excerpts. : ipod

Today's favorite iPad App: Epicurious

hussain — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:25:00 GMT

... and it's free!

iPad Thoughts

hussain — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 04:20:00 GMT

Watching a video on the iPad is really nice - great clear, colorful HD screen - with one exception: the glare. I watched a handbraked episode of Stargate Universe, as well as Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and an episode of Modern Family via the ABC Player iPad application.

Overall, the apps for the iPad - ones designed to take advantage of the larger screen - are wonderfully useful.

Specific iPad applications

The Yahoo! Entertainment app is much more useful than the web version. It's too bad neither TiVo or MSN have iPad formatted apps like this. Customizing TV listings is very intuitive, poking at on/off choices with a finger is even more intuitive than pointing and clicking with a mouse.

The NPR app is fun, too, with streaming access to affiliates as well as a triple stacked stacked news story layout.

The Yahoo! Entertainment app crashed a few times, as did the NPR app, returning to the home screen.

The IMDB application was really fun. The wife and I sat around looking up movies and reading trivia and being silly running lines from The Karate Kid and Office Space. All on the couch, without a keyboard. That part truly shows off how the same data, different interface and in a movie-watching setting (couch) really can make the power of the internets click. I understand why Steve says it's a magical device.

ABC Player is fantastic, access to watch shows on demand is reminiscent of Hulu. I have to say that I was right on the edge of buying an iPad and the Modern Family episode featuring it had a little bit to contribute to pushing me over. ABC being owned by Disney with Steve Jobs as a 7% shareholder probably had a something to do with that.

Cool Hunting and Gilt's apps are also really great; easy browsing of the articles and items to buy are formatted to take advantage of the screen and input style. Here, also, Gilt's application has crashed once or twice on me.

With the larger storage space (I got the 32gb model), I think what might be an issue soon is more organization for certain applications. It sure is nice to have space for a lot of music, but music doesn't need screen size as the successful iPod line can attest - videos and pictures do. And both videos and pictures need some level of organization and categorization. On iTunes, on the desktop, I can only select a single level of folders for photos, whereas on the iPad, it has a more sophisticated level of organization: all thumbnails, or view by date or view by location. This is clever and pleasing. With videos, it's just by all thumbnails and once people gear up and buy tv shows and movies via iTunes, some better level of organization will be needed.

Some Technical Thoughts

Using the various applications on the iPad makes me think of the early days of the World Wide Web when various different browsers were coming out and HTML implementations were fragmenting and CSS was implemented spottily. The big angst and handwringing was about having to design a website multiple times just to cover all the browsers that were out there. It's clear that there's a divide between web browsers made for desktop and laptop devices (15"+ lcds, but more likely 19"+) and handheld/phone devices (3.7" screens or so) - things that fit in your pocket. The iPad is a new class of device - can't fit it in your pocket, but you don't want it to be a traditional computer - at about 9.5". This is the size of the "netbook" which hasn't really caused any inspiration at all, except maybe in the NGO sector as cheap laptops for the developing world (see XO, etc.)

The varying interfaces are also of concern. Right now, there're very few (free) iPad formatted apps. That, of course, will change. When Flash rose to prominence (and even now) the

Another thought comes to mind with Windows 7 Phone Series - Microsoft's touting that you can write Silverlight (browser-based) or XNA (XBox 360) applications and have them run on WinMo7 devices. This hearkens back to the horrible fail of Sun's tagline for Java "write once, deploy anywhere." No one will want to run the same silverlight browser-based application (19"+ screen) or XBox game in the same format as a mobile device (3.7" screen). They're two different types of media.

USB charging is an issue - it just doesn't work on (some) computers. On all the ones I have, the iPad won't charge - I have to use a wall outlet. There are apple support articles on this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4060 and http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4049.

I took a peek at some of the crash logs and most of them appear to be Y! Entertainment out of memory ones and one Mobile Safari one.

