Category: Tech

*sigh*

I want one of each:

CURSE YOU, STEVE JOBS!!!

Edit: Made each picture link to Apple’s page about them.

OK, nevermind on the previous post.

You can turn “shuffle” off.

Mine!

Arrrgh!!

But I hate “shuffle” for my music!

Why, Jobs? Why?!

Now that my iPod is “like-new” again, I did some playlist maintenance on it. I don’t like manually selecting albums to listen to most of the time. I want it to just serve up, semi-randomly, my favorites, with some oddities mixed in here and there. And, thanks to Apple’s Smart Playlists, that is in fact possible. But only if the music collection is suitably organized.

Smart Playlists can collect songs based on almost anything, and as many different criteria as there are, well, criteria for organizing music. Genre, Artist, words in the title or album, words not in the title or album, my rating of the song, the type of file, the date it was last played, the number of times it’s been played… all that and more.

Since I prefer to listen to full CDs, in the order they were recorded (I. Hate. Shuffle.) first I set up a playlist of all my non-album songs (individual downloads from back in the day before I was so enlightened to only listen to full CDs, mostly).

Then I set up a playlist for all my 2- and 3-star rated songs, and excluded anything that was on the “non-album” playlist.

Then I set up a playlist for all my 4- and 5-star rated songs, with the same exclusion.

Finally I made a smart playlist combining the two above playlists.

Seems like a lot of work? It’s not, really. Took me about 5 minutes (since I’ve already compulsively rated and tagged all my songs — yeah, organization is a bitch, which is why it’s a good habit to have).

At any rate, here are the 5 CDs I’ve listened to so far today:

• Beck, “Sea Change”
• Radiohead, “My Iron Lung” (EP)
• Radiohead, “Hail To The Thief”
• Modest Mouse, “Good News for People Who Love Bad News”
• They Might Be Giants, “Flood”

These are all great albums… and I probably wouldn’t have picked “Sea Change” or “Good News for People Who Love Bad News” on my own, so props to DeadSexy for choosing them…

I finally got the correct battery for my iPod, and replaced it. It wasn’t trivial, but it wasn’t too difficult, either. Hard part was lining up the tiny connector for the hard drive, and figuring out what to do with the extra wire on the replacement battery. The original battery has just enough wire to reach the connector; the replacement has about three times that length. It’s all good, though.

Today I did a full-on test… although not the test that Apple recommends. I did a test of the way I use the thing — long playlist, cycling through my favorite CDs on shuffle.

Even then, it managed nearly 8 hours — 7 hours 52 minutes 13.08 seconds, to be exact. Yay!

See? I was right and the Apple Store “Genius” was wrong. The battery was depleted.

Now it’s DeadSexy again.

Note to self:

Make sure and finish everything important before 1 January 2029.

Hmm… I’d better set a reminder on my calendar…

…check.*

*(Yes, my calendar now has a reminder set nearly 25 years in the future.)

There’s a cool-but-geeky (but cool) post over at the Pacfic Tech site, telling the story of how Graphing Calculator came to be written and included on the first Power PC-based Macintosh computers.

Basically, it was done by two guys sneaking into the building. Ron Avitzur wrote it up. He’s my new favorite hero.

My favorite parts:

At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames. We calmly carried it outside to avoid setting off smoke detectors, plugged in another monitor, and tried again. The software hadn’t caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction.

NOTE: I’ll bet it probably was an AppleVision 1710 monitor. Apple was always replacing those. Although the timeframe is a little off…

I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn’t ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

Oh, man. My dream job. Imagine a world without managers… it’s easy, if you try…

Most engineers at Apple had been through many canceled projects and completely understood my motivation.

I think this is true at many companies, especially post dot.bomb.

My skunkworks project was beginning to look real with help from these professionals as well as others in graphic design, documentation, programming, mathematics, and user interface. The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends.

Interesting… as well as a compliment and support for open source development.

Once we had a plausible way to ship, Apple became the ideal work environment. Every engineer we knew was willing to help us. We got resources that would never have been available to us had we been on the payroll. For example, at that time only about two hundred PowerPC chips existed in the world. Most of those at Apple were being used by the hardware design engineers. Only a few dozen coveted PowerPC machines were even available in System Software for people working on the operating system. We had two. Engineers would come to our offices at midnight and practically slip machines under the door. One said, ‘Officially, this machine doesn’t exist, you didn’t get it from me, and I don’t know you. Make sure it doesn’t leave the building.’

Waitwaitwait… the folks developing the SYSTEM SOFTWARE only had a “few dozen” PowerPC machines to work with? NO WONDER the first PowerPC units shipped ran System 7.x so FRIGGIN’ SLOOOOOOW.

And the reason they did it all:

I view the events as an experiment in subverting power structures. I had none of the traditional power over others that is inherent to the structure of corporations and bureaucracies. I had neither budget nor headcount. I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked. Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.”

Truly awesome.

Speaking of running to work, I don’t think I should run with my iPod anymore.

Dammit.

It skips. Badly. Like whole albums at a time.

Sure, the damn thing is still under warranty but I don’t want to have to be without it while sending it off for repair, or, more likely, replacement with some refurbished piece o’ crap that someone else broke.

Now I just have to find a RAM-based player that’s as cool as an iPod. Do such exist?