Apple Fiends

Apple's recent suits and resulting court case against Apple 'rumor' weblogs to get them to reveal the names of the Apple staffers who leaked trade secrets, has caused much concern among journalists who are worried about losing their rights to privacy of sources if a legal precedent is set.

Whether these Apple news webloggers are indeed journalists is unclear: they may be producing news articles but without any journalistic ethics or methods. Apple's methods in going after these one-man-bands with heavy lawyers reminds me of America's war against cocaine. It is not fought at home.

Unable to police its millions of coke addicts, the USA is defoliating coca crops — and any other crops in the vicinity — in Colombia and putting many innocent farming families on the breadline in the process. (If they do succeed, the coca will no doubt be grown in another country to satisfy the US market.)

Similarly, Apple is not questioning its staff about the leaks. Perhaps Apple does not want to demotivate its employees by investigating them too heavily internally(!?), or maybe they prefer their buyers to be deprived of advance information on their products, but Apple's image and fans are suffering as it switches from being the cool alternative to being The Man.

Jam-Packed

I've had no reason to pause at Edmonton, North London, since I saw Hawkwind at the Edmonton Sundown thirty years ago. Oh yes, and various traffic jams on the North Circular Road - the famed A406.

This morning in Edmonton, Ikea opened a new shop - their biggest in England - just after midnight and although only about 4,000 people turned up, chaos ensued: fights as rabid marketing victims jumped queues and congestion as bargain-hungry shopping zombies parked cars back along the NCR instead of in the car park. All this for a three-seater leather sofa for £45 until 3am and a double bed frame for £30 between 3am and 8am?

Channel 4 News: "There were 22 persons suffering from heat exhaustion and crush injuries ... and approximately 3,000 members of the public were discharged from the site by the police."

Ikea's new flagship superstore remains closed this morning while they repair the front doors.

BBC: Crush chaos at Ikea store opening: "Police said the stabbing of a man, in his 20s, near the store at about 0130 GMT was unrelated."

Reuters: Man stabbed in IKEA store chaos

ITV: Chaos outside furniture store

Tut tut, modern Britain, how people behave in a crisis expresses their character.

Apple didn't have this problem when 3,000 people queued patiently to get in their new Regent Street shop. Different kind of people.

Apple Mac stuff

The iPod microphone iTalk has many possibilities:

When you've got a really fat teacher that mumbles during your lessons at college, but your parents don't believe you, record the fat teacher on your iPod. Its the only way to sort the problem out.

Wow, a whistleblower that didn't get in trouble.

You can unstall Linux on the iPod and then record for free or play Doom on an iPod.

One reason to look in at an Apple Store are the thirty inch Cinema HD Displays. These unfeasibly huge screens need two special new Geforce cards to drive their 4.1M pixels.

Apple at MoMA photoset

Newsfire is a very sexy RSS aggregator.

Audion is now free. 1. install. 2. register with free password. You can then copy playlists to it or access iPod files directly. And the story of why Audion is now free is fascinating.

iTunes LAME encoder. Many people prefer the sound quality of this mp3 encoder to the new m4a encoder in QuickTime/iTunes.

Game: Homeworld 2. Looks like it's time to upgrade my iMac. This is apparently like an interactive Chris Foss painting. Chris illustrated many sf book covers in the 1970s.

Keys:

CMD Shift I = inspector
ALT ESC = complete the word
CTRL EJECT = Shutdown
CMD OPT CTRL 8 = White on black

Problems logging in? Run Diablotin to check startup items.

Network problems? In system prefs, try setting Network, Ethernet, manual, MTU to 1458 because 1500 is too big for some ISPs. Restart to make sure the value has changed.

