Cup of Brown Joy - Elemental

Tea inspires some seriously strange sentiments at times, but seldom much stranger than this…

Rate this:

3.6 (2 people)

Video comments now enabled!

Video comments have now been enabled on the site — to leave a video comment, you’ll need a webcam, and a free account from viddler.com.

It’s good clean fun, so let’s see your comments!

Rate this:

2.8

Up Above My Head

Rate this:

2.8

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.

Rate this:

2.8

Nokia N95 First Impressions

Yesterday the FedEx guy showed up with my new Nokia N95, fresh off the plane from Hong Kong. The idea of a well-connected, web-enabled feature-rich phone that also had a decent camera was just too tempting.

I like the idea of shooting pictures and videos, but I seldom leave the house with the intention of doing so; even though I’ve got a nice small digital camera, I hate dragging it around with me on principles, and even when I do want to use it, it’s seldom charged up.

The N95 is a better camera than my little pocket digital, and since I keep my cellphone charged and with me 24×7, I won’t have any excuses not to take a few pictures.

Read more

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.

Read more

Just Google

A little bit of Saturday Madness from the guys at Leth & Sex News…

[tags]Google, Leth and Sex, Video, Humor[/tags]

Rate this:

2.8

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…

Read more

Apple TV Initial Impressions

Something bad happened yesterday — I wore out yet another keyboard. Worse, while I was at the crack store Fry’s picking up a new one, I walked past a stack of Apple TVs, and one of them followed me home.

Outside of being in the store anyway for the keyboard thing (the “colon” key failed — how the hell can a “colon” key fail? Semicolon works. Shift+anything else works. Try writing HTML or CSS without a colon key), I probably wouldn’t have been as tempted to get one right now if it hadn’t been for the high rate of very interesting hacks emerging for the Apple TV over the past few days — I’m guessing Apple has hit another one out of the park.

The unit comes boxed more or less like an iPod — fold-open box in a slip case, “Made by Apple in California”, etc.

Not a cable in sight, other than the power cord (boo).

At least the power cord doesn’t have a huge transformer brick on it (yea!).

Read more

Ala carte programming — who pays for what?

The FCC yesterday came out endorsing “Ala carte” programming from cable and satellite providers — as a way to give parents more control over the type of programming coming into their house.

The full statement of the FCC Chairman before the Senate yesterday is here (Acrobat document), but one section that caught my eye was this:
Read more

Next Page »