Kindle First Impressions

My Kindle arrived last night, and I’ve had just enough time with it to form some early impressions.

Physical

Yes, the thing is butt ugly. It badly needs a pass through Apple’s industrial design group. Or even Dell’s. But that’s okay, it’s early days, and you buy it to read ebooks, not look cool. That’s why you have the iPhone.

I’m a little more concerned about the build quality — the buttons, particularly the Previous/Next/Back paddle buttons, feel a little fragile. I’m not sure if they are, but I’m a little nervous about how many times I’m going to click them before they stop responding.

Worse, you can’t avoid the things. Between the big navigation buttons, and the keyboard, there is very little room to grab or hold the unit without hitting a button.

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The iPod Tax

Leopards Ate My Baby!

Well, not so much leopards as OS X Leopard.

And by my baby, I mean my MacBook Pro.

And by ate, I mean trashed my hard drive.

But other than that, yeah – Leopards ate my baby!

I did the preorder from the Apple Store, and the Fed Ex guy dutifully brought it by at about 8:40 this morning. Apple had marked it “signature required”, so I got a chance to ask the guy whether he had seen a lot of them; he told me that he had at least 300 on his truck alone, and wondered what it was, so I ‘splained.

The early arrival gave me a couple of hours to play with it before I had to run off to a meeting, so I threw caution to the wind and decided to give it a whirl.

My initial plan was to do a clean install of Leopard on an external drive, boot off of it, and slowly move essential apps over. This would give me a chance to do some housecleaning, and get away from an install that I’ve been carting around since Panther.

Unfortunately, Leopard was having no part of this — it would only install on the internal drive; not sure why this is the case.

When I said I was throwing caution to the wind, that’s a pretty mild breeze – I have two backups that are done automatically overnight, including a bootable clone, so I wasn’t overly worried.

That being the case, I decided to go ahead and upgrade the install on my internal drive.

After starting the install, it went through an interminable “consistency check” of the DVD. I let this run about 20 minutes and hit the skip button, and started installing.

The installer ran for about five minutes, and failed claiming that it had a problem copying one file, and that I needed to reboot and try again.

Attempting to reboot back to the internal drive failed spectacularly — it would attempt to start up, and then shut back down again.

Booting the Leopard DVD again, I attempted another install, and it indicated that there was a problem with the internal drive, so I started up Disk Utility off the Leopard disk, and tried a verify. That failed, so I tried a repair. That failed, so I dropped the partition and created a new one, and went back to trying to install. It failed again, in the same place.

Switching my startup disk to my clone backup, I booted off the backup, and tried Disk Utility from Tiger. It was also unable to verify or repair the internal drive, so I erased it, and it looked okay.

At this point I figured that the Leopard DVD was actually corrupted, so I tried it again, and this time let it complete the entire (45 minute) consistency check of the DVD.

No problem. So I decided to try the install again, and it completed about an hour and twenty minutes later, with no problem. I let it transfer my stuff from the backup drive (another 2 hours), and I’m now running Leopard.

I have no idea at all what happened; my best guess is that there was a formatting error on the internal drive, but if so, this does not seem to be a terribly robust way of handling it. After spending 45 minutes verifying the DVD, it might have been nice to verify the target drive too before trashing it in this manner.

The moral of the story is that BEFORE you do something like installing Leopard, be absolutely sure that you have a good, current backup. This isn’t the first time it’s saved my ass, and every time I become more of a believer. “Time Machine” is doing its backup at the moment, but I’ll still be doing a clone backup overnight, just on general principles.

iPhone mini-rant

Before I get started, don’t get me wrong — the iPhone is still the best phone I’ve ever used, at least for the purposes for which I use a phone.

Doesn’t mean it still doesn’t have a few problems.

Also, I’m not talking about unlocking, jailbreaking, installing third party apps or using my own ringtones. Not that I’m not interested in all of the above, it’s just that until the firmware quits being a moving target (which obviously won’t be until Leopard is out, at the very least), it’s a game for those who are in it for the chase — anyone who’s looking for a stable solution to this at the moment is deluding themselves.

No, my not-so-big but increasingly annoying problem is in using the thing just as Cap’n Jobso intended.

Every so often, I’ll put the phone in the sync/charge cradle (which I do almost any time I’m at my desk), and iTunes will suddenly pop up an error along the lines of “The iPhone “YourNameHere” cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all of the items in the selected playlists (X.XX GB required, YYY.Y MB available).”

Looking at the phone, all of my contact, appointments, mail and photos are available, but there’s no audio or video in the iPod section. iTunes claims that the entire phone is occupied by “X.XX” GB (6.33 GB, at the moment), of “other” data.

The only fix is to “Restore” the phone. This works fine, except:

A) It takes nearly an hour to add my 7ish GB of crap back to the phone.
B) I have to re-pair bluetooth to my car’s hands-free unit and my headset.
C) It’s happening way too often.

This happened again on Sunday (not quite 48 hours ago). Now it’s Tuesday morning. A couple of hours ago I was listening to music on the thing while going through my morning routine, and suddenly it’s back to no media and can’t sync.

This is the reason I’m not chasing any of the third party apps and ringtone stuff, btw — outside of the re-pairing, the fix process is all pretty much hands-off. If I were coloring outside the lines, I’d have to redo that each time, too.

This isn’t a major big deal, and I’m not the only person suffering from it, but every time it happens it pisses me off to think that Apple is spending so much time putting out updates designed to foil those blackhearted rogues that are trying to extend the phone’s functionality, instead of fixing it to work the way it’s supposed to work out of the box.

Grrr.

