l-dopa

(thanks to www.6v6gt.com)

~jeff

If you don’t like the iTunes mini-store in iTunes 6.0.2, turn it off. Geez! I’m as much against DRM as anyone, but I really can’t stand the irrational fear-mongering that some douchebags seem to kick up on a daily basis. If a company wants to invent a way to transparently market to me more effectively — like Google is going with gMail, by the way — then hey, go for it. I like the fact that Amazon etc. is using thousands of dollars of high-priced equipment to suggest that if I like Thelonious Monk, I might like T.J. Kirk. In fact, I want those systems to get better. And finally: I have good taste in music. I bet you do too. Wouldn’t it be better if our voices were heard by marketing companies, rather than the tasteless dopes who enjoy the musical processed cheese product from the stars of American Idol?

Apple certainly should have announced the feature (and they certainly shouldn’t have it on by default), but if you turn off the mini-store, Apple does the right thing and transmits no data on the artists you like. Crisis averted. Sheesh.

~jeff

…any thoughts?

• iPod FM Radio Tuner: Griffin Technology has been making pretty much this exact same product for a while now. The only aspect of Apple’s design that even seems slightly innovative is the on-screen radio interface, which is certainly snazzy, but not novel. What would be novel is if Apple would open up the iPod to allow third-party developers to develop software modules (like the iPod stopwatch, the dinky games, etc.) for it. Griffin’s iTrip for the iPod Nano seems to use some kind of embedded tuner software module for sound out, so it’s certainly possible.
• iLife ‘06: iMovie and iDVD seem to have received negligible improvenings, the iPhoto update seems pretty good, and they’ve stopped pretending that including iTunes is a feature; but it really looks like they pissed all over GarageBand in order to shoehorn it into a podcasting tool. I couldn’t find a single new feature — or any enhancements to existing features — that would be of any interest whatsoever to musicians. Which is too bad, because I really, really like GarageBand, I think it’s one of the better products Apple has ever developed. It’s really quite nice at multi-track recording and getting out of the way while it does so.
• iWork ‘06: Nice try, but they need a spreadsheet. This is a point release at best, not an $80 upgrade.
• Photocasting/iWeb: Gawd, I wish they’d stop pimping .Mac, but with 1 million subscribers, that equals $100 million per/yr, which means: .Mac isn’t going away anytime soon. .Mac subscribers could already publish their photos with a screen saver, but “photocasting” them might be incrementally more elegant. Hopefully it works with NetNewsWire et. al. And: iWeb looks pretty decent, if somewhat redundant.
• Intel iMac: This is a lovely package, but I can’t help to think that if they had held off a couple months ago when they updated the iMac with the iSight camera and the FrontRow software, there would have been far more impact. But you always need “new” products for Christmas, I guess.
• Intel MacBook: Lovely, and of course, I want one, but I’m not sure I want a 1.0 design like this. Where’s S-Video? Where’s Firewire 800? Where’s dual-layer DVD burning? Those features are in the existing PowerBook line, and are conspicuously missing from the new MacBook. Yeah, to make up, it has a nifty IR remote, but I don’t need a remote for watching movies on a 15″ screen — I’m probably not going to be that far away. And don’t even get me started about the name. That’s the worst product name Apple’s come up with since vingle.

In a word: meh. This is the first MacWorld Keynote in a while that has left me somewhat cold. I can’t help think that most of these innovations are marketing innovations rather than technological innovations, and I usually give Apple more credit with their designs than that. But hey! the stock should continue to shoot through the roof, so let’s all buy more, as I am optimistic that there will be more and better goodies while 2006 unfolds.

~jeff

Every mac user has a pretty good time on the internet these days, except for one reoccurring problem: occasional Windows Media Files. Lord only knows why Microsoft has invented a format that they don’t plan to actually support, but their Windows Media Player software for the mac has always stunk and stunk bad.

Well, now thanks to a wonderful, magical company named Telestream, this problem is no more. They licensed the Windows Media Codec and, get this, they actually ported it to the Mac OS X platform! And what’s better, what used to be a 10$ product for playback is now free; they only charge you if you want to make .wmv files, and honestly, except for the criminally insane who would ever want to do that. Pick it up and banish Microsoft’s Windows Media Player from your desktop forever.

~jeff

Picking up a copy of Jason Forrest’s “Shamelessly Exciting” has been on my to-do list forever — I really enjoyed his last album, “The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash“. The new-ish video for his new single, “War Photographer“, is an instant classic, smoothly combining vikings, Zappa-style melodic bridges, and Voltron in an animation style reminiscent of the best works of Genndy Tartakovsky. Needless to say: you should check it out.

