Hey, lookit that!

My blog address is now officially on my own domain (augmentedfourth.com)! Blogger is still hosting & publishing everything, but I finally got around to making my server's DNS point to them instead of using the amateurish blogspot.com URL.

Also, in playing with blog stuff I was poking around some old posts of mine. Apparently, in October 2005, I saw into the mind of Steve Jobs. Everything I predicted/desired in that post has come true in the years since.

iPhone 3.0 (3GS) Voice Control problems

OK, so I really like the new iPhone. However, its Voice Control feature is really not up to snuff.

Firstly, if I want to dial the phone by voice, I have to take the phone out of my pocket and speak into it—even if I've got a Bluetooth headset connected. My old RAZR let me voice dial into the headset by pressing the button; why won't the iPhone? The headset button just makes the iPhone redial your last outgoing number, and only if you hold it down for a couple of seconds.

Secondly, if I have a playlist containing only podcast episodes, Voice Control won't play it. Apparently Voice Control will only play songs for some reason. I've got multiple podcast playlists (one for the short daily ones that I want to listen to first, and another for the other longer ones that come out less frequently), so when I want to switch between them I have to glance down at the screen.

Thirdly, and probably most important to me, there's no way to use Voice Control to start a playlist in shuffle mode—which, once my podcasts are finished, is exactly what I want to do. I have to start a playlist, then separately issue a "shuffle" voice command or shake the phone (if 'shake to shuffle' is enabled). While this could a serviceable enough option, it adds one to the Skip Count of the first item in the playlist! I haven't skipped the song; I just wanted to start the playlist in shuffle mode. This throws off my smart playlists, some of which use Skip Count and Last Skipped Time to determine which songs should be included.

The worst part of this two-steps-to-shuffle bit, however, is how long it takes—especially while I'm driving the car. I should be able to issue a single voice command, not go through the whole rigmarole twice just to end up how I want it. Not to mention that it takes nearly 3 seconds of holding the button down just to start Voice Control each time, and then it may or may not understand my command properly the first time anyway.

Actually, in the process of writing this post, I discovered way to get a playlist going in shuffle mode without incrementing any songs' Skip Counts, but it takes three steps! First, issue the Voice command "shuffle", then it says "no music is playing; do you want to play music now?" So then you have to wait for the beep and say "yes," which starts playing your whole library in shuffle mode. Then you can start Voice Control again and tell it to play a particular playlist, which will then start in shuffle mode.

Apple, please think of the people who are using your products in the car! Make it simple to place calls and initiate shuffled playlists without looking at the device! There's a "shuffle" button at the top of every playlist in the visual interface; shouldn't that be an option in the spoken interface as well?

I realize that, at iPhone OS 3.0's introduction, they said that Voice Control wasn't totally complete. However, its inclusion at all was one of the big things that convinced me to finally get one, so I'm a bit disappointed that it was added on without the usual polish of most Apple products.

My (brief) adventures with AppleTV

So I bought an AppleTV yesterday. I had been advised against it by two different people, especially since my primary intended use was going to be for playing videos from Hulu through the Boxee plugin. I'd been told that the Flash video playback on the device was no good, and both of the people to whom I spoke had either uninstalled Boxee or gotten rid of the device altogether.

However, I'm stubborn, and I figured my standards couldn't be too demanding. Hulu on my iMac looks awesome, even through Boxee, so how much worse could the AppleTV be? I still watch cable and DVDs through the coaxial input on my TV, after all! Also, my TV is a 4:3 CRT, and I haven't even been exposed to the fancy-schmancy High Definition stuff that's all the rave these days. I just wanted to see it for myself, so I went to the Apple Store after work yesterday and picked up a 40GB ATV.

I thought that my set, with its HD component video inputs, was capable of displaying 720p HD— but apparently it isn't. I had to settle for standard-def 480i output from the device, which was the first disappointment of the evening. I set the machine to sync with my iMac's iTunes library, then I sat down to eat dinner with my wife (who was finally discharged from the hospital yesterday! hopefully she stays well for a while this time).

