Tag: apple
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2012 September 27
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Freedom to Change Your Mind
I posted a few days ago about freedom of and from choice, but I think there’s something orthogonal to that spectrum: The freedom to change your mind, both figuratively and literally. [ ... 978 words ... ]
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2008 October 19
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Upgrades versus Antiques
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2007 March 09
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Frustrations in using iTunes and iPod to capture podcast listening behavior
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2007 January 12
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the iphone will not be your new mobile computer
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2006 November 17
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macbook pro volume settings are aware of headphone presence
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2005 October 25
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iPod go thud then click, click, click.
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2005 October 21
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2005 October 06
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No user serviceable fans
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2004 October 27
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My iPod experience is all about tickling myself.
I've had an iPod for a little over a week now, and I've been working pretty diligently to rate every song I hear and trying to make sure all the metadata is correct. I've even started tinkering with tagging songs using things like :dreamy, :goofy, :energy, :calm in the comments field for use with Smart Playlists. (Yeah, I know about TuneTags, but the psuedo-XML in song comments bugs me, as does the somewhat buggy behavior of the last version of the program I tried.) By this point, I've managed to cram about 3400 songs from our CD collection into it. (So much for the marketing!) With my efforts so far, a “Good Music” Smart Playlist selecting for 3-stars and above gives me around 415 songs. This doesn't count the songs I've rated with 1-star, which get deleted from the iPod periodically. Also, I've yet to get a significant proportion tagged with special comments, so mood-based and concept-based playlists are far off until I get a better tool for letting me quickly and lazily tag songs. So, this morning on the way into work I fired up my “Good Music” playlist on random for the first time, and I was amazed at how good the selection was. Yes, I rated these songs, so I should know they're good--but so far, I've had all 3400 songs on shuffle and have been alternating between listening and rating, skipping songs I wasn't in the mood for, and canning songs right off the bat with a 1-star rating. So up until now, my rotation has been an okay experience. However, hearing that mix of consistently high rated songs was an unexpectedly good experience. What occurred to me as I rounded the last stretch of I-75 into Detroit this morning is that this metadata and these Smart Playlists on shuffle amount to an attempt to tickle myself. Ever try that? For the most part, it doesn't work. Sure, you know where you're ticklish--but if it's your hand trying to do it, you're expecting it and the tickle doesn't happen. I'm probably stepping too far into breathless pretentiousness with this, but it makes me want to think further about machine learning and intelligence. Yeah, Smart Playlists are a very, very rudimentary form of intelligence, but it's good enough to tickle me with a music mix--which is a very real bit of value added to my life. I wonder how much further this tickling-myself metaphor can be taken? That is: take a machine endowed with information I produced, apply some simple or slightly complex logic with a bit of random shuffle, and feed it back to me to see if it makes me experience it with some novelty. Someone's got to already be on top of this as a research project. That, or it's an idea obvious or dumb enough only to appeal to me. [ ... 973 words ... ]
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2004 October 19
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I'm one of the iPod generation now
So I finally got myself an iPod, thanks to The Girl. Through various twists of replacement policy and iBook promotional antics, somehow she ended up with two 20GB 4G iPods, both of which she's been planning to sell off on eBay to end up with some cash and an iPod Mini. Well, it finally occurred to me this weekend that I needed to buy one of those iPods. Lately, I've been only been listening to streaming radio at work, since I don't really have the hard drive space on my PowerBook for music, and loading up the work PC with MP3s is pretty unpalatable. I miss the days when I had a 40GB library at work, but between company policy where I am now and having lost that whole library in a hard drive crash back then, I'm hesitant to go there again. Enter the iPod. I was reminded of its presence in The Girl's office, still boxed up and shrink-wrapped, at a moment when I was thinking about podcasting and thinking about my lack of hard drive space. So, I gave in and snapped it up. Thus far, I'm pretty happy. Sure, I'd been looking at the larger capacity models that came with a dock and remote, but this one was the right price at the right place and the right time. I was also lucky that she had an iTrip she was selling that just happened to work satisfactorily for playing MP3s in my car - something that's been a bit of a quest of mine for years. While it's true I do have an in-dash Blaupunkt MP3 CD player in my Ford Focus now, it's also true that 20GB certainly outweighs 700MB. The few snags I've run into so far mostly have to do with the fact that it seems like my desired usage pattern of the iPod isn't quite supported. See, I don't want to have a massive library on my PowerBook, to be synched in part onto my iPod. I have a library on a file server at home, and I want to use the iPod alternately as a music store away from home for iTunes on my PowerBook and as an MP3 player while I'm driving. I don't want any music at all on my PowerBook. Problem is, though, the iPod isn't quite a first-class citizen in iTunes. Party Shuffle doesn't work, and I had a few problems with making sure metadata (like ratings and last played date) made it into iTunes. Oh yeah, and I wish they'd turn down the wheel sensitivity way down when setting a song's rating. At present, it's just a bare millimeter of a finger's twitch to leap from 1 to 5 stars. Might just be me. But, for the most part, I'm very happy to have my own music at work again, and the potential of tinkering with smart playlists and podcasts are exciting to me. That, and the fourth-generation iPod is just an elegant, slick joy to hold. [ ... 900 words ... ]