vidcast feeds, starting to find some early greats out there like RocketBoom, Command-N, and OpenAlpha. I've also started hacking together feeds for great online video shows which lack feeds. And then, there's the occasional private hack I've done to record shows with a capture card or help catch up on TV shows I find on Usenet.

To watch all of these things in the living room, I use Xbox Media Center on my modded Xbox, networked to a file server in the basement. However, there are probably very few other people on the planet who'd bother setting up a rig like mine. So the combination of iTunes loading feed-delivered video enclosures onto an iPod equipped with an AV cable and a remote sounds like a genius combination for really jump starting the next phase of the vidcasting rise.

Archived Comments

Pete Prodoehl
2005-10-21T19:27:21

I really wish I had a enough spare parts of bucks lying around to build a MythTV box, because I could create quite a freaking videoblog aggregating machine out of it, and view it all on the big screen TV... Someday... Someday...
l.m.orchard
2005-10-21T20:29:08

Pete, well, I'm not doing all that bad with just an NSLU2, a 160 GB drive, and an Xbox. :)
Seth Mason
2005-10-21T20:59:13

Thanks for the tip about Xbox Media Center. I'll have to check that out.

How did you mod your Xbox? Or did I miss a post about it?
l.m.orchard
2005-10-22T01:43:09

Seth: Oh, I just went over to ModChipMan.com and picked up a Xecuter 2.6 and soldered it in myself. I upgraded the internal HD with one from a junker PC. Very cool to dump all my games onto the drive and leave them squirreled away in their cases. And then there's all the homebrew stuff like XBMC...
Seth Mason
2005-10-23T03:59:13

Thanks for the lowdown.
Steph_B
2005-10-25T18:48:47

I wanna thanks for the tip about Xbox Media Center too. It's very useful information for me because I'm going to create videoblog instead of my homepage.

No user serviceable fans

2005-10-06T10:54:42+00:00

Grr. Last night, My PowerBook suddenly started making the oscillating, growling noise of a fan with built up crud rattling against the blades. I'd thought it was the hard drive at first, knowing my luck, but I narrowed down the sound to the fans in the back and could make the sound go away by cutting back CPU usage.

Normally, as with all the other machines I have, I'd open the sucker up and clean that out with a q-tip or cotton ball. However, this is still under AppleCare for another year or so, and I doubt they'd look kindly on me pawing around inside this thing yet. But, I really don't want to part with it for most of a week, just so they can ship it to someone with a more official screwdriver and Apple-branded cotton swabs.

Archived Comments

fluffy
2005-10-06T13:15:13

Apple's official policy is that opening a system up and servicing it yourself doesn't void the warranty as long as you don't break it. At least that's the case on desktops and the Mini, and I'd imagine it extends to laptops as well.
M. Quirk
2005-10-06T14:58:01

Also, if it's a minor thing, they can probably do it on-site at either the Learning Center in Ann Arbor, or at the Apple Store in in Novi's 12 Oaks mall.
Andy
2005-10-24T06:06:23

Go to Office Depot and get yourself some air in a can. They call it cleaning duster. The stuff is great for blowing junk out of tight places. You can even freeze stuff with it if you tip the can just right.

It's ozen friendly!

My iPod experience is all about tickling myself.

2004-10-27T21:18:19+00:00

I've had an iPod for a little over a week now, and I've been working pretty diligently to rate every song I hear and trying to make sure all the metadata is correct. I've even started tinkering with tagging songs using things like :dreamy, :goofy, :energy, :calm in the comments field for use with Smart Playlists. (Yeah, I know about TuneTags, but the psuedo-XML in song comments bugs me, as does the somewhat buggy behavior of the last version of the program I tried.)

By this point, I've managed to cram about 3400 songs from our CD collection into it. (So much for the marketing!) With my efforts so far, a “Good Music” Smart Playlist selecting for 3-stars and above gives me around 415 songs. This doesn't count the songs I've rated with 1-star, which get deleted from the iPod periodically. Also, I've yet to get a significant proportion tagged with special comments, so mood-based and concept-based playlists are far off until I get a better tool for letting me quickly and lazily tag songs.

