Naquada

In my quest to possibly buy every Crumpler bag out there, I went out and got a The Champ (XL). I’ve long looked at getting a backpack that can hold my Macbook, Camera (Canon 350D) and my daily condiments.

Ok, Ok.. I admit it.. I’m a Crumpler Slut.. I’m a Crumpler Addict, My names ‘Drew.. and I own Crumplers.. and this is my fourth bag.. I love everything about Crumpler, not just its crazy ideas (such as the Beer for Bags Promo; bring in beer.. we swap it for bags.. and of course the beer party afterwards) or its bizarre and weird marketing, but just because these bags are cool, pretty, sexy, funky and pretty indestructible.. Once you’ve married your bag (that’s registering your bag to normal people) your bag is guaranteed for life.. they are strong.. and I mean strong.. hand made and fit all your life neatly in their ChickenTex Supreme fabric (no clicking around with wishy washy thin nylon here)

So I got my Champ ready for my Digital Masterclass tomorrow down in Dover at Kearnsey Abbey. The Champ neatly fits my Macbook (and possibly room for another laptop), has a bottom section that easily fits my Canon 350D and room for two 350mm lenses, in fact the bottom section is big enough to take out the Velcro dividers, and put my Crumpler Bens Pizza directly in (there’s nothing like extra padding!).

There’s enough pockets and slots to fit almost everything you’d possibly want to, or not want to take out with you, side pockets, bottom pockets, back pockets and even hidden pockets, and it’s got a a very nice side loop for popping a tripod leg through and holding it firm to the side of your backpack..

In fact I’m so impressed by this Crumpler, its willed me on to get another for work to replace the failing IBM rucksack..

Now Moo are providing MiniCards for Skype users as well as Flickr users.. Getting your Skype name across can sometimes be a bit difficult, so Moo have teamed up with Skype to make more MiniCards. Just like the Flickr ones, they are little cards where you can put your Skype Name, your web or blog link, pictures, and really just about anything else you want.

To celebrate the MiniCards launch, Mooare giving away free packs of 10 cards during this week. Just go to moo.com/skype, look for the “Enter promo code” field and type freebie. You can then customize your card.

Ok so I’ve been bad again this weekend.. The front room is almost finished, and its time to throw out the old and get some new goodies to brighten the place up.

Technically not the front room, but I got Pure One DAB radio for the bathroom (which kind of counts as that’s the next room on the list to re-vamp), I’d been looking for a bathroom DAB radio for ages, and the Pure Oasis DAB Digital Radio is just plain ugly, and nothing else really looked that good. The Pure ‘ONE’ is cheap, at £44.99 its about the right price for a bathroom radio, and the quality again is just amazing for such a small unit. Its just great, meaning that I can now enjoy Digital Radio in the shower and bath..

The front room now has three shelves as opposed to the seven I used to have, so it’s time to cut down on ‘extras‘. The CD’s and DVD’s are slowly being encoded onto iTunes on the Mac G5 upstairs, and after almost 12 years, the old stereo in the living-room really has had its day. So I’ve replaced it by purchasing a nice new Pure Legato CD-40, not only is it smaller than the old hi-fi, its DAB and its also got re-vu, which means I can pause live radio.

Of course the set-up wouldn’t be complete without an Apple Mac Mini to run the videos, audio, and act as the DVD player.. Thursday evening is plumbing in day… Digital bliss and geek gluttony.. Perfect..

So there was one issue with the new MacBook; playing shared video either via iTunes or via Front Row, it just didn’t work, fullstop

I expressly wanted to be able to stream audio and video from iTunes on the G5 back to a number of Mini Mac systems round the house, and getting the MacBook was a great way of actually testing to see if the wireless was up to playing it round the house.

I was very disappointed at first to find that although audio streamed no problem at all through iTunes and Front Row on the MacBook, video just caused a major headache for the MacBook.

At best Front Row came up with the message ‘The remote host is having issues playing this video’ or, Front Row just hung with a blank screen, or even sometimes iTunes on the MacBook hung and eventually needed to be killed.

I was initially thinking that this was an issues with my iTunes folder being on a linux box over samba, and I was ready this morning to head out and get a big SATA drive to put in the mac, but I wanted to try a local copy of a video first.

Setting the preferences to not copy the video into the iTunes library on import kept the video locally on the mac, but alas, the issue was still there, neither iTunes or Front Row on the MacBook would play the video.

A little more head scratching and thinking pointed me to some websites that discussed the MP4 tags needing to be very correct for iTunes to allow streaming, why I have no idea, but anything was worth a try..

A little digging later and I found Lowell Stewart’s Lostify; a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It allows you to change or enhance the MP4 tags on encoded video, and with a little conversion, I updated the tags and re-imported the video into the iTunes library.

Happily this completely fixed the problem, both iTunes and Front Row could then play the shared video. If you encode using things like Handbreak or use iSquint, the MP4 tagging seems not up to Front Row and iTunes standards.. So thanks Lowell, Lostify opens up a whole new world of video streaming, and seems to be a fix most Front Row users don’t know about..

If you do use Lostify, make sure you drop Lowell some money via pay pal, its worth a little of any ones money!!

I’m actually very impressed with the speed and quality of the streaming even over wireless from a remote samba iTunes library, and Front Row really is a nice application for intel macs, line up those Mini Mac’s, we’re going streaming…

Ok so I couldnt hold of any longer, a particularly long stay in the Apple store in Regent street yesterday resulted in the purchase of one of the new MacBooks.

I didn’t unpack it until lunch time today, as I wanted to savour the moment, call me sad I know but these something wonderful about being able to open a brand new box, and slowly explore the contents on your new purchase.

