The music industry has been going 'back to the future' for format inspiration again, with the launch this week in the US of the D45 via iTunes. These digital downloads feature an 'A' and a 'B' side, and the thumbnail image embedded in each digital file looks a bit like an old 7" single sleeve or a jukebox promo version of an old hit. The range includes a 'D45' from Michael Jackson (of course), and 'Use Somebody' by Kings Of...
This time last week I was gearing up to attend The Guardian's first Activate summit at Kings Place. I've blogged about Gerry Jackson's heart-breaking mission to get independent news into Zimbabwe, Nick Bostrom's presentation about 'the end of the world', a politics panel featuring Tom Watson and Adam Afriyie, and the thread of data release and story-telling that ran through the day. I wanted to conclude with a final set of observations about what had caught my eye, made...
Last Wednesday Arsenal's Champions League tie against Roma went to penalties - but the real shoot-out for me was in the Crown & Sceptre pub on Foley Street, between @solle's iPhone and my Nokia N95. It was 'London IA in the Pub' night, but Matthew and I were a little distracted by the game. Once it went to extra-time we nearly ducked out to a nearby pub that had Sky, but instead we ended up watching the penalty shoot-out in...
My wife has had one of Apple's limited edition U2 iPods since 2004, which she got not because of a desperate love of the band, but because it was the first time one was available in black. Sadly last week it died, and she was faced with the dreaded 'unhappy iPod' icon. The thing is, I can't help feeling that it might not have been a total coincidence that the machine chose to give up the ghost on the very...
I wrote the yesterday about using a Linux live CD to recover data from the hard-drive of my spyware-riddled Windows laptop. One thing I couldn't do via Linux was deauthorise the machine for my iTunes account. Apple's iTunes has a limit of five machines on which you can play your DRM infected protected music. Now, of course, I'd already burnt to CD any purchases from the Apple store I'd made using that laptop, and re-imported them to remove the DRM,...
I love last.fm. You love last.fm. Everybody loves last.fm. It is a cool poster child for the Web 2.0 generation, and the fact that they built their business model on avoiding paying streaming royalties in the UK as much as possible is neither here nor there to most people. But... ...installing the application on your Windows XP PC can be really sucky. The problem is that the Last.fm application seems to pay no attention to the account settings on the...
I try and be platform neutral and agnostic as much as possible. This blog runs on a Debian Linux server from Bytemark, I work on a MacBook, my main PC is a Dell running Windows XP, and I get to play with the Linux-based Eee PC that my wife takes everywhere. My star sign is Libra and I like a balance in my OS experience. So I was fairly open-minded about trying out Microsoft's Silverlight. There has been some (inevitable...
I'm one of those people who have been happily running Windows on PCs since the early nineties, and have never had any problems with virus infections, adware, spyware, or other malicious programs. In fact, I'd quite got myself into the self-righteous position of thinking that anybody who did have problems clearly didn't know what they were doing with computers. So, it was somewhat dispiriting last month to discover that my laptop was riddled with a horrible infection. I know exactly...
Over the last few days I've steadfastly avoided writing about the blogging and twittering hype around Macworld. This is not especially because I'm an Apple naysayer, but I'm certainly not a fanatic. I think Apple make some very good products with some gorgeous packaging, but I also think they enjoy an incredible 'brand halo' which allows them to get away relatively uncriticised for quite major flaws like battery life and replacement issues, and over-charging UK customers on iTunes. [1] One...
Everyone might be waiting for tomorrow with baited breath as Apple finally announce that the iPhone will be available in the UK, but Greece has got there first. Yep, apparently mum is already no longer the word in Heraklion (just a couple of hours down the road from where I live) and in Volos Sugarenia has blogged a Greek advert for the iPhone from their local store - at an eye-watering €749. Meanwhile, jimeh has a picture uploaded to Flickr...
