digicasts

Apple Activates Podcast Downloads in 2.2 Firmware - Mac Rumors

Woo and indeed Hoo

This is great news, always a pain to not be able to download the latest podcast if you are at your iTunes. Also gives you more to casually download and listen to, for free!

After installing leopard I brought a new hdd to take advantge of Time Machine. A great backup tool as I am sure you are aware. But since then my mac would never go to sleep. After much searchig and deactivating Time Machine I discovered that it was not the source of my problems.

Again, more seaching. I looked to are what apps were running and there was nothing out of the ordinary. But still my mac would not sleep. I eventually just lived with it. It is a good idea anyway to leave it on occasinaly so I can do all it housework whilst you sleep.

But enough was enough. I was more bothered that I didn’t know why.

More searching. And eventually I discovered that you can use the Console to see what processes are happening and check the system logs. I found put that mysql server was running and failing. Every ten seconds. Bingo. It was my machine running as a server and failing that stopped the sleep mode kicking in.

I used to use leopard as a server for development work with php and mysql. But I disovered xamp and that made life a whole lot easier. So I must have installed an mysql update and not configured it correctly.

To fix I reinstalled mysql buy used the version for 10.4 rather than 10.5 and made sure I selected ppc rather than intel (fell into that trap before)

So am really writting this post so if others can’t get their mac go to sleep. This may be the reason. If not use the process viewer to keep an eye on what is running and use the console to see the system logs. They reveal a lot and ultimatly ended my ten months of a no sleeping mac.

EDIT

Was all fine and basking in the glory of seeking the standby light pulse as beautifully as it does. But when I went to use mysql. It failed.

So I reinstalled xampp but after I did the error in the cosole came up again.

On a mission I googled further and found that there was a plist for mysql in the launchDaemon folder. I removed it an restarted and all is well.

My guess is that the xampp installation of mysql confuses the built in or seperatly installed mysql. The plist was trying to boot the local version failing then retrying every ten secpnd and that is why I got the constant errors.

Sounds simple all laid out like that. Oh well.

WoW Whore Has 36 Accounts, Raids by Himself | Ripten Video Game Blog

I find it hard enough to concentrate on one character whilst raiding, this guy play 36 at the same time. A little extreme, and kinda defies the point of an MMO that is to play with other people and work together. Though I am sure he enjoys playing with himself.

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regret

can’t be arsed to have a look right now to see if it’s true

…and I am getting four to five bars when I previously used to get one or two in the house. I put this down to o2’s coverage because in Victoria and down on the coast I was getting five bars. It was only at work and home that I was getting a crappy signal.

This should mean better battery life as when then phone is looking for 3G on such a low “barely on” state it used more power a it latches on and disconnects to the 3G service.

As much as I love the iPhone, 2.0 has been a bit buggy.

IE Death March

I fully support stopping development for IE6, I have read that some companies charge more to develop for IE6. On any project I undertake IE6 always doubles the coding time, it is so full of bugs and you have to put a million hacks in for the site to work properly.

The same site coded the way it should be works in all the other major browsers bar the odd minor bug here and there, but IE6 can completely screw it up. But I guess anyone that works in web development knows this. It is evil.

But saying that you will stop developing for it is a big issue. My other half works for the government and they have to use IE6. At work we have a large global client, who also all have to use IE6, which was a major deal when told that the uber modern AJAXariffic practically WYSIWYG CMS had to work in the primitive browser.

So there is a massive audience out there who have no choice but to use IE6 and to not develop to be compatibly means you alienate a big potential audience.

Ho hum

Boo Microsoft, they should have never of released such a piece of crap in the first place.

If you don’t want to be over-geeked, try to ignore the narration, better still scrub through with the sound off.

It still seems pretty techie and a long way off being a consumer or even a professional product, but i like the idea of feeding the software a some video and some super hires stills I took of the same object/place and combining the two.

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

I have had the new 3g iPhone for three weeks now and here is my ickle report.

When the 2.0 firmware was launched, it was like having a new iPhone, the applications available way surpassed the quality of applications available to the previous installer on jailbroken phones. The big boys were now playing, there was money to be made and the app store model was a great way to make it.

It was surprising that iPint (a viral type app from Carlsberg) was available from launch. Now more and more marketing apps are appearing, Chanel even now have one, and it wont be long before iPhone apps become one of the lists of things on a marketeers project plan.

Games such as Super Monkey Ball and Crash’s Nitro Racing really show of the power of the phone. The same iPhone that was demoed a year ago is now running full 3d apps with Wii like motion control. I don’t see the iPhone as being a replacement to a dedicated gaming handheld, but it has potential and certain games that require simple control will do well.

One on my favourite apps is BeatMaker, it costs £10.99 and is a 118mb download. But it features a full sequencing application, not a little “tap the pictures of a drums to make a drum sound” apps we have seen before. BeatMaker links to you mac so you can add your own samples, create banks, export to wav files etc. On the phone you set your sequences using pads, lay out in a sequences, you can even chop up your samples, apply effects, use EQs and rearrange and tweak everything. A lot of time has been spent on this app to make it pro tool and its developers deserve all the praise and money for seeing the potential on the iPhone. It is an app that has already generated a lot of buzz and its great fun trying to be the next Timberland.