After I finished cleaning up from dinner and loading the dishwasher, all of the lights in the house suddenly turned off. They flickered back on briefly, but soon the house was dark. Thankfully, it wasn't yet 7pm, and Daylight Saving Time meant that there was still enough light coming through the windows that we weren't entirely enshrouded. My AppleTV adventure was cut short, though. I turned on my (battery-powered) EeePC in order to look online for the power company's phone number, only to realize that the outage had also turned off my modem and router. I ended up using Google's 800-GOOG-411 service to get ahold of them anyway, and was told that it was a known outage that should be resolved by 7:46pm.

Around 7:30, the lights came back on. I turned the AppleTV back on and resumed the iTunes sync. I let the AppleTV play the latest episode of the FLOSS Weekly podcast while it finished syncing and I surfed the Web on my netbook. This was the best use of the device I'd had yet... the ability to listen to podcasts & surf the Web while downstairs in the living room and not holed up in front of the iMac in my home office.

After the sync was finished, the AppleTV wanted to update itself to the latest Apple firmware, which I allowed it to do. Then I created the USB patchstick with my SanDisk thumb drive so I could hack the box and install Boxee. It installed and ran just fine, so I fired up Hulu. The video there was incredibly choppy. It got better when I turned off the 480p high-resolution stream in my Hulu account and restarted the stream of Monday's episode of Chuck, but it still wasn't smooth. This was very frustrating, and the Boxee CBS player had the same problem. Oddly, the Comedy Central player was better, but still not great.

Boxee was awesome when I set it up to play video files over the network from my Mac. I had a House episode I'd downloaded recently since my cable box's DVR cut off the end of the show, and the XviD file played great streaming through Boxee.

However, my main attempted use for the AppleTV was going to be a replacement for cable, watching all the shows I like with Hulu and through Apple's iTunes Store. I wanted to make sure I got all my video legitimately, through paid or ad-supported Internet means, and not have to resort to downloading all my shows from the shadier corners of the Internet. Since Hulu wasn't satisfactory as a cable replacement (and Big Bang Theory doesn't have any legal Internet distribution, anyway), I restored the device to its factory settings and put it back in the box to return it to the Apple Store.

It made for an enjoyable evening of hacking around (I even enabled ssh access to the AppleTV, which was pretty fun just for the hack value), but it's just not viable as a replacement for cable. I'll probably need a full-scale Mac mini for that, but if I'm going to run full-on OS X I don't want to be using a CRT with overscan, anyway. I'll wait until I can afford both a mini and a new flat-panel TV with HDMI input, which probably won't be for a while.

Apple's new anouncement

First off... this is probably the very first Apple announcement in at least four years that I didn't know about in advance. Seriously, the first time I heard about Tuesday's press event was in the NYT article linked below. I feel this is my first step toward becoming a "cranky geek."

In any case, I've finally been thinking more about getting an iPhone, and this new wave of features (and the speculated cheaper new hardware in the summer) is making it ever more attractive.

The oddest thing to me about this report, though, is the description of their new "pay for program enhancements" feature in the App Store. When I read this, my first reaction was to think, "Cool! People can now offer free trial apps and then charge for an upgrade to the full version, like Mac apps have done for years!" However, they've explicitly stated that any app offered originally for free can't have any paid add-ons, so this model won't be available. If developers want to offer trial software, they'll still have to put separate free and paid apps into the Store.

I also hear that they're upgrading the synchronization of personal information from the Internet to the device in the form of direct CalDAV support. Sounds cool; I'm officially considering this seriously now.

Apple Shows Off Next Version of iPhone Software - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

OS Virtualization on a Mac: Parallels vs. VMWare

Now that Apple's computers use Intel processors like the rest of the desktop computing world, it's become easy for Mac users to run other operating systems in tandem with OS X. Sure, PowerPC Macs can dual-boot certain Linux distributions that distribute a compatible version, but a lot of Linux software packages are written only for Intel's x86 platform.

With the change in processor architecture, a Mac can run all the mainstream desktop operating systems... including Windows, if you want. In fact, you no longer even have to reboot the computer to switch the running OS; virtualization software is now available to let you boot a virtual "guest" system within your OS X "host."

The two competing commercial programs for virtualization within OS X are Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion. (There are a few free-software alternatives, but I haven't successfully used any of them.) It seems that VMWare and Parallels are both very good at what they do, and they seem to be playing a constant game of leapfrog such that "who's better" is constantly switching sides.

