CS and the City

When I started writing this review, I was half way through my fifth flight on Virgin America in three weeks time.  I felt knowledgeable enough to write an informed review on the entire VA experience.  But as I started to flesh out my mental notes into something more concrete, I realized why I enjoyed my flights so much:  The Virgin America plane is one big gadget.

Red is the name of Virgin’s in-flight entertainment system, and the most featureful I’ve used in my travels. It has radio and an impressively complete Music library, Music Videos, Satellite TV, TV on Demand ($1.99 per), Movies on Demand ($7.99 per) , and Video Games.  The Virgin Airbus is the first plane to pass the “Can you play Doom on it?” test (and all the cheat codes work!).  One of the other really hyped feature of Red is the seat-to-seat chat and plane chat room, but I did not see a single person in the chatroom during any of my flights.  I think this might be more “wow” than actually useful.  On the other hand, a feature that is very useful is the ability to order drinks and food directly from Red at (almost) any time during the flight.

Despite the plentiful entertainment options, Red is very much still in beta.  There were several points where the system was slow and unresponsive, once requiring a reboot.  This must be a somewhat common occurance as flight attendants occasionally warn about the need to reboot during the take-off speech likening it to their passengers’ Windows PCs.

Some of the features aren’t built yet: Read, Shop, and Email keep telling me to try again on my next flight. Red allows you to create to create musical playlists, but there’s no payoff if your list disappears as soon as you get off the flight.  It screams to be tied into a personal account (so much so that a login button is present in the home menu, with no functionality behind it).

I’m also convinced that several of the Satellite TV channels are pre-captured streams.  For example, on all of my flights, the Sci-Fi channel seemed to be playing the same two episodes of Battlestar Galactica over and over, and the video feed didn’t seem to break down in turbulence like CNN would.  Speaking of which, the satellite’s reception seemed to relatively poor compared to the similar system on WestJet flights.  This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if they offered a fresher selection of on demand video at a cheaper price point (read: free).  Geek style points for offering Diggnation and Boing Boing video for free though.

On the technical side, I have a supicion that Red is built on Linux.  After rebooting, my screen faithfully displayed the familiar X Windows Server backdrop before moving into Red.  Another sign? One of the games in the system is called Linux Circus.

Overall I’m very impressed with the system, but they’re going to have to iterate quickly on both the features and the content lest Red becomes a novelty rather than a necessity.

Though it’s been a poor season of roll up the rim to win for myself, my parents managed to snag one of the Garmin Nüvi 250 GPSs.  I’m heading on a Canadian coast-to-coast roadtrip this summer and my parents graciously offered their prize to help make sure I don’t get too lost on the way.  

The 250 is very thin. The outside sports an SD card reader, mini-USB port, and power switch.  Booting it up for the first time, I was surprised to find that Tim Hortons had gone to the trouble of branding the Garmin with a Tims logo at the start.  My roommates joked that it might also have a “Find the nearest Tims” button.  We were even more shocked to find that it actually does.

According to Garmin, they’ve customized it to include more than 3000 locations.  For me, it seems to display the ten or so closest results, the furthest away being 12 km (gives you an idea of the saturation of Tim Hortons in Southern Ontario).  It’s a very cool feature, and makes these GPS prizes pretty unique for the winners.

I noticed that plugging the Garmin into my laptop to charge mounted the filesystem, which let me poke around for what makes the Tim Hortons GPS special.  As far as I can tell, the main directory has a number of .img files that store the map data.  By process of elimination, it looks like the Tim Hortons data is stored in a file called gmapoem.img.  This is a known filename for dealer customizations, and a quick look through a hex editor of my copy shows a few “TIM HORT” strings in the mix.

Seems like any Garmin owners should be able to get the same “Tims button” by adding the gmapoem.img file.  If there are any interested participants, leave a comment and I’ll send you a copy of the file to confirm this.

Beyond that, looks like this gadget has a number of avenues of customization and a features I haven’t discovered yet.  As interesting things crop up, I’ll be sure to publish my findings.

