guttervomit

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IceRocket Fun: Harry Potter vs Tom Cruise

16 Jul 2005

Was having some fun with Mark Cuban’s Ice Rocket this morning and found a cute "blog trends" analysis tool that lets you pit 2-3 search-terms against each other to see how much buzz they’ve been getting over a specific period of time. On a whim, I entered the two biggest buzz-magnets of the past few weeks, Tom Cruise and Harry Potter.

It seems that poor Tom hasn’t been getting quite the same amount of attention as the bespectacled boy wonder, even with the recently-released War of the Worlds. The "Harry Potter" spike towards the 16th is unbelievable. About 2.75% of IceRocket’s tracked blogs are talking about the Tim-Hunter clone; if you believe the current estimate of 13 million blogs worldwide, that means that over 350,000 bloggers (!) have written Potter-related posts in the past month.

And speaking of Harry Potter, the Guardian ran a contest two weeks ago for amateur authors to write a death scene for Albus Dumbledore, but in the style of another, established author. The Neal Stephenson and Kurt Vonnegut versions are friggin’ brilliant, clever and yet wonderfully familiar.

Posted in Randomness | 3 Comments »
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My First Ipod, Part Deux

14 Jul 2005

It’s hard to get over how much easier the iPod is to use than the iRiver. Some of my favorite little features:

An automatic "Recently Added" playlist, which updates every time you add new songs to your library. The iRiver had nothing like this, which made it really difficult to locate and play stuff you had just downloaded. (Basically, I had to remember the names and albums of the new songs, and navigate to them using the file-system view.)

Album Covers! Here’s something that every color-enabled MP3 player should have — the ability to display the album artwork of the track you’re currently listening to. If I was on a Mac, I could supposedly use an AppleScript to automatically download all the covers for my entire music collection in one click, but as I’m still on a PC, it’s all painfully manual. Thankfully though, Windows Media Player has already done the image-hunting for me, so it’s just a matter of matching the artwork with the songs. (This is still a significant task though, so at the moment, I’m only doing it for the new albums as they come in.)

Did I mention it has zero startup time? Well, it has zero startup time. You press the PLAY button to turn it on, and it’s ready in about half a second.

Also, the fact that it syncs and charges from the same USB2.0 port (at the same time) means that it’s practically never running low on batteries. With the iRiver, you had to choose one or the other — charging or syncing, and I’d often end up with a dead iRiver (not to mention an awkward sense of irony) if I accidentally left it plugged in too long. Apple’s idiot-proof approach proved that the two concepts weren’t mutually exclusive.

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New Singles This Week

13 Jul 2005

Two singles from two of my favorites:

Coheed & Cambria’s "Welcome Home" from their upcoming album (Dear Apollo I’m Burning Star IV Volume I: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness) can be downloaded right here.

Maximo Park is set to release their new single "Going Missing" on Monday (July 18th) as well. If it’s anything like "The Coast is Always Changing" or "Now I’m All Over the Shop" it should be a real killer.

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Logitech Wireless Headphones

13 Jul 2005

Bluetooth headphones again, this time from mousemaker-extraordinnaire Logitech. I’m really into the idea of having a wireless headset that you can use with your PC or your digital music player, and I think I’d be willing to shell out the (admittedly pretty exorbitant) amount that this thing is going for, when it comes out here. The Logitech page says it’ll be retailing for US$129 (or about PhP7200), yowza.

I’ve had a little bit of experience with Bluetooth-based addons to mobile devices (my old Motorola V500 came with a wireless headset), and I know that although the total-freedom concept sounds great, it does have 2 small gotchas, either of which may be deal-breakers for some folks:

1. You now have yet another device that will need regular charging. On my Moto, the headset didn’t come with a power indicator, so it was always running dry at the most annoying times. In my case, that would push my current "portables that need charging" list to 5 separate items, which can be a major hassle because I don’t have enough available sockets at home to charge them all simultaneously. (I suppose I could buy another power strip, but still …)

2. Although it’s great to be able to travel with your music player in your bag instead of bouncing around in your pocket, you will not be able to switch tracks or control anything other than the volume with this headset. This may or may not annoy you, depending on how well you build your playlists. I’m something of a playlist virgin, so I don’t know how quickly I can get used to the idea of loading the proper list before I actually start listening.

