notes: June 2005

The podTunes age

I think Apple has seen a bright future for the podcasting concept (whether or not it will still be called 'podcasting' in future is another question entirely), as a means for professional radio to undergo rebirth and amateur radio to explode from the underground and into the mainstream.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005
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Smugness unsettled

Here's a column I wrote in the week after Apple's big Intel switch announcement. It seemed like a good opportunity to use the old "smug Mac users" line again, so I did.

There's many collective nouns for Mac users, but my favourite is "smug".

Put a dozen Mac owners in a room together and the air will reek of smugness. They are users of the best computers and the best operating system in the world, and heaven help anyone who disagrees with them on that matter.

Mac users have made great efforts in recent years to point out their technical superiority over Windows-using friends and colleagues.

"You poor thing," the Mac user would ooze, "having to spend so much time worrying about viruses and malware. I don't have that problem, you know."

The Mac versus Windows debate has been a religious war for years now, and neither side has ever been willing to give even an inch to the other.

I say all this as a Mac user myself, for the last four years. I've been as smug as the rest of them; moreso, probably.

All of which goes part way to explaining why any Mac users you know might be acting a little strangely now.

Last week, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple and surely the smuggest Mac user of them all, stood up in a crowded hall in California to make a speech. In it, he told his astonished audience that as from 2007, all new Apple computers would be designed around a new processor, the chip that is the "brain" of any computer.

The manufacturer of the new chips is Intel, famed for its close relationship with Microsoft. Apple's decision to embrace what it previously derided as weak technology seemed like a slap in the face to millions of devoted Mac users.

For a decade, Macs have used the PowerPC chips designed and built by Motorola and IBM. They were more expensive than Intel's chips, but worked harder and operated at far lower temperatures.

The last PowerPC chip to be used by Apple was the G5, a blisteringly fast piece of kit that turned humble computers into processing powerhouses.

Two years ago, Jobs promised that Apple would release laptops with G5 chips, but that promise was never kept. IBM could not produce a G5 that was small enough to fit in a laptop, or that could operate within such a small space without melting all the components around it (these processors get very hot indeed, and need extravagant cooling systems to keep them functioning).

Apple found itself in a quandry. It could hold out for further technical innovation in IBM's laboratories, or it could swallow its corporate pride and switch to a different kind of processor.

For the vast majority of consumers, the change shouldn't matter, or even be noticeable. Most people don't care who makes the components inside their computers, the only thing they worry about is getting a computer that works and is reliable.

But for the army of software developers who write applications for Mac OS X, Apple's award-winning operating system, dozens of questions have popped up. Not only do most of them face extra work just to make their programs work on the new Intel-powered Macs, they also wonder if those same computers could run Windows.

It sounds like the geekiest of concerns, but this announcement is the biggest story in Apple history for five years, and it has got under a lot of people's collars.

Some are confident that Jobs knows what he's doing, and that Apple can be sure of increased sales and greater success in the long term. Others gloomily predict the end of the Mac platform, and even the end of Apple as a company.

Whatever our view of the future, us smug Mac users can be forgiven for sporting a miserable expression for a little while. After all, the last thing we want is to have anything to do with - ugh - Windows.

Labels: mac, work, writing

Monday, June 27, 2005
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20050627

I guess this is where Blogger folks are testing the API
testing_api.blogspot

How to turn a Mac mini into a simple home studio
Possibilities present themselves...

The Battle of Norton St Philip
Re-enacted at the weekend

Glastonbury tag at Flickr
Pictures of mud

The best Doctor Who stories?
Usenet decides

Giles on tour
Barney and I, snapped by Phil. Includes pictures of me being very silly

Blogger images
Blogger will now host 300MB of images for you, for free

Monday, June 27, 2005
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Barney's song

bella-babab.mp3 (250KB mp3 file, about 14 seconds)

I recorded Barney singing as he sat on the toilet. Then I remixed the song in Audacity. It's great when he's in a singsong mood.

Labels: singing

Thursday, June 23, 2005
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Mini observations

Another light-hearted Mac-related post, celebrating the arrival of my new Mac mini computer: Mini observations.

