A while with an iPod (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Having an iPod is nice, but I am sort of glad I didn't pay $250 or whatever for my 8gb "3rd Generation" Nano. I have two major beefs with this player, and most likely all iPods.

The first complaint is the click wheel is really not that great an operating device. It took me a while to figure out the various ways this worked. There's a "Menu," back and forth arrow, a circular motion, a center button, and "play/pause." The circular motion does different things depending on what menu you have. In play mode, it's the volume. In menu mode, it cycles through the menu. Sure, fine, I can get used to that. Except for the worst part about this navigation tool: it is far too sensitive and had no tactile feedback. So my thumb or finger slides around a featureless smooth plane, which means I have to look at it or "guess" the distance based on how far my thumb and finger are from the edge. My thick thumbs have a tough time staying within the printed lines like a toddler with a jumbo crayon, and often I can't select what I want without staying perfectly still. It's like operating an old ball mouse over a table with crumbs on it.

Not only that, but having the player in my pocket or any enclosed space changes things at random. Yes, I even bought a protective case for it. Yes, I can lock the wheel to not move at all, but the lock is a thin, hard-to-grip button at the lower edge (especially with the protective case over it), so have to remove it from the case to slide it back and forth. Plus it locks everything down, so if I use it, I am unable to change the volume or anything, which means to suddenly hear what announcement is being made over the Metro or if someone starts speaking to me, I have to quickly yank out my ear plugs. Then there's my music which doesn't have a steady volume for each song, plus I'll need to change the volume from "drown out the city traffic" to "be polite and not irritate people near me with tinny techno beats on a quiet metro ride." I have had enough times where I had needed to hit a "mute" of sorts that I never lock down the volume/pause, and so I have to be careful I do not bump the face of the iPod. When walking, this means in my pocket will often raise or lower the volume, and click back and forth between songs randomly. I think the best solution would be to get a set of headphones with a mute built into the cord.

The second gripe is iTunes. I hate iTunes. It has made my Windows boot time nearly 3 minutes from the 55 seconds it used to be. Can I drag and drop music? Oh no... I have to let iTunes load it, and then it wants to scan everything else, and thanks to my iTunes, I now know I have 9800 songs on my shared drive, which it wants to reload any time I add music. Not to mention it wrestles to be the default media player, and then doesn't play the music I click on right away. Sometimes I have to double click a song several times to get it to go, "Oh, you want to play something! Sorry, how about renaming it instead?" It always seems to be "working in the background" in some way. I see it taking up to 150mb of RAM at times, take up 10-30% of CPU when loaded, and ... oh, won't let me play or load ogg files (I found a hack to let iTunes play it, but my iPod refuses to acknowledge it). Plus iTunes only uses Windows. I am going to give Banshee a try on Ubuntu, though.

An annoyance I have for all MP3 players I have ever had: Time left and skip ahead for podcasts. I want to know how much time I have to go before the end, in case I want to speed things up before I hop off a stop, or find a good place to pause. To find where I am, I have to fast forward or reverse to get that bar. Plus, I can only fast forward or reverse about 10 seconds per second, so if the iPod resets my placeholder to the beginning for various reasons, I have to remember where I was, and hope I wasn't in the last 20 minutes of a 2-hour podcast, because there's no "rewind from end" feature, only fast forward from the beginning. So if I got reset at 1:00 in a 1:20 podcast, it will take me nearly a minute to get one hour forward into the podcast.

I am not sure the iPhone will be much better (as a music player). It does not have a click wheel, but it's an all-screen interface. The headphones do have a mute feature, though, to answer calls. That will be REAL handy. My biggest fear with an iPhone? How to carry it around while using it. It's a bit big for a belt clip, and I am afraid as much as I run into things that I'll break the iPhone in a matter of weeks with it attached to my hip. Posted in: apple , ipod , mp3 , music

BitStories 2008-06-13: Josh and Brian Ride Again! iPhone 3G, Netbooks, and More (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

Hey, remember TinyPodcast? No? Well, Brian Jarvis and I (Josh Bancroft), two guys who happen to work at Intel, started doing a weekly podcast way back in 2004. Basically, the two of us geeked out about the latest mobile devices, cool software, and technology news and rumors, and recorded it. It was moderately popular, and some people actually complained when it tapered off…

Well, we’re back! And we’re under the Bit Stories banner now. I work for Intel Software Network, and I’ve had the idea and intention for a while now of doing a show there like Brian and I used to do. Now we’re actually doing it.

