I have too many digital media files and they’re getting disorganized. I want to be able to add stuff to my iPod on the road, so my MacBook Pro is therefore my “main” iTunes library. I typically buy new digital music or TV shows on that laptop and rip CDs or DVDs on it. So, in theory at least, it’s the master library.
But when I’m in my office, I’m typically using my iMac’s music library, so it needs the music files. And because my laptop has much more limited hard drive space any Tv and movie files I’m not interested in watching currently (sorry, Battlestar Galactica season 1) get off-loaded to the iMac. Which means my “master” library isn’t so master anymore.
What I need is a software synchronization solution that’s iTunes-aware. You could just crank up Chronosync (or your own standard, hometown file-syncing program) and have it push missing files back and forth. That solution has at least two problems. First, it would be hellish to get Chronosync to exclude just the movie and TV files I don’t want on my laptop. Also, it knows nothing about my metadata — star ratings, play counts, last played date and so on — that iTunes is tracking separately on each computer.
So I’m testing out a free 30-day trial of a program called Syncopation (version 2.1) which claims to sync iTunes libraries exactly the way you want while keeping all the metadata honest. It’s a tiny download and then you install a copy on each of the computers you want to keep in sync. The free trial supports two computers while the paid version ($25) can do its tricks on five computers. Once the program is running on each computer, it syncs just as you require over a wired or wireless network, either in the background or on-demand.
Syncopation also offers lots of useful options. First off, you can choose whether all libraries are equal (”peer to peer” syncing) or one is a master. You can choose on each computer whether to include or exclude syncing TV shows, movies and/or podcasts. I’ve set it top sync TV shows from my Macbook Pro to my iMac but not the reverse, for example. You can also limit it to specific playlists and decide whether or not it should have the power to delete files. Finally, you can select any or all of six pieces of metadata for syncing (genre, rating, play count, last play date, skip count, last skipped date). If you’re setting up a central iTunes library on a network server somewhere, Syncopation can also add tracks to another computer’s library without actually importing the data files. All in all, a very savvy and slick app.
Stuck with my Treo “smart” phone in an airport recently, I decided to navigate over here to my blog via its wimpy browser. The Treo is on Verizon’s 3rd-generation broadband service so even though I have a fair number of pictures on the front page, I figured all would be okay. Nope — the experience was ugly, at best. After burping and hiccuping, the Treo’s browser finally just gave up and said the page was too big to download. Well, that’s no good.
In search of a more mobile-friendly manner to display GravitationalPull.net, I tapped into the rich vein of Wordpress plugins. I first stumbled on Alex King’s WP Mobile Edition plugin. But a little tapping around for reviews in Google found some people complaining that King’s plugin killed their search engine rankings by serving a stripped-down mobile version of their sites to the search engines’ indexing robots.
Instead, I opted to install Andy Moore’s Wordpress Mobile Plugin. It doesn’t mess with search engines and creates a very stripped down, easily rendered site when it detects a visitor is using a mobile phone browser. And you can choose whether to use a red, blue, green or pink background for your header! You can also choose to treat really advanced mobile browsers, like the iPhone’s Safari, as regular Joe computer visitors and give them the full experience of your blog.
But it’s not quite perfect. On the down side, the free version of the plugin puts ads at the bottom of your mobile site. The unfree version is 25 Pounds, kind of steep for a Wordpress plugin. There’s also an annoying bug that prevents the plugin from properly displaying some images when it creates mobile versions of individual posts. Moore explains (in the plugin site’s forums) how to use the Wordpress plugin editor to negate two buggy lines of code but, really, shouldn’t the developer just make that fix himself, especially for 25 Pounds?
If you want more options, blogger Speckyboy has a number of other mobile plugins, as well, listed in a blog post a few days ago.
With apologies to 19th century English poet John Masefield, I have an issue with my digital camera and none of the major camera vendors are helping me out. As we all learned way back in the days of Kodak Tri-X and silver-halide, the field of view of your basic human being is about equivalent to a lens with a 50-millimeter focal length projecting onto a 35-millimeter wide piece of film. Any shorter length lens creates a wider than human field of view while longer lengths zoom in for close-ups. So the basic, everyday lens that you had on your trusty old single lens reflex camera, in my case a Canon AT-1 which I had for about 27 years, was 50 mm.