Stephen Fry is gadget blogging

ZOMGBBQ!!11

Stephen Fry is blogging?

Stephen Fry has an iPhone?

(and apparently everything else Apple has ever produced)

Yep, and yep.

What’s more he’s doing a damn fine and well informed job of it:

Server side apps only. No, no, no, no, no. This is NOT good. It’s one thing to want to keep the proprietary system closed, but to present a device sealed in digital Araldite is a Bad Idea. An Ubuntu flavoured Linux for mobiles is in the works, and you don’t get more open source than that. Damn it, there’s Linux for the Palm available these days. Even Microsoft are making gestures towards client-side open source apps. Only amateurs are going to want to create server side apps for the iPhone. In case you don’t know what I mean, I should explain that the only third party programs available for the iPhone are run out of Safari (the resident browser) pages. You can’t download squat. Enthusiastic individuals will come up with WorldMate or Splash Photo or other top ten smartphone app lookie-likies but until Apple introduces a Java implementation or allows the bonnet to be unwelded and lifted up, the device will remain a fraction of what it should be.

Not that that’s a terrible surprise — I think at this point I’d be more surprised to find Fry holding forth on a topic he wasn’t well informed about (I’d be nearly as surprised to find out a topic he’s not well informed about exists).

If he keeps this up (and if they can keep the server up; it’s been down most of the day since everyone started posting about it), this is going to be a joy to read.

(Speaking of Stephen Fry — apparently a new season of QI starts tomorrow, too!)

(Umm… That’s on the “bittorrent” channel for those of us outside the UK — I suspect hell would freeze over before QI ever aired on US TV.)

Cooler MacBooks Prevail

Similar to my experience a couple of years ago, I shipped the MacBook Pro off to AppleCare on Tuesday evening, and on Thursday morning, it was back. About what I expected would happen, unless I was counting on it, in which case it would take every bit of the quoted ten days.

So, I prepared for the worst, and hoped for the best.

The repair documentation sticks to the story; they replaced the logic board, and “other parts as required”, which I’ve pretty much got to believe includes fans — it may not have been the entire problem, but a logic board failure doesn’t seem likely to sound like a fan on its last legs.

Whatever.

At least it’s fixed — and running much cooler. By about 50°F, in fact. The fans are now reporting an RPM above 0, as well.

Interestingly, the MacBook I borrowed (2GHz Core 2 Duo) ran about 20° hotter than the MacBook Pro does now. On reflection, that doesn’t surprise me overly, since the aluminum case on the Pro is a terrific conductor of heat.

The MacBook was nice — one of those snappy looking black ones — but even with 20 gig more hard drive and 802.11n, I’m still happier to have my MacBook Pro back.

“We don’t need no water (don’t) let the MacBookPro Burn…”

I finally got bit by one of the various bugs of the early-build MacBook Pro Core Duos.

A week or two ago, I noticed an occasional rattle-y sound from the ‘book. Actually, it took me awhile to narrow it down; when I’m in my office the ‘book perches on a shelf along with a small-form-factor PC and a collection of external drives that makes up my media server. At first I thought it was a bearing going out in a drive, but eventually I narrowed it down to the MacBook, and decided it was a fan getting a little noisy, and resolved to keep an ear on it (so to speak).

The noise quieted down, so I figured maybe it was just some little piece of debris (label off a chip or something) got caught in the blades.

A couple of days ago, however, I started to have stability problems — the Mac would occasionally lock up for no discernible reason, and even threw a couple of kernel panics.

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Unleaded DRM

I’m already tired of hearing people bitch about the new iTunes Store / EMI deal to offer DRM-free music. The typical whine is about paying $0.30 more for them not to put DRM on the music.

Get a grip, folks — for your $0.30, you also get a reasonable sampling rate (256Kb/s AAC – double the old rate — is awfully close to CD quality), and if you don’t want to buy ala carte, the whole album (without DRM, at 256Kb/s) is the same price as the old DRM’d up one.

Besides, it’s not like they don’t know you’ll go for it — how much extra money did you pay the oil companies to not put lead in your gasoline? And they didn’t even include a feature that was two times better than an old one.

[tags]iTMS, DRM, Big Oil, Apple, EMI[/tags]

Notes on Apple TV

One week in, more-or-less, and I’ve had time to form a few initial impressions.

It pretty much “just works” — the only problem I’ve had (and still have) is using the Harmony through the Xantech remote extender. Annoying, but livable until someone comes out with alternatives.

The interface is still very nice, yet slightly crippled (in Apple’s traditional fashion) by having an interface device that’s short a button. There needs to be some way to do things like “adjust aspect ratio” and “view metadata”, but even if such was built (or hacked) in, there’s not a button on the remote to support it. Video playback could also benefit from “skip forward” and “skip backward” buttons (preferably with configurable durations).

Having access to my music library with a nice interface, plus the ability to conveniently watch video podcasts that I’ve always avoided before (my attention span for watching video on a computer is rather short) is almost worth the price of admission by itself.

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Apple TV, Harmony Remote & Xantech Xtra Link

I’m as much of a gadget geek as the next blogger, but even I get fed up with clutter after awhile.

The last go-round configuring my media center ended up with only the TV, speakers, and a Xantech Xtra Link sensor out in the room, and all of the componentry stashed in a closet behind.

A Logitech Harmony 880 remote replaced the box o’ remotes, and communicates with the gear in the closet via the Xtra Link (an infrared remote extender).

Naturally, when I hooked up the Apple TV, it got wired into the closet too, with an IR emitter stickied to the front of it over the IR window.

After getting the basics working, this made the next order of business adding it to the Harmony 880, which is where things began to go a bit awry…

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