If you haven’t listened before, this isn’t some professionally produced, slick, marketing message controlled by our corporate overlords. We’re just a couple of geeks who love gadgets, phones, computers, the web, and software, talking about whatever’s new and cool. We try to make the audio sound good, but it’s always going to be a little rough around the edges, and we’re OK with that. Sound like something you’d be interested in? Come have a listen.

Click to play

In this show, we talk about the following, in no particular order:

• The iPhone 3G announcement - its features, whether Brian is finally going to cave in and get one, how AT&T is raising prices on the plans just because they can, how we can’t wait to see what comes out of the App Store, and everything else we can think of. We’re a little obsessed.
• Netbooks vs. regular laptops vs. Tablet PCs (with the tangent typing vs handwriting discussion).
• Where we want to take the show - we don’t have grand plans - we pretty much have always played this by ear, but we’d love to hear any ideas or suggestions (or complaints!) you have, so we can keep it interesting.
• And a whole lot more I can’t remember right now!

The show is about 38 minutes long (we try to stick to the magic 40 minute length), and weighs about 35MB (it’s a 128kbps MP3). You can download the file directly, listen using the streaming player in this post, or (BEST OPTION!!1!) subscribe to the Bit Stories podcast feed in your favorite podcast aggregator (like iTunes). If you subscribe to the feed, you’ll get each show delivered automatically as it becomes available - probably once a week or so, with the occasional bonus video or audio segment thrown in for fun. Plus, we’ll love you forever if you subscribe.

Are you thrilled that the show is back? Mad that we changed something? Think we suck for being gone so long? Just want to say hi? Post a comment, and let us know! Seriously. We crave the validation that your feedback brings. You have no idea how fragile our self esteem really is…

Posted in: audio , bit stories , bitstories , brianjarvis , intel , iphone , mp3 , netbooks , podcast , software , tinypodcast

iPod review (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Yeah, like most of my readers have had an iPod for a while now. I couldn't afford one, which seems wrong considering what I make, and I am working on that problem. So, apart from a few moments at an Apple store, I have never actually played with one apart from the Shuffle I got back about a year and a half ago.

So now I am trying to get used to the "click wheel." It's not designed for fat thumbs like mine, and since I have that dyspraxia, it's hard for me to get my eyes to look at the screen while my thumb moves about. But if I figured a mouse out, I'll manage this eventually. But the problem is that it's so damn small.

I'd like to be all, "OoooOOooh, iPod is popular, and I am so counter-culture that I will claim something outrageous about the decline of modern morality by Steve Jobs," I used to be like that, annoyingly enough. But I have to admit, this is pretty cool. Maybe not $249 cool, but pretty nifty. What a crisp, bright screen for something so small. It reminds me of one of those gadgets I imagined as a child as being futuristic to the point I want to go back and time and show my 8-year-old self how impressive this is.

"Ha HA! You are stuck in 1977, where a 'portable TV' is the size of two car batteries and nearly as heavy! And you only get black and white at that! Mwah ha ha!"

I have issues with the 1970s.

I still hate iTunes. I had to boot back into windows to activate/register my iPod, which took like 35 minutes because one of the things I have noticed about Windows is that if you don't start it in a while, you have to download a lot of updates which you don't really have a choice at. Windows updates, Java, Firefox, new anti-virus signatures, and even Pidgin and Quicktime/iTunes wanted to be updated. Then the iPod already had a firmware update, which then crashed iTunes and wiped out all my playlists (it's okay, I didn't really use that feature, but I had to re-import some 5800 songs just to copy them to the iPod). I swear, I only left Windows off for a few weeks! Yay Ubuntu!

