I was playing around with FLAC this evening, contemplating whether it's time to re-import my whole CD collection once and for all in a lossless format so I don't have to do it again in the future. I ended up clicking over to the iTunes Music Store and what did I see on the front page? A link to "iTunes 4.5 (New features and download)"
Clicking the link takes you to a page with info on the new features of iTunes 4.5 and new stuff in iTMS. Free download singles each week, iMix playlist sharing, Music Videos and Movie Trailers sections of iTMS, Radio Charts with playlists from lots of radio stations, wishlists, WMA imports, and most important Lossless encoding built in to iTunes. Hopefully they mean FLAC, since they talk about 50% size reductions with no quality loss which is about what I've been getting with test tracks using MacFLAC.
If you go into the the Learn More page about iMix, there is a link to "Download the latest version of iTunes" but that just links to http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ which still has the current version of iTunes available.
There's another link on the main iTMS page that says "iTunes Anniversary Free Download - Foo Fighters" but clicking it just takes you to the page for "The Colour and the Shape" album but no free track or free album info there. I'm guessing this will all change overnight and things will be live tomorrow.
Sitting here playing with my new Treo 600 made me realize what a complete PDA geek I've been over the years. I've made it a point to keep most of the PDAs I've had as I outgrew each one, thinking some day it'd make an interesting collection. At least they don't take up much space, and as far as I know they all still work. =)
PalmPilot 5000 (512k RAM, 1996)
PalmPilot Professional (1MB RAM, PalmOS 2.0, 1997)
Palm III (2MB RAM, dropped the "Pilot" name after a lawsuit by the Pilot Pen corp, OS 2.0, 1999)
Palm Vx (There was no Palm IV strangely enough... the Vx was an upgraded version of the Palm V slim PDA with the metal body, 2001)
Palm VII (Funky PDA a little thicker than the Palm III and about an inch longer, with a built in wireless data modem which required special Palm VII apps to use the data services. A flop in the long run, but was pretty cool for its time, 2001)
Palm IIIc (was my wife's... color version of the Palm III)
I also had an Apple Newton review unit for a year or so when those were hot. I also have a couple of Psion Series 5 units which are very cool with a decent keyboard and lots of accessories that go with em. I reviewed the very first Blackberry model, that was a pager-sized device but had all of the cool email features that made the newer PDA-sized Blackberrys such a huge hit a few years ago. The strangest device I have tho is a weird NEC MobilePro 700 which is about 1/3 the size of a small laptop, that never really worked well but had a decent keyboard for taking notes in meetings and such.
Up to this point my favorite device has been the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA. It's a fully blown Linux machine that pretends to be a PDA. Great for doing systems admin work via SSH. The hidden thumb keyboard is the best I've used, and it has both CF and SD slots for adding memory and accessories. Just a bit too large to carry around all the time though. With the wifi CF card it's great for doing wireless network surveys.
Ugh what a collection. Or pile of junk, not sure which at this point. Hopefully the Treo 600 will finally be the best of PDA functionality, wireless Internet, small form factor, and good cell phone abilities.
My Treo 600 Smartphone arrived today. I was skeptical at first whether I'd like it, since it's quite a bit larger than my SonyEricsson T616. Fortunately, they're both GSM so I can just swap the SIM card back and forth between the two.
PocketTunes totally rocks. I just wish they had 30GB SD cards so I could put all of my tunes on there. Of course the interface still can't come close to the iPod's, but being able to carry one device instead of two would be worth it. Still searching for the perfect IMAP client, but SnapperMail 2.0 (due to be released in early May) looks like it'll be awesome. Full support for mail storage on SD, IMAP, SSL, large message capabilities, full HTML support, etc. Hoping to get in on the beta as soon as it's released....
My big hangup with the Treo right now is the lack of built in Bluetooth. I've really learned to love the Bluetooth sync capabilities that I have between my PowerBook G4 and the T616. Hopefully a Treo 600 compatible Bluetooth SD card will come out soon... seems a shame to have to plug in a sync cable all the time. Bleh....
