Sync Apple Address Book With Googlemail (and no iPhone)
I’m late to discover this, but those lucky iPhone users have not only got that gorgeous hardware to play with, they can also sync their address book contacts with gmail while the rest of us can’t.
Well, actually we can, though it needs a bit of fiddling in terminal as described in this useful hint. But I mean, really, Apple, what the hell?
I could swear earlier today it had changed to the style of the American site. I could swear because there was a little link advertising the site redesign and offering a tour. I took a little look round, and decided I like the old UK version better.
That version is now back, it appears to me. What’s going on?
Well, it seems a new version has been appearing intermittently since at least October - see here - but that’s even more odd. What are they doing, why are they waiting, are they going to think better of it? Or is there some preference I can (and have inadvertently) set to see the old version?
I know these are two-a-penny, but… A well respected journalist of many years’ standing wrote last week in the Guardian that “as we all know, many Wikipedia entries are just rubbish”. I won’t dispute this (though “as we all know” is lazy). What tickles me is the implication that whilst it is “grappling with an underlying and often inflammatory problem…that of quality control” papers like the Guardian have got this sorted, and would never allow a journalist’s ignorant assertion that “the best known Linux application is Wikipedia” to go to print.
Oops.
I’ve been waiting patiently (well, almost patiently) for Amazon to launch UK downloads without DRM. Given that they’ve done it in the US and got all the major labels on board, it looks like they’re going to get there ahead of iTunes (whose interface I like, but Amazon’s better on DRM and price). But maybe it won’t be Amazon who get there first…
play.com is now offering EMI downloads at 65-70p per track (generally undercutting 7 digital which also offers the EMI tracks) and, according to Guardian Technology expect the other three labels to join within the year, which may give them the edge on iTunes (and Amazon haven’t even left the starting blocks).
The BBC’s selection of Podcasts is growing (slowly), but if you want to listen to most of their shows you’ll be glued to your computer because they’re still only streamed in Read Audio.
Unless you know a way to grab Real Audio streams and stick them on your iPod. I’ve used the following method to get “listen again” streams for shows I’ve missed. It’s a two step process: you need to download the Read Audio stream and then convert it.
Happy listening.
Episode 8 of the current Doctor Who (ie. the one after next, which itself is almost two weeks away because of pesky Eurovision) is called Human Nature, rather like the book by its author, Paul Cornell. Even though I’m steering clear of spoilerous forums, I have concluded there is a possibility that the episode may be an adaptation of the book (the first such Doctor Who adaptation, as far as I’m aware).
The BBC have published several Doctor Who ebooks on their website including Human Nature but it’s gone! There’s a message: “Human Nature will return, in more ways than one, in a few weeks… “ which rather confirms the adaptation theory, but is driving me up the wall!
I have a general principle with adaptations that I will read the original first (thus a film of a book I like to see after I have read the book). I might have let this one go, had I not had the opportunity to read it, and then had it snatched away. If only I’d saved the files to disk when they were available. So I begun to search… Maybe someone else had, and would be offering them for download? I tried to use Google’s cache (but it wasn’t complete). Eventually, thankfully, I found an old web archive: effectively the internet’s time machine allowing you to go back in time to when they were available and get them again. So I will get to read it before it’s on the TV.
On the internet, then, everyone can be a Time Lord.
Legal free music download service eMusic launched in the UK last week, offering tracks free of digital rights managements (DRM). I don’t know what will happen to allofmp3.com in September so I thought I’d take advantage of eMusic’s free 25 track trial. Although eMusic is pricier and almost certainly has a smaller catalogue, I searched for a couple of moderately popular jazz musicians as a test of the kind of music I’d want to buy.
| iTunes | allofmp3.com | eMusic | |
| Price per track | 79p | $0.05 approx | 17p-23p |
| No of Stacey Kent Albums | 5 | 2 | 5 |
| No of Humphrey Lyttelton Albums | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Format | 128k AAC | Almost anything | VBR MP3 |
iTunes has the edge still in terms of ease of use, but has two drawbacks: price and DRM. 79p per track for downloads still makes lots of albums more expensive than buying on CD, and although the DRM is unobtrusive, and fine if (like me) you have an iPod, music you buy you should be able to keep when you move to different hardware/software.
eMusic is still easy to use with a nicely designed website and (this is where it has an edge over other competitors) it has a download manager available for Windows and Mac which is easy to install, configure and use. And although its subscription model is expensive for the occasional buyer, with albums costings around £3 the prices will suit regular downloaders.
I don’t know whether I will subscribe after the trial, but on first showing I’m tempted. Incidentally, if you are considering joining, email me and let me recommend it to you. I’m wouldn’t actually recommend it (yet), but if you’re going to join anyway, there’s 50 free downloads in it for me, so why not? And, incidentally, if you do get some Humph, the album common to both eMusic and iTunes, Georgia Mae, which I hadn’t heard of, has a distinctly groovy New Badpenny Blues, guaranteed to annoy the traditionalists and very enjoyable.
To friends who are trying to use Windows as their primary operating system, owning a digital camera can be a pretty unrewarding experience if you rely on the software that comes with your camera (using a Mac with iPhoto you’ll never get round to putting the Camera manufacturer’s CD in your machine). To them, I recommend Picasa, an reasonably good iPhoto clone which comes free from Google.
Now Google have launched Picasa Web and even better an iPhoto plugin for the Mac users. This is Google doing it right: at Google labs there is a Linux beta version of Picasa which has been developed using a customised version of Wine and offers almost all the features of the Windows version. They’re making sure they are including users of all platforms.
So, I thought I’d install the plugin and give it a try, and in so doing I’ve posted half a dozen pictures from my trip to Scotland last weekend:
Uploading was extremely slow, but the web albums look really good (far better than the static pages iPhoto posts to .Mac, if you have it). You can resize and zoom in on the photos, there’s a slick slideshow function and an RSS feed. And as well as uploading from iPhoto, you can fully manage your albums through the web interface: uploading, reordering and reorientating. Very promising.
I’m late to this one - it’s been doing the rounds for over a week - but it’s fully deserving of the exposure it’s getting.
The story so far: Vincent Ferrari rings AOL to cancel his account. Knowing of their reputation, he decides to record the experience. Then the masterstroke, he posts it on his blog, insignificant thoughts.
AOL: “I’m just trying to help here”
VF: “I called to cancel the account. Helping me would be cancelling the account.”
AOL: “No it wouldn’t”
There’s a mirror of the recording here.
It gets picked up by blogs and on forums and by the local and national media including CNBC.
AOL issue an apology and sack the employee concerned, presumably the fact that he was rude ( not that they wouldn’t have scapegoated him anyway, but he made it easy for them).
What they fail to acknowledge is that is that it’s not until 3′34″ that “Jonathan” crosses the line. It’s the first 3′34″ that AOL should be ashamed of, when Jonathan is doing his “job”. Their response should have been a change of policy and a major retraining programme for their customer service staff. Or even just putting cancellations through to customer services rather than sales. They disregard the complaint as an atypical one-off glitch in their customer “service”.
All the same, it may do some good for these companies to know that the appaling disregard they have for their customers’ time and intelligence can so quickly gain widespread coverage. Another hooray for the internet!