Ah, but here’s the rub. Most affordable, or “prosumer,” digital SLR cameras have a sensor that’s smaller than 35 mm. In the case of my Canon Rebel XT, for example, it’s 22.2 mm by 14.8 mm, or about a ratio of 1.6 to 1 versus the size of old 35 mm film (it’s sometimes listed as “APS-C” in reference to a long-dead smaller size of old-fashioned film). That makes a 50 mm “regular” lens more like an 80 mm zoom lens. Fine, if I need a spiffier lens I can just buy a 31 mm lens which would be the equivalent of a 50 mm lens in the old days, no? Actually, no.
You see, only the cheaper digital SLRs like my $700-ish Rebel XT have these smaller sensor dimensions. More expensive models like the Canon 1d Mark III or Nikon’s D3, which cost $5,000 and up, have sensors that match the collection size of an old-fashioned 35 mm film camera. These are known as “full frame” cameras. And since professionals who use full frame cameras spend the most on lenses, the best lenses aren’t made in weird dimensions for we the cheapskate masses.
For example, if you want a lens that opens wider to take better pictures in low-light situations, what’s known in the biz as a fast lens, you have to buy a 50 mm one. I did just that last year, buying a fantastic Canon EF 50mm 1.4 lens that takes amazingly detailed shots in the shade. But I’m stuck with using it as a zoom because of the smaller sensor in my Rebel XT. What I need is a digital SLR with a full frame sized sensor that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Anybody listening? Anybody?
Update 7/2/08: Close but no cigar: Nikon today announced a full-frame camera, the DX700, but it starts at $3,000 without a lens. I’m looking for something quite a bit less.
Last year was quite a year — maybe the best year ever — for acquiring computers around these parts. In January, bulking up my new home office, I bought a 24″ iMac. Best desktop computer I’ve owned, by far. In April, my mom needed a Windows Pc to do her taxes so I sent over my self-assembled Shuttle box and built a super-cheap replacement using an Asus T3 barebones system. A few months later, I upgraded my 17″ Powerbook to a 15″ Macbook Pro. And in November, I bought a Kindle. I sold the old Powerbook on eBay but for those keeping track at home that’s a net gain of two systems. My wife likes to joke about how many CPUs live in our house but she’s got a point. If you count work laptops and everything sitting around (some old and decrepit), you easily get into double-digits.
This year has been much quieter and thriftier, perhaps appropriate given the economic times we live in, on the Pc acquisition front. The old mac mini went off to my nephews and no new systems have entered the premises.
And so I find myself, in a strained geek metaphor sort of way, involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. Or, to be less obstuse, trolling Newegg and DealMac and all sorts of other bargain bins wondering if there isn’t an insanely cheap system to be assembled this summer. Maybe just some upgrades?
Plenty of “news” today about the mobile Internet, prompted by this Wall Street Journal piece on Google’s Android mobile phone operating system. The Journal’s story is chock full of details of the internal struggles of Android developers and carriers that may support Android phone. While Google had said phones running Android would be available in the “second half” of 2008, now it looks the first phone will be available in the fourth quarter. Seems like a lot of sound and fury signifying not much.
There’s also a nice profile of Android lead dude Andy Rubin in the July issue of Wired magazine (not yet online - blech). Aside from a few goofy factual errors (Cut and paste among different mobile apps has been available on Palm for ages and probably on Windows Mobile, too), the Rubin story gets much closer to the important big picture underlying a lot of the coverage of Android and other mobile platforms like the iPhone.
The bigger story, the meta-story, if you will, remains the same as it has been since the Internet first went mobile. The carriers want to keep everything locked down with all profits flowing their way. That’s why mobile music sales remain in a quagmire — gotta give the carriers their cut and protect $2.99 sales of ring tones. It’s about as un-Internet a business model as you can get. Thus, with Android, you have handset makers not wanting to anger carriers and carriers delaying things to “customize” Android for their particular networks. Dana Blankenhorn has it right in his blog post this morning: “These problems would not exist if the government simply set standards for hardware and opened up the spectrum to competition.”
