Penmachine

From my Twitter stream:

• My dad had cataract surgery, and now that eye has perfect vision—he no longer needs a corrective lens for it for distance (which, as an amateur astronomer, he likes a lot).
• Darren's Happy Jellyfish (bigger version) is my new desktop picture.
• Ten minutes of mesmerizing super-slo-mo footage of bullets slamming into various substances, with groovy bongo-laden soundtrack.
• SOLD! Sorry if you missed out. I have a couple of 4th-generation iPod nanos for sale, if you're interested.
• Great backgrounder on the 2009 H1N1 flu virus—if you're at all confused about it, give this a read.
• The new Nikon D3s professional digital SLR camera has a high-gain maximum light sensitivity of ISO—102,400. By contrast, when I started taking photos seriously in the 1980s, ISO—1000 film was considered high-speed. The D3s can get the same exposure with 100 times less light, while producing perfectly acceptable, if grainy, results.
• Nice summary of how content-industry paranoia about technology has been wrong for 100 years.
• The Obama Nobel Prize makes perfect sense now.
• I like these funky fabric camera straps (via Ken Rockwell).
• I briefly appear on CBC's "Spark" radio show again this week.
• Here's a gorilla being examined in the same type of CT scan machine I use every couple of months. More amazing, though, is the mummified baby woolly mammoth. Wow.
• As I discovered a few months ago, in Canada you can use iTunes gift cards to buy music, but not iPhone apps. Apple originally claimed that was comply with Canadian regulations, but it seems that's not so—it's just a weird and inexplicable Apple policy. (Gift cards work fine for app purchases in the U.S.A.)
• We've released the 75th episode of Inside Home Recording.
• These signs from The Simpsons are indeed clever, #1 in particular.
• Since I so rarely post cute animal videos, you'd better believe that this one is a doozy (via Douglas Coupland, who I wouldn't expect to post it either).
• If you're a link spammer, Danny Sullivan is quite right to say that you have no manners or morals, and you suck.
• "Lock the Taskbar" reminds me of Joe Cocker, translated.
• A nice long interview with Scott Buckwald, propmaster for Mad Men.

Labels: animals, apple, biology, cartoon, geekery, humour, insidehomerecording, iphone, ipod, itunes, linksofinterest, nikon, photography, politics, science, surgery, television, video, web

When we sold our old laptop recently, we used the money to buy a couple of iPod touches for our kids. I know, we spoil them terribly and all that. Ours is a geek house. Get used to it. (And if you're interested in their old iPod nanos, those are for sale too—let me know.)

Ordering online, I presumed (naively) that while the iPods are of course made in China, there would probably be a North American distribution centre where they are individually laser engraved and then shipped to customers here. But Apple and UPS let you track your order. Ours shipped directly out of China, and the results are a bit depressing.

There's been a lot of hoopla about Apple pulling out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the Chamber's poor climate-change policies, Apple's greener laptops made with more recyclable materials, and so on, but I have to wonder whether many of those efforts are being negated by the insanely inefficient transport routes taken by items shipped from the online Apple Store.

Although I ordered two identical devices (with separate custom engraving on the back of each) at the same time, as part of the same order, here's how the two iPods are getting to our house:

• iPod #1: Shanghai, China → Anchorage, Alaska → Louisville, Kentucky → Buffalo, New York → Mount Hope, Ontario → Winnipeg, Manitoba → Calgary, Alberta → Richmond, B.C. → Burnaby, B.C.
• iPod #2: Shanghai, China → Anchorage, Alaska → Louisville, Kentucky → Lachine, Québec → Montréal, Québec → Mount Hope, Ontario → Calgary, Alberta → Richmond, B.C. → Burnaby, B.C

Same order, same type of device, same factory. But apparently, the most cost-effective way to get them to me was to send them together from Shanghai to Anchorage to Louisville, then to separate them, sending one via New York, Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta, and the other via Québec, Ontario, and Alberta. Both passed through Mount Hope and Calgary, but at different times. They're both now in Richmond on the way here to Burnaby, hopefully on the same truck (but I'm not sure of that—see below for an unimpressive update).

It's about 9,000 km direct from Shanghai to Vancouver by plane, but on these routes each iPod has traveled almost twice that far (around 17,000 km) by plane and truck, with takeoffs, landings, and transfers. I know the packages are small, but the price of shipping that way can't possibly be taking into account the relative energetic and environmental costs of the two routes.

Never mind that, by essentially excluding environmental effects, it's less expensive to manufacture the iPods an ocean away to start with. How do these transactions add up, when you multiply them by the millions?

If we're interested in ameliorating climate change, I think that we'll have to address the mismatch between the monetary efficiency and energetic inefficiency of these haphazard transportation methods. But that will likely mean that our gadgets will get more expensive in the short term, in order to make our lives more tolerable in the long term. I have a feeling that, with our generally shortsighted human thinking, we might not be willing to accept that.

