Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

Nerdy post for users of Apple’s Front Row coming up.

If you use a Snow Leopard (or possible Leopard) machine as your media centre and you rip your own TV stuff into iTunes, you may have puzzled over why TV shows seasons that sequence correctly show up in Front Row in a random order, particularly if you’ve not added stuff to your library in the order it was originally released.

Leopard’s Front Row annoyed a few users by changing the organisation scheme from…

TV Shows ->
The Avengers ->
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3 etc.

…to…

TV Shows ->
The Avengers
The Avengers
The Avengers

Which was fine with me while I knew that each entry corresponded to a season, and seasons were in ascending order. But in some cases the seasons seemed to come out in a random order, and I puzzled over it for ages (well, I like puzzles). Had I tagged badly, and it was sorting by release dates? Were the most recently added to iTunes showing up first? Actually it turns out it was none of this. You might have entered the season number in iTunes and have it all showing up correctly there, and when you check the tags you see the correct seasons too, but to get Front Row to read it you’ve got to force iTunes to write it to some other place (I’ve no idea where) by, for example, renaming the show temporarily and then naming it back to it’s correct name. It’s inconvenient (and a disappointingly mundane resolution to the puzzle) but at least it works until Apple release a proper fix. If they ever fix Front Row.

Incidentally if you’re finding some of your TV Shows are showing up as movies (as well as TV shows) in Front Row, despite being correctly categorised in iTunes, this similar workaround suggests changing the media kind to podcast and then back to TV show.

I’m having a little play with Wordpress 2.7’s image handling. Here are some pictures I took today at Sheffield Park Gardens.

Once in a while something comes along that is so cool that you can’t believe it.  When Martin Varsavsky blogged about an SD card that included wi-fi I was impressed, but when I read that it can also add geotags to your pictures using wi-fi skyhooks (as the iPhone does, when not using GPS) I had to check the date.  It’s not April yet. How do they get all this functionality onto such a small card?  (It can also upload to photosharing sites via hotspots.  Oh yes, and it has up to 4gb of memory.  Currently pre-ordering at $99.)  

There’s a rumour of an Apple iPhone service that will pass iPhoto your movements and sync those with your pictures to add geotags taken on cameras that don’t support them; iPhoto ‘09 and its Places features makes whichever solution actually materialises first something of an essential upgrade for your kit.

Good news from мебелиRogue Amoeba. When they sadly made it clear that an Airfoil for iPhone, sending your iPod other app’s audio to your hifi, is not possible due to Apple’s restrictions, I inferred they couldn’t get sound from the Mac onto the iPhone either. Not so, and Airfoil Speaker for the iPhone is under development.

Ideally, this will include a remote control for Airfoil too, so by combining with Apple’s remote (or perhaps even through a simple integrated iTunes controller) you would be able to start playing music on your Mac, decide where to send it (including, of course, right back to the iPhone) all from the iPhone itself.

So even if you don’t have an Airport Express in every room, if you’ve got your iPhone with you you’ll have access to your whole library of sound anywhere you can connect to your network.

An even nicer refinement, though one Apple may not like to implement, would allow the audio to be streamed to the iPhone wherever it is on the internet…

One of the things the iPhone has got a lot of stick for is the camera. It stayed at 2MP when the 3G version came out. I didn’t think that would be a problem; actually because it’s always with me I’ve used it a few times and the picture quality (not the resolution) bugs me. Review said it had good quality for a phone camera, that’s as maybe, but phone cameras are awful. Plus it does weird stuff like this (it is, I have discovered, a known issue) which makes me wonder how this camera actually works.

And this.

If Apple were to make it work with video, however, all will be forgiven.

As part of one of my courses I will be assessed on a personal journal. “I recommend you set up a blog” said the lecturer “for your reflections (and rants)”. So I have. Please wander over (if you feel so inclined) and have a look.

Note that all registered users at Little Storping are registered at HCI-Blog.littlestorping.co.uk automatically.

I’ve been plagued lately by registration spam (mostly from @gmail). It doesn’t seem to be doing any harm, but it’s irritating; especially as Akismet seems to do such a good job on eliminating the comment spam.

So I’m going to make two changes here in the village of Little Storping. Firstly, for a trial period, I’m removing the requirement to register in order to comment (I originally used this to avoid comment spam). Secondly, any user who hasn’t yet commented on a post will have their registration deleted. Don’t worry if you haven’t commented yet – that’s what this post is for! Make sure you’re logged in and just stick a comment below saying, well, whatever you like, in the next 48 hours, and I’ll believe you’re human.

My apologies to those of you who miss this post and haven’t commented before midday (BST) Sunday 19th October. Of course, you don’t now need to re-register, but I like it if you do, and it allows you to edit your comments if you need to (and, of course, add and edit recipes in the Happy Ploughman!)

Update: I’ve carried out a slightly less radical cull that originally planned, removing everyone who hadn’t posted and who had an @gmail.com or @gmx.com address. I’m not picking on you guys, it’s just that’s where most of the spam seems to come from (I’m surprised gmail doesn’t filter them out…). Anyway, it’s still cut the number of registered users by 75%, and I know most of the rest of you are human…

When I did my first degree, a few of my lecturers pushed their own textbooks; it makes sense, no doubt, since it would be a work whose authority (one hopes) they would have full confidence in – but it also makes them money.

Now I’m starting my masters (MAVE at Sussex) I find that it’s iPhone apps that are being pushed! Shamelessly, I might add. I like this.

I finally got an iPhone. The trauma of its aquisition is still too raw (and I’m still too poor a typist) to relate, so this is a test for the Wordpress App, to see if I can post a picture from the phone…

Edit: practising editing and getting used to photo orientation (taking photos with the app isn’t as intuitive as it could be). I notice the iPhone keyboard doesn’t seem to have the thingies for doing HTML…

Despite the fact that there was only one feature I claimed I needed in iTunes 8 (which didn’t materialise – it appears the focus is on making playlists less personal rather than more so), I’ve realised there was another feature I wanted even more, and it is there – the ability to mark any file as an audiobook without having to use the make bookmarkable script for AAC files and for the first time being able to get an MP3 into the audiobook library.