The two biggest carriers, AT&T and Verizon, say they aren’t supporting Android as of yet. I can’t figure out how that squares with their prior claims that they had opened their networks to any compatible phone. In December, AT&T was telling anyone who’d listen that you could use “any handset on our network you want…We don’t prohibit it, or even police it.” Verizon used a bit more legalize but declared that customers would get the option to use “wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company.” Said devices would have to abide by a “minimum technical standard” and pass tests at Verizon’s own testing lab.
But Google has a long-term plan that may route around all this nonsense and foot dragging. The company convinced the Federal Communications Commission to impose open access requirements on the new swath of spectrum auctioned last year in the 700 Mhz frequency range. Ultimately, Verizon bought the license. Assuming regulators stick to their guns, Android devices should gain free rein once the 700 Mhz offering comes online in a couple of years.
Too much of the coverage, however, pits Google’s efforts against Apple’s iPhone. In the real world, both are moving the industry in the right direction. From an Internet user’s point of view, they are complementary not contradictory. Just as with the iTunes music store, Steve Jobs got incredible concessions from the cellular powers that be to improve the situation for ordinary consumers. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot (I still can’t get over that the iPhone’s bluetooth implementation is more crippled and limited than the one in my Verizon Treo). But it’s progress that will grow more powerful as the iPhone becomes more and more popular.
In a sense, this struggle is much the same as the battle over broadband when cable and telephone companies first started rolling out high-speed connections back in the 1990s. There was the distinct possibility that the owners of those fat pipes were going to mess with content, filter web sites or restrict usage. After millions of dollars spent by all sides lobbying, the industry chose to go down a (mostly) open path. Let’s hope mobile can go the same way. The emergence of the next Facebook, eBay and Google depend on it.
Web marketing guru Seth Godin has a Kindle and he seems to like it but he’d also like it to be more revolutionary in a very Godin-esque way. Okay. He’s also incredibly sexist. Godin claims the Kindle is “for women” because 1. it’s ugly and 2. the top 10 best sellers are not tech-heavy and “an Oprah book is #1.” This is pure, unadulterated hogwash.
First of all, as I’ve been arguing over and over, the Kindle is for people who are big, huge, frequent, constant readers of books who are also comfortable with gadgets. Kindle is NOT primarily aimed at super-gadget hounds who also happen to read some books. The design is definitely way old school, not cutting edge 21st century. Godin says “the colors and feel of the machine don’t feel like the current uber-geek tech dream device.” Exactly.
But what does that have to do with women? My wife likes her sexy iPod Nano as much for the stylish look and feel and color as for the music. She’s also not so into the Kindle, which felt clunky to her. Zillions of both men and women find gadget design and style important. The idea that Kindle is for women because it has a weird design is, well, just weird.
Second, an Oprah book is selling well for Kindle and that’s some sort of surprise upon which we Godin can build this silly thesis? Are Barnes & Noble bookstores “for women” because they sell tons of Oprah books? In point of fact, the Kindle top 10 is just about the same as the overall, dead tree pulp Amazon.com top 10. Both (as of right now) feature David Sedaris, The Last Lecture, Tim Russert, a pair by Stephanie Meyer and, yes, Oprah’s pick by Eckhart Toll. The main difference is the print top 10 includes two more Russert books, which aren’t available on the Kindle, and the Kindle top 10 includes Scott McClellan and Fareed Zakaria’s books, which hardly seem like chick lit. Sheesh.
That aside, I’m also not on board with Godin’s critique that the Kindle “does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book.” As I’ve noted before, the Kindle does a great job of improving the act of reading by giving you an instant dictionary at your fingertips, letting you change the size of the typeface on the fly, giving you the ability to search every word of a book and every word in all of the books in your Kindle library and storing notes and highlights in a computer text file. You also have instant web access, so you can follow-up references in books on the spot, like when I looked up an important 19th century Supreme Court decision in the middle of reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Lincoln.