And that's a bit of a bummer.

UPDATE 11:30 a.m.: There's something amusing about the situation now. Both iPods arrived at Vancouver International Airport in Richmond before sunrise this morning, after making their way halfway around the world, rapid-fire, in five days. But they've now, apparently, been sitting at YVR, about 12 km away from my house, for three and a half hours without being loaded on a truck, because of "adverse weather conditions." What are those conditions? It's raining a bit. In Vancouver, in the autumn.

FURTHER UPDATE 2:00 p.m.: Delivery. Of one of the iPods. They were both at the airport, both supposedly delayed by weather (though it's sunny now), and one got put on a truck and arrived at the house a few minutes ago. The other one, presumably, is coming on another truck. Point reinforced. Next time I'll buy retail, where I can at least assume that two of the same product from the same batch came to the store in the same vehicle.

FINAL UPDATE 5:00 p.m.: The delay of the second shipment at YVR is a mystery even to the friendly UPS phone rep. It will be delivered tomorrow, taking longer to travel the 12 km from the airport to my house than it did to traverse the 3500 km from Ontario to the West Coast yesterday.

Labels: apple, china, environment, ipod, transportation, vancouver

Here's a list we're starting to need in our household, since the girls got new iPods this month, and my wife and I are each on our second or third:

• Lifehacker - Top 10 ways to repurpose your old iPod (via TUAW)

Options include using it as a virtual flash card deck for speech notes, or to run a presentation, holding reference information, as a backup drive, and for booting Windows XP (!). Or, as TUAW suggests, you can give it to a friend or family member, keep it as a car unit, or, as I have done, load it up with background music for Christmas (or for intermissions for the band).

I may try to use the old iPod nano as a Mac boot disk, even though that's not supposed to work. It can't hurt to try.

Labels: apple, family, geekery, ipod

UPDATE: By some miracle (and no, I don't know what I did), one last try at installing the software worked at around 12:30 p.m., and I managed to load on some video and audio, plus podcasts, onto the Zune device. I'm going to transfer a bunch of my daughter's MP3s and let her give it a spin to see what she thinks of the Zune now that it's working, more than 24 hours after I first started trying.

It's been a few years since I used Windows regularly, but as a typical Mac fanboy I do have to ask: do those of you who run Windows regularly actually have to put up with this level of frustration all the time?

Right now I'm staring at the Zune installer program screen, telling me for the fourth or fifth time that it "Can't access Microsoft Update" (I can access it fine by going to the website, by the way). This is on the second computer I've borrowed from my dad to try to install the Zune application. Yesterday I spent something like nine hours (on and off, mostly off, thankfully) trying, repeatedly failing, and then eventually getting the Zune software to install on his older Windows XP laptop. And then, at the end of the day, while the computer itself could see that the Zune player was connected, the software never did, and I could never sync anything to be able to play it.

Having worked for a Windows software developer at one point, I have decent Windows tech-fu techniques, which I employed during yesterday's mess, even creating a new user account before the software successfully ran. Yet here I am again, needing to put the same skills to use once more the next day to get a Microsoft product working with a Microsoft operating system, because yesterday all of my ninja skills weren't good enough to get the music player to, you know, play music.

It's a pity. I like the Zune as a piece of hardware. It's cute, the packaging is nice, it seems well built, the premium headphones are really quite elegant (if bass-heavy). Yes, the Zune design team has tried way, way, way too hard to ape the iPod Nano—the one that's two generations old now, by the way—even down to the "Hello from Seattle" etched into the back in place of "Designed by Apple in California." They've made the hardware as close as they can get to an iPod without getting sued, I think.

The Zune pad that replaces the iPod scroll wheel is good, and the onscreen interface is nice indeed, smooth and useful and (for once) different. What I've seen of it, anyway: I've been unable to do anything with it, not even listen to FM radio, because the Zune (unnecessarily, I think, like the iPod too) needs to be set up from a computer first. Which is my whole problem.

If you buy an iPod, is setting up iTunes on Windows this bad? I've never done it, but I may try just to see how the experiences compare. If it is, I'm sorry, and it's a wonder that anyone ever uses a portable music player. At this point, if I'd actually paid money for the Zune, I would have returned it by now, since for the past day it has been an attractive electronic paperweight, and not a sufficiently heavy one at that.

But for now, as I've been writing this rant, I've used one of my Macs to download the full Zune installer package and move it to my dad's XP laptop using a memory stick. It seems to be installing. Perhaps by the end of this paragraph I will know if the Zune software can see the Zune player, and maybe let it play some music or videos...

Nope. "INSTALLATION FAILED. Could not write the Zune Launcher to key \SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run." What a lovely experience, and waste of my time.

Labels: design, fatigue, ipod, microsoft, software, zune

It looks like a few people are getting those free Zunes from Matchstick I mentioned recently. Mine would have arrived yesterday, but I was off at the clinic, and again today, so FedEx Ground is dropping by again tomorrow.

