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the iPod zombie trance

I am an iPod zombie too. This Times of London article points out some of the disadvantages of people wearing iPods – both on an individual level and on a group level.

I concede these. There are days when I’ve forgotten to bring it along or recharge the batteries, and I am amazed sometimes by how much interesting background noise there is to hear. Birds, leaves rustling, snatches of conversation on the footpath, bus or train.

On the other hand, sometimes there aren’t any interesting or appealing ambient sounds. Sometimes it’s just the white noise of traffic.

I definitely use the iPod more in Sydney than I ever did in Hobart. Why is it more of a big city thing? Is it peer pressure, being more reliant on public transport, the busier and more stressful lifestyle?

Listening to music is an escape from the drudgery of the world. After a long busy day in the office, and faced with a grueling commute – it is nice to simply tune out and almost be somewhere else.

Yes, I can see why it isn’t a good thing to have a society where everybody is enclosed in their own personal musical cocoon. On the other hand, this is also a reaction to other things going on in society. If the people who are soliciting donations for charities, selling credit cards or just begging are going to be more upfront about interrupting me – when this isn’t welcome – then I am grateful for anything which makes this more difficult. Acting as if I am in an iPod trance is one way of shielding myself from this.

It’s possible that iPods and other mp3 players are creating a world where people are unaccustomed to silence and where abundance of music is taken for granted as just a background.

It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s also possible that the option of having constant music will help us appreciate deliberate silence.

Zen and the art of creating iTunes playlists

Please excuse this frivolous post and the slightly misleading title.

I have found that it is very easy to get into a rut with what I’m listening to on iTunes. When it is so easy to play only my most favourite songs or my most played songs, that’s often what I listen to. It’s not a good idea to listen to only favourites for a lengthy period of time – it means that I get bored of these great songs and take them for granted

One solution is to sometimes play only the songs that I’ve rated 3 or 4. The problem is that I haven’t rated systematically rated my entire collection. I do this more on a ad hoc basis, otherwise it would be a huge chore. I never rate a new CD until I’ve had it for at least a month, except for those tracks which really leap out as being particularly good or bad.

Here’s one solution which cures this sort of ennui. Morgan’s eclectic sampler playlist.

I use the word sampler in its traditional sense, that this playlist will give a reminder of the breadth of your collection, remind you of the sorts of things which you have.

This playlist has two main guidelines:
1. The idea is to choose only one track from each album. Each album’s representative should ideally be your second or third favourite track from that album.
2. Never choose your favourite tracks – then this playlist would become a just another favourites variation.

Of course, rules are made to be broken. Maybe you’d like to slightly over-represent newer albums, so you can get to know them better. Sometimes you might choose not to represent one-track wonders at all, if you really regret that one track you purchased from that album and don’t view it as representative at all.

The downside is that this playlist takes a bit of work, especially for selecting the second and third-best tracks of albums you haven’t listened to in a while. But that work can itself be enjoyable and illuminating about your collection and how you yourself have changed since adding particular albums.

The other thing is that this playlist is meant to help you escape from your iTunes ruts, don’t let it become a new rut in itself. If it’s a short list, don’t listen to it for more than a few days at once. Even if it’s a really long list, it will have definitely served its purpose after a week. Then leave it for a while and move on, hopefully to some tracks which the eclectic sampler playlist inspired you to rediscover.

first impressions of Office 2004 for Mac - get it for the Project Center!

I have mentioned before (in a post which might have been accidentally deleted) that although I am very much into Macs, I don’t instinctively hate all things Microsoft.

This doesn’t mean that I particularly like Microsoft. I use Windows XP at work (I am contemptuously familiar with that operating system) and Panther at home, and there is absolutely no comparison between the two. XP doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Panther. Moreover I despise the way Microsoft won the browser war, and then once it had the most popular browser, it proceeded to neglect it so that it is now the most atrophied browser that is also the most popular browser.

All that said, once in a while Microsoft makes some decent software and it deserves credit when this happens.

I am referring to Office 2004 (the newest version for the Mac).

using the shift key to rip certain copy-protected CDs

Today I had my first experience of a seriously copy-protected CD, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, released by EMI. I didn't have much luck ripping it onto my Mac - I ended up having to force quit out of iTunes. Apparently there are a number of different copy-protection methods. One method can be circumvented with a magic marker. I didn't think that this method would work on this particular CD, so I looked for other methods. Then I saw this reference to hold down the shift key on a Windows computer for 5 seconds after inserting the CD. This stopped the CD from automatically launching the program which would interfere with the copy protection. I then copied the CD with iTunes, and soon I'll have it in my iPod.