What a fun week. I've been working to build a new mail system at InfoWorld to allow our Treo 600 users to have a good standards-compliant mail backend. Needless to say, being stuck with Notes mail servers doesn't work out very well when trying to use cutting edge technology. I've been running my own personal mail system this way for years now, but decided this was a good chance to try out some newer technologies.
My personal setup consists of Sendmail, SpamAssassin, Procmail, and UW-IMAP. This works great for a small number of users, but for a more robust system I evaluated a number of different options that wouldn't require local system accounts for each user, and that would let us do LDAP authentication. I finally decided on using Postfix, Amavis, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, and Cyrus IMAP. Things are working pretty well, but I'm still in tweak mode. More to come....
Pod Shield clear iPod protector. Way cool.
Trendy Geek on Tuesday introduced the Pod Shield, designed to protect your iPod from scratches, dirt and fingernails. The Pod Shield is made from a thin, transparent material that clings using static (instead of adhesive) to the front and back of your iPod. One size fits all iPods, old or new, although Trendy Geek notes that it's optimized for third-generation models. Each Pod Shield can be removed and re-applied.... [MacCentral]
From the MacWorld Editor's Notes blog:
Stream Your Home Music to Work... For Free
I have been impressed with Slim Devices' Squeezebox (4 mice, April 2004 issue) and its predecessor, the SLIMP3, for some time. But even if you don't have $249 to spend on an awesome network music player for your stereo cabinet, you can take advantage of Slim Devices' remarkably good server software to stream your home music library to your work. [Macworld Editors' Notes Weblog]
From Morons.org:
I'm all for free speech, but perhaps the Glassport Assembly of
God should have warned the people that came to see their Easter
performance that their show wasn't appropriate for small
children. After all, if I had kids, I don't think I would
want them to see the Easter Bunny getting whipped and a vivid depiction of the crucifixion of Christ. [morons.org headlines]
Crazy....
The battery of the PowerBook and iBook have a built-in processor that manages the remaining power and updates the battery life remaining that you see in your menu bar.
Check out this AppleCare knowledgebase entry for details on calibrating your PowerBook or iBook's battery. This needs to be done when the machine is new, and every few months thereafter.
I did the calibration on my 15" PowerBook G4 today, and after the battery drained down to 10 minutes remaining, I got that "You are now on reserve power" warning. Normally I go plug in when I see that... but this time I just kept working and watched the battery meter get down to 1 minute remaining. It stayed at the 1 minute mark for 30 minutes before it finally went to sleep. So, basically the battery's calibration was off by 30 minutes or so. Once the battery is fully charged, my total time remaining will be 30 minutes longer than it was before I calibrated.
Now to do this with my second battery....
Careful... not workplace safe.
GW dance remix
Join the party party, yea buddy. Now I know you have all heard these things, a speech remixed into a dance track. This one is pretty good, not safe for work however. [KFOG DJ Big Rick Stuart Weblog]
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available." Heh....
You know you're a serious geek when you get jazzed about retractable cables. But... I really really hate cable clutter. The folks at www.ziplinq.com make some excellent ones, anything from power adapters to retractable firewire, USB, network, modem, and even mice with built-in retractable cables.
Over at MacSlash:
Tired of the DRM wrapper in songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store? An anonymous U.S. citizen has created a tool called playfair that strips the FairPlay DRM from those songs. From the README: "So what will playfair do for you? The playfair program is quite simple. It takes one of the iTMS Protected AAC Audio Files, decodes it using a key obtained from your iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file." Note that this is not a GUI application. You'll need to have Xcode installed and chant the "configure/make/make install" mantra to build fairplay, then use it from the command line.... MacSlash
For my everyday use, the Fairplay workaround from Aaron Swartz that I posted yesterday works great. It allows me to play my .m4p music on all of my systems, instead of being limited to 3.