Honestly, other than the Zune itself, I'm most interested in the "premium headphones" this promotional one seems to come with. I've always found Apple's stock iPod headphone earbuds remarkably lame. On the other hand, these premium earbuds don't come stock with the Zune either.

Labels: audio, headphones, ipod, linkbait, microsoft, zune

Looks like it's been a fun day in iPhone/iPod Touch land. And no, I don't plan to get an iPhone, and didn't get in line, but I did try to update my iPod Touch, without success.

Labels: apple, iphone, ipod, vancouver

• AOL Instant Messenger
• Photo Booth–style effects and comic captions for photos
• Mario-style racing
• "Band", "Drummer", and "MixMeister"
• Guitar stuff (iPhone only)
• Rube Goldberg machine game
• Two apps for Flickr stuff
• Jared! (if you remember him, you know; if you don't, don't bother)
• PayPal
• Sound Effects
• Twitter, of course
• Choplifter, sort of

Some are free, some cost a little bit of money. You'll also need the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 firmware to install and run them—but as of right now, you can't get it yet. So you could buy these applications, yet not be able to use them until tomorrow or so.

Labels: iphone, ipod, itunes, shopping, software, web

I was a bit surprised to be contacted by Matchstick, a Canadian "word of mouth marketing" company, yesterday. I figured after some of their missteps a couple of years ago, they might have gone out of business—but instead it seems like they might have learned a thing or two and survived.

They've been contracted by Microsoft to find bloggers and other types like me to evaluate the Zune media player, software, and online marketplace, which has finally become available in Canada after its U.S. release almost two years ago. I (and Chris Pirillo) had a chance to play with the first-generation Zune—yes, the brown one—briefly in Seattle before that original release, and I was impressed with the hardware and user interface. At a recent trip to Best Buy, I also liked the fun but very un-iPod-like approach to the Zune onscreen user experience, despite the extremely iPod-like form factor of the device itself.

But I haven't had a chance to work with the Zune software at all, and reviews of that over time have been mixed. Matchstick will be sending me a black Zune 8 to try out, so I'll find out for myself. But I'll either have to borrow a Windows PC from someone, or install Windows on my MacBook, to get it to work—there's no Mac support, alas.

But with luck I'll be able to find out whether our Zune subscription links at Inside Home Recording actually work. The little Zune should arrive next week sometime. Maybe I can photograph it with the new/old camera.

Labels: audio, gadgets, ipod, microsoft, zune

I'm posting this from my iPod Touch on a bench at the playground at my kids' school. They are riding bikes. Yay for free open Wi-Fi from one of the nearby apartments.

Labels: apple, family, geekery, ipod, school

• I mentioned the other Derek Miller before. Looks like he's going to get even more famous—his latest album is a collaboration with Double Trouble and Willie Nelson. So when you see "Derek Miller with Willie Nelson," it's really not me.
  
  
• I didn't know that the Milky Way, in which we live, is a barred spiral galaxy.
  
  
• User interface design, simplified.
  
  
• "That's not the same." "Yes it is."
  
  
• I love the existentialism of Garfield Minus Garfield.
  
  
• The 20 biggest record company screw-ups of all time.
  
  
• Podcasting statistics, explained.
  
  
• Check out the iPod on the Space Shuttle. (They had to put in a different battery for safety, by the way.)
  
  
• From Stuff White People Like: "[Going to graduate school] is an opportunity to join an elite group of people who have a passion for learning that is so great they are willing to forgo low five-figure publishing and media jobs to follow their dreams of academic glory."

Labels: ipod, linksofinterest, music, podcast, school

A few days ago my wife mused that she'd like something by her bedside to listen to podcasts and music on, so she doesn't have to go to sleep wearing earphones. Gadgety guy that I am, today I went out and found her just such a thing, the Logitech mm50 iPod speaker system. While it has been superseded by Logitech's newer and very similar Pure-Fi Anywhere system, the mm50 is still widely available (for now) in the $100 to $150 range, brand new.

I've had my eye on the mm50 since Adam Curry advertised it on his Daily Source Code podcast a couple of years ago. For our needs it's the right mix of reasonable size (it's about the length of a loaf of bread, and as deep as a thick slice), portability, ease of use, and, most of all, sound quality. The unit I bought was a discounted open-box floor demo from Best Buy, and while there I compared it to a variety of other options. It sounded superior to most of them, and better than pretty much anything in the sub-$200 category, including its newer Pure-Fi sibling.

It's not perfect. While it charges any iPod plugged into its dock connector, and includes adapters for several iPod models, the mm50 doesn't act as a true iPod dock that you can connect to your computer to sync up. (Earlier releases of the mm50 did offer that feature, and it's still noted in the manual, but newer revisions like ours don't have the necessary pass-