As I've written before, I believe that creators should be fairly compensated for their work, but that copy-protection technology goes way too far, and I have no moral qualms about circumventing it. I've never been interested in downloading music from file-sharing sites. The only thing which would tempt me would be if I wasn't able to rip a CD which I had lawfully purchased. Then I would feel entitled to download an illicit copy.

When will the record companies realize that people like to listen to music on their computers and mp3 players, and it is manifestly unfair to prevent this from happening? It is simply such a stupid thing to do - piss off your paying customers and drive them into supporting your real target, the file-traders.

I'm about to really start ranting, so instead I'll link this detailed explanation of how the shift method works.

connecting to BigPond ADSL on Mac OS 10.3 + bandwidth hogs

I wrote earlier about my difficulties with getting iBook connected with Telstra's BigPond ADSL service. Well, it turned out that Telstra don't support Macs running on OS 10.3 (Panther). Don't ask me why. I was quite miffed when I noticed this in the fine print. Information like that should be in big bold letters under the Mac requirements. Well I'm happy to say it is possible to connect to BigPond ADSL on a Mac with Panther. It was actually quite easy. So easy that I could have been saved a lot of frustration if only Telstra had bothered to slip in a piece of paper with a few sentences giving some direction to Panther users.

This was something I worked out substantially on my own. I called the Telstra technical support this afternoon. I got the usual line that they don't officially support Panther, but the guy knew that it was possible to connect with it, but he wasn't sure how.

That wasn't at all helpful, but unless the guy was totally lying, it was good to know that it was somehow possible. Of course there wasn't anything on the BigPond website about this. So I looked further afield and found this helpful discussion thread. This gave me the information which I needed to try a different strategy, which actually worked! I went into System Preferences / Network and decided to try the "Assist Me" button for the hell of it, and that did the trick. So now I can return to using my iBook for everything.

Now my dilemma is, shall I stick with Bloglines (which I have developed a liking for), or go back to NetNewsWire (which I also like)?

While I'm talking about Australian broadband internet services, I have got to mention one huge difference between the Australian and American pricing models. In Australia, they really punish bandwidth hogs. All but the most expensive plans have a monthly download/upload allowance. The most basic plans start give you 200 MB to last an entire month. If you go over this allowance, one or both of these things will happen: you'll be charged for each MB over the limit; your connection speed is curtailed so that it's hardly any better than dialup.

From my observations, a 200 MB plan will work for somebody who never surfs the web for more than an hour a day (looking primarily at text), and who never goes to graphics intensive sites, never downloads or streams music or videos and never downloads applications (except maybe the absolute necessary patches and updates, if there aren't too many in that month). And MMORPGs like Lineage, EverQuest and Shadowbane are totally verboten.

I admit, I have been spoilt by my experience in the US, where there are no monthly download allowances. Those would never fly over there! Although I recall reading something about American ISPs are starting to worry about bandwidth hogs.

And it isn't fair when the person who is downloading pirated versions of Buffy season six (6 DVDs worth) and other movies is paying the same monthly charge as the person who just looks at the news, checks her email and does some shopping.

In theory, I can accept the idea of download-based pricing. But it's still a pain. Would it make a difference if they just sold it a different way, such as providing discounts and incentives for lower usage? Who knows. It's probably not so much of an issue in Australia, because most people here have never known anything different.

first glance at Opera 7.50

[See this follow up post about Mac browsers]

Opera 7.50 has recently been released. For the first time, Opera for Mac is no longer a version behind the Windows version. Opera 7.50 is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Of  course, Mac users upgrading from Opera 6 will notice more changes than Windows users upgrading from Opera 7.

Opera is still a small download, compared with the other major browsers. I like to use Opera for extended browsing / searching, because it has all sorts of handy short cuts which make browsing more efficient. Things like the z and x short-cuts for the back and forward buttons. Pressing F8 to be tab directly to the address bar, and then being able to go directly into a Google search by typing something like‘g MT “public relations” debacle’. I also like having nick-names for  bookmarks, so instead of using my mouse to click on my LiveJournal bookmark, I can just press F8 and type in my bookmark’s nick-name, “lj” and be there. I like a browser which saves me key-strokes and mouse usage.

It can also be really helpful to be able to continue browsing from your previous session, and being able to undo closing a browsing window.

Of course,  these were all things available in previous versions of Opera, so why upgrade to 7.50? Mac users will appreciate the magic wand for remembering passwords and having access to the full range of skins. The user interface looks more efficient and takes up less space on the screen.

One of the big innovations in Opera 7.50 is that it contains a news aggregator. This is a great idea and will probably be taken up by other browsers. Unfortunately, I found the results to be patchy. In the Windows version of Opera 7.50, I experienced difficulties reading my subscriptions. For some reason, the Mac version worked better. If you experiment with Opera’s news reader, I would highly recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts for marking items as read. The Opera news reader is very basic when compared with software like Net NewsWire (even the Lite version), but it’s still a notable first attempt at combining a browser and news reader.

