Very quick update testing both the WordPress app for the iPhone and the camera of the shiny fourth iteration of the beastie.

Thus far I’ve been very impressed. Still very much a fan of the Android system but the over all quality of the iPhone 4 is undeniable. It’s taken them a while but I think Apple may have finally gotten it right. Of course time will tell.

For now enjoy a dusk snap from a nearby park taken yesterday from the in-built camera

Ever encountered the hassle of archiving music in one format but needing it in another for your portable music enjoyment?  I have and spent this afternoon sussing out the most sensible way to do it (under Windows anyway).  Read on you, like me, faff with things like FLAC but need something a little more robust for on the road…

I’ve recently tidied up my music collection and got the tags right and started re-ripping my real-world CDs to FLAC. I like FLAC because it’s an open format and it’s lossless (meaning it retains the same full audio quality of the CD in a slightly compressed format) but it’s a touch on the chunky side.

For portability I have my Sansa Fuze that serves me extremely well but I’ll run out of space sharpish with FLAC files so Ogg, another open audio format, comes into play. Ogg is lossy (meaning audio data is cropped to significantly shrink the files but in way human ears don’t notice too much) so I can fit oodles of it on my Fuze. Problem is the faff of converting the FLAC albums to Ogg then copy them over. It’s a little laborious.

I started to hunt around for some tools that might do the trick. First stop: Songbird. Sadly no file conversion options on the go here. Next up DB Poweramp, a Windows audio ripping and conversion package. No luck here either as I have to convert to Ogg then create the destination folder on the Fuze (repeat for each album… ZZzzz….). Media Monkey has the facility but in the free version.. argh!

With great surprise my salvation comes in the form of an audio player / library that I shunned years ago: Winamp.

Winamp on a BIG monitor works well but gets very cramped very quickly on medium to small screens. That aside it does support copying to portable devices while trans-coding to the format of your choice all within the free version. The level of configuration you can dive into for your portable device is impressive. Permitted formats, by file extension, can be specified with anything that doesn’t match being converted automatically to the format of your choice.

Converting to Ogg isn’t supported out of the box however a happy Winamp plugin adds this and you’re good to go! I’d go into more details but hardly anyone actually reads SpaceCookies at the moment so leave a comment if you’re interested to know more.

Yes yes I know things like iTunes are much simpler and easier to use but if, like me, you’re one of the minority that demand full control over the quality of their music and aren’t scared off by a little tinkering it’s a great solution.

El Reg posted a piece yesterday on the surprising health of CD sales in the growing age of online music downloads and streaming services. It’s hanging on a lot better that was thought in the face of retailers closing and the easiness of buying through services like iTunes and zapping straight into your portable music player of choice *coughSansaFuzecough*. This got me to thinking that more so than occurred to me before the CD is my generation’s Vinyl.

The dawn of CD was greeted with a volley ‘oh look how small it is and harder to break’ along side ‘aaaaah it sounds rubbish’. Granted it didn’t help that mastering audio to CD was an art that took a long while to mature so CDs had poorer sound quality due to the content rather than the media. In my humble opinion a well mastered CD on average sound kit sounds better than a Vinyl – but it’s still a digital representation rather than vinyl’s physical capturing of sound which in the high-end of things should always sound better.

Times move on.. vinyl wanes in popularity as CD players become cheaper and more portable, CDs themselves become cheaper it gets it’s feet solidly under the carpet. Now digital downloads are nuzzling their mitts in too, now, I’m seeing some similarities to the CD vs vinyl argument.

Digital downloads are, by nature, again smaller physically (i.e. intangible) and harder to break (you can’t snap an MP3, only break the drive it’s on – but that’s ok, you can download it again) but also by the same token there is a quality trade-off. MP3 / WMA / AAC / whatever all are ‘lossy’ audio formats which means to get the file size down elements of the audio data is removed. The level of audio data removed impacts the quality of the sound. MP3, being one of the oldest lossy formats, suffers the most with quality degradation. I’ve played with legitimate MP3 downloading but always feel it’s lacking something so I’m returning to CDs for the most part.

With a CD I get the full audio quality which I can then convert into the lossy audio format of my choosing, rather than the music’s retailer’s, at the quality I desire while still retaining the full quality audio for home enjoyment. Perhaps most importantly though I’ve grown up with CD and feel at home with it, much like the generation or two before me hold vinyl in such high esteem.

Perhaps the time will come when downloading full-quality, or loss-less, versions of music will become commonplace but until then I strike a balance: listening via Spotify premium when something is new then bide my time to snare the CD once the price drops.

As ever thoughts and comments are open

Shiny for £100?

When digital cameras made their baby-steps to mass market they were pretty good but a little light on some features and depth of quality. Now, of course, even a cheap digicam can take a snap that compensates for even the poorest lighting.

I’ve been musing over the idea of getting the video equivalent of early digicams – pocket HD video recorders popularised by devices like the Flip HD. I know this line of consumer technology is in it’s youth but given that pocket camcorders are now around the £100 (such as the Samsung U10 I’ve been eyeing up) I’m thinking it might be worth a punt to see if they’re up to the chatter I hear about them.

Figure worst case scenareo I’ll get a couple of YouTube giggles from it!

Thoughts, comments?

The BBC, among others, are reporting today that a proposed tax of 50p (0.5 GBP) per month to be levied against any (presumably residential) fixed telephone line has been deemed unfair by MPs.

Oddly it seems the MPs have gotten this one right, in my opinion at least.  This tax would be used to fund ‘ultra-fast’ broadband along the lines that is already seen in more technologically advanced countries.  Problem is that ISPs, along with all communications companies operating in the UK, are lazy and greedy.  Why shell out for better infrastructure when they can still sell poor quality horrifyingly limited connections over copper-wire?

