Last year Emma gave me an iPod for Christmas – its been great for trips and such, but I have a collection of 300+ albums that I don’t listen to much anymore. I recently saw an ad for a gadget that I hoped would make my older music more accessible. Last Tuesday it arrived. After all the turkey and family time, I took a little time for myself and cleared my desktop – and hooked up my
new Griffin
iMic. Its a small adapter about the size of a York Peppermint with a short USB cable on one end, and a 1/8 headphone jack at the other (they even provide the stereo Y cable for a turntable)

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‘iPod users are music thieves’ says Steve Ballmer, Micro$oft CEO

In a recent article on the Silicon.com website, Andy McCue quotes Ballmer as saying: “We’ve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is ‘stolen’.”

Of course, now that Microsoft has finally entered the online music store market, selling their flavor of digitally “secured” music,
one would think it hypocritical that the M$ CEO would attack/disparage the leading source of legal downloadable music, Apple. With over 100 Millions songs sold, Apple’s iPods and the iTunes Music Store is M$ major music competitor.

One might be tempted to think this is just another campaign of Microsoft FUD – twisting the truth over backwards in an effort to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, as they have done repeatedly in the campaign against Linux and Anything Not From Microsoft …

Of course, there are those who think Ballmer is secretly a fan
of the slick little iPods that are selling so well – http://homepage.mac.com/trianglejuice/iblog/C1683193892/E2045005395/Media/ba
llmersipod.swf

   

My long pending order arrived yesterday! Back in June Apple announced the Airport Express (AEx) – a neat little wireless networking gadget (802.11g – 54 Mbps) that can serve as a wireless link between my computer in the office, and my stereo/media center downstairs at the other end of the house. As soon as I heard about this, I had visions of using iTunes to tune in some of the more interesting internet radio stations, and using the AEx to send them to my stereo downstairs. Its crazy to be trapped in the office to listen to some of the nicer internet music sites.

Also see
notebookreview.com – includes AEx internal photo!

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Photo courtesy of
Joi Ito’s blog

Pretty funny Shockwave movie based on the Mac Switcher ads
(use headphones – not office safe ….)

Video found via Jerry Pournell’s Chaos manor site

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I’ve been reading more about software for X10 and Macs, and I ran across more information on the xTension software. I’d initially passed on their software after a brief test, when I saw it start up the Mac Classic environment – that seemed like such a step backwards with the beauty of the Mac OS X built on Unix. But yesterday I got a copy of the beta they are calling X4X (xtension for OS X), and I installed it on my Mac, and – its very fine!

I created the master list for the 9 X10 controls that are running in the house, then I created some events for sunset and sunrise (Wakeup Coffeemaker, etc), and after some more reading, I’ve started creating Applescripts for some of the events that I want to happen. Very nice stuff – amazing that its considered beta!

There is a support list and quite a bit of resources for the xtension users – unless something unexpected and crazy happens, I think this is what I’ll be running the house on.

I’ll write more when I have it more experience with it!

While making the rounds of tech new sites, I ran across
Home Automation with Mac OS X, Part 1 by Alan Graham on the O’Reilly site.

About 7 years ago I got a Firecracker kit from X10. I played with it a bit, loaded software on my PC, quickly added $120 of expansion parts, and had the house lighting and coffeemaker on schedules in short order.

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Last time I wrote about computers here, I mentioned that I was planning to get a Mac. Well, I found a good price for a dual processor 1.25gHz G4 with 512Meg of ram and a Superdrive (DVD recorder), so I pulled out my VISA card and bought it. I was even able to get Applecare (3 year extended warrantee) on it (for the usual fee).

It was running an older version of OS X, 10.2 Jaguar, so within a week I went to the local Applestore in Tyson’s Corner (partly to check the store out), and I left with a new copy of OS X 10.3 (Jaguar). A week later I got a copy of iLife 04, to get the improved iPhoto, and to have a copy of Garage Band to play with.

My initial impression is that its a very cool computer. When I install software, it
requires that I “authorize it” by entering my UserID and system password. I bet Microsoft systems would be a lot more secure if they used such a feature.

So far the only time it has restarted (booted) is when I turn it off, or when it has installed a major change in software (security updates, etc).

Most of the setup was painless – I took an ethernet cable and tied it to our router (does NAT and Firewall duties for our network from the cable modem)
and a few moments later I was on the internet. It seems Emma’s Win98 machine and can read the Shares there just fine, but it can’t get into my old Win2k machine. Of course, I’ve had that problem before – trying to share files from the Win2k system to Emma’s PC – so thats not new., just annoying.
All my old emails are in Outlook 2000, in a 210 Meg .pst file – I haven’t found a way to move them to the Mac yet, but I did get the Mac Mail program working with my ISPs and aliases.

I bought a copy of Photoshop 7 for Mac on eBay, I have no desire to pay $600+ for Photoshop CS, and I use version 7 at work, and had it on my PC as well, so the learning curve should be small. I got a copy of PageSpinner, a basic HTML editor for the Mac, based on comments in Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog
$30 seemed reasonable for a web editor – $180 for BBedit doesn’t. And I’ve heard bad stories about DreamWeaver on OS X

I’m still sorting out FTP on the Mac – I’ve tried Fetch and Transmit and neither seems at all intuitive – guess I was spoiled by WS-FTP …

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Emma’s been in Richmond visiting her mom this weekend, and while she’s gone, I’ve been backing up all the files on my PC, preparing to move everything to the Mac G4 coming tomorrow (Feb 9).

While I was going through the partitions, I found some old MP3 files from Sigur Ros and a few other artists. In the past I’d always used WinAmp – avoiding the DRM issues of the MS Media Player 9 (which I refuse to install!). On a whim, I downloaded the Windows version of iTunes to see what the fuss was all about.
It’s pretty neat – has some nice sort options, and has a place to stick the cover art when you load albums into it.

Its got a Visualization feature – but it doesn’t seem as well done as the visual plugins for WinAmp – it doesn’t seem to be modulated by the music as much as
the winAmp modules. I did find a site with info for adjusting the visuals –
http://doors.stanford.edu/~sr/itunes/.

I’ve been looking into getting a MAC for the next computer I buy.
In the past, I’ve assembled my own PCs; from the 286-20 I built in 1989 and started the BBS with; through the intermediate AMD machines; to the Pentium-4 tower I use these days. From MS-Dos with DesqView and QEMM through Win 2000, all have been on the WinTel hardware platform.

Frankly, its just too vulnerable anymore. I’ve got antivirus and firewalls and all of that – but MS just leaves too many opening for their “partners” that translate to open doors for all the crackers and scammers out there. Well, no more.
All I do is webwork and graphics anyway – why not use a machine better made for such work. I’l look them over for the next couple months, and hopefully by June … I’ll decide and … get either a G4 or G5.