My other gripe about is that Opera 7.50 is that it now only supports search shortcuts for Google. The previous version would support some of the other search engines like AlltheWeb and Teoma. Even though Google is probably at the height of its ascendancy, the other search engines are still relevant if you want to be thorough.

Opera is ad-supported for people who aren’t able or interested in paying for it (there is an upgrade discount for people who’ve registered previous versions of Opera). The good news is that now the ad window is a lot smaller and less intrusive than in previous versions.

Opera continues to be an innovative and competent browser. Sometimes there can be hassles with using a browser with such a miniscule market share, when too many web designers are only concerned with supporting IE for Windows. Opera’s particular niche is that it’s a power-user’s browser. Its extra features won’t be helpful to people who lack the time or interest to explore and play around with them.

iPod not being recognized after the iTunes 4.5 update

I am one of the many people who has experienced this problem after upgrading to iTunes 4.5. I have a 20 GB iPod which I bought at the Apple store in the Mall of America in January. There is a fix to this solution and it has worked for me. Go to Apple's web site, choose the Support tab, then choose the Discussions sub-tab, select the iPod product forum, then select the [regular] iPod, and then the Usage folder. The posting is currently second from the top and is called "iPod doesn't appear in Updater or iTunes in Mac OS X". The instructions were fairly straightforward, at least for Panther users.

Ultima III and Ultima IV

Why are retro classics like the early Ultima games popular? Is it just nostalgia - adults pining for what they enjoyed in childhood/adolescence? Is it because mobile phones, PDAs and mp3 players offer a similar a similar gaming environment to the Apple ][, Commodore 64 and TRS-80? Could it be that these some of early games compensated for their technological limits by having better gameplay? Or has this renaissance been caused by the strengthening of the open source movement?

If you're curious, try Lairware's remake of Ultima III (this particular version is for the Mac only). It's shareware. Registering it for $15 will let you finish the game, but you can waste days on this game before you get to that point. It's very polished.

There's also xu4, a freeware version of Ultima IV for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and other platforms. Ultima IV is a bigger and better game than Ultima III, one of the best games of all time, imho. xu4 is not yet playable to the end, but they're getting there. The personality quiz at the beginning of the game is reason enough to give it a try.

There are a lot more resources on retro-gaming, even other new versions of these games. Not to mention all the sites about running emulators of old operating systems on modern ones.

region free DVD viewing

As I mentioned earlier, I'm returning to Australia on February 1. I have my tickets, I'm now in the process of working out what things I should take with me, and which things I should sell, give away or throw out. I was thinking that I might as well give away my small DVD collection, because it was going to be too difficult for me to view them in Australia, thanks to DVD region encoding (the link is a good summary - albeit slightly biased in favour of regioning). It is so frustrating that a technological solution is deliberately blocked like this.

I've decided that I will bring US DVDs with me in the hope that I'll eventually get a Region-free DVD player in Australia, or I'll find region-switching software for my iBooks's DVD player that will work, that will at least set my iBook's region-switching-counter back to zero.

Safari, Opera and Explorer

[See this follow up post about Mac browsers]

It’s a chicken or the egg type question – did Safari come about because Microsoft was not working on new versions of IE for Mac, or did Microsoft stop working on IE for Mac because Apple started competing with Safari?

When Safari first came out, I was annoyed. First of all, it had that tiresome brushed metal interface (although I’ve since found out that this can be removed with Metalifizer). Secondly, it made me concerned the other Mac browsers, such as Opera, OmniWeb and Camino wouldn’t be able to compete. Although I like all the software which Apple throws in with its computers, I want there to be a viable market for third party software developers for the Mac.

I’ve since come to like Safari. I think that it’s arguably the best free browser for any operating system. It’s very fast – both to load and for browsing. It has tabs and it renders pages very nicely.

Overall, I still prefer Opera 6 for Mac for the following reasons.
I already paid for it, so might as well get my money’s worth
I really, really like some of Opera’s time-saving shortcuts: how you can use the “z” and “x” keys as backwards & forwards buttons; how you select the location bar by just pressing F8 (in this way, it’s much better than Safari, which makes you drag over the whole URL or press Command-L); how bookmarks can be given brief nicknames which retrieve the bookmarked site when entered into the location bar; full screen browsing is easily turned on or off with F11.

Opera’s not without its problem. It takes more time to load than Safari – which I can forgive because Safari’s got an innate advantage in this area. The most two severe problems are that less pages seem work in Opera than Safari and that it is more prone to crash than Safari. These are major problems, and if they continue to get worse, I will reluctantly have to switch to Safari.