I’ve become a filthy ipod user after years of using my half broken Rio Karma and feeling audiophilically smug.
Mostly the experience thus far is good, though I may have driven the ipod insane already (see pic):
Monthly Archives: September 2008
If you want your pudding…
…you’ll have to eat your meat.
Or so it seems on emusic, where after many attempts at finding a solution to the problem of licensing the excellent DJ Kicks series of mix albums they have added a new download restriction – albums where you either download the whole thing or nothing. Reaction in the reviews on the albums has been mostly furious, especially as for one of them (Four Tet) they’ve only uploaded part of a mix. I’m not sure I get the anger myself, these are mixes after all, so they should be enjoyed in their totality. On the other hand it is always nice to test the waters on an album with a single track, and restrictions are always a bad idea unless absolutely necessary.
Obviously the problem behind this is licensing of compilations. I’ve only ever bought a couple of DJ Kicks albums myself, being the rather excellent ones by Annie and Erlend Øye (the singing DJ). I have now whacked the Kruder & Dorfmeister onto my save for later pile, which at a mere 295 albums possibly needs a bit of a prune. emusic may be about to suffer interesting times again now as various bigger players move into the non-drm digital music market, hell I’ve even bought a few things from itunes plus, though only because they took too long to appear on emusic. My two year sub with emusic runs out in a couple of months and I’m still pretty likely to renew, having to pay once every so often for access to a huge library of independent music is hard to beat.
me right now (ish)
Thanks to reading this
Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. ( Post that picture with no editing. )
(Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.
all over the internet here’s your meme you lucky people.
Now would be a good time to point out that in a moment of madness I made a page on here of photos of me over the years (which is actually a stalled blog post yet to be edited up) and also that when I remember I do tag myself on flickr.
And yes, that is a poor photo, in a fit of annoyance at my post on mp3 player sizes my N95 promptly died on Friday. Must get it to the repair shop tomorrow, for now I’m two generations back on my Sony Ericsson K700i.
This man can clearly challenge Salmond…
Iain Gray, has now become the leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament.
Marvel at this performance he put in to defend Wendy Alexander, their last leader on the vexed issue of Labour’s position on an Independence referendum, alas he declined the opportunity to speak in Portugese.
Four Years Gone
So it’s now four years of living in London (and a week).
I marked three years with a massive post, but this time I’ll just put up a few photos I’ve found on my old Sony k700i. I think I got it like a week before I left for London, and it was my first camera phone. Annoyingly I’ve just had to press it back into service because my N95 8GB has just had total screen failure and my N80 is still locked to Orange.
This was my last meal in Edinburgh, and there was a magnificent sunset, but I only had my crap camera. Still, brings back a lot of memories.
I took a lot of photos on the train down the following morning and the two above I’m still rather fond of.
And then I started being a commuter. These two remind me of endless evenings spent getting the tube home. Thankfully that didn’t last.
iSulk
Compare and contrast:
Marketing blurb for the 160gb ipod:
Decisions, decisions. Who needs ’em? Why should you have to choose what to put on your iPod? With up to 160GB of storage, iPod classic lets you carry everything in your collection — up to 40,000 songs or up to 200 hours of video — everywhere you go. In a completely new, even thinner, all-metal design, this iPod is a modern classic.
And now for the 120gb ipod:
(freshly announced and replacing both the 80gb and 160gb models)
With 120GB of storage, iPod classic can hold up to 30,000 songs, 150 hours of video, or 25,000 photos. That’s more than enough room for a day’s — or a lifetime’s — worth of entertainment.
Yes folks, I was quite looking forward to Apple’s announcement this week. See, I think now that my Rio Karma seems to be unable to play a song without skipping, keep the battery going for more than 4 or 5 hours and crashes every so often that it could be on the way out. Now, those of you who know me well know I’ve had a large mp3 collection for some time, indeed for so long as I’ve had one it’s always been larger than the biggest mp3 player on the market by a factor of about two:
(some figures estimated, I’m not that anal!)
Now, I’m sure I could get by with 120gb, but it looks to me like when looking at capacity it’s going to take a few more years for flash based players to get to where we are now with disk based players. I do approve of many of the strides that Apple are making in becoming a bit more environmentally friendly after a crap start. But it does drive me a bit mental that they still think that making a piece of technology as thin as possible is more important than making it long term sustainable by having user replaceable parts.
Even the iPhone makes replacing the battery on a mobile phone feel like commiting a minor crime against the Cult Of Jobs. I’d probably overlook the reduction to 120gb if I knew I could replace the battery easily. I mean, come on, surely ipods are so standard by now that having user replaceable parts available on the market could acutally make Apple more money _and_ help save the environment at the same time. Hands up, who’d carry two batteries? In the meantime, you might just find me carrying not one iPod, but two in the near future. Unless the Zune tempts me to continue being an accidental Microsoft nerd.
And yes, I could just go and get a 160GB model, but given the low reviews on amazon and talk of low reliability I’m willing to guess Apple have decided that particular model was too unreliable to stick by, fortunately Toshiba’s 240gb HD is meant to be somewhat lower in power usage and heat dissipation than it’s 160gb predecessor, so maybe it could be in a nice shiny new player before Christmas when the prospect of long train journeys will finally make me crack and buy something. For now, I’ll content myself with the 3000 songs I’ve stuffed into my N95, though AAC HE has some artefacts, there’s not so many that it annoys me when listening for short periods.