Geekularity

There may be a day in the not-too-distant future where a you need only hum a few bars before your bio-media-comm implant automatically checks all the online music stores, buys, downloads, and plays the song directly into your cerebral-cortextual-whoozawhatzit. Until then, there will be at least a few moving parts between you and your music enjoyment. Apple has made tremendous strides to reduce the number of moving parts by creating the closed system of iTunes and iPod. Outside of that system however, the amount of work required to get music into your ears increases exponentially.

Efforts to integrate other music services into the iPod music experience have come and gone, all with mediocre success. The process of transferring music from the outside into iTunes has either been too difficult to attract users or has been blocked, either legally or technologically, by Apple.

Amazon introduced their MP3 music download service this week, and so far it appears to have legs! The downloader used by this service is available on PC and Mac platforms, it integrates with iTunes and Windows Media Player, and best of all, the music is high fidelity and DRM free! The installation was a snap, and the music sounds great! Coupled with Amazon’s One-Click shopping experience, this service is poised to take a bite out of Apple’s music sales!

The Amazon MP3 service is still in beta, so there may be some additional features and UI enhancements in the coming months, but as of right now, it looks pretty good. Apple has a challenge that it will need to answer to. Possible responses from Apple may include:

• Ramping up their DRM-free music offerings assuming they can make nice with enough music labels. Perhaps they’ll even drop some prices on songs. Yay!! Competition breeds choice.
• Some technology kung fu or legal action which limits Amazon’s ability to load the songs directly into iTunes. Boo!! Apple talks the talk when it comes to openess, but can’t walk the walk as their feet are in cement shoes being poured by the ??? (RIAA?).

Fortunately, Amazon can play in the tall grass with the other big dogs, so I think we finally have another formidable player in the online music market! Game On!

For those who bought the iPhone at its original price of $600.00, Apple has released the details on how to claim your $100.00 credit. There are two tips I’d like to pass along so that you don’t pull your hair out while you sit on the phone for 20 minutes waiting for an Apple support agent to pick up the phone:

1. Do not actually try to redeem your store credit using the web browser on your iPhone. At the end of the process will be a page with bar codes and serial numbers, which you will need to print if you intend to visit a physical Apple Store. If you started the process on your iPhone like me, don’t worry, you can start over again using your computer.
2. If you are looking to put your $100 store credit towards an iTunes gift card, and you are looking to get some instant gratification, don’t redeem your store credit on the online store. The “Gift Certificate by Email” option, upon checkout, does not allow you to apply a store credit. That area of the payment page is greyed out and unavailable. You CAN order physical iTunes gift card(s) and then apply your store credit, but then you will need to wait for snail mail to deliver your cards. If you are in a hurry to turn your credit into iTunes songs, then a visit to your local Apple Store will be in order.

I have joined in with a chorus of geeks who wish they could use and recharge their MacBooks while they were in the car or boat. But Apple only makes a DC adapter that is compatible with airplane power ports and not with 12V car (cigarette lighter) ports. Since the MagSafe connector is patented, and they have yet to license it to third parties, there just aren’t any commercial solutions to-date. Sure you could use a power inverter to plug your normal power brick in to your car, but the conversion from DC to AC and then back to DC is extremely inefficient, and I’ve found most devices to be rather noisy and hot. I was looking for a DC-DC conversion solution, and I figured I would have to take matters into my own hands.

I am a decent maker/hacker and I love playing with electricity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve electrocuted myself in this lifetime… all in the name of science and discovery of course. Nevertheless, I am out of practice, and when I looked at the four or five pins at the end of of the MagSafe adapter, I assumed that there was some complexity to the voltage and polarity, and I had neither the time, nor the drive to figure it out. Plus, my MacBook Pro is now my primary business asset. If I mess it up by shorting it out somehow, this experiment gets very expensive very quickly. So, I put this project on the bottom of my to-do list as I waited for something better to come along.

About a week ago, I came across this link (via RubyHead) to Mike (MikeGyver) Lee’s website where he sells both turn-key solutions as well as instructions to build your own DC-DC power adapter for the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The great thing is that I already owned one of the third party power adapters that he recommends, so all I needed was about $7.00 worth of radio shack parts. Awesome! So, I bought the do-it-yourself instructions from Mike Lee, and gave it a go last night. So far it works great!

It turns out that the polarity and the pinouts on the MagSafe Adapter are really no big deal. I won’t give away the details in this post. So if you are interested in doing it yourself, or even buying a turn-key solution, please check out Mike Lee’s information. I advise you to visit this site sooner rather than later as Apple has away of making cool and helpful things like this disappear through cease and desist orders. Anyway, I now have a road-trip worthy MacBook Pro.