So, this morning on the way into work I fired up my “Good Music” playlist on random for the first time, and I was amazed at how good the selection was. Yes, I rated these songs, so I should know they're good--but so far, I've had all 3400 songs on shuffle and have been alternating between listening and rating, skipping songs I wasn't in the mood for, and canning songs right off the bat with a 1-star rating. So up until now, my rotation has been an okay experience.

However, hearing that mix of consistently high rated songs was an unexpectedly good experience. What occurred to me as I rounded the last stretch of I-75 into Detroit this morning is that this metadata and these Smart Playlists on shuffle amount to an attempt to tickle myself. Ever try that? For the most part, it doesn't work. Sure, you know where you're ticklish--but if it's your hand trying to do it, you're expecting it and the tickle doesn't happen.

I'm probably stepping too far into breathless pretentiousness with this, but it makes me want to think further about machine learning and intelligence. Yeah, Smart Playlists are a very, very rudimentary form of intelligence, but it's good enough to tickle me with a music mix--which is a very real bit of value added to my life.

I wonder how much further this tickling-myself metaphor can be taken? That is: take a machine endowed with information I produced, apply some simple or slightly complex logic with a bit of random shuffle, and feed it back to me to see if it makes me experience it with some novelty. Someone's got to already be on top of this as a research project. That, or it's an idea obvious or dumb enough only to appeal to me.

shortname=ipodtickles

Archived Comments

ac
2004-10-27T18:52:33

a smart playlist i use is one where it shows me songs that have been played 3+ times and are unrated. i look at it periodically and then quickly rate those tunes.
pjm
2004-10-27T19:23:18

You should see the elaborate, nested, weighted Active Playlist I built to keep the rotation fresh on my iPod... to summarize, every song gets "rested" after playing, but the rest is shorter if the rating is higher. (There are, of course, special rules for new and/or unrated songs.) Nothing exceptionally clever, but the end result is close to having what amounts to a little radio station which only plays music I want to hear. It's freakin' incredible, and, as you put it, I feel like it's a very real bit of value added.
George
2004-10-27T21:36:03

Self-tickling seems to be a reoccurring theme of yours. Isn't the Amazon Wish-of-the-Month club along the same lines?
l.m.orchard
2004-10-27T21:52:49

George: Huh, you know, I think you're right. I never thought about the wishlist thing in those terms, but it fits! I'm actually starting to think this might be a good way to handle information overload. Like, establish some rules or set up some learning (ie. bayes or whatnot), toss in a shuffle, and filter a firehose through it. (ie. 611 RSS feeds I've subscribed to) I couldn't possibly process everything from the firehose, so a jug or two from it is better than nothing-- and a swig fuzzily selected from the better parts is better still. The idea is not to even try to get everything, but make the best of what I can actually use in a particular context. (like the current song, or a wishlist item, or a few dozen news items)
Michael McCracken
2004-10-28T00:57:50

I agree - pondering this kind of thing is fun : http://michael-mccracken.net/blog/blosxom.pl/computers/mac/music/Shuffle.html I figured that the best way is to have it try to guess based on how you already interact with it instead of making you rate things (I have had iTunes for years and still mostly not rated the songs.)
l.m.orchard
2004-10-28T06:56:33

Hmm. although, for info overload that isn't quite tickling yourself (not with RSS feeds anyway) because not all of the input is your own. And, Michael: Yeah, that's something I've started thinking about too. Wondering how hard it would be to come up with a little assistant that asked at each transition between songs, "Was that a good transition?" You give a thumbs up / thumbs down, or maybe some stars, and after awhile the thing can start building playlists. Unfortunately for me, the Party Shuffle mode isn't available for use when playing songs off the iPod in iTunes. Otherwise, I'd say that'd be a perfect mode to tinker with a small window of song order
brian p
2004-10-30T11:50:08

great idea on the comments, i hadn't even thought of that. i mostly use the genre to filter, but i'm inspired. the 30k songs are a bit daunting tho.

I'm one of the iPod generation now

2004-10-19T19:15:49+00:00

So I finally got myself an iPod, thanks to The Girl.