From MacFormat, October 2004:

If you can toggle Caps Lock, then it's a 'hang' not a 'freeze'. Hang is software (usually), freeze is hardware.

iPod photo

The iPod is now mainstream, but as Insanely Great reminds us, it's nothing compared to blue jeans, now there's a product. And Mac360 posits that the new iPod photo may be Apple's first iPod mistake? Who cares, it's 60 gig, I could get most of my music on there. The U2 iPod is a mistake for me because I don't care for U2. Perhaps the iPod is too popular for these Mac sites to endorse now it is no longer Mac-only.

I'll tell you what's so great about the iPod: the design, which allows you to hold it in one hand and scroll or scrub and select all the lists and playlists and contacts and the calendar and notes and play the games and pause and power off and change the volume by moving only your thumb on that hand. Brilliant design. A world-beater. The notes are really useful: there are already databases available to tell you where the nearest wi-fi or toilet is. Well, fairly useful.

I'll also tell you this: the iPod is only the hardware component of iTunes. The iTunes Music Store is but a single window in iTunes. The photo functions of the iPod photo need iTunes to sync. And the iPod is nothing compared to Apple's revolutionary product before last: Airport Express and AirTunes - which needs iTunes.

Now some random iPod stories:

I beg to inform you that Podcasting killed the HTML star. It's a big phenomenon and I've just noticed it. Even the BBC has the podcasting bug. It's an RSS feed with audio that you can download to your mp3 player, or listen to on your computer. Brilliant idea, to supplement the thousands of radiostreams, now anyone can be a DJ or pundit on demand without having to worry about supplying a 24 hour feed. As Les Posen says: 'podcasting is less about the method of delivery and more about freedom of choice and democratisation of the spoken word'.

Update: now NetNewsWire supports podcasts, so you can download new stuff automatically to your iPod and listen to it while travelling.

And for those of you who are instant musicians using Apple's amazing GarageBand, or something more exotic, there's a new site MacIdol that gives you 3 GB free to store your music and let others hear it - and stick it on their iPods.

Empty iPod? For those of you with no record collection or musical knowledge: an iPod PlayList book. Links to iMixes on the iTunes Music Store. I haven't seen the playlists so I can't recommend this. By the way, this is my first iMix (iTunes link).

Are you as above, plus wealthy? Maybe the sort of person who buys books by the yard, before Hello magazine visits? Then you need MusicGuru. I found this site hilarious.

Or you could get someone else to rip all your CDs for you at a dollar a disc: the FillPod chappie teaches his customers how to do backups as well, and he doesn't keep copies, he says, which must mean he will be decoding the same CDs over and over, which must mean he has the volume turned right down.

Ballmer's iPod [via Pogue's Posts - always worth a look.]

The iBend is a one-off art piece - this must be one of the few eBay pages with a sound sample - for which bidding has ended.

Now, you can bring the Heavy Metal experience everywhere, the only thing better is being on the stage with your favorite metal band.

The iBend comes with four rocking guitar solos, that you control. Jam out with the radical whammy CENSTRON bend wheel, or rock the extreme pitch knob, you won't be disappointed. You may even get that elusive guitar god gig you have been looking for. Begin your new life, with the iBend.

iPod Socks are real, not something I made up. I think I want some!

We all know we can plug an iPod into a Smart car or a not-so-smart BMW, but how about a portable block party?

This paragraph contains an unmixed metaphor. The iTunes plugin for Audioscrobbler is called iScrobbler and its latest incarnation manages to copy data from my iPod to my Audioscrobbler page if I do things in the right order. As a guide, there is a text file with the plugin called iPod Submission Limitations, something the UK press does not have now. Stay with me. In tonight's Evening Standard (8/12/04) there is a big article on the iPod flash, a rumoured new device. For an old Apple fan like me, this is like seeing Hawkwind's new album win the Mercury prize. But don't they realize that if they spill the beans on Steve Jobs' latest project, he may just can it?

Browser Chrome

Will you look at the size of the chrome on this browser! This is Firefox using tabs with the Web Developer XPI. It's great, you can edit the style sheet en vivo.