[ UPDATE: Stupid me. Apparently, Logitech also released an iPod-specific version of this headset that addresses my #2 complaint. (Well, it addresses it if you're gonna be using it with an iPod anyway, and you have US$149 to spare.) ]

Posted in Hardware | 1 Comment »

My First iPod

10 Jul 2005

I got my first iPod yesterday (courtesy of my friend mocca) for just a smidgen over US$400. Not a bad deal considering that I paid a similar price for my 20Gb iRiver last year. This is a landmark moment for me because this iPod Photo is my first ever official Apple purchase (yeah, Bill Gates owns my sorry ass).

Now if there’s one thing that Apple really excels at, it’s presentation. The cute understated packaging of this top-of-the-line device is spiffy.

The inner white box opens up like a book, with the iPod on the right side and the headphones and other cabling on the other.

In case you are one of those unscrupulous types who are familiar with things like "P2P" or (gasp) "bit-torrent," Apple provides a helpful reminder which you have to peel off before you can get to the good stuff.

Not much stuff in the box, because the current edition of the iPod Photo had to forego value-adds like a docking station and firewire cable to lower its old US$600 price tag. Considering that the docking station is only worth about US$40, I don’t see why this is a bad deal at all actually.

That white chunk of plastic over on the left is the charger by the way. You’ll probably have noticed that there’s no power cable to be seen. That’s because the USB 2.0 cable plugs directly into the power adapter when you want to charge up. I found this to be a Really Good Idea, given that every new gadget I buy has a minimum of two cables that come with it and it’s becoming a real bitch to keep them all organized.

The iPod had just enough power straight out of the box to let itself be fiddled with for a few minutes. As always, you lose about 8% of total disk capacity to formatting. 55Gb is still a heck of a lot of space for a pocketable device though.

Apple recommends that you have iTunes and the iPod Updater tool installed prior to connecting your iPod for the first time, which I ever so obediently did.

The iTunes software is, by the way, the first music player I’ve seen that doesn’t have a dedicated STOP button. In Apple’s mind, I suppose, PAUSE-ing and STOP-ing are the same acts. The same functionality can be found on the iPod itself, so kudos for consistency and all that.

Total charging time was over 3 hours, and since it was past midnight when I got the software running, I decided to leave the iPod connected via the USB port to charge up and sync my music and photo collection at the same time.

7 hours later I’m back at my machine and the iPod is fully charged. However, something weird has happened to my PC: my available hard disk space has gone from 10gb before I went to sleep to just under 5mb. Where the 9,995mb went was a mystery to me. I realized later that the iPod was creating "optimized" versions of all of the images I wanted to sync, and storing them on my PC. (In hindsight, it seems obvious that it would do something like this, but it confused the hell out of me when I first realized what it was doing.)

Thoughts and Some Digression

Anybody who’s ever heard or read about the iPod will already be familiar with all the hoopla about ease-of-use and idiot-proof operation, and having come from the iRiver, I have to admit that those accolades are well-deserved. Without breaking out a manual, I was able to figure out how to use everything on the device, including how to build playlists on-the-fly and how to rate songs, which was practically impossible on the head-scratching-laden iRiver. The learning process was made a whole lot easier by the helpful hints that the iPod displays right on its screen and in a larger part by how consistent the whole UI is.

Performance-wise, it’s a real joy to use. It’s instantly on, and scrolls through the songs in its drive as fast as you can wind the click-wheel. Guess those dual ARM processors really make a difference here.