It was really hard to make a distinction between the two, but after reading an intense comparison on MacTech.com I discovered that:

• Parallels is a little bit faster than VMWare


• However, the faster the "host" Mac, the less speed difference there is between them


• VMWare is much better at virtualizing operating systems other than Windows (i.e. Linux)

Since I have a fast, recent Mac, and I plan to run a lot of Linux virtual machines, that clinched it for me. In fact, I ran into a poll on MacResearch.org that showed that people virtualizing Windows tend to go for Parallels those running Linux VMs tend to go for VMWare. Since my primary application will be Linux virtualization, I bought VMWare. I tested it before I bought it, and it's been running the latest version of Fedora (one of my favorite Linux distributions) just great. It also looks like I'll have plenty of cool features whenever I decide to start virtualizing Windows.

And, since I bought in 2007 (December 31, but it counts), it looks like I'll be able to take advantage of a $20 VMWare rebate as well. The website says it'll take a few days for my order to be fully processed and for my rebate eligibility to be verified, but it looks like it will go through.

I bought a new iMac!

I have been saving up for a new computer for a while, so with Apple's Black Friday discounts today I went to their store and bought one. It's a 20" iMac with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, which needless to say is a huge improvement from the three-year-old Powerbook that was previously my main machine. The new Mac will be even speedier when I increase the RAM, but I didn't want to pay Apple's outrageous charges so I'll be getting that upgrade someplace else. Still, the 1GB of DDR2-667MHz memory that came with it is nothing to sneeze at.

Apparently the two Apple Stores I usually frequent were very busy today, but luckily I was at Apple's retail Web site before I went shopping and I discovered a new little-known location not far away; I went there (at about 10:30am) and had no wait whatsoever.

It came with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) pre-installed, but a 10.5 (Leopard) DVD came in the package so I could immediately upgrade to the newest operating system. They must still have a backlog of 10.4 machines that were already assembled and packaged. I didn't have any personal data on the computer yet, so I completely wiped the hard drive and installed 10.5 rather than upgrading.

I'm really enjoying it, and I'm trying to stay with the bundled software and hardware as much as possible. I'm still using the Mighty Mouse, iChat, and Spotlight instead of the replacements I had in place on the old machine. However, Safari just wouldn't cut it for browsing and I already installed Firefox.

Anyway, I'm rambling now (if I wasn't in the first place; this is a personal blog after all), and I should probably get back to playing with the computer. And maybe eating. Between going to the Apple Store, cleaning my office to make space for the new computer, and setting everything up, I just realized a little bit ago that I forgot to eat anything. Dinnertime!

Apple retail stores revamp for holidays - Yahoo! News

The best Steve Jobs article I've read in a while

Though the author, John Heilemann, is a self-described "Mac cultist," he offers a well-balanced summary of the life and times of Steve Jobs in his recent article for New York Magazine (linked below).

It's long, and according to a friend of mine it "was written with an editor's vocabulary" (that is to say, with sesquipedalian tendencies), but I found it interesting and insightful.

The iPhone Inaugurates a Dangerous New Era for Apple Boss Steve Jobs -- New York Magazine

Apple Retail - Insanely Great Stores

If you've ever been to an Apple Store, you know that it's different than anything else out there. The one in the mall near my office seems like a cross between Brookstone and Gymboree, with an informal schoolroom in the back.

This difference has catapulted the Apple's direct-to-consumer outlets into the most profitable retail venture in the country. In terms of sales per square foot per year (the standard metric for retail success), Apple's chain of stores brings in almost twice as much as Tiffany & Co., its closest domestic competitor.

For more detail, including some quotes by Apple CEO Steve Jobs about the reason for the monumental achievement, click the link below.

Fortune - Why Apple is the best retailer in America

Not Talking about the iPod

Oddly, an article about portable media players that doesn't so much as mention the iPod. Granted, the article is about devices with wireless data transfer capabilities, but Apple's market-dominating player isn't even noted for the fact that it lacks such a feature.

Music and Video Players Add Wi-Fi Access - PCWorld.com

Another Apple prediction

So everybody has been speculating about Apple producing a cellular phone, a widescreen iPod, and various other bits of technology. But, as Valleywag has stated, there's probably something even bigger coming up.

I bet it has something to do with the 32GB NAND Flash chip that SanDisk announced a few days ago...

Geekzone: SanDisk Launches 32 Gigabyte Solid State Drive