On the other hand, Godin wants to, how to put this gently? Umm, ruin the experience of reading a book by turning it into a Cliff Notes reduction combined with a utter free for all of distracting distractions:
“Here are three simple examples of how non-fiction books on the Kindle could be better, not just cheaper and thinner:
–Let me see the best parts of the book as highlighted by thousands of other readers.
–Let me see notes in the margin as voted up, Digg-style, by thousands of other readers.
–Let me interact with hyperlinks and smart connections not just within the book but across books
I can think of ten others, and so can you. Instead of making this a dead end (like a book) they could have made it a connector (like the web).”
I guess it’s a fair complaint if you aren’t happy with books as they exist today and you want them to be “more like the web.” I can’t say that I wish books were more like the web at all. Let me contemplate and think and take in the author’s words quietly in my mind, please. Reading a book is not reading stuff on the web, nor does it need to be. Godin’s comment actually made me think that maybe Nick Carr was right about some people when he complained that Google was making us dumber (a thesis which, overall, I find to be just dumb, but that’s a whole other post).
Ultimately, though, Godin makes one solid point that I can agree with. The Kindle, or really the whole concept of wireless e-reading devices, will revolutionize the way ideas are sold and spread. Just not exactly, precisely in the way Seth wants.
p.s. It’s more than a little ironic that while good master Godin wants more interactivity and webiness in his Kindle, his own web site doesn’t allow comments — at all. How conversationally tone deaf is that? UPDATE: Nor has my post appeared in Godin’s trackbacks eight hours after pinging his site.
Several of the new features are truly great little additions. The smarter auto-complete list is probably my favorite. In the prior version, when you started typing a web address, Firefox would try to guess what you wanted but usually ended up offering a whole bunch of deep links within sites when you really just wanted the main site. The new auto-complete uses a combination of the total frequency of past visits along with recent visits and comes up with smarter choices. A couple of minors changes, like triple-clicking to select a paragraph of text and improvements to opening a bunch of tabs at once, round out a very nice upgrade.
I’m also glad that most of my favorite add-ins, including Google Notebooks and Delicious bookmarks, have made the jump to 3.0 compatibility. As I noted the other day, however, Google has ended development of its excellent browser sync product. I’m now using Foxmarks to keep bookmarks in sync but I’m suffering from a huge loss of capabilities since Google’s product also synced history, cookies and other stuff. Hopefully, some more capable alternatives will crop up and/or Foxmarks will add features. Meanwhile, any other add-ins that people recommend?
p.s. there are some great tips and tricks for using the new Firefox over at Lifehacker. I especially needed the one showing how to delete mistyped web addresses that then get onto your auto-complete list. Blech.
For a while now, I’ve been trying in vain to move a copy of the film Notting Hill off my TivoHD and onto my iPod. It’s all legit. The TivoHD allows such a transfer using a Mac and Toast’s Tivo Transfer software. The Tivo itself is networked with one of Netgear’s Powerline HDX101 adapters, which in theory run at 200 megabits per second. But every time I tried to copy the movie, the process dragged on for days (!!!) and eventually died without completing.
It’s especially weird because moving things off our older second-generation Tivo always works fine. That guy is also connected with an identical Powerline HD adapter and is considerably farther away in the house from my Mac. It was a total mystery. I tried rebooting the adapters and the Tivo and reconnecting all the cords multiple times. No help. I switched Netgear adapters from one Tivo to the other. Still no better.
Then, today, I was trolling around on the very fine Tivo users site Tivo Community and found this thread of people discussing similar problems. It appears that my hyper, super duper, fancy pants, third-generation TivoHD doesn’t like to walk and chew gum at the same time. The Tivo gurus recommended setting both channel tuners to non-functioning channels and making sure the Tivo wasn’t recording or downloading anything else.