Accessories

Seems like there're more accessories to shake a stick at yet, never the right ones. In particular, there needs to be an unobtrusive and heavy stand that can hold the 1.5 lb iPad in landscape and, most importantly, the angled, top heavy portrait mode. An ideal stand height would be about the height of the iPad's bezel, and black in color. I'm temporarily using the WD TV stand I have and it's too light (can't hold the iPad in portrait mode) and too high (about twice the height of the iPad bezel), but it's functional.

The Macally ViewStand looks quite clever, mimicing an iMac type appearance for a landscape view: http://www.macally.com/EN/Product/ArticleShow.asp?ArticleID=325

The M-Edge Trip Jacket appeals to the Molskine lover in me: http://www.medgestore.com/products/ipad-trip.psp

I'd also like to see more clamp-type accessories so I can have the iPad at various angles in various places.

I can haz drm free mp3z?

hussain — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:54:00 GMT

Apple dropped it's price on DRM-free MP3's to $0.99 (some DRM tracks are $0.89, see ArsTechnica, WSJ) via iTunes Plus, just like all their other tracks; and Amazon (from $0.89 and up) and WalMart ($0.94/ea) are starting to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads - what is this world coming to!

http://icanhaz.com/mp3z?

Never mind that Apple embeds your name in their DRM-free tracks - they're 256 kbps instead of the normal +DRM 128 kbps iTunes tracks. Amazon's are 256 vbr, fyi.

Correction, MobileSafari - and Crashes

hussain — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:10:00 GMT

Sweet. My iPod Touch crashed while browsing the csis site yesterday and I barely knew it - I thought it just dropped me back to the main app launcher screen because I mistapped or accidentally did some combination. But, no, it actually crashed.

How did I know? Next time I hooked kitterpod up to synch, iTunes asked (something like), "Hey, there, I see you've had a crash, would you like to report it to Apple?" I clicked "totally" before I could get a screenshot, but Apple keeps all the crashlogs on the local computer:

The crash file contains an Incident Identifier - seems obvious, to track the incident, a CrashReporter Key - which merits more digging, since it looks like a SHA-1 hash or maybe an actual encryption key? (lunixnerts) - bytes free, bytes wired, the app that's about to jettison and a ps list. Woot! OS X, for one, and the crashy app is called MobileSafari. Who knows where else MobileSafari might be deployed?

Incident Identifier: 2F067E21-C4EF-42FA-B970-D3CB90754080
CrashReporter Key:   [redacted]
OS Version:          OS X 1.1.1 (3A110a)
Date:                2007-10-10 21:59:34 -0600

1449984 bytes free
34918400 bytes wired
About to jettison: MobileSafari

Processes
 PID  RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE Command
   1   148K   220K   236K launchd
  13   344K   176K   536K CommCenter
  15  6.44M  13.5M  8.31M SpringBoard
  16   664K   208K   836K configd
  17   192K   176K   352K crashreporterd
  18  1.54M   272K  2.07M iapd
  19   296K   292K   524K mDNSResponder
  20   404K   356K   676K lockdownd
  21   188K   224K   272K syslogd
  22  84.0K   180K   112K update
  23   292K   264K   484K ptpd
  26   188K   208K   252K notifyd
 419   840K   784K  1.31M mediaserverd
 430  11.4M  13.0M  19.3M MobileSafari
 434   312K   320K   896K crashdump

**End**

Dropping one back to the main screen seems like a fairly decent way of handling a crash or a bug on this platform. Not knowing immediately that I'd crashed, I went back to Safari, sorry MobileSafari, and it restarted with the same pages I had in place - at the time, csis, a csis pdf, and JiveTalk beta for iPhone - all of which reloaded. And crashed. But eventually, kept going.

iPod Caturday

hussain — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 13:06:00 GMT

Safari on iPod Touch doesn't do SVG

hussain — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:31:00 GMT

Safari on the iPod Touch doesn't do SVG. What you're not seeing there is the polygon layer north west of Manaus, Amazonia, Brazil. I wonder how much memory (and processor stress) the svg code would've been.