Through various twists of replacement policy and iBook promotional antics, somehow she ended up with two 20GB 4G iPods, both of which she's been planning to sell off on eBay to end up with some cash and an iPod Mini. Well, it finally occurred to me this weekend that I needed to buy one of those iPods.

Lately, I've been only been listening to streaming radio at work, since I don't really have the hard drive space on my PowerBook for music, and loading up the work PC with MP3s is pretty unpalatable. I miss the days when I had a 40GB library at work, but between company policy where I am now and having lost that whole library in a hard drive crash back then, I'm hesitant to go there again.

Enter the iPod. I was reminded of its presence in The Girl's office, still boxed up and shrink-wrapped, at a moment when I was thinking about podcasting and thinking about my lack of hard drive space. So, I gave in and snapped it up.

Thus far, I'm pretty happy. Sure, I'd been looking at the larger capacity models that came with a dock and remote, but this one was the right price at the right place and the right time. I was also lucky that she had an iTrip she was selling that just happened to work satisfactorily for playing MP3s in my car - something that's been a bit of a quest of mine for years. While it's true I do have an in-dash Blaupunkt MP3 CD player in my Ford Focus now, it's also true that 20GB certainly outweighs 700MB.

The few snags I've run into so far mostly have to do with the fact that it seems like my desired usage pattern of the iPod isn't quite supported. See, I don't want to have a massive library on my PowerBook, to be synched in part onto my iPod. I have a library on a file server at home, and I want to use the iPod alternately as a music store away from home for iTunes on my PowerBook and as an MP3 player while I'm driving. I don't want any music at all on my PowerBook. Problem is, though, the iPod isn't quite a first-class citizen in iTunes. Party Shuffle doesn't work, and I had a few problems with making sure metadata (like ratings and last played date) made it into iTunes.

Oh yeah, and I wish they'd turn down the wheel sensitivity way down when setting a song's rating. At present, it's just a bare millimeter of a finger's twitch to leap from 1 to 5 stars. Might just be me.

But, for the most part, I'm very happy to have my own music at work again, and the potential of tinkering with smart playlists and podcasts are exciting to me. That, and the fourth-generation iPod is just an elegant, slick joy to hold.

shortname=ipodismine

Archived Comments

Buzz Andersen
2004-10-19T16:34:59

Congrats--if you'd like a free license for PodWorks (http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks), let me know :-).
C
2004-10-19T21:35:43

No, its not just you. The rating sensitivity is way too high, trying to set four stars, while half awake on the morning commute, is a near impossibility.
Tim Jarrett
2004-10-20T09:33:47

Agree about the sensitivity of the wheel in general. Regarding your usage, have you thought about moving your PowerBook's iTunes Library file to your file server? You could then manage the iPod from the file server's library. If you still want to be able to sync the iPod on the go, you might set up a separate account on your PowerBook whose iTunes Library is local and use fast user switching to go back and forth when you want to sync. Not seamless but it should work. At least I hope it does--that's how I want to go when I start converting all my CDs.
l.m.orchard
2004-10-20T10:05:30

Tim: I think I have some more playing to do, but moving my iTunes Library to the network server wasn't quite working. There *is* the option to do so in the preferences, but things don't seem right: CDs still import to the local drive, and it doesn't seem like any metadata gets saved there. And then there's also the issue of how the thing acts when the network share isn't available, and how I can maybe get the share automounted when I go online at home.
dirt
2004-10-20T10:27:23

I'm very jealous Les...I've been coveting a iPod for quite some time now.. I've promised myself I could get one once I get my MP3 collection squared away and organized. About 1/2 way thru getting the tagging completed, on 45G worth... Can you say time consuming? I knew you could..
fluffy
2004-10-22T14:12:41

My usage pattern seems more or less the same as yours. The way I supported it was to make a smart playlist called "entropy" which is set to only include songs which haven't been played in the last 6 months (this number goes up if anything sneaks into my iPod which has been played recently when there's still unplayed stuff which isn't on it), arranged by album, limited to 25GB (I have a 30GB model). Then I have a playlist called "currently digging" for the purpose of loading specific albums on. Finally, I set the iPod to shuffle by album.