Back in 1980, Morgan Fisher curated an album called "Miniatures". It consisted of fifty-one tiny tracks by various artists including people like Kevin Coyne, Michael Nyman, Ivor Cutler and Robert Fripp. Everything on the album was under a minute long I've recently hit upon the modern digital DIY equivalent - making a microtunes "Miniatures" playlist on iTunes - although I did have to extend the time limit slightly. I sorted my music library by track duration, shortest first, and the...
I've mentioned before that I haven't exactly been seeing eye-to-eye with iTunes 7.2 on my PC. It keeps getting upset and sparking Windows error dialogue messages if I run it without my iPod attached first, and won't quit without warning me every single time that iSproggler is using the iTunes scripting interface, am I sure I want to quit? More seriously though, I don't like the way that Apple do not follow the standard Windows OS conventions with some of...
Finally at the weekend my personal weekly chart on Last.fm was updated - for the first time since December 2005, when I was last a regular scrobbler. That rather eclectic mix, featuring such obscurities as TOT and iLiKETRAiNS was replaced by a chart which looks rather more like my staple musical fare. Having got enough cable to finally hook up my main PC to the internet via the phone socket for the first time in 18 months, I've also downloaded...
There has been a bit of a buzz around the announcement of a service called Slacker in the USA, which will be a device which plays personalised radio stations to the user on the go. Matt Marshall at VentureBeat even touted it as a potential "iPod killer". As I read through the promised feature-set, I started to get a little nagging voice in my head, saying "Hang on, isn't....this....what...I..do?" Because for the last few months I've been working on...
Since the announcement that the BBC's iPlayer would contain elements of Microsoft's DRM, and that any forthcoming versions for the Apple or Linux OS would also need to incoporate some type of DRM, a debate has been raging on the backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list. Opinion is broadly split into two camps. There are those who understand that in order to facilitate any kind of on demand service, the BBC needs to protect the interests of the rights-owners involved in making...
Just before Christmas one of my favourite bands, Depeche Mode, released a digital box-set via iTunes - "The Complete Depeche Mode". Even in an industry not known for always putting the customer first, the audacity of the release is breath-taking. Costing £139.99, the set features 644 downloads, of which 59 are exclusive to the box-set. And of course, the tracks that are 'exclusive' to the set are also exclusively available using Apple's proprietary DRM format. The exclusive content, which consists...
With his open letter to the music industry, Steve Jobs has done an excellent job of shifting the attention away from Apple's iPod/iTunes DRM based lock-in, and onto the music industry that supplies the content driving the sales of Apple's hardware. I think my favourite quote amongst the responses I stumbled upon on the web was: "The greatest trick Apple pulled was to build a market where lock-in is mandated, but convince the world that this was something they did...
The recent announcement that Apple (computers) and Apple (Beatles music) have settled their trademark differences has prompted a great deal of speculation that the Beatles catalogue will finally become legally available on digital music download stores. There has also been speculation that when (rather than if) this happens, thanks to the new chart rules, the Beatles could clog up the UK singles charts as people rush to download tracks from one of Britain's most successful musical exports. James Masterton has...
Following on from first Bill Gates and now Steve Jobs wading in with their views about the DRM status of online music purchases, the BBC News site has a "Have Your Say" discussion about the issue - "Is this the end of copy protection for online music?" One of the BBC's sub-editors has gone a bit rogue on the homepage though. At the moment the International edition of the BBC News site is promoting the thread with a tagline asking...
Yesterday I wrote about the accessibility issue with Apple's newly announced "iPhone" product - and my concern that should many devices end up adopting their approach of a mobile phone without a tactile interface, usability for the large section of the population with some visual or motor impairment might be a problem. I also looked at the very vocal response of a section of the Apple fan community to the very suggestion that this might even be a question worth...
Well, it seemed churlish not to join in with virtually every other blog I read and not post something about the mobile phone / multimedia device you may have seen launched by Apple last week. I have to start by saying that I am intrigued by the user interface, and I'll be fascinated to hear about how people get on with it out in the wild. Rather than talk about the much-vaunted product itself, I wanted to look at a...