Apps not being made by Apple do mean that some are a bit buggy and will crash, but it is still a new technology and as more apps get made more knowledge will be shared.

The 2.0 upgrade was not good enough, I had to have the new 3g phone and the new price was a major desicion maker as I had only brought an iPhone in March after deciding I couldn’t wait. Improved battery life and better sound were also desirable as you kinda need to give the iPhone a charge about once a day. But I do use it more than a normal phone, constantly checking it through the day, seeing what people are doing on Facebook or just checking emails or trying out new apps.

So I have it, it is lighter than the first iPhone and slightly larger (maybe a millimeter or two). Its curved back does make for a comfortable hold, but when on a desk tends to rock a bit when not holding it in your hand. There is no dock supplied with the 3g, not a big deal as mine was never really plugged in due to the dock not fitting an iPod and I stuck with the plain old classic USB cable.

The GPS is there, but is a bit slow, certainly not the speed they show on the adverts, but any GPS device when first activated has to triangulate the satellites, and it starts by first giving you your position based on your distance from signal masts in your area, and then drills down to the pulsing GPS dot. I haven’t really used it on the move yet, but it does pick up my stationary position well enough. Though it tends to place you on the nearest road on google maps.

Then there is the 3g, this is a bit touchy, I have tried it and I do get better speeds (about 110kps) but not the 3g speeds I was expecting. When you activate 3g the signal strength goes from full to one bar and because it is on the cusp, the iPhone is constantly looking for a 3g network which really drains the battery. We (the iPhone community based on forums and articles read) are not sure if the blame is with Apple or O2. I live in zone two in London, an area according to O2 has very strong 3g coverage, so I should be getting more than one little bar. Will have to wait and see on this.

I have turned 3g off now (as I mainly use wifi networks to browse) in an attempt to save battery life.

Speaking of battery life, it could be due to 3g, but i haven’t noticed a difference. It was only on friday that i turned 3g off so will need a few more days to decide is there is an improvement.

Sound wise, the internal speaker does sound marginally better, but phone call quality is now perfect. It was a bit hazy on the first iPhone, but I do not make many calls on it, it is used as a little internet device more than a phone (I feel like Al from Quantum Leap using his “Ziggy” device).

I guess my verdict in hindsight is that I would have been more than happy to have stuck with the first iPhone. Even with that first iPhone I would rarely need to use web out of a wifi areas (still too scared to get it out on the street due to the risk of being mugged). I have only used 3g to test rather than needed to use it, same is true with the GPS. The improved battery life would have been good, but the extra drain of the 3g and GPS do use up this extra capacity. Not that it is a major hassle as I have iPod cables everywhere so am never far away from a place I can charge. And it is always nice to hook up to my mac at home and get everything from my phone backed up by simply plugging it in (don’t even have to open and app or click anything, it just does it)

It is the 2.0 upgrade that has really created the excitement and the difference with me, something that was available to all iPhone and iPod Touch owners.

Ho hum

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google must divulge YouTube log

That is the problem with the internet, if someone wants to find out what you are doing, they can. This is a pretty tall order though. I don’t understand why TV and music bosses don’t embrace the technology that is available to them, having your clips watched millions of times is not a bad thing.

Technology has changed the way people watch and listen to media. I rarely watch something live on tv, I set up the Sky+ box and know that it will be there to enjoy at my leisure, with the ability to skip forward 5 minutes to miss the ads. On the rare occasions I do watch live tv, I kinda enjoy the ads, as I don’t see them that often and most will be new to me.

I laugh how music companies are starting to not use DRM on music they sell, after the millions they have spent developing ways to control what you download. If they did this years ago, people would have probably spent the money to get a decent full recording rather than try to find a full album intact and all encoded correctly on Napster with their 56k modem.

Sony’s minidisc that let you transfer content from a computer to your minidisc was hideously complicated, you had to re-encode the file to the Sony proprietary format, then “check” the song out to a minidisc, if you failed to check it back in you couldn’t put it on another disc. It doubled the space required for your songs and was a pain in the arse.

Apple (be warned I am a bit of an Apple fanboy) on the other had have a very good system. You can burn as many copies of the music as you want, and allow the actual files to be played on five devices. Which is pretty fair, and only once have i run out of “devices” due to sending a track to a friend for a listen and having to put my password onto their iTunes but it was pretty simple to disable all the others and start a fresh.

So get a grip Viacom, rather than waste energy stopping people watching your stuff for free, take on the feedback and make more of what people want. If they saw it on YouTube, enjoyed it, they will be more likely to try to catch it when it does come on tv.

Plus YouTube is a pretty crappy way to watch something like a tv show, the ten minute limit on clips and the poor quality don’t make for a comfortable engrossing experience.

http://gizmodo.com/photogallery/crazyiphone/1000563406