Sound fidelty is top-notch, but the stock earphones that the iPod comes with kinda leave something to be desired. Normally, I wouldn’t even complain about this because I’m not a huge audiophile, but I’ve gotten so used to my Sennheiser MX500’s and I’m having trouble deciding whether I should just ditch the pretty whites.

Some annoyances:

The iTunes syncing process involves renaming all of your MP3s and filing them away in ambiguously-named, sequentially-numbered folders. This kinda sucks, because it means you won’t be able to easily retrieve a file if you want to share it with someone, unless they have iTunes as well. On the other hand, I rarely transfer music anyway, so I suppose this isn’t a really big deal (and given that the iPod has so much space, I could always just travel around with a copy of iTunes so I could install it when I needed to).

You could conceivably turn the sync off and just copy your files over to the iPod using Windows Explorer, but I have a feeling this is going to involve some kind of performance hit. I’ve yet to try this out myself though, so that’s really just a baseless theory.

What I Really Love

One word: podcasting. It’s absolutely free, it’s new content on a regular basis, and it automatically downloads to your computer. The way that it’s been integrated into iTunes 4.9 makes it incredibly easy to browse and subscribe to anything in the PodCast directory. Practically every topic from ESPN Sports coverage to Technology Talk Shows to Movie Reviews is available for download — pretty much an automated radio-on-demand, if you will. Right now I’m subscribed to Adam Curry’s new music show, Engadget’s weekly tech talk and Cinecast’s weekly movie reviews, which are all really great stuff to be listening to while you’re on the road.

This is all just my first impressions of course — I have a feeling it’ll take at least a few more days before all the little implications of having this device on my person really sink in.

More next time!

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Jason Fried Interview

10 Jul 2005

There’s a very nice interview with Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals, over at Tom Peters’ personal site, which I have been slowly digesting over the past hour.

Here’s the part that I’m struggling to wrap my brain around:

We’re not much into planning or writing a lot of things down that are concrete. My personal opinion is that every decision you make should be temporary. So when you start writing things down, you start putting signatures to things, and you start being locked into your past actions. You’re letting your past determine the future. So I prefer to just start designing and see where things go. Then you can make adjustments and tweaks, realizing that every decision you make and everything you do can be changed if you come up with something better. I think that’s the best way to design things.

It also lets you make decisions when you have the right information to make them. The traditional design process might include a lot of documentation of functional specifications, or lots of charts and diagrams, and a bunch of stuff that you compile before you begin designing. In reality, you can plan all you want, but by the time you start actually designing something, and using it in the real world, you start seeing patterns and things you never could’ve guessed before. If you’re locked into a plan, then you can’t change those things.

I’ve been part of a lot of web projects that started out one way and turned almost completely around during development, so I can understand why he thinks it’s a bad idea to try to pre-plan everything. On the other hand, I’m not sure if my current clientele would be comfortable entrusting large projects to someone who just wings it. I don’t know … maybe this is the kind of advice that I can only safely apply to my own situation once I’ve got more experience.

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Without Gravity: Tenderfoot

10 Jul 2005

Apart from the ethereal Sigur Ros, I know pretty much squat about Iceland’s music scene. As of this morning, Without Gravity makes two, and although they are thematically similar to Jónsi Birgisson and company, musically they couldn’t be more different.

The first comparison that popped into my head, as I listened to this trio’s album Tenderfoot today, was of another trio from slightly further south, i.e., Travis. And indeed, there’s a lot of spots where these two bands share their respective grooves.

If you have a hankering to try something from outside your American/Asiatic comfort zone, one of the standout tracks "Beautiful Son" is available for download right here.

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Fantastic Four

7 Jul 2005

I was kinda worried, going in to the theater last night, that Marvel’s latest comic-turned-movie was going to be Daredevil-style superhero-cheese. I was wrong.

This isn’t like Daredevil at all, but it’s also not much better than that old stinker.

