Do you like how my titles never make any sense?

Received an invite to Hulu the other day. Hulu is NBC/Universals answer to iTunes TV Shows service, which brings obvious questions such as did NBC pull out of iTunes because of a pricing dispute with Apple or because they already had their own service planned (because you sure as hell don’t code up a video platform this quick.)

Any poop, there were hints abound that this service wasn’t going to be US only, but hey guess what? It IS!

Which is an absolute insult and I’ll tell you why. Apple offered NBC and the like a way to get a global distribution. A little while before they pulled out, Apple had gotten TV Shows into Europe, so shows like Heroes and The Office could be downloaded in the UK. But now they can’t in any way shape or form because NBC want to go it alone but can’t be arsed to negotiate distribution and rights in Europe.

So due to greed the world (except US… the world is always except US) misses out.

Also, good luck finding a legal way to watch the office on a portable device now.

New Radiohead LP next week and I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it I ….  Weird.

It’s gonna be soooooo gooooood, I heard most of the tracks either live myself or from bootlegs and I love them to bits.  The collection of live bootlegs was in itself one of my favorite albums of last year, so I’m wetting myself in anticipation to hear what the studio recordings sound like.

Even better you can pay what you want for it, I just paid what I would have had it been on iTunes, is that tight?  But even if you aren’t bothered about radiohead you could pay just a few pennies and see why they’re awesome.

There’s also a box set type affair, but it’s made to order and costs 40 quid! lol.  You get weird crap with it, and as well as the CD’s everyone gets 2 vinyls as well, what would I do with them?  Suppose I could model a rather smart hat from them.

I guess thom yorke wasn’t too happy with parlophone’s record deal renewal terms.

Tried out the BBC iPlayer yesterday, or was it the day before?  Fuck, what the hell does it matter you shitting bastard!

It’s a multitude of immense bouts of stupidity. It only works on Windows, so first, being that I tossed out my boot camp installation a few months ago I kicked up Parallels, which I have a pretty standard XP install on.  So that’s stupidity #1.

First had to sign into the site with my beta invite login.  Here’s stupidity #2, the beta ID wasn’t my iPlayer Login, it was just to access the page where you sign upto iPlayer.  So I had to created yet another login.

Once i’d got a login I choose a show to download.  Ironically the big show on the iPlayer page that day was one of those celebrating Stephen Fry’s 50th, I say ironically because he’s a well known Mac advocate, even going as far as saying he hates windows and Microsoft in general with a passion.  So I choose that one.

It then gave me a sorry message because my system had failed the check list.  Oh I can’t use firefox. Stupidity #3.

So, in Internet Explorer now, tried again.  Chose the same show, this time I got 4 happy green ticks.  Yay…oh, not yay.  Despite the ticks my set up is still wrong, it tells me to look at the point with a red X.  Cept they’re all ticks.  All happy green ticks.  Stupidity #4.

Googled my problem and discovered it’s so specific that I need Media Player 11.  No mention of this by the beeb.  So upgraded Media Player and tried again.  Stupidity #5.

So logged back into the site again, chose the Stephen Fry thing, then guess what.  I’m still not ready, I now have to download iPlayer. Why the heck didn’t the process begin with this?  Stupidity #6.

So I installed iPlayer, went back to the site, chose the Stephen Fry thing.  It then added the show to the iPlayer apps download list.  Pheeeeww.  Ah, not much is coming though.  Left it for a good hour.  Still 0%.  Stopped the download and restarted it.  Nothing.   Stupidity #7.

Life is too short.

If I was the BBC I’d immediate scrap the iPlayer and sack everyone involved.  Just put the shows on an infrastructure already established.  iTunes, or maybe even Joost. It’s simply a waste of resources and license payers money to construct your own.  Just stop it now.  Please.

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.

Discovered Kip the over day. At first I was overjoyed because I thought I had found an application I’ve been waiting for for a long time, turns out its not quite my dream app yet.

You see, we have iPhoto for looking after our photo’s and displaying them in a way that suites photo’s, we have iTunes looking after our media files and displaying them in a way that suites media files. So what became immediately obvious to me is that we should have other cataloguing applications for other kinds of files. In particular, an app for cataloguing document files… and displaying them in such a way that suites document files, and maybe even spreadsheets. I think it would be ideal for apple to do this, after all, they seem to be struggling to move finder onto the next level, if you had specialist apps instead you would only need finder for odd bit of archiving and such like.

So yeah, my first thoughts were that Kip is THAT app, but it turns out it only supports PDF’s, and is especially geared towards scanning stuff in to be turned into a PDF, and then catalogued. You can drag existing PDF’s in, or create new ones by simply dragging images into a drop box. It’s still early days, this is a free preview edition, it will be commercial pay-for software eventually so maybe it will support other files by then. The way you tag the documents is highly effective, you can click on a tag and it will show just those documents, but also hide the tags that are no longer relevant, and you can keep drilling down by selecting more tags until there’s just the couple documents left. Also, when you hover the mouse over a thumbnail it shows a zoomed in portion in a floating break-out box, a little in the style of that trick aperture does, you know the one…

Oh and, it crashed on me today so…