Used the 2nd Gen iPod nano + Nike for a while now so here is a scattergun barrage of my feelings.

What the peeps have been saying is true, the iPod+nike effort really does succeed in being a motivator.  No way would I have run as much as I have been over the last few weeks without this kit.

Probably no substitute for those expensive shure or sheinerheissher earbuds that cost a fortune but the redesigned apple earbuds sit in my ear in such a way that they seem to sound a little bassier than the older ones, so that’s good.

My eyes truly did decieve me when glancing upon the photo of the Nike armband on Apple’s site, it isn’t a gross mock-leather affair at all.  It’s all fabric thank god, it’s not great, great would have some way of seeing the screen, but after wearing it I can appreciate the design, it’s all for the feel of it on your arm, when you stretch it tight around it manages to make yer feel all muscley, haha I dunno how it does it but it makes you feel super fit.

My nano 2G has crashed 4 times, maybe even 5.  Some have been hangs when initiating a workout, the other times when casually navigating the library.  I thinks Apple knows of a problem because since receiving it iTunes has patched the nano’s firmware 3 times already.

Often, especially with 80’s music, some music has been mastered to CD a little too quietly.  You can fix this in iTunes by using a feature which lets you increase the volume on a per track basis.  I’ve had a little problem with this feature when the music is on an iPod before, but the Nike kit outdoes all my previous annoyances with what is one of the most dumb things I’ve ever witnessed.  When, running and you hit a piece of music which you have had to increase the volume for it will do as it should and you won’t notice that the music has been recorded too quiet.  But then the womans voice will shout “2 MILES COMPLETED” so loud that you jump, fall to the ground twisting your ankle and nursing your poor ears which now have blood pouring from the vessels.  Yup, the nano has increased not just the volume of the quiet music playing, but the whole iPod volume, including the nike vocal cues.  Gosh… dumb.

I still haven’t gotten over how much I love the red finish, every time I pick up the nano I have to stop for a few moments to gawp and take in it’s beauty.

Wow, I’m pooped, i’ve just come back from a 3.5 mile run… well apparently it was 3.5 miles…

Hey look what arrived today! The toast of the town, it’s a red iPod Nano. Gosh, the box is even smaller than I realised, no photo can do justice to just how small this box is. Me loves the red, it’s a nice red, as nice as a red can be. The nike thing is a dandy contraption, and super easy to use. To calibrate it you just go to the calibration menu, choose either walk or run and that run for say 400metres, and it says to you sumting like “start running now” in a darling female voice. Unfortunately, i think I must have got the distance a bit off when I calibrated it though because I’ve just come back from a run and the Nike+ website reckons I’ve just run 3.56 miles and looking at an A-Z I cannot make the route out to be 3.56 by anyones reckoning. Guess I’d better give the calibration another good going over.

Hey, tell you what, the new headphones are a real improvement. I didn’t have all that much against the old ones except that run running I’d have re-adjust them a tad now and then. Well, these new ones sit so snug in and cosy in my ears that they didn’t budge an inch the whole jaunt.

I founsies a nice little Wordpress plugin for flickr. It adds a “photos” tab to the the upload/file broswer panel on the write post page. You scroll through your flickr photo’s right on the write post page and just click on one, a menu pop’s up and you choose the size you want to be inserted into the text! How easy is that!

Not at all sure what to write about so I think i’ll write about how allay cats love to play hop-scotch.

The nights are drawing in terribly now, i was staring out my window at 5pm at a moonlit night and it was way depressing. It’s deadly silent too. Scary.

Ordered a (Product) Red* iPod nano, nike+ sensor doodar and nike+ armband yesterday, hazaaaar. My joy was quickly soured however when the order gave me an estimated despatch date of the 23rd of october. That’s like 3 weeks away! So hopped around in a strop, cursing Apple for releasing these things when they can’t even fulfil a days worth of orders so they really ought to call it a pre-order. But I just, like 5 minutes ago received a despatch confirmation off them! Wooohoo! Now that’s what you call a pessimistic despatch date.

The Nike+ Armband is freeking ugly by the looks of the picture but as far as I can work out, when you’re using the nike sensor it’s either the ugly faux leather armband where you can’t even see the screen, or you run with it in your hand, getting in a tangle no doubt. Because the sensor stops it from fitting into the slinky little apple made armband and it’s using the same socket as the lanyard thing so that’s out of the question too. Bit of a nuisanse that.

Google Documents and Spreedsheet, meet Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time and other garbage.

Waaa Waaa!  Google have gone nuts, or has my browser?  One of the two have, maybe both.  You can’t get any closer to having Safari 2.0.4 than having Safari 2.0.4 can you?  Ah well, I loaded Firefox and tried it in there instead.  It is all stylish and pleasent on the eyes like most of Google’s services but I don’t think I’ll personally use any of it.  I was interested in using the spreadsheet because I still haven’t got a good spreadsheet app on my mac, they’re either bloated and take an age to load, like Openoffice/Neooffice or they are some unusabliy limited freeware effort.  I can’t seem to be able to figure out how to do certain things with Google’s spreadsheet though, things that are must have features for a spreadsheet.  For instance how do you complete a sequence of numbers?  Usually you can just type say “1″, then “2″ and “3″ and then drag select them and then expand a box in the direction you want it to complete the sequence.  I just can’t seem to do it in Google’s.