Setting this machine up is more interesting, even more challenging, than I had expected. I deliberately did not use the Migration Assistant to import everything over from my old iBook, because I want to use this machine differently and organize the files on it in different ways.

Labels: tech

Wednesday, June 22, 2005
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Tweaking Mail in Tiger

A new article published at Mac Devcenter: Tweaking Tiger Mail:

The release of Mail 2.0 was largely overlooked amid all the fuss about Tiger's system-level features, but a number of people made public complaints about changes made to the user interface. Mail's performance has improved, but the apparent willingness of Apple's designers to create an entirely new kind of toolbar icon just for use in Mail got up some people's noses.

Labels: tech

Wednesday, June 22, 2005
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20050620

Magnetic north moves out of Canada

Podshare, a bewildering concept
So, even if someone does decide to shell out money for this, they still have to put up with the constant nags for payment in every audio file they download? Bizarre. I tried listening to one of Richard Vobes' podcasts but I didn't enjoy it. I found my way there from the Britcaster hub of, um, Brit podcasters.

The Daily Show kills weblogs
Very funny. I suspect this has been widely linked so apologies if I'm telling you something you already know. Warning: .mov file

Ural river tree delta
Mmmmm, deltas

Next stop: land of the midnight sun
By train from London Waterloo to the Arctic Circle. My inner traingeek wants to do this journey one day. Fantastic.

Feedlounge
A new web-based aggregator. These things are going to become hugely huge in the next few years, I reckon.

One way or another these pavement pictures are worth browsing.

Textsnippets
Snippets of code. I once had an idea for a repository of fictional characters that might work in a similar manner.

The Twins of the Father
An identical twin has become dad to identical twins. His tales of family life are very entertaining.

Bogbumper
Birds and insects photos blog; great pics

Ancient Egyptians were mass-producing glass 3,000 years ago

Monday, June 20, 2005
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Find what you love

You've got to find what you love, Steve Jobs tells students at Stanford University, and I applaud him for doing so.

I think there's far too much pressure on children to map out their life at far too young an age. There are two factors that have brought me to this conclusion:

Choosing A-levels and University degree courses at age 17 or 18
No-one I know (myself included) has ended up working professionally in the field they studied at that age

18 is too young to decide your whole life. When you're 18, you certainly feel as though you know enough to plan your life, but as you age this soon becomes obviously wrong. In fact, the older I get, the more I understand how dumb and naive I am and always have been. As I get closer to 40, I start to appreciate that I shall never be as wise as I'd like to think I could be, but at least I shall understand how wise I'm not. Of course you can't tell people to wait until they're 40, either. My advice would be not to rush. I'd urge school leavers to consider working or volunteering or doing a bit of both - and not just travelling for travelling's sake, either - just to broaden their horizons and understanding of the world before they choose what to do next.

Colleges tend to welcome older students; don't be afraid of returning to education when you're older, when you'll have a better understanding of what you want to do and more motivation to do it.

People change as they get older. The subject you enjoyed at school, and decided to study to degree level, loses your interest. It gets overtaken by other interests, other priorities, by events and changes in society and technology. I can't think of any person I know who works professionally in the same field they studied while at university. If you want to get the most from your education, take the time to decide what it is you really want to learn.

Steve Jobs is right to tell young people to find a subject they love, something that really gets the sparks going.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice."

I can't express it any clearer than that. Place a very high value on your time. Every experience is precious; value them all.

Labels: life, writing

Monday, June 20, 2005
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Singing Round the Town

Tomorrow (Saturday 18th) is Singing Round the Town day in Bradford on Avon.

It's a day to celebrate the community with song, dance, a bit of samba drumming, and loads of other musical activities. In the evening there's a great lineup of local bands doing a gig at the best venue in town. If you're in spitting distance of Wiltshire, and like live music, you should come down and join in. The weather's going to be fantastic.

I'm planning to take lots of pictures during the day, and shall also be doing an experimental audio diary which I might post on these interpages some time next week.