I also realized, I need an iPod case. Possibly better headphones than these stock ones. Posted in: ipod , mp3 , music

Oh, right, this is why I hated iTunes... (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Well, takayla willingly gave me back the shuffle, and I have been fooling with it all morning. I know, I'll go blind if I keep doing that, right? I got this shuffle as a gift from an Ars gift exchange about a year and a half ago, and then I got the iAudio, so I didn't use it. I recall this was my first encounter with iTunes, and how much I hated it. This is my beef:

- It is currently taking up 73% of my CPU, and that's after I added my music.
- I can't just add stuff to my iPod, no, I have to have iTune "discover it," or import a folder
- That "import" stuff, and thank God I remembered this from last time, slows down the iTunes to a crawl. Last time, it froze the computer, so this time I am importing only a few songs at a time.
- The iPod doesn't like ogg files. Come on, it's an Open Source standard, Apple, jesus. I got iTunes to accept ogg with a plugin, but the iPod won't take it because even the most current firmware won't recognize it. So much for half my music.
- I have to bind it to this computer, and that's not so much an iTune issue (it could me, I didn't check very thoroughly), it's the fact the shuffle takes a proprietary charger/transfer device.
- Linux can read, but not sync. I think it's a PEBCAK, so I had to boot back into Windows for the first time in a week
- Because iPod wants to catalog things ITS way, my current folder structure is pretty meaningless
- Adding songs you just burned from disk or moved around folders requires a manual rescan

Oy. Of course, I may have to get used to this, not just because of the Shuffle, but if the rumors are true about the new iPhone coming in late June, the $200 new iPhone with the 2-year contract, GPS, and so on... it could replace both my MP3 player and phone, which I could budget for since I planned on getting a new phone anyway. Posted in: mp3 , player

Lousy f***ing luck... (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

So, a few days ago, my MP3 player disappears. This is cause for concern because I really need it to stay sane on the Metro. I had it Tuesday, and then I couldn't find it Thursday. I always put it back in my backpack in a special pocket, which is where I last saw it. The headphone wire extension was still there; I have an extension because headphone wires are often too short for my long torso, so unless I want to hold my Walkman/MP3 player with a crooked arm, I need an extension so the player can go in my pocket. But the MP3 player and actual headphones were gone. I know I didn't get it stolen, because I came home with it Tuesday, put it in my backpack, and noticed I still had my camera, which I took out and upgraded the firmware on; it has all these new options which may help it stop being a crappy camera, but that's another post.

I looked everywhere for it. Figured I'd give it a good look over the weekend. Losing my MP3 player is like losing my wallet; I *always* know where it is, so when I *don't* know where it is, that's really abnormal.

So last night, I decide to get ahead on my laundry work. I wash my stack of underwear, socks, and a Katuscon shirt I am wearing for a meeting today. As I start the dryer, I hear thumping. That's odd, I think. Why would socks, underwear, and one polo shirt thump? Sadly, my brain just went, "Well, maybe it's the zipper on the Katsucon staff polo shirt," and immediately forget about it.

No foreshadowing needed here, huh? I imagine you know what comes next. I don't even want to say it.

I have no idea HOW my MP3 player ended up in the dryer. Needless to say, it no longer works. I found the headphones twisted around a sock like vines on a fencepost. The player won't even turn on, and it was probably cooked since it was so hot, it was initially hard to hold in my hand.

It wasn't an iPod. It was a Cowon iAudio U4, a gift from takayla over a year ago and I *loved* that thing, because it could play OGG files, of which I have many. It had an easy-to-understand interface, and I didn't need no F***ing "iTunes" to put music on it; it was just like a hard drive. I hate iTunes. Hate hate hate because not only do they not have a Linux client (yes, I am aware there's a hack; I tried it on my Shuffle), their Windows client is a downright memory hog, a bitch to remove, saves stuff in some proprietary format that is hard to back up, slows down my boot time almost as bad as an AOL client, and generally a bloaty, piss-poor design.

Yes, I could but another one, but you know what? I am not exactly rolling in the dough here. I guess I'll have to find my older one with only stores 256k, or go back to the Shuffle, which I loaned/gave to takayla for the gym, so I don't know if I can get it back without being an ... well, I wish there was a better, non-racist replacement for this word. Posted in: laundry , mp3 , music