Author: admin

I was surprised that my new 20GB 4G iPod didn’t come with a docking cradle. Come to think about it, almost no electronics come with docks anymore. That’s why we have multiple $300+ gizmos tethered to our computers or power outlets with nests of cables, twisting in the breeze. It just ain’t right.

Anyhoo, here’s some neat iPod tips, tricks and hacks I’ve found:

* Winamp5 ml_iPod plugin So you don’t have to use iTunes.
* GoogleGet Downloads news and weather headlines to your iPod’s Notes section with the click of a button.
* iPodAgent Sync your Outlook calendar, email and contacts without having to manually export everything and drag them into the iPod drive (What’s with that, Apple??). You can even use it to run regular backups on your PC’s files.
* MusicBrainz This software, together with the massive online song database, will automatically tag all your MP3s with the proper artists and albums, just by listening to them. Its accuracy is about 50%, but that’s still 50% less songs to manually tag.
* Hackaday’s list of iPod hacks, both of the software kind and hardware kind. Void your warranty today!

To me, Bram Cohen – the creator of the P2P technology BitTorrent – is inarguably a uniquely precise individual, the kind of character you would find among the profound hyperlexics in a Douglas Coupland novel. His hobbies include “recreational mathematics”, juggling, and solving strategy games and twisty puzzles. If you read his blogs at Advogato and LiveJournal, you’ll see him espousing pragmatic mathematical advice on everything from electoral votes to military-strength cryptography. This is a guy who wrote an entire algorithm, in pseudo-code, on wagering in Final Jeopardy.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that BitTorrent is not only open source and free to download, but terribly clever. He told Neowin that he gets an interview a day. So it’s a sad thing then that all everyone ever wants to ask him about is his thoughts on piracy, and the fact his program is the preferred pilferer of the people.

He usually gives a non-commital response, citing technology agnosticism. He believes the traditional CD and DVD model of the moviemaking fat cats is quickly becoming extinct, but that is a pragmatic assessment easily proven by mathematical trends. People say he’s playing it safe, but I think that’s really what he thinks. Piracy is a socioeconomic topic that doesn’t involve math or logic. And anything that doesn’t involve logic, isn’t worth considering.

You just have to read his entry on hiring employees to understand how his mind works. “Interviews are practically worthless for screening candidates,” he sniffs. His strategy? Pick the candidate with the shortest commute time. Can you get any more pragmatic?

One of my pet peeves in people/technology/processes are a lack of precision.

I just got Silverlotus an 1GB iPod Shuffle for Valentine’s – one of the first to grace Canadian shores (The box even came with a free song promo for the American iTunes Store).

One thing I was struck by was Apple’s obsessive detail into the end-to-end user experience. The Shuffle is small, simply designed and solidly built. The earphones are confortable to wear. The iTunes media library software makes buying, sorting, playing and transferring music a breeze. Especially the buying; with three clicks you can buy a song and have it ready to play on your iPod.

Critics charge that the Shuffle is a lame duck, since it has no built-in LCD screen or FM radio or salad tosser. They just don’t understand that making a good product doesn’t mean fulfilling a giant feature checklist; first and foremost it has to be intuitive, reliable, and attractive.

That’s Apple’s great secret to success. It’s not exactly rocket science! iPods control 80% of the hard-drive-based digital music player market because all its competitors use clunky interfaces, buggy firmware, nonexistent technical support, terrible media library software, and are encased in a cheap looking faux chrome enclosure that only a blind engineer could love.

Only Creative has come close to understanding this with the Zen Micro.

UPDATE: Apparently David Gilbraith agrees: “Apple is a great vindication of ballsyness rather than MBAness. Jobs is our generation’s Frank Lloyd Wright.”

People say that Apple is just a big reality distortion field generator, but if the shoe fits, wear it. Case in point: the story of the Graphing Calculator. It was part of a cancelled project that an Apple contractor decided to finish by sneaking into the building and worked with no pay for six months. It shipped on twenty million PowerMacintoshes.

P.S. One thing I didn’t get Silverlotus: a romantic dinner at White Castle.

“You have to remember that EA is a marketing driven company,” writes an anonymous poster on DSLR who claims to have worked for Electronic Arts. “The marketing department has almost complete control over the process and finished product.”

This is quite evident in the new Need for Speed: Underground 2, EA’s latest, er, advertising vehicle. Racers drive past billboards hawking Campbell’s soup and Old Spice, and realistic facsimiles of Burger King and Best Buy franchises. A Cingular Wireless icon surgically welded to the GUI acts as the communications controls. The exquisitely detailed real-life Hondas, Toyotas and other real cars can collide head-on with brick walls and escape with nary a blemish – a kowtow to the automakers, who forbid their gas-powered creations to be shown as unsafe or imperfect in any way.

This is also the first time a major song artist will premiere a song in a videogame. That’s right, NFSU2’s menu screen will be the first worldwide debut of Snoop Dogg’s remix of The Door’s “Riders in the Storm”. Other top billing artists also feature, including Mudvayne and Chingy.

Underground 2 is not the first EA game to have advertising or EA Trax, but neither has a videogame comes this close to blurring the lines between entertainment and commercial. It is a grand experiment in making EA a mainstream media powerhouse that is as profit driven as possible.

However, you can hardly blame EA for putting advertising, sponsoring and licensing in the front seat; the Wall Street Journal states game developers now spend $10 million or more in building and marketing a triple-A title, and that money has to come from somewhere.

As games enter the mainstream, advertising seems inevitable. (Even live-from-the-Internet ads are being considered.) The trick is to design ads that do not break the immersive environment of the game.

As for the grand experiment, most gamers seem to be taking the Burger King-ified game in stride. But perhaps the Cingular icon was one step too far; as someone further in the thread raged, “It’s not like the billboards where at least you can say “well i’m in a city, there’s billboards. there’s a burger king”. but this damn logo on my windshield?”

In the D drive: Need for Speed: Underground 2 and Silent Hill 4: The Room Trial Version

Complaining your DSL will only sync at 2.4 Mbps when next door gets 2.6Mbps? Put things in perspective, you could have lived in Mink, Louisiana. The small community just got telephone service.

BellSouth Corp. spent $700,000 – or about $47,000 per phone – to extend about 30 miles of cable through thick forests to Mink, about 100 miles south of Shreveport. Phone customers around the state will cover the cost by paying a small monthly charge on their bills.

Entering the 20th century called for a party:

The community celebrated with a fish fry Monday – gathering at a church and dishing out catfish, okra, hushpuppies and slaw to about 100 residents, friends, public officials and others.

Well, this is Louisiana. And it wasn’t all fun and games:

“It wasn’t 15 minutes after that phone was in before a telemarketer called me,” [Mink resident] Edwards said.