For the long term though, I don't really want to depend on the iTunes infrastructure to still exist in 10 years time. Without a non-DRM version of all of those iTMS AACs I would end up buying all of this music again. The switch from tape to CD wasn't too bad, since I didn't have a large music collection back then, but I want to make sure I won't have to make that transition again in the future.
They really will sell anything on eBay these days. Eurotunnel is selling one of the TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines) that was used to dig the Channel Tunnel. Shipping not included. Heh....
Aaron Swartz gives an excellent in-depth explanation of how the iTunes Music Store and Freeplay (the Digital Restrictions Management technology used to protect iTMS files) work here.
Here's the Fairplay part, and the simple procedure for doing a phantom authorization of a system:
The iTunes client hashes some system information to get a unique ID for the computer. It sends this hash to the iTunes server. If it doesn't already have three hashes, the iTunes server attaches this hash to the user's account and sends back the account's decryption key. The key is stored in iTunes's SC Info file, encrypted using the hash (so the file cannot be moved to another computer).When you go to play a song, iTunes simply hashes the information together, uses this to decrypt the SC Info file and retrieve the key, and uses the key to decrypt and play the song.
(The hash is MD5 and the song encryption is AES.)
When you place an encrypted song on an iPod, it decrypts the SC Info file, reencrypts it using the hash of the iPod's info, and copies the resulting SC Info file to the iPod.
Deauthorization simply runs the process backwards: the hash is sent to Apple, Apple removes it from their list, and the SC Info file on the local machine is deleted.
This leads to a hole in the system which allows you to authorize as many computers as you want: authorize the computer, make a backup of the SC Info file, deauthorize the computer, replace the SC Info file with the backup. Now the computer thinks it's authorized to play songs, but the store thinks it isn't (and thus allows you to authorize other computers).
Excellent detective work, Aaron. FYI, the SC Info file is found in /Users/Shared/SC Info/SC Info.sidb in case you don't feel like searching for it. It's hidden in Finder of course, but you can see it from the command line.
Standard disclaimer applies. This shouldn't be used as a way of allowing an unlimited number of machines to play your .m4p's. but is a good way to extend your fair use rights so you're not limited to playing the music on only 3 of your systems. =)
Ever since I made The Switch, I've been really missing one of the best features of X Windows... virtual desktops. I've been searching for a tool to do this for OS X for a while now, but hadn't found anything really worth using. The closest thing to virtual desktops so far has been setting up Fast User Switching, but that only really works if you disable passwords for the accounts. Not cool.
So, today I happened upon Desktop Manager, currently in alpha form (v 0.51 at the moment). It does everything I've been dreaming of for virtual desktops in OS X. So, check it out, submit bug reports, and lets help Richard make Desktop Manager all that it can be. =)
Playing around with iSpeak It 1.5, which uses the Mac's built in text-to-speech ability to create mp3/aac files from any text source. That can include Word docs, PDFs, RTF, HTML, etc, so you could have your favorite RSS feeds converted to audio then sync'd automatically to your iPod every morning, to listen to on your commute.
May be more trouble than it's worth, but the voice simulation tech is getting good enough that I can definitely see this becoming a viable option in the near future.
Now, what really would be cool is a speech-to-blog gateway so you could just record your thoughts on the fly with any voice recorder, cell phone, or iPod with the mic kit and then have it generate the blog entries for you.
About noon today Pacific time I noticed that I could no longer access my personal mail server for my domain. That server, a Debian Woody machine, also happens to run SpamAssassin, MySQL, and Apache for some test pages I am playing with. I also recently tweaked my SA rules to be much more aggressive which added quite a bit to the RAM used per spamd process.
I was silly enough to put this blog up on that same server on top of all of this. Needless to say, that was a bit much for an elderly rackmount server with only a 300Mhz CPU and 192MB RAM. It was still running, but was totally out of RAM and swap space, and was very unresponsive til I killed off Apache and SpamAssassin and cleaned things up a bit.
Now that I reduced the max number of httpd and spamd processes that it'll launch, and cut back on some of the larger SA rulesets I had added, things appear to be working well again. Time to move MT on to a bit faster box, methinks.