Transmission has been a favourite BitTorrent client of mine for a long time. Its compact design, complete feature set and small memory footprint are much preferred over the bulky Azureus. Unfortunately, somewhere after v0.7, it lost its high-performance ways and I had to switch back to Azureus just to get my downloads to work. I’m happy to report that it’s back, better than ever post-v1.0 (Now at v1.10).

I recommend any Mac owner check it out for their BitTorrent needs. It’s now also available on Linux/*BSD so I suspect they can experience the same joy

I wonder why it is that Windows apps have brutally straight forward names like MP3 Tagger and Windows Journal and Mac apps have names like Tangerine. Do Mac developers strive to make their names as unrelated as possible? I have to know these things if I’m going to become one

Here’s the money shot: Tangerine does cool stuff with your iTunes library that would have taken you way to long to do yourself. Sort of like SoundFlavor (I guess… my PC owning buddies have been rubbing that one in my face for a few days now). Get on the free beta here or better yet, get yourself a license for blogging about it.

Tangerine is a tool that analyzes the songs in your iTunes music library by beat intensity (amplitude?) and allows you to create playlists by specifying ranges of BPM and intensity and then making arrangements of songs based on your parameters. For example, you can create a playlist that starts with slow tempo music and then builds in the middle, effectively making a perfect (and random) workout soundtrack.

But keep in mind, it’s beta software. It’s hard to tell at first though (I’m really impressed how fast it flew through my music collection).

Things to watch out for:

• Since Apple in their infinite wisdom decided to store album art work outside of files, it appears that any albums you’ve tagged with Artwork using the iTunes get album feature won’t properly display in Tangerine. It’s too bad too, the playlist view is very very cool. It would be even cooler without all the ‘?’. Hey, do Apple one better, want to go populate those BPM fields on my songs for me? I know I’m not going to…
• Tangerine seems to have trouble with some of my songs. Sometimes it evaluates the BPM incorrectly (fast for slow, slow for fast), but worse is that I think it fails on some of my songs. Instead of indicating that, however, it just doesn’t show them in the library. I can only assume that’s why they aren’t here.
• I really wish I could simply drag a song in and then have Tangerine generate a playlist based on that first song. Sort of like Pandora but for iTunes. I don’t really need songs that rise and fall over the course of the playlist, but if it’s raining in the morning. I’d love to be able to tell Tangerine just to give me a bunch of songs based on this one Sufjan Stevens track and throw it on my iPod. Which leads me to…
• Yep it’ll save the playlists back to iTunes, but I wish I could save it directly to the iPod. Technically Tangerine should just be a plug-in to iTunes, but I think they’re quite limited by Apple’s API so I understand why it’s a seperate app. Still, I don’t want to have to switch between them if I can avoid it.

As always, things are bound to change between now and 1.0. I’ll give you an update once it comes out. Definitely give it a sneak peak while you can though. The UI is tres pretty (as Potion Factory apps seem to be). Man, who needs all those Web 2.0 apps anyway?

AKA The only reason I will be installing Crossover Office on any future Intel Macs.  I’m not kidding, it’s that good.  Don’t bother reading this, go get yourself a copy at the Writer Homepage.

Using Windows Live Writer feels like how it must have felt to use that very first version of Microsoft Word.  All that ease of use pouring over you after years of being stuck with edit. How everything is fast and intuitive and not hidden in awkward commands or layers of documentation.  Windows Live Writer is possibly the best example of “Do one thing and do it well.”

I cannot remember being this passionate about a Microsoft product since I used Encarta to breeze through my fourth grade report on Jellyfish.

But let’s start from the beginning. The beginning being my blogs, all three of them.  One is a personal blog on a webserver running on Wordpress, the second is a friend’s development blog I contribute to on Blogger (De-coded under links), and the third is CS & the City.  None of my blogs are official Microsoft Live Spaces blogs and all of them were picked up without any hassle by Writer. All I had to provide is the URL, username, and password.

With this information in hand, Writer sets out to my blog, making a connection using one of a number of supported API (According to the website, Writer supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), the Metaweblog API, and the Movable Type API.)  Once it has successfully connected to the blog, it writes a quick-test post and then downloads all the applicable styling information and related images so that when you write your post, you can write it in exactly the same style as it will appear in your web browser.  Of course, you can switch to a normal word processor style view, or even HTML view to fine tune the markup.  As Writer works now, however, it creates some of the cleanest markup I’ve seen from a Microsoft product (Frontpage anyone?).

