Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Capitalist Lion
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Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
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Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Thursday, August 8, 2002
21:08 - Top off your iPod's coolness tank http://www.apple.com/ipod/download/	(top)
The iPod firmware update to version 1.2 just came out today, and it rocks da house. Now that iTunes can keep track of the play-count and last-played time of your songs, the iPod can now do the same thing-- play a bunch of music as you ramble around the town, and then when you sync it back up to your Mac, all the last-played times and play-counts are updated in iTunes to reflect what you've heard via the iPod as well as what you've played on the local machine. I love that. (It will also apparently handle Audible books-on-tape by keeping track of where you paused a file mid-track, then resume it there when you use your iPod-- and then update it back to your PC when you re-sync it.) Other new updated features include support for the new Sound Check thing, so your ears won't get blown out by an MP3 that's recorded at a level twice as high as the previous track you'd listened to. It also has a new Clock screen, and a Date/Time setting-- so it can do the last-played times properly, as well as to support the also-new Calendar feature. This doesn't serve as a PDA-style appointment-reminder yet, because iCal isn't ready until next month; but until then, we've now got a cool little pocket calendar, which is non-trivial functionality. It's also been reorganized slightly-- there's now a "Browse" option that gets you to the Artists/Albums/Songs/Genres/Composers selection menu (the latter two are new), and there are new updated graphics that make it clearer when it's not safe to disconnect the iPod from FireWire and when it's okay. There also seem to be a lot more languages supported. This stuff's just so damn cool. Having Mac hardware is like having a car with a gas tank that you get to fill up with software coolness every few months; just when you've gotten used to what functionality you have in the current versions, along comes an update that's always geared more towards making it even more fun and cool than before, rather than just fixing bugs. It really does feel like my love for technology gets a new booster shot every time they do something like this. Today at lunch, I was in a car with a friend who was searching for a song on the Discman-like MP3/CD player that was in the car. Because the player could only sort by filename, and because the guy didn't know whether the filename began with "Azar Habib" or "Hatten �r Din" or what, he spent a good ten minutes skipping around blindly looking for it. I couldn't resist peeking my iPod out of my pocket, so I could point out how much less tedious and more fun it is to be able to paw through one's songs on the basis of artist name, song title, genre, album, composer, or playlist-- without the slightest regard for what the filenames or folder names containing the actual MP3 files might be. His reaction was a pained whimper. "Everybody has an iPod except for me!" (He also mentioned how software like WinAmp is supposed to let you manipulate the ID3 tags and sort the songs by them, but it doesn't often work very well-- some files simply won't let you edit the fields. Whereas with iTunes, it's simply a matter of clicking on a field and typing. And it even updates the filenames and folders accordingly, now-- just in case anyone cares to delve into the filesystem for some reason. But otherwise it's a purely ID3-tag-driven interface.) And now that it's available for Windows too, it takes a whole lot of effort to come up with a reason to dislike the iPod. Unless it's the FireWire issue... and now that Apple has released a free SDK for FireWire to developers of embedded devices, the counterarguments are getting thinner instead of multiplying. Maybe I should buy stock in a clothing maker who sells shirts with breast pockets.