(Thanks to Jimmy Clough and everyone else who sent this in)

~jeff

TVgasm posts a wonderful series of screen grabs take from “Everyday Italian”. I can relate; this is essentially how I feel about:

• Spaghetti sauce with chunks.
• Mold-based cheeses.
• White sauces.
• Seafood.
• The gristly parts of red meat.
• Red meat.
• Onions.
• Garlic.
• Herbs.
• Bananas.
• Luncheon meats.
• Eggs.
• Mayonnaise.*
• Sour Cream.
• Cottage Cheese.
• Yogurt.
• Veggie Burgers.
• Tofu.
• Cheerios.
• Chili.
• Soup.
• Stew.
• Jelly.
• Beets.

UPDATE: Salsa.

~jeff

*Why don’t you just spit in my mouth.

My friend Lamonte just turned me on to “The Music Genome Project” i.e. Pandora. It’s a personalized radio station — which there are about 100,000 of on the internet — but listen, stay with me, this one is really quite good. You give it an artist to start with, it extrapolates your taste from there, and the results are eerily accurate. It even explains the reasons why it picked each song; and if you really love a particular song, it’ll point you right to the track from the iTunes Music Store. Give it a shot, it’s exceptionally well done.

The only drag is that all the music listening is browser based via a Flash plug-in, but! throw in an Airport Express* and Airfoil 2.0**, and whalla, your entire dwelling is filled with beautiful music.

~jeff

* It’s hard to discount how great the AirPort Express is. When plain-old 802.11b first came out, my friend Jon called it a “life-changing” technology, which I thought to be slightly overblown praise at the time but has panned out to be exactly correct; wireless networking really has changed how we interact with computers and information in general. Having wireless music streaming to my stereo hasn’t exactly changed my life, but it has significantly enhanced it, allowing me to conveniently listen to music at times when I certainly wouldn’t have been doing so without it. If you like music even a little tiny bit, I can’t suggest strongly enough that you treat yourself to one (it even works via the PC version of iTunes!) but I would also strongly suggest waiting to buy anything of this sort until after this Tuesday.

**…which is simply awesome software; it’s one of those shareware apps that you try for the first time and register right away. Why doesn’t Apple provide this kind of functionality in the OS? Airfoil allows you to stream music from any app on your Mac to your AirPort Express, and what’s even better, if you have more than one AirPort Express, you can stream to them all all at once in sync. Rich people pay upwards of multiple thousands of dollars, no kidding, to wire their rich-people-mansions to provide this kind of functionality, and with this software plus a couple of cheap AirPort Express boxes, you could have it for a couple hundred bucks.

Google Pack; a good idea which right now consists of a half-baked selection of Windows software. Instead of Norton AntiVirus, why not ClamAV? Intead of RealPlayer, why not VLC? And where’d Open Office 2 go? And what about including a GMail-optimized version of Thunderbird? These are open-source projects that could really benefit from the publicity Google could provide.

And why not throw in Adobe Flash 8* plug-in too? FLA is the video format that Google Video is based on, it would be nice to be able to pre-suppose the nice new codecs in version 8.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of bundling together best-of-breed third-party software to pretty much knock the legs right out from under Microsoft — it’s far easier to tell your mom to download “google pack” than to download seven or eight various apps** — and the auto-update feature is very cool — but I wish this set of apps didn’t have the vague scent of “marketing synergy” about it.

~jeff

* geez, that feels weird to say.
** …but then again, my mom has a mac; and every time she sends me an email with a jpeg picture of the family dog nicely resized to 640×480 and correctly attached, I whisper a quiet prayer of thanks to the developers of iPhoto.

Oh, this is so great.

(thanks to onegoodmove.org!)

~jeff

Most people understand that there is, already in place, digital right management (DRM) systems that can key specific media files to your hardware. Both iTunes Music Store files and Windows Media files are encoded in such a way that files encoded with DRM will play only on a couple of your devices. In any case, the technology certainly exists today to create a downloaded file that only plays on your computer.

As Digital Rights Management becomes more commonplace and more ubiquitously embedded into the devices we own, what if our media devices begin to requre DRM signed files, and as such what if these DRM’d files gift the media companies with the ability to charge you — specifically you — an individually specific price for the ability to view/listen to/experience a media file on your hardware? Consider this nightmarish scenario:

Imagine if in a couple years, you got profiled by iTunes 9.0 as a “sci-fi fan”. As a result, maybe the cost for you to download and view a personalized, DRM’d copy of “Space Epic 4021″ goes up a dollar. They know you’ll pay! They have the records to prove it.