So I tuned the tuners to a couple of music-only channels and, as Jerry Pournelle likes to say, Bob’s your uncle (actually, Bob’s my dad, but you know what I mean). Tivo transfered the entire movie, over 2 gigs, in a little under an hour. We’re still not setting any speed records but that’s totally acceptable. Now I’ll export for the iPod and have portable Roberts and Grant banter where ever I roam. Nice.
Got plenty of opinionated comments on my prior post about pricing of the new iPhone 3G. Thanks for all the comments. Just a couple of quick responses from me
First, my main point is about how Apple and AT&T’s shift from higher up-front cost to higher per-month fees radically altered the sales projections. Thought experiment: If Steve Jobs got up on stage last week and introduced the iPhone 3G with all the features just as he actually did but the price stayed exactly the same, would anyone be predicting tens of millions of iPhones sold this year? No way. The biggest news out of the speech was the price cut (See this great post by my old boss, Eric Savitz, summarizing analysts’ reactions). The basis of the swelling sales estimates is the “price cut” from $399 to $199. The almost $400 up-front cost turned out to be too much of a psychological barrier for consumers, but it was just that: psychological! People didn’t realize that, considering the two-year total cost of ownership, they were getting a great deal.
Second, I didn’t mean to say that the new or old iPhones aren’t worth the cost or that added features weren’t “worth” more. I was commenting on how shoppers can be manipulated by pricing models.
Third, I — and almost everyone else — have actually underestimated the price increase on the iPhone 3G. Take this Gizmodo article, for example. That’s because AT&T calculates a couple of bogusly-labeled monthly surcharges as a percentage of your monthly plan rate. These are the “government fees” that you’re somehow supposed to think are taxes or something ordered by Uncle Sam when in fact they’re just sneaky ways for AT&T (and every other cell phone operator, to be fair) to raise your bill. Plus there actually is tax charged on your cell phone bill in most places. So the added $10 or $15 a month that I mentioned in my previous post is probably more like $12 to $18 a month or more, depending on how your bill works out.
If you use the $18 a month extra, then you’re paying $2,071 over two years, up from $1,839. Discounted at 5%, you’re paying about $1,969 versus $1,616. Ouch.
As a guy with far too many computers, well, at least four that I use on a regular basis, keeping things in sync is kind of hopeless. Instead, some computer gets assigned a certain task and all the related files. I use my Macbook Pro for email, for example, and digital photography lives mainly on my iMac, oh he with the big screen.
But some tasks can’t be penned in so easily, particularly browsing the Internet. I’m just as likely to read web sites or my Bloglines feeds on any computer in he house. So it was a great day around these parts when Google introduced their browser sync extension for Firefox, which “continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers.” The add-on also kept track of which sites you had open when you last closed a browser and offered to open them when you next opened a browser.
Unfortunately, the browser sync program has become the latest victim of Google’s shifting priorities. There won’t be a version for the new Firefox 3.0 browser and the existing extension for the prior version of Firefox wil bite the dust soon (news I first read on Lifehacker). So it’s time to move on and find an alternative.
Many people are talking about an extension called Foxmarks, so I’m giving it a go. One limitation versus the old Google sync is that Foxmarks only keeps track of bookmarks, not cookies, history or saved passwords. You sign up on the Foxmarks site, which serves as the main repository for all your bookmarks and gives you access to them from any computer, which is an added little bonus. The first sync was incredibly fast. But Foxmarks doesn’t work continuously. It seems to just sync when you quite or request a manual sync. So either remember to sync manually after you’ve added a few new bookmarks or don’t let Firefox crash. I’ll report back after using it for a bit.
Even with Foxmarks, I’m still lacking a more comprehensive browser sync solution. Some people are touting Weave, an entire browser syncing platform that Mozilla introduced back in December. But it’s a 0.1 release, not something I’m going to trust with all my important data.
UPDATE:Techmeme is collecting various responses, including:
I have too many digital media files and they’re getting disorganized. I want to be able to add stuff to my iPod on the road, so my MacBook Pro is therefore my “main” iTunes library. I typically buy new digital music or TV shows on that laptop and rip CDs or DVDs on it. So, in theory at least, it’s the master library.
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