Safari on iPod Touch doesn't do Arabic

hussain — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:33:00 GMT

The iPod Touch's Safari browser shows Arabic characters as blocks.

I guess they couldn't afford the extra memory for the additional fonts for Safari "lite."

A Unicode sample page highlights the other character sets left off of the "Safari-light" that's on the iPhone and Touch - Devangari (Hindi) and varietals (Tamil, Bengali, Gujrati), Arabic, Tibetan, Tagalog, Thai, and Hebrew, among others.

rebirth of the ipod - fat guy in a little suit

hussain — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:23:00 GMT

After determining that corporal punishment wasn't going to be a long term solution, I started sourcing hard drives for my ailing 20Gb 4G iPod. Quickly, I realized I could probably put an even larger hard drive than the original 20Gb (MK2006GAL) Toshiba 1.8 if I got a larger backplate. Uncertain whether it'd work, I looked briefly on the internet and couldn't get a decent affirmative response.

Oddly, I hadn't thought of eBay when looking for backplates or drives, until I started thinking about batteries. eBay (duh) has everything and more. So, I asked one of the 40Gb backplate sellers whether it'd work. "Winterpoem" was very helpful, but unfortunately his auction ended before I could buy it. $167 later and I had a 40Gb 4G backplate and a MK6006GAH, a 60Gb hard drive. The replacement was straightforward and now I have a 60Gb 4th Generation iPod. A new 5G 80Gb iPod's about $350, so I "saved" $187 and a 50 mile trip to the Apple Store. I consider that a good deal.

I'll probably end up buying a 1200mAh battery and an eVo2 iSkin that fits well (the 20Gb sized iSkin fits, but looks like a fat guy in a little suit, which is also fitting) which'll set me back another whopping $25.

I also forgot that they made 4G color iPods in the same size, so for another $100 (which'd've blown my budget) I could've gotten a color LCD (~$50) and a color motherboard (~$50).

As a last note, if you're selling (or reselling) your old 60Gb 4th gen iPod photo's HD on eBay, delete all the info from it, otherwise someone'll find your pictures and keep your music (which, in this case, wasn't worth it).

That didn't take long

hussain — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 19:49:00 GMT

My expected temporary fix for my iPod has shown its limitations: iPod won't sync as of this weekend and is exhibiting the One Infinite Click again.

Aggressively reseating* the hard drive worked, again, but I've got plans to order a HD (and battery, just for fun). Still doing a bit of research on whether it's worth trying to "go big" with a larger hd in the iPod.

Also, attempting to use CDs in the car is a strange thing to do.

Yaay, blogging.

* Oh, ps, there was one "technique" I left off of the One Infinite Click post - smacking the iPod. Yes, actually physically assaulting the thing is something that the internets recommends due to the Toshiba single-platter 20gb hds having a tendancy to get "stuck." A "stuck" hd is not a good thing, clearly, but resuscitating the thing so that cost/benefit replacement ratios can be debated isn't terrible. Thwaping it means it's going down anyhow, might as well get some pleasure out of it. And, yes, I did hit the crap out of the hd to make it work.

Solving my iPod's "One Infinite Click"

hussain — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 07:48:00 GMT

A few days ago, my 4th gen monochrome 20gb iPod refused to synch or be recognized by iTunes. It was making the oft mentioned and characteristic constant faint clicking sound typically called the "infinite click of death." I prefer to call it "One Infinite Click" after Apple's HQ address. After doing the Apple-recommended "5 R's" for what seemed like days (I did it in fits and spurts over two days, since it takes a long time for the iPod to be recognized as it's clicking and whirring), I eventually got it to half-resynch, but then fail, and back to the "One Infinite Click."

Macworld is on the 9th, so I figured I should wait to hear what the Steve's going to announce before making the drive all the way to Boulder or Denver to drool at those respective Apple Stores or buying something on line, just in case the prices drop. The next best thing would be getting my hands dirty and trying to figure out what causes this.

