Rockin' the Macworld

If only I was. I'm quite excited to to see what Apple introduces in a few hours. As you may remember, four years ago I went to a Macworld. It was pretty spiffy. Take a look at the picture, for proof.

MacBook Air? Time to wait and see!

Want.

Want.


Source: errorwear

Vista and Leopard's Windows Filesharing

Vista is a pain in my ass.  Leopard, decidedly less so, but still a pain.  The two of them together?  Well, please just kill me.

First issue - Vista can't connect to a fileshare I set up on my Leopard-based PowerMac.  Vista complains that I've entered the wrong password.  On the Mac, /var/log/samba/log.smbd says this:

[2007/11/17 22:57:59, 0, pid=475] /SourceCache/samba/samba-187/samba/source/auth/auth_odsam.c:opendirectory_smb_pwd_check_ntlmv2(446)
opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user gave -14090 [eDSAuthFailed]

From this site, I found that when entering the username on Vista, you have to do it in the format of IPADDRESSusername.  So, if the server's IP is 192.168.1.1 and the username is bob, then you enter 192.168.1.1bob as the username on Vista.  And then enter your password like you normally would.

Second issue - Vista's Windows Backup and Restore Center gives you the option to backup to a fileshare.  Seems like a no-brainer, eh?  Well, not so much, as evidenced from posts like these.  I eventually found that I had to use the registry edit to change Vista's LmCompatibilityLevel from 3 to 2.  That seemed to do the trick.

But of course, Vista has, yet again, failed in its backup.  The network share is no longer available, or some such BS.

I love Windows.  Gah.

AppleCare in a foreign country

Having AppleCare is a good thing. My power adapter on my 15" PowerBook bit the dust last week. I took it into the local Apple office here in Bangalore and got it replaced. First time I've had to get a repair on this computer outside of the normal 1yr warranty. AppleCare will expire on this computer in September. Very good purchase. I'd highly recommend it for anybody that has an Apple laptop. It's that whole, piece of mind thing.

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1532

One cold, calculating motherfucker.

iPod mini - 4GB of storage - $249
iPod - 15GB of storage - $299
iLife - $49 (downloads of iPhoto and iMovie no longer offered)

It's about time that they put the hurt on users for iLife, and I'll happily shell out $49 for iPhoto's speed improvements (it's unbearably slow on a dual 1.42GHz G4 with nearly 2000 photos). GarageBand looks cool, but I'm not much of a musician... playing with loops in Soundtrack is fun, though. I'm still happy to get updates for all the other apps as I use them all. iMovie's currently exporting a video to VCD so I can send it to my Speed TV-less friend up North.

As for the iPod mini, interesting concept, but not quite what I was expecting. I thought it'd be more square-shaped than it really is. As a coworker of mine commented - iPod mini price drops could happen if Apple starts selling a lot of 15GB iPods (and subsequently stops selling 4GB iPod minis). Oh, and Phil Schiller (Apple's Sales/Marketing VP) mentioned that Apple hasn't ruled out the 2GB iPod mini. Interesting.

I'm still in love with my 1st generation (1G) iPod, but the announcement that Alpine would be coming out with a car unit with an iPod control interface might actually convince me to update to a 3G iPod (or use Nicole's 3G iPod in the car ;-).

El Gato's new EyeTV stuff looks cool. They added quite a lot of features in their newer models - MPEG-2, Digital Satellite support, and HDTV. Note that each feature comes in its own unit, but all use a Firewire interface. Unfortunately, there's not one über unit that supports it all. Still, it's better than MPEG-1 from the original USB EyeTV.

Hrm, what else... good on Ten Technology for coming out with a Bluetooth audio interface for the iPod. I'm curious as to how good it sounds. And Griffin's playing catchup now with Belkin as it released a voice recorder for the 3G iPods.

G5 = Gotdamn!

Wow, so Apple came out with a bevy of announcements today. I won't repeat what's already been covered on /., but hell yeah baby. Go Apple! Please put my dual-1.42GHz G4 to shame! I'm going to look forward to upgrading to your 3GHz G5s as soon as they're available in 12 months!!! Hell yeah!

Cool iTunes stuff....

So, since iTunes 4 came out, I've been experimenting a little bit more with smart playlists and converting my lower-quality MP3s to higher-quality AAC files. I found out some cool things yesterday:

1. I created a smart playlist called iPod playlist. I told it to populate the playlist with songs that never had been played before, rated between 3-5 stars, with a maximum playlist size of 4675MB, chosen randomly. Why the size? Simple, for my iPod. That's about as many MP3s I can fit onto it. So, when I play my iPod, the play count for the song will be incremented on the iPod and automagically synched up with my iTunes playlist. Very cool. And because the smart playlist is dynamic, it'll constantly give me new stuff to listen to until I've listed to all of my music. When that happens, I'll configure the playlist to give me stuff I haven't heard in six months or so, keeping it still very fresh.

2. If you're re-ripping CDs to AAC format, replacing the MP3s you have, and the ID3 tags match up with what's already in your library, you'll be given the option to Replace Existing songs. Do it - it preserves the original creation date, play counts, ratings, and any album art you might've added to the file. The only thing it doesn't preserve is the genre, but that's easily fixed.

I'm VERY impressed at how iTunes manages the library. I hope all those Windows users get a good version of iTunes at the end of the year that does all of this stuff.

Legal music downloads a reality for me now.

Today I purchased and legally downloaded a track from Apple's new iTunes Music Store service. I had a LOT of trouble getting to that point, due to the immense amount of traffic the poor service is seeing. And, after managing to make the purchase, I haven't been able to make a connection to buy more music. I'm gonna try again soon.

But, all in all, the purchase went very smoothly and the quality of the AAC-encoded tune (Missy Elliot's Get Ur Freak On) is awesome. I'm going to start encoding everything I buy in AAC as it is the superior codec.

The $0.99 price per track is great. Don't be fooled, though, not all albums are $10. It's up to the labels to set the pricing, as I found out with Audioslave's album - it's a per-track price only. So, you want all 14 tracks? Great, pony up $14. But, for a lot of the albums on the service, you'll pay $10.

Apple, so far, has done a fine job of creating this service. I'm sure it'll become more reliable as the initial hype dies down. I was sad to see that Metallica (har har) and Linkin Park were nowhere to be found on the service. And, doing a search for "Voices Carry" by 'Til Tuesday turned up no results. That's why they've got the request link :-)

Killer App

Interesting roundup about Apple's rumored music service and hoaxified Vivendi purchase over on Washington Post today. I'm of the opinion that this whole music download service could be the killer app that Apple has needed for years to pull in more consumers to the Mac platform. If Apple can get all of the Big Five labels signed on, and offer downloads at a reasonable price, with excellent iTunes and iPod integration, then this is going to rock the PC using world quite hard.

It's going to be interesting to see where this goes on 28 April. I've got plenty of free space on my hard drive just waiting for some (finally) legal music downloads.