[UPDATE: 2007-06-25 10:30 AM PST]

Yes, this configuration does charge the MacBook’s battery, unlike the Apple Airline adapter which just powers the laptop. It’s hard to see, but the indicator light on the MagSafe plug in the picture above is indeed orange.

As part of the “One Last Thing” portion of his keynote this morning, Steve Jobs announced that developers wishing to create applications for the iPhone are relegated to creating Web 2.0 style web applications for use inside of the iPhone’s implementation of Safari. While Safari is supposed to be fully functional on the iPhone, including Javascript, which will allow for AJAX driven user interaction, the only access to the internal workings of the iPhone will marshalled through URLs and possibly Microformats.This begs two questions:

1. Will developers be able to take advantage of any offline persistence frameworks inside of the iPhone like Google Gears?
2. Can AT&T’s EDGE network handle the extra bandwidth burden that AJAX user interaction often adds?

First and foremost, I suggest making a backup of your iTunes library before you upgrade to the newest version. You already have a backup routine that has done a complete system backup in the last week anyway… right!

That being said, you may experience some difficulties syncing your iPod with music that you ripped from a CD after you have upgraded to iTunes 7.2. Especially if one or more songs match music that you had also bought from the iTunes Store. The error message I received was as follows:

“While syncing to <iPod device name>, the file <song name> was not copied because the file type is not supported by the iPod”

After several hours of fiddling with the MP3 file’s ID3 Tags and trying to rebuild the iTunes Library, I finally found the following fixit solution.

1. For each song that shows up in the error dialog box, find it in your iTunes library and copy it to a new location (I used my desktop).
2. Once the file has been copied to a new location, delete the file which is in your iTunes library by clicking on it from within iTunes and pressing the delete key. If you are prompted to keep the file or move it to the trash, choose to move it to the trash.
3. Re-import that song back into you iTunes library by clicking and dragging the copy of the file back into the iTunes window.
4. Sync your iPod again to confirm that 1) the file does not show up in the error list and 2) you can see and play the song on your iPod
5. You may need to iterate through this process several times as the sync error log seems to only show 100 songs at a time. If you have more than 100 songs that won’t sync, you may not know it until your next sync.

I hope this little incompatibility or file corruption just applies to me. However, I suspect that the iTunes 7.2 upgrade might cause problems for more people in the coming days. Please leave your thoughts, complaints and suggestions in the comment section of this post. I’d like to know if this is a small problem or if it’s more wide-spread.

[UPDATE 2007-05-31 1:32 PM]

There’s a new discussion and several other solutions available in the Apple support forums:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4645674

[UPDATE 2007-06-01 9:42 AM]

Playlist Magazine has an article, in which they call this problem a bug. However, I’m still inclined to think that this was intentional behavior from Apple to test the waters on how many people had indeed burned their iTunes Store music out to CD and then reimported it.

http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2007/06/itunes72gotcharedux/index.php

Steve Job’s displayed Apple’s new media center(ish) product today called iTV, which seems like a pretty cool product! I can leave the noisy PC, with a 1TB storage array in my office, while this sleek little box sits below my yet to be acquired 50″ flat panel display and streams my content. There’s just one thing missing before I buy, a TV tuner & PVR solution that integrates seamlessly into Apple’s Front Row application. I didn’t hear a mention of such a feature yet, so my wallet remains safely in the pocket (Don’t worry honey, I promise to check with you before I buy).

Here’s what I am using until Apple comes through. I originally setup MythTV on an old Linux box. This worked great until I wanted to try my hand at placeshifting, which is when I bought the SageTV suite and installed it on top of of Windows. It has this cool Java applet that I can use to watch TV from anywhere in the world. I’ve even streamed my favorite show, Good Eats with Alton Brown, over a wireless EVDO connection while staying at a relative’s house in the rugged foothills of Northern California. Since I already had the old PC and a video capture card, this whole setup gave me the same functionality as a TiVO and a Sling Box for a very reasonable $100.00. So, Mr Jobs, this is your competition. Please review SageTV’s feature set and let me know when you have a comparable product.

Apple announced today that it has released a beta version of a bootstrapper for Microsoft Windows XP. Named Boot Camp, this product will finally allow users to install MS Windows XP on the new Apple Intel-based PC hardware. And let’s face it, the Apple hardware is SaaaaaaWeeeeet. So the ability to use both OSX and XP on the same laptop… with full driver support… without having to use an emulator, is long overdue! As an aside, you know the Apple developers have been quietly chuckling to themselves as they watched the hacker community trying to do this for the last few months!