After a bit of Googling, there're three main solutions I found on-line for "One Infinite Click," in ascending invasiveness:

Reformat the iPod hard drive with Windows

AppleInsider

Reseat the HD cables

Mackgeekery's post

Replace the HD with a similar model Toshiba MK2006GAL 20gb drive

Josh Highland's blog post about replacing a 4th gen hd - very high del.icio.us and referred to elsewhere
CNet's article about replacing the hd

The iPod was already behaving badly, taking a long time for any of my computers to recognize it, so the first step to reformat the HD was to put it into disk mode. After a long time (over 10 minutes or so) Windows decided to recognize it and the iPod itself stopped clicking long enough to be recognized, I used the disk utility to reformat H:\ (quick, NTFS). Disconnected, reconnected and iTunes 7 fired up and wanted to restore the software on the iPod. Great so far. Disconnected and connected to an external power source, as requested, let it do its thing then reconnected to the machine. ITunes 7 wanted to restore again. Ok. One more cycle of that business and it's clear that reformatting isn't the solution. I've got to open the thing up.

Pricewatch's and Froogle's listings for the MK2006GAL are around $100, so I figure I'd better do step 2 before spending the money. Opening it up was easier than I thought: jeweler's screwdrivers and a bit of plastic stressing until I figured out which way to wedge and it popped open. The internals look like all the pictures on the net. I pushed the IDE HD connector on the HD. I think it felt a bit loose, but I don't know. Reseating complete.

I went through The Process: attached the iPod to the machine, let it restore, disconnected and attached to a power source, and back to the computer. I think I may have heard one click as iTunes started to copy over the 3000 mp3 items, but I can't really tell.

Lucky me, the whole library loaded and it seems to work great! No need to spend the $100 or so for a new hard drive (yet). I may, though, spend the $30 for a newer battery, as the one I have has been dying for a while.

The Steve announced the iPhone and iTV, but no change in prices to the 30 and 80gb iPods. I'm very happy with my 20gb 4th gen, especially now that it works!

iPod Downloads

hussain — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 16:27:00 GMT

Merriam-Webster's put up 10 free text downloads for the iPod

Declaration of Independence (1776)
Constitution of the United States (1787)
Bill of Rights (1791)
Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803)
Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
Gettysburg Address (1863)
Civil Rights Act (1964)
Social Security Act (1935)
Monroe Doctrine (1823)
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

this is how you know we've lost

hussain — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 20:37:00 GMT

This is how you know we've lost and they've won:

LONDON - British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said on Wednesday.

The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash’s 1979 anthem “London Calling,” which features the lyrics “Now war is declared -- and battle come down” while other lines warn of a “meltdown expected.”

Briton held as terror suspect over punk song, MSNBC 04/05/2006

Idiots.

work haiku

hussain — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:25:00 GMT

cackling ladies
whisper and whoop, orgasm
slip into ipod bliss

iPodNotes

hussain — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 16:28:00 GMT

Other places that have Notes content for the iPod:

iNatomy - anatomy resources for students in medical fields
web iPod bible sync - for all your bible needs (applescript), from the maker of PINT, a text-to-iPod tool (also applescript)
bibleplayer - another bible for the ipod (not free)
iPod Gourmet for recipes and iPodTender for drinks (neither are free)

iPodNotesShakespeare

hussain — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 07:18:00 GMT

With a little help from perl and the wonderful Project Gutenberg, I've made Shakespeare's Sonnets (88kb zip, ~630kb expanded) into iPod Notes format. Placing these on the iPod is straightforward. Copy the unzipped directory into your mounted iPod's "Notes" folder.

I'm excited to read these in my downtime and revisit old favorites. (29, 100, 106)

I'm thinking of doing a reminiscence tour of stuff I grew up on: lots of Latin (Ovid, Cicero, Virgil), Persian (Khayyam, Sa'di, Rumi), and maybe even Urdu poetry. Later, some more modern ones, if I can figure out the rights/licensing issues.