Whilst it wasn't traditional link bait in the sense of trying to get something onto the front page of Digg, when my good friend Frankie recently wrote about his experience of using Sony's SonicStage software, he must have known that I wouldn't be able to resist responding. First off I must say I thought Frankie gave a very honest account of using and installing the software. He was using the CD supplied with the player to install it, so I...
There has been a dribble of coverage recently that Sony has lost a court case in France over the inclusion of DRM restrictions with content downloaded from the Sony Connect store. The verdict was apparently delivered on December 15th, but only just seems to be making news following an announcement by the group taking the action, the Union Federale des Consommateurs - Que Choisir. Sony themselves have so far declined to comment as far as I can tell. The case...
One of the things I was most looking forward to about arriving back in the UK was firstly setting my main computer back up again, and secondly, docking my iPod with iTunes for the first time in nearly nine months. I was worried that neither my or my wife's iPods would survive our trip with their data intact, and so before we left the UK I had copied onto the laptop we were taking with us around 15Gb of music...
This is page 6 of a 6 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 6 Download a print version of this article Beta Software and Edge Products I was surprised to see quite a small penetration of the current beta software. With both Vista and IE7 out in the wild I expected to see a reasonable amount of use. Perhaps they just don't just have the buzz around them that open source does? IE7 has 0.04% browser share...
This is page 5 of a 6 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 6 Download a print version of this article Internet Explorer Requests To The BBC Homepage As with the Windows Operating System, Microsoft have done an excellent job of migrating all their users onto the latest version of the software. Over 90% of requests for the BBC homepage from an Internet Explorer browser came from the most recent stable release - Internet Explorer 6. Versions...
This is page 4 of a 6 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 6 Download a print version of this article Browsers Visiting The BBC Homepage The browser market amongst those requesting the BBC homepage still shows a vice-like grip from Microsoft products, but both Firefox and Safari represent small but significant deviations from the Internet Explorer norm. All the versions of IE together make up just under 86% of requests to the BBC homepage, with Firefox...
This is page 3 of a 6 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 6 Download a print version of this article Windows Operating System Share Concentrating on just Windows alone we can see that Microsoft have done a very thorough job of converting their user base to the most recent iteration of the software. Windows XP accounts for just under 70.5% of the Windows requests, and Windows 2000 a further 17.4%. That means in total around 88%...
This is page 2 of a 6 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 6 Download a print version of this article Operating systems visiting the BBC homepage The complete dominance of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 is no surprise. Just over 70% of requests to the BBC homepage come from machines running Windows XP, and IE6 took 78% of the browser market. In the operating system sphere the stranglehold of Windows is nearly complete - a...
This is page 1 of a 6 page article - 1 2 3 4 5 6 Download a print version of this article Studying the software that visits the BBC homepage It started with a casual enquiry from a colleague - "I wonder how many Firefox users visit the BBC homepage?" - and before I knew it I was involved in a lengthy statistical analysis of the browsers and operating systems that request the BBC homepage at http://www.bbc.co.uk. Our...
A wonderfully sensationalist front page splash from the Standard today to point out what man has known since the invention of the headphones, that listening to music loudly for a long time damages your hearing. It wasn't quite clear from the article what was so product specific about this type of hearing damage to warrant billboards proclaiming "IPOD HEALTH ALERT". Maybe the Standard knows that the AAC compression recommended by Apple emits additional ear-destroying sonic frequencies which other mp3...
With a month off on my hands I'm working through a lengthy list of things that I've always wanted to do around London, but have never found the time for. Today I ticked three things off the list. I started at the Estorick Collection at Canonbury Square in Islington, which until June 5th has a exhibition on Avant-Garde Graphics from 1918 to 1934. The gallery itself is quite small, consisting of six rooms, five of which are taken up with...
I went to the Mac Expo at Islington Business Design Centre yesterday (open today and tomorrow, £10 to get in) I have to say I was slightly disappointed with the lack of branded freebies. The top gadget on offer was the slimp3 which looked awesome. I also realised that I am now certain my next large investment in technical kit is going to have an Apple logo on it. My favourite moment though was when I was receiving a...