Like every Mac I’ve had, setup was simple, seamless and easy, it was up and running within about ten minutes, and loaded with all my normal applications within about an hour or so.

So far I’m very impressed, I was very worried about the various comments going round about the heat, peeling black skins and glossy screens, but I’m glad to say (touch wood) none of these issues seem to be affecting my unit.

I think the black MacBook just looks slightly slicker than the white. Admittedly white has always been associated with Apple, but since the introduction of the black iPod, I’ve grown to like my darker side of Apple. Not to mention the glowing white Apple Logo on the black lid just looks quite mean…

So I’m sat here on the sofa, streaming radio to the downstairs Airport Express, writing the blog and all is well with the world. I’m now officially an Mac geek, a two mac household, a member of the cult of Mac..

Any issues ? well.. just one, it seems that front row (or iTunes or something in the ‘i’ world) dislikes streaming shared video from a remote drive. That is, that I have my main iTunes directory on a samba share to my G5, both front row, and iTunes seems to not be able to play videos over wireless using front row 1.2.2…

I think this is a Apple / SMB / Front Row / iTunes sharing issues from the look of the Apple forums, some experimentation with locations of the iTunes directory may be needed over the next week..

So I took a quick shopping trip into Reading on Saturday and came back with a few new iPod accessories. Apart from the the AV cable (so I can run video in the bedroom), I saw that Alan had got himself an iPod Radio Remote.

I’d toyed with the idea for a little while, since the occasional trip into the IBM Southbank office would be slightly nicer being able to still listen to the radio. So I decided to pick one up.

It’s a pretty nice little unit, and I’ve missed having the iPod remote with the video iPod (they changed the connectors from the old iPods). It plugs into the dock connector on the bottom of the iPod, and brings up some additional items on the iPod’s menu.

Generally I’ve pretty impressed, although you seem to have to use headphones plugged into the remote itself to pick up a decent radio signal, since they become part of the aerial. The interface is OK, its not stunning, but does the job (I’m hoping they will do a bit of work on this in future upgrades to the firmware).

So far the only downside, and I’ve not tested this extensively yet, is that I don’t seem to be able to pick up RDS information. Although the remote should pick up RDS information (so I should see the radio station name and song information) I don’t get any information when I’m sat at home. Even when I tune the iPod to the same frequency that I get using RDS at home, there’s no station info.. Slightly annoying.. but I’ll be able to give this a decent test on Tuesday when I head into Southbank..

Not surprisingly at all that wonderful video iPod picture that has been circulating for the last few days has turned out to be a complete and total fake (mores the pity, but it did look a bit promising!!).

The person with the sharp photoshop skills has kindly released a video documenting how the entire project was pulled off. Along with some funky music, and some quick neat Photoshop moves, the video makes it clear that this particular video iPod isn’t anything more than a normal 5G iPod photographed twice at 180 degree rotations and touched up a bit.

Although there was a lot of is it? isn’t it? flying around, I think everyone kinda knew that it looked just too nice to be real.

A shame really but.. So what will tomorrow bring!?

I’m in London all day tomorrow so I might drop by the Apple store on the way home if there’s any good news during the day…

thanks Jim!!

Apple has planned a special event for February 28, according to several reports. The invitation-only event will be used to introduce new products and will take place at 10:00 a.m. PT at Apple Town Hall on its Cupertino Campus.

The rumours seem to be flying about point to the fact that Apple are releasing the Video iPod (the current one being a ‘taster’). The possible new Video iPod is even more possible given that Apple have filed a number of patents recently on touch screen technology, Theres a few good ‘leaked’ photos flying round that point to the fact that the new iPod video may have a full video screen and a ‘virtual’ touchwheel.

Guess we’ll all find out on Tuesday..

So I’ve started to go fully Digital. I’ve liked the idea of DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) for a long time, and was shamed into the fact that my sister had a DAB radio, and I didn’t!!

I decided to test out the whole DAB experience with the Pure Chronos, a DAB Digital Clock Radio from Pure Digital. I’m actually really impressed, on the sound side, the quality it much better than what I had before, I never managed to get my old clock radio to hold any station without sounding awful, crackly, hissing or just losing it completely. With the DAB it picked up all the stations perfectly, and gets 100% signal strength, the general sound just also sound much fuller and better (obviously from being a digital signal).

I’ve also found a few stations that weren’t available to me before, like Chill, similar in style to things like overexposure.fm but with a leaning to more mainstream chill.

On the technical side, I like the idea that the Chronos has four alarms. Each settable for weekdays, weekends, daily or once. The once setting allowing you to set an alarm for a certain date and time in the future. So this means I can now keep my early morning work days separate from my weekend lay ins..

Also, since the DAB signal contains the date and time, no more setting the clock to be right after power-cuts or summer/winter swap overs. The only downside, and I say this is a minor point; the unit only displays nasty 24 hour format time, I’m a purist, not in the military, and like my times to be am or pm.. as yet I’ve not found a way to get it into that format..

I’ve just managed to update my blog to show my currently (and recently) played track as shown from AudioScrobbler (or Last.FM).

I’ve always had the link to my Last.FM statistics page on the right under the Listening section, but now, in a kinda geeky way you can see what I’m listening or have listened to directly from here.

I’ve always like AudioScrobbler and Last.FM for the ability to understand what I’ve listened to, and what other stuff I might want to listen to, based on my music listening patterns. I’ve actually discovered quite a few new albums from its recommendations..

Anything I listen to at home gets updated in the Last.FM database in close to realtime, and anything I listen to on my iPod gets updated as soon as the iPod syncs up.

The MT scripts came from Cal Henderson (I think!!) and are under the creative commons licence.