Better communications infrastructure is badly needed in the UK but tax is not the way to pay for it.  Government intervention is needed to kick the ISPs up their ethernet and force them to pay to for the upgraded.  ”BUT”  I hear you cry “then they’ll pass on the charges to us!” – quite right!  Problem is this:  if the Government via tax were to foot the bill they’d still charge us more for their “improved and faster service, because we care about providing the best facilities possible”.  So anyone paying for their internet connections will be stung – but if improvements were to be funded by tax we’d be stung twice >__<

Comments, thoughts?

I get a lot of emails with long-winded speeches in the footer about how terrible it is to print the email that’s just been sent – think of the trees wasted!  There’s two problems with this (ignoring that wasting paper is actually good for the environment – higher demand for paper = more trees planted to meet demand):

Firstly that adding all this at the bottom of the email wastes more paper in the event that the message *is* printed.

Secondly that adding all this to the base of each email adds to the amount of hard drive space required to store the message on mail servers.  Hard drives use power to run, the more data there is to be stored the more hard drives are required.  The more hard drives that are required the more power will be used.

On a side point all this including the body of the email you’re replying to has the same impact.

I know it seems petty but if people are going whine about printing emails at least be brief about it!

Thoughts, comments?

My housemate got a shiny 42″ HD tellybob. Originally we were going to go halves then two things happened: his parents offered to put towards as Christmas pressy and I got all nay-sayer about HD.

Thing is… now it’s here… and it’s a bit shiny. Still got my awesome Sony trinitron old-style telly in the lounge for my Wii and when I want to watch a DVD & The Shiny is in use (& because in a house with two gamer geeks being able to fire up more than one console at a time Is worthwhile). The Xbox 360 looks immediately better – suddenly there’s details before unseen *gasp*. DVD up-scaler does a fine job of making standard-deff video looks very good and there’s still a plot to hook my lappy up to it

May have to dig up the HD version of Transformers movie for a watch… Could see that being pretty nice.

So, in short, I deal myself a slice of Humble Pie and admit that it is’ in fact, pretty good stuff this HD lark.

Posted by Wordmobi

Simon Says 'Use Google Chrome'

Namely the feature I’ve been waiting for… bookmark synchronisation! Great days I eagerly downloaded the dev version (up to version 4 already, crickey) and with great gusto I hammered in my login details and waited with baited (is that even the right spelling in this context? meh) breath for my Google Bookmarks to stream down.

And I waited.

And waited.

Waited some more…

Nothing. Oh. Suppose it must just sync between chrome and other instances of chrome. That’s still cool but was a bit of an anticlimax. But wait… the story doesn’t end here!

Enter @chronarion! The fellow seemed to be interested in tails of bookmark fail, being involved in Chrome development an’ all. His words of wisdom told me that sadly Chrome does not sync with Google Bookmarks (which kinda makes sense – Google Bookmarks sucks.. sorry Google, it’s true). Oh woe was me, for how will I now access my bookmarks when not on one my own machines?! FEAR NOT, said @chronarion (disclaimer: not actually a quote), FOR SALVATION… is at hand. Turns out your Chrome bookmarks are also synced up rather nicely to Google Docs for web-based access where-ever you are.

Well pleased. So export my Google Bookmarks I did, import them to Chrome I continues, and gasped I concluded as I watched with glee at my Google Docs as it filled up with my bookmarks.

The only real down-side I’ve found so far is that you cannot edit your bookmarks within Google Docs but given the highly beta nature of the Chrome dev branch I really don’t feel like complaining about it.

On a side point Chrome (well, Chromium to be accurate) for Mac is feeling more and more stable – I’m now using it side by side with Firefox as my two main browsers. Bookmark sync isn’t enabled in the Mac version at the moment but expect it’ll appear soon.

Keep up the good work Google ^_^

Note: to enable bookmark sync under Windows make sure you’re on at least version 4 of Chrome (FileHippo are always up to date) then follow the easy instructions here. Enjoy!

Lots of gadgets make for disaster-proofing

The Tomtom app for the iPhone appears to have appeared in Americaland for $99.99. Tomtom app for the iPhone (or any GPS enabled phone for that matter) seems like an obvious win in terms of usefulness and carting around less clutter but the price point seems… well a little out of sync with my idea of reality. That said my idea of reality is far removed from that of the iPhone Brigade. For me having one all singing all dancing does *everything* device is great… but ultimately a fail. So there you are, merrily chattering away on your iPhone (in the event that the call actually connected), uploading your freshly shot videos to youtube, geotagging your auto-focused snaps, emailing your friends, Twittering to everyone else, now using the Tomtom app to get to wherever it is your going when DONK…

…the unthinkable…

it a) breaks b) runs out of battery c) you foolishly destroy it escaping from a hoard of rampaging chickens who have momentarily mistaken your for the Hero of Time.

Well now you’re screwed. How will you take photos of this exciting place you’ve come to? How will you tell people on twitter how awesome it is? More importantly… how will you get home??

I have my man-bag, laden with many exciting colourful badges as it is, in which I cart around work iPhone, personal Sony Ericsson phone, digi cam, sat nav, occasionally an EeePC, MP3 player, USB pen drive – none of these things are crazy heavy or excessively bulky but it does pretty much guarantee that at no point am I truly knacked by one device keeling over.

On a side thought $99.99 is far too much for a Tomtom app for iPhone – for the benefit of everything in one device I can see the temptation but for the issue of battery life (without car charger of course), risk of one device failure and that Tomtom have zero hardware cost and next to nothing distribution cost it all smacks of taking advantage of the iPhone crowd’s “oooh look at me and what the walled garden of my iPhone can do” attitude.