I also love the fact that it picks up my categories I have set up on my Wordpress blogs (although it doesn’t appear to let me add additional ones from Writer).  It also lets me change properties of a post – enabling/disabling comments and trackbacks, adding trackbacks to ping, etc.

I do have a few pinch points I need to point out though.

The sidebar has links to a number of recently written posts as well as a link to create a new post.  Unfortunately, clicking them will open up your new or existing post in a brand new window.  Word learned this lesson years ago, and Firefox has more recently taught IE a thing or two.  Tabs for posts would be a welcome addition and I can only assume it’s coming in a future version.

Spell checking is available, but it isn’t in-line like Word or Outlook.  Now that I can get this functionality in the Wordpress or Blogger console with Firefox 2.0, I don’t want to give it up.  In the same vein, though Writer will automatically save draft versions of my post, it will not propagate them to my blog automatically. It gives me a button to do that (under the Publish drop down menu).

All in all, an incredibly solid product considering it’s in beta and it’s free.  I’m really looking forward to where the MS developers take it and what third-parties do with the powerful SDK.  I’ve already got myself a Flickr plug-in.

Last complaint?  It’s not available on my Mac, yet.  Come on, there was Windows Media Player for Mac! Why not a Windows Live Writer too? Especially if the developers add support for .Mac blogs.  That would be a kick in Apple’s iPants.

Earlier this month I celebrated the one year anniversary of the arrival of my very first Apple: my 12″ iBook. Along with it, I received my second iPod, a blue second-generation 4 GB iPod mini.

I was hoping to give comparison battery numbers after a year of ownership. I was blown away by the battery life when I pulled it out of the box so I was quite interested to see how well it would do after a year. Unfortunately, the iPod didn’t last that long.

I started noticing issues in my iPod over the last three or four months. Random shut-offs and weird lock-ups started popping up. Not with any sort of frequency. At least not with enough frequency for me to be without it. In hindsight, putting it off only made it worse. With less than a month left on warrenty, I punched up Apple on the internet and requested a repair.

Unfortunately, Apple’s one-year warrenty policy on my iPod is, well, several shades of bullshit. Really, it’s just a gradual fade out of service possibilities. You get free phone support for the first 90 days. After that, you’re looking at $30 per phone call. If you have trouble with you iPod (as I did) you can send it back for repairs free of charge IF it’s within the first six months of ownership. After that, you’re looking at a $40 fee for shipping and handling. Really too steep considering how much it must ACTUALLY cost to my little iPod back to california. If the guys on eBay can do it for $10, I don’t see why Apple can’t.

Although Apple’s “support” is largely a money grab. I was quite impressed with how timely it was. Shipping a return-for-repairs package to me took two days. Shipping my iPod back, another two. Repairs were done in less than two and as we speak, my replacement iPod is in a DHL sorting facility on its way back to me. The process uses a nice web interfaces for checking the status and e-mails you updates when it is received and on its way back to you. Also DHL seems to do a lot better at keeping their updates on their tracking page relatively real-time. Purolator and Canada Post could take notice.

I also found a quality issue with the touch scroll wheel. It felt as if the wheel itself had spotty reception so the scroll functions were often jerky; I would scroll for some distance with no movement and then the highlight would jump to the item two away. I remember reading that the second generation minis had their scroll wheels optimized for power use so I suspect the feel here was a victim of the optimization as I’ve never come across it in the first generation minis.

On the positive side, I’m still on my original pair of ear buds. I managed to go through three during my year with the first generation mini.

For those interested, here are the accessories I’m using with my mini:

• Griffin iTrip mini
• Apple Firewire + AC Adapter
• Generic AC to USB adapter (charge using the iPod USB cable)
• Generic headsup cellphone holder for car (mounts to air vents)

Note: No case. I don’t feel like I need it and I’m using my iPod every day. You cannot say that about any other iPod except the shuffle. That’s why it will be a while before I upgrade my iPod mini.