And conversely, a user who is not profiled as a sci-fi fan — maybe they’ve proven to like watching dramas and romantic comedies — maybe they get a deal on “Space Epic 4021″ because it’s not normally the kind of movie they like, however, getting a dollar off on it might actually entice that user to buy it.

Of course, I suspect what really happens in this scenario is that the price goes up for everyone and they give “discounts” to targeted customers. Being targeted for a “discount” is not as creepy as being targeted for a “price hike”.

This is not just hypothetically plausible; this is completely and 100% technologically possible today. And I will predict this: a sliding-payment scale is the logical end-point of DRM-encumbered media files. This is just yet another reason why open formats are so important, and yet another reason why the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 is garbage*.

~jeff

* and here’s where to contact your representative to tell them.

~jeff

New iPod users invariably ask me one question: How do I get the music off my iPod? And normally I reply, get “Podworks” from Sci-Fi software.

But from now on, I think I’ll be recommending “iPodDisk” instead. Just launch this app when your iPod is connected, and a new volume pops up on your mac desktop containing all your music, conveniently sorted by metadata tags; even Smart Playlists show up as copyable folders. And: it works with Spotlight and Windows formatted iPods. Nifty, clever, and free.

~jeff

Joomla is a really nifty CMS (Content Management System), it’s used for everything from small personal websites to large corporate installations. Setting it up on Mac OS X requires a little work, but luckily, not too much work, or we wouldn’t be discussing it at all. Here’s a half-half-assed (quarter-assed?) guide to getting Joomla up and running on your mac:

1. Install MySQL. This sounds like a pain in the butt, but the Mac OS X package installer is really not that bad and installs everything nicely into /usr/local/bin/ like it should. I don’t think you have to actually do everything this dude suggests, but his suggestions are in fact the right way to do it. Make sure to assign a root password, either by using the Terminal or the PreferencePane.
2. Install YourSQL into your /Applications folder. Use YourSQL to make a database by entering host (localhost) user (root) and password (whatever you set it to) to connect, then click on the column that says “localhost”, then click on “Create Database”. Name your database “joomla”.
3. Enable PHP on your mac.

4. Download Joomla (currently at version 1.0.5), double-click to decompress the .gz archive, and rename the resultant messy joomla_1.0.x-blablalba folder to just plain “joomla”, then move it to the “Documents” folder in the “WebServer” folder in the “Library” folder on your hard drive.
5. Navigate via a web browser to http://localhost/joomla/
6. A lovely config page will come up and tell you what is right and what is wrong in the joomla installation. You’ll have to chmod a bunch of the files. Open the terminal, type chmod 777, hit space, then drop (one by one) the incorrectly set folders in the joomla directory, hitting return after each one.
   NOTE: I’m sure chmod 777 is too permissive, but who cares. It can be fixed later.

7. Reload http://localhost/joomla/ to check to make sure all the permissions are correct. When they all are, proceed through the rest of the install; you’ll be asked for the MySQL user, password, and database name (localhost, root, and whatever you set it to).
   NOTE: Using the mysql root user is probably bad, but again, who cares. This, also, can be fixed later.

8. At the last stage of installation, it’ll give you a box filled with words. Lots and lots of words. Copy all those words, put them in a text file, name the text file “configuration.php”, and save that text file inside the joomla folder.
9. Delete the “Installation” directory in your Joomla folder.
10. Go to http://localhost//joomla/ . Now you have Joomla! Lots and lots of Joomla.So much Joomla. Administer joomla here:
    http://localhost/joomla/administrator/ .

~jeff

Mail.app has a bad habit of going offline at the drop of a hat. Where Entourage seems to perform online actions even when in offline mode, Mail gives up the ghost with a moment’s notice.

This script fixes that very problem in a very elegant way, overriding Mail’s offline status and forcing mail checking for you, without annoying error messages.

I have a lot of crappy CDs. Millennium Music in South Carolina has an intriguing offer; they offer to trade you an iPod for a bunch of crappy CDs. I’ve contacted them to see if the 60 GB iPod they offer is the previous generation or the current generation; if it’s the current “video” 60 GB iPod, I might actually consider taking them up on this. Sure, at that rate, they’re only offering $2.28 per CD, but as I mentioned before: I have a lot of crappy CDs.

Update: Turn It Up in Northampton will give $4 per CD; I think I’m gonna try them, as I suspect they’d be more receptive to my obscure atonal jazz CDs anyhow.

~jeff