I’ve gotten my mitts on Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time for my DS Lite.  It’s spot on fun from Nintendo and surprisingly eventful, constantly surprising things happen.  I love it!  I’d describe it as a light-hearted cartoony final fantasy, you walk around colourful maps occasionally being pulled into step-based fights.  It’s got quite a sense of humour too, in my last playing session I came across 2 Kooper Trooper’s who had been fitted against their will by alien probes and the probes were making them speek in l33t.  Seriously, they called my characters n00bs and said things like w00t and pwned. lol nintendo aren’t trying to be hip with this, they’re taking the piss out of the culture. lol

Lastly, Arrgh I want me’s a Nano Product Red!  Actually, I want a pink nano but i’d risk being beaten up for having one.  But the Red one is defo’s the next best thing and you’d be doing your bit for charideee.  But arrgh, for some reason it isn’t appearing on the UK apple store site, it’s on the UK Apple site but not the store.  Grrr.

Bought a Tripod today, Scott Kelby told me not to get a cheap one, but this was only 50 quid, yet it’s the brand he recommends. So is that good or bad? It’s pretty damn fine actually, it’s light and has a ball head. The legs and that seem stable enough but the the quick-release socket where the camera goes has a tiny tiny amount of give and I’m wondering if it’s enough movement to shake when the shutter goes. Dunno.

I was listening to a mac podcast the other day and they brought up a subject I hadn’t given much thought to. It’s all about security, a boring subject, especially where the mac is concerned because it’s almost a non-issue but there are some surprises.

The Mac has 3 user levels where security is concerned and they are almost impossible to compare to the 2 windows provides so I won’t even bother. The do anything security level is “root” which anyone familiar with unix will know about, if you are logged in as root you can cause huge huge damage such as reformat the hard drive.

Next is admin who can modify most desktop level things without hassle, but can even do root level stuff by giving an application permission to escalate the user level. An admin only needs to give their own password to do this.

The least privileged user is “standard” who can access their own files and that’s about it. But, they can provide an application with admin access by providing the application with an admin’s username and password.

With a fresh installation of Mac OS X, after you have given the welcome sequence a username and password to use the machine with you will be logged in as “admin”, this is the default user-level and all would seem well because the OS hasn’t given you any rhyme or reason to change things. Well, this podcast mentioned that this is really dumb, in fact there is even a flaw with the package installers, they can, if they wanted escalate your user-level to root without even prompting. I’m actually quite shocked at this, if you use your mac day-to-day as a standard user you will have no such risk, it is impossible for an app to escalate to root without you giving it an admin’s login details.

I’ve dropped my account to Standard and I haven’t had any problems or naggles at all so I recommend everyone to do this. The only hassle is that when you do something like drag an app from a DMG to the Applications folder you will need to provide the admin account details. Ack, it’s not bad though, I can live with that quite easily. Also, when you are a standard user threes a gotchya with the terminal you should know about. Standard users don’t have access to sudo, so when you read a tip that says things like do “sudo defaults penis.plist erect = 1″ you will need first to poop “su admin” where admin is the name of the admin account.

I love the Apple Keyboard to bits, it has in my opinion a perfect tactile feel, a good compromise between noisiness and jellyness. But, it’s also a good example of Apple design that absolutely has to be treated with kid-gloves if you want it to stay looking prestine.  It has a translusent case, which looks great for the first week and then begins to show everyone your eating habits and problematic hair lose.  I’ve only had this particular specimin a few weeks and look at it already!  Hey, that photo was of the whole keyboard and I cropped it to an inch of its life to show the yuck and it still looks clear, despite the knockers I love my camera, imagine the damage I could do with a macro lens!   Actually, I want a telephoto lens before a macro, the most affordable but still OK four-thirds (thats the standard of lens my camera uses) is 200 quid, but the couple I’ve watched on ebay have gone for the 120 quid mark.  Mmmm, still not an impulse buy.  damn.

I had already lost a bit of blogging fever because my cyclical in style depression is looming around the place, it’s really annoying, at the moment I’m waking up thinking to myself “ooooh, I fancy working on that coding project I’ve got going today” and I spring out of bed, read my webfeeds and then take Eddie for a walk.  Then when I get back and sit at the comp something comes over me, everything slows down… no thats not right, ugh you see this is the bit I find impossible to explain.  But yeah, my mind clouds over and I sit here for some minutes and then think to myself “fuck it, i’m going back to bed.”  Still, at least it isn’t bi-polar, did ya see that doc Stephen Fry made about it?  Twas fascinating.

So that was the first reason for bloggy slackiness but then my Cheap-assTM hosting went tits up.  They had fireworks from a hard drive and it turns out they don’t have much in the way of mirroring going on… that’s why it’s Cheap-assTM.  Felt like days passed before I could post anything, and even when the site came back the databases took a further day or 2 to be restored.