Labels: singing

Friday, June 17, 2005
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On Park Street

The number 9 bus from Temple Meads winds around the shopping district, then heads past the tourist gateway to the harbour area, and starts up Park Street. When the bus stops by some fountains on the left, you can open up your iBook and connect to Streetnet, the local free wifi network.

While the bus chudders uphill, away from the fountains, you'll lose connectivity for a few seconds on the bend, then find it reappearing as you pass Waterstones on the right. Now's a good time to hit 'Submit' on the login page, and start playing.

But first you'll want to enjoy a noodle around. You can look in Borders and mooch at the media bookshelves, but you won't find what you want and it's available for free from the public library anyway, so why waste cash on it? You can open up the iBook again in Borders, just to see, but there'll only be a crappy T-Mobile hotspot that is almost as overpriced as the coffee in Starbucks.

Back on the street you can explore a little more, noticing that all the takeaways offer a 20% student discount, and that a huge number of people passing by have iPod earphones stuck in their heads, and that an alarming number of emergency vehicles are passing at high speed, sirens wooing and waaing, and that the men erecting scaffolding outside stop to look at every attractive girl that walks by.

Battery level at 80%. Good.

Labels: tech, writing

Friday, June 17, 2005
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Julie went clubbing

"Before I met my husband I was going out with this guy called Chris. We lived in London at the time, and our relationship wasn't going very well, so he decided to move to York.

"After he'd settled in I went up to see him, and to my surprise he suggested we go out to a nightclub. I've never enjoyed clubbing but it seemed like the only decent idea we had at the time, so off we went.

"There we were in this club and I wasn't really enjoying myself, but I danced anyway. There was an upturned speaker cabinet next to the dancefloor, which was where all the girls put their handbags.

"I got incredibly hot very quickly and thought that I had to take some clothes off. But all I had on was a dress, a bra, and some knickers.

"So I went to the Ladies and took my knickers off and put them in my handbag; then I put the handbag back in the speaker cabinet with all the others and carried on dancing.

"Later on, they stopped the music and an announcement was made over the PA system; they asked for me, by name, to go to the reception desk. I was amazed, I couldn't think how anyone could have known me there.

"I went to reception and they asked me to go into a small side room. Inside were half a dozen police officers, all smirking. One of them asked me to confirm my name, which I did, then said: 'We've been following a known handbag thief, who raided the handbags in this nightclub this evening. We caught him red-handed with 14 handbags. Could you confirm the contents of your handbag, please?'

"So I said, 'Um, keys, Railcard, Abbey National card, um, knickers -' at which point all the police people started laughing their heads off. I joined in.

"So I got my handbag back and I had to make a formal statement at the police station at four in the morning, which at the time I thought was terribly funny but Chris was really annoyed about the whole thing.

"The thief got taken to court and I think I got about £3.67 in compensation. But the York police constables were always terribly nice to me on the phone."

Labels: writing

Thursday, June 16, 2005
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New day

A new day, a new CMS. Today I am sucking at the teat of Blogger, having been thinking of doing same for some time and then deciding that if it's good enough for Matt Jones, it's good enough for me. Plus there's the opportunity to re-instate comments (hmm, we'll see how that goes) and play with some of the extras and add-ons available for B'g'r these days.

There are other reasons for (yet another) switch:

Simplicity. I'm trying to make as many parts of my life as simple as they can be. Donkeys years ago, when I first wrote a comparitive review of various weblogging systems, I said that Blogger was the simplest to use. That's still true today.
Creativity. I've got a new aim: to be more creative. At the top of my todo.txt file, in big capital letters, I've written the words "BE CREATIVE." That's there to remind me of this every time I make a note about something I need to do. I decided to impose this rule on myself one evening after spending about two hours in front of the computer, idly tapping and clicking. I realised at bedtime that I'd spent that time reading crap and browsing rubbish, filling my already busy brain with even more useless information. "This is silly," I thought. "In theory, I earn a living (or half a living, anyway) from being creative. Why do I find it so hard to be creative in my spare time?"
I fancied a change.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005
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Lauren Ipsom

Famous filum star. Oh how she shined on the sliver screem.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005
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