Gareth Simpson's Notes

Life is Random

Sunday, January 16, 2005

So say Apple as an excuse for the stripped down nature of the iPod Shuffle.

Except of course, they're right. A random selection of your favorite tracks is mostly all you need. Having reinstalled my home computer, I have yet to get round to replacing all the wiped out music.

Turns out it doesn't matter. Instead I've been connecting to my last.fm personal radio station. All my top tunes (no laughing at the back) streamed to my home in random fashion.

Does this mean I'll get an iPod shuffle? Well no, I still lust for the full on white iPod goodness and iTunes Audioscrobbler users will be pleased to hear I am > < this close to getting one.

What I would get would be a mobile phone that would stream last.fm to me at an affordable cost. I wonder how far in the future such a device is?

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Low end Apple

Friday, January 14, 2005

There's not much point in pontificating too much on the Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle. The world and his wife has done this.

Of course I'm still going to do it.

Personally I think the shuffle looks like a nice flash player, but it hasn't had me reconsidering my decision to get an iPod. The Mac mini looks fun, and if they're still going in 12 months I'll probably get one to retire my current iMac. With any luck they'll be G5 based by then.

The response to the new Apple products has been largely predictable. People are largely hailing them as the affordable Mac/iPod for granny or castigating them for being underpowered / underfeatured and not as cheap as they look. I can't decide which side I'm on.

What I am surprised about though, is doom laden predictions that they undermine the Apple brand. I can't believe this is true. The smart luxury brands always have an affordable range as well to keep the aspirational masses happy. I'm strongly reminded of a documentary I saw not so long ago the jewelry market. The gist of it was that recently Cartier neglected its low end range in favour of its more traditional uber-jewelry. All they found was that Tiffany ate them for breakfast across the board.

I'm thinking that Apple has decided that it's brand building has been successful enough at the high end that less expensive versions are not only desirable, but necessary. All they have to do to make it work, is maintain their perceived quality.

At the end of the day, these products are simply more affordable. They're not exactly cheap.

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Six Apart and Livejournal

Friday, January 07, 2005

With all the excitement about Six Apart acquiring Livejournal I think it's worth remembering the importance of Livejournal.

I hope fervently that there will still be room for posts like this one (from my own Livejournal's friends list) in the SA/LJ era or we will all be poorer.

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What security problem?

Friday, January 07, 2005

In theory my home machine should be a completely spyware and virus overrun spam distributing zombie.

I've been running anti-virus free Windows XP pro on a broadband connection for about a year which I'd heard was tantamount to suicide, especially when you consider that almost all of that time was pre SP2.

In my more paranoid moments, I have taken to running netstat -a to look for unexpected connections whenever my machine slowed down suspiciously.

But in the last few days I have installed both Anti Virus software and Microsoft's new Anti-Spyware tool and both report me clean.

Hurray for the twin joys of XP's built in firewall and FireFox.

I suppose there's always the chance that my problems are so insidious that neither tool could spot them. Hey ho.

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Music player usage is a power law just like everything else.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

At least if you believe these figures from Audioscrobbler:

lastscrobplugin | count

-----------------+--------

wa2 | 17667

itw | 5518

wmp | 2920

osx | 1846

foo | 1823

xms | 591

ark | 533

qcd | 205

jmc | 74

rbx | 39

slm | 27

tst | 9

shk | 4

mdn | 3

bmp | 3

mpd | 2

noa | 2

pte | 1

123 | 1

The good news for me is that iScrobbler for Windows is the second most popular plugin even if it lags seriously behind Winamp.

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43 Things

Saturday, January 01, 2005

I can't decide if 43 Things is pointless or genius.

I'm very much hoping that it will turn out to be as inspired as delicious and flickr.

In the spirit of discovery and safe in the knowledge that at least it's somewhere to keep my new years resolutions, I've signed up.

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