I haven’t ever bought one song through iTunes - and it’s because of their stupid DRM (Digital Rights Management) which controlled where you could play that music you bought. That might be changing now as Apple announced at MacWorld (though I heard it through ReadWriteWeb) that they will be offering the 10 million songs in the iTunes store without the onerous restrictions. They will even offer re-downloads of songs you may have already purchased (at high quality) without it. There have been many times that I wanted to grab something off iTunes but refused to do so on principal (and because I have Linux machines that I wouldn’t have been able to listen to the stuff on afterward) and I’m happy to see Apple has finally gotten bold enough to stand up to the record companies on this issue.

My Apple Powerbook G4 is feeling a little slow lately. I’ve been looking at something new and shiny to replace it for about a half a year now and just when I thought I had decided to go with PC hardware and Linux (probably Ubuntu), Apple has upped the ante. One of the things I like about my old powerbook is the aluminum chassis, plastic just doesn’t do it for me - and now the new Macbook is available in aluminum! At $1,300 with a bigger screen than my trusty old 12″ and higher screen res (though I’m not thrilled about the widescreen), a fast processor and a couple GB or Ram, it’s going to be hard to look elsewhere. Then, as if we could make the decision any harder: Open Office 3.0 now offers native OS X support!
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Personally I’m not interested in owning an iPhone (I have so far successfully avoided getting a cell phone at all) even though it is the slickest thing I’ve seen anywhere, but a $200 iPod touch might lure me in (there’s talk that Sept will bring about such a thing). The capacity is still too low though. I want it to be able to hold my entire music collection which only the biggest one does right now which is currently $500! No removable battery is a big downside for me having had similar problems in the past with Palm. And no flash support? I’m not a big fan of flash, but it is everywhere on the web! Thats a serious limitation. I do like the iPod/iPhone interface a lot, it’s too much like an appliance for me (kinda like Palm pilots were), although the new ability for third party apps should bring about a much more interesting mix of abilities.
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If you have an iPod shuffle and you’re content dealing with iTunes, don’t bother reading this. I was getting fed up with the fact that every time I plugged my iPod into a friend’s machine, or into my work machine, iTunes would bark that the iPod was already synced with another iTunes installation (my Mac) and would ask if I wanted to erase everything on it and sync with this one instead. I realize I can apportion some of the iPod as regular flash space to carry files from one machine to another, but what I wanted to do was to copy music onto the iPod like any normal flash disk, listen to the music in the car on the way to work using the Ipod controls, then maybe grab some different music for the ride home from my work machine. Sometimes I wanted to rip a bunch of disks at one location, and listen to them in the car and then copy them off to my home machine at some point. Apple’s pact with the recording industry made simple uses like this impossible… that is, until an open source project developed in python opened up my iPod (shuffle) and let me use it the way I wanted to.
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I work in the IS (Information Services) department at a manufacturing company. I am constantly asked by fellow employees for computer advice. While I really do enjoy talking about computers, and I don’t mind answering their questions, over the years I have come to realize that Windows is really not a good option for someone who does not like futzing with computers as much as I do. I will relate three short incidents (just from *this* week!) to illustrate my point.

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I downloaded video ‘proof’ of OSX booting up on an x86 based notebook, so the rumours are true! It booted amazingly quick on a 1.6 mobile Intel Pentium (532MHz bus) with an ATI mobility radeon 9600 (768MB Ram). I had originally read about it on Slashdot, but…it pointed over to this site which was of course suffering the ’slashdot effect’ where thousands of users across the globe are clicking on the link to check out the big news of the day and end up totally swamping the poor guy’s server just because he had an interesting article up one day.

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