Let’s consider the basic differences:

"Daredevil" tried very very hard to capture the drama and grit of the seminal Frank Miller comics, but was inevitably undone by the star power of Ben Affleck’s chin.

The crew that handled "Fantastic Four" on the other hand already knew they were going to be cheesy going in, and tried to revel in it as much as they could. It works about a quarter of the time: the story progresses along nicely during the first half-hour, but as soon as they start "superheroing" it devolves fairly quickly into a crapfest.

Although I can certainly understand the feel they were trying to go for, there were just too many fundamental oddities to keep everything believable. The Fantastic Four lay waste to suspension bridges and entire city blocks, blow up cars and buses, and people stupidly gather around to applaud them. And Dr. Doom’s powers are never fully explained — one minute he’s attracting metallic objects, then he’s shorting electric mains, then he’s powering the Reverse-Cosmic-Ray machine (or is he absorbing it?), then he’s blowing holes in people (but apparently, not rubberized Mr. Fantastic, which tells me that he’s firing some kind of projectile instead of a real energy blast … huh?).

And Jessica Alba! Jesus Christ! This is the "Christmas Jones" school of movie scientists at work again, folks: put any dumb blonde in a corporate blazer, throw on a pair of spectacles, tie her hair up into a bun and hey presto! Expert geneticist!

Is this the kind of movie that’s supposed to build anticipation for the bottom-feeders like next year’s Ghost Rider?

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Anticipating the iPod

6 Jul 2005

I decided a couple of weeks back to sell my soul to … er, join the iPod bandwagon. I have a bunch of reasons for deciding to switch but they can basically be summed up thusly:

1. I need a media device with a storage capacity of 60gb.
2. The Gigabeat encodes your music files.

Ok, that sounds a bit weird, so let me explain (to myself, as well as to anyone reading this). My music collection grows at the rate of about 800mb to a gig per month, and I recently hit the ceiling on my IRiver H320. I kinda regret not going for the 40gb model back when I was shopping around, but that’s all in the past.

My original decision was to stay anti-iPod for the rest of my life, and go with Toshiba’s Gigabeat F60, which has a huge color LCD and represents the bleeding-edge of digital audio players (it debuted just a few months ago). In some ways, it’s a better alternative to Apple’s flagship product because it’s slightly friendlier to PC music formats (although iRiver is still singular in its support for OGG).

However! The Gigabeat has one failing, which was to me, a deal-breaker. It encodes your music files as you copy them over from your PC, renaming them .SAT (in an effort I suppose, to show support for Microsoft’s Plays For Sure standard). I’m not sure why I hate this "feature" so much; I guess I just couldn’t bring myself to buy anything that would alter my files without giving me the option to refuse. (In fairness, the Gigabeat does allow you to copy music over without encoding them, but they’ll be unplayable. Oh boy.)

In any case, that didn’t leave me with many other options. The iPod Photo represents practically the only other ultra-high capacity player on the market (well, there’s also the Creative Zen Xtra, but it feels so … second-generation, with its monochrome, green-backlit display and its relatively short battery life). Curse Apple for forcing my hand!

I haven’t actually bought the iPod yet, but I’ve pretty much made up my mind about it. The recent US$100 price drop couldn’t have come at a better time: the idea that you could buy a 60gb top-of-the-line player for about US$400 was just too good to resist.

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City on Film

3 Jul 2005

City on Film is the third group from the prolific Robert Nanna, lead singer of Braid and more recently, Hey Mercedes. (I use the term "group" loosely here because City on Film is Mr. Nanna’s first solo outing, although he explains here that he’s been working on it for over 5 years.) Fans of the straight-up rock sound employed by his first two bands may be a bit put-off by the curiously-devoid-of-electronics feel that Nanna has gone with for City’s debut collection, In Formal Introduction, but it’s definitely worth a good long listen.

One of my favorite tracks, a Dave Matthews-style rocker called How a Helicopter Sounds, is available for download.

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