And to make things even more irritating they haven’t restored one of my databases properly, my listmania one where I catalogue shit, and is now a pretty damn vast database has been restored without the UTF-8 encoding intact.  So all them foreign films have now got titles like “La Vie Un Gar^&$son, Mons^&£@^n”.  I’d email Cheap-assTM to restore it again… properly, but I figure the chances of them managing it now are probably nil.  So I’m just going to have to go back to the last version I have of it locally, which is about a month old and merge them somehow.  It’s most annoying.

I’m really feeling the new iTunes, the grouped with artwork view is very effective.  Best of all is the gapless play, a feature I’ve been waiting for for a good while, it didn’t do too good a job of scanning my library for gapless LP’s though, the first one I tried it on, Mew’s “And The Glass Handed Kites”, which incidentally is in my opinion the best LP so far this year, was not tagged as gapless, but it’s easy to correct by selecting all the tracks and setting the gapless option in their info dialog.  I do not like the new colour scheme though, it looks like a goth got their dirty mitts on it.

A stork visited my brother and his wife on Tuesday, a wee girl with rosey red cheeks and is as sweet as a little baby can be.  I’d post some photo’s but I don’t post photo’s of people without their permission (unless they’re animal) and i’m not asking permission because then i’d have to mention the blog and that would be damned embarrassing.  Not to mention all this baby can do is gurgle and scream.

Tomorrow is the 12th, which means Apple are announcing something awesome, probably.  Well, it has to be better than the last presentation hasn’t.  Also, if the incredible wow-ness of the 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo isn’t even good enough for inclusion in the presentation then it must be the stuff of paralytics.  They’re going to announce a movie download service, thats a given, but by all accounts that must mean that there’s a new device to watch them on, becuase the current iPod doesn’t quite cut it for full length movies.

But it’s not just a video iPod they’re introducing tomorrow, it’s the iPhone, with super-duper movie playing features, and i’ve uncovered an exclusive photograph of it, I found it whilst hacking apple.com.  Just look at that thing!  Touch sensitive screen, and such a high quality resolution that you can even watch episodes of Crossroads on it.

The biggest feature is to do with the mobile phone element though, and it is absolute genius.  How many times have you been forced to answer an important call and you’ve had to be all smiles and pleasent otherwise you’ll lose that lucrative contract?  Well, Apple have invented a way to make your voice sound happier, ecstatic even.  In fact, the phone will even laugh for you.  These features are so important that even with the touch sensitive screen Apple decided to dedicate 2 physical controllors to them.

AAAAAARRRRRGHHHHH

It’s even worse than I feared!!!  I cannot believe it, i’m totally gutted.  They’ve released a new iMac that’s 24 fucking inches and it’s freaking the same price that mine 20 inches used to be!  With a Core 2 Duo as well.  I feel like crying.  How much do you think I’ll get for this one in ebay?

I need comforting on this traumatic of all days.

My EyeTV Hybrid arrived today. I’ll tell you what, it’s a good job I didn’t get the DVB-T only version despite being a lot cheaper because as expected I get sod all Freeview here, it does detect the existence of a couple of Freeview channels, just the BBC ones (do they have preference where freeview frequencies are concerned?) but it can’t make head nor tail of them. To be fair my room hasn’t a roof-top aerial connection, I have to use a portable, but I did also try it on the house aerial downstairs via the iBook and it still had no luck.
So, I’m having to use its analogue support which still gets you the quality EPG via a web service and recording facilities so woo. From a portable aerial my reception is barely watchable… as expected. After a mammoth amount of hunting through old cables and shit I found a CAT5 splitter from many years ago so I was able to see if there was anything pick-up-able from the Telewest cable, which my cable modem is using. Hey, who’d have thunk it, Telewest are still transmitting a couple of analogue channels. Analogue cable TV has always been pretty grainy and a little washed out but its preferable to all the wierd ass atmospheric interference I’m getting from the aerial. The channels I get are BBC One, BBC Two, Channel 4, ITV1 and bizarrely a channel which seems to be Bloomburg during the morning and early afternoon and E4 the rest of the day. I cannot fathom why i’d be able to find that, and not say Channel 5?

I’m finding the software to be neat and well designed but during the messing, re-scanning and all that it did crash a few times, or as the mac puts it, unexpectedly closed.

It isn’t quite as streamlined and intuitive as a PVR, for instance you can’t just pause live tv any time you like, it isn’t always recording so you have to press record before you can pause it. Although, confusingly when it isn’t recording pause will do “freeze frame” which at first looks like it’s paused but when you press pause again it will jump to whats happening now and you’ll have missed what had happened meanwhile.

I’m disappointed with EyeTV’s apple remote interface. It feel’s obviously not integrated with front-row despite them trying hard to mimic Apples interface. Also, I appreciate that the Apple remote is rather lacking in buttons but even still they could have done better to make the most of it. Up/down does volume and left/right does seek. If you do Seek when record isn’t running or you aren’t playing something back it just flashes up “not applicable” or words to that effect, you would have thought it more sensible to make left/right do something else useful whilst seek isn’t applicable, especially when stupidly if you want to change channel you have to press “menu” to go back to the menu screen, which makes good old channel surfing a total chore.