Saved by Broadband

Good luck to those that have dial-up and want to keep their computers up to date these days.



That's nearly 300 meg of updates for this round.

The Dream iTunes Disk?

The dream part will make a little more sense once I finish up a post in progress.

LaCie just announced a new hard drive with iTunes Server support! We've been talking about this at work. We want an iTunes data store that isn't chained to a computer. I don't want to have to run a 200W computer just to access some podcasts on my Apple TV. This looks perfect. From their manual...


Apple has its own protocol known as iTunes. All HipServ’s include iTunes Server support. Computers and DMPs with iTunes support can enjoy their media that is stored on the HipServ. Selected protected content using Apple’s FairPlay DRM will need to adhere to the rules that the content creator has specified. HipServ complies to these requirements and will allow playback if those requirements are met. When UPnP sharing for a folder on your Ethernet Disk mini Home Edition is turned on, the device will appear in iTunes under Shared.


I read that as supporting protected content, as long as the playback device is authorized. Hopefully that includes Apple TVs, and not just authorized computers. This drive isn't nearly as good looking as the new Western Digital My Books or Iomega drives, but it isn't bad, and I should be able to hide it away. Half of me wants to preorder right now. The other half says wait for a review about Apple TV support.

5 of the Now

• The Chemical Brothers - The Salmon Dance This was an instant favorite from the new album. It's wacky but a good tune. The video is great, and kids love it, which makes it nice that they edited the track for the video. Here's the YouTube copy. If you like it, I suggest you pick it up from the iTunes store.
  
  


• Scissor Sisters - Take Your Mama I was jamming to this the other day and realized I haven't had any Scissor Sisters in the 5otn. This 30 second preview doesn't really capture the fun and energy of the track. This is a great album.


• The Crystal Method - Cherry Twist I had the good fortune of seeing the Method live, twice, back in '97 and '98. They've just released a deluxe edition of their album Vegas to celebrate its 10th anniversary. It really is one of the great electronic dance music albums. Cherry Twist didn't see as much success as some of the other tracks on the album, but I especially enjoyed it live.


• Moby - South Side (Hybrid's Dishing Pump Remix) Chem Bros, Crystal Method, Moby, and Hybrid. Is it the late 90s? Gwen Stefani helps Moby take it up a notch and then Hybrid knocks it out of the park. I'm a sucker for strings in electronic music.


• Adam Freeland - Silverlake Pills Rockin

Lock it Down

Electronics have lots of buttons. Sometimes you don't want to press those buttons. You just want to leave things the way they are. iPods have Hold switches. Phones allow you to lock the keys and unlock with a key sequence. Windows Mobile PDAs allow you to lock and unlock using the touch screen. Modern cars let you lock the window controls. The thing is, these are all mobile devices. Are they the only ones that can use a lock feature?



How about locks for all types of electronics? I want to be able to lock my TV, DVD, and receiver controls. If you have kids, annoying friends, or even drunk uncles, you know that there are plenty of people that want to push your buttons when you don't want them pushed.

Give me a software lock. Put it on the remote next to mute. Put up a small, translucent, lock icon when operations are attempted while locked. Remove the lock when power to the device is interrupted, just in case you lock it and lose that remote :)

The Other iPod Dock

It's not the thing that goes on your desk. It's the thing that now looks more like your desk, with icons on it.

The new iPod touch dock doesn't match the iPhone. Instead, it matches the new dock coming in Leopard.



Isn't it funny how Apple can make basically identical products look different? The do the same thing with apps. Aqua, brushed metal, dark gray. Ugg, it annoys me.

The New Apple Keyboard and VI Pain

So far, I've been pleased with the new Apple keyboard...except for VI. I'm a heavy VI user, and if you're familiar with the text editor, you know that you use the Escape key, a ton. That's bad news for the new Apple keyboard. The esc key is now a half-height key, up with the F keys.



This is terrible for my VI usage. I miss the key all the time. Sometimes when I miss, I hit F1 and dim my monitor because that's the brightness down key! Grrrrrr. The esc key on the old Apple keyboard was not only full size, but double wide. I had no problems hitting that one. I'm going to give it a little longer, but I can't suffer when using VI.

Quick is Key(words)

Tagging your photos is a grueling process, but the end result is magical. You feel so great when you type your friend's name into the search box and up pops all the pictures of them.

As an iPhoto user, I previously used KeywordAssistant because the tagging tools in iPhoto were just too slow. iPhoto '08 has fixed that. The new keyword tools are amazing. You can now easily enable keywords and tab between photos to fill in the keywords. I suggest using the View menu to enable keywords and disable everything else so you can quickly tab and type.



Even better, you can promote your most used keywords to your Quick Group. This will assign one letter quick keys to your keywords. Hit the letter to add the keyword, hit it again to remove it. You can tag hundreds of photos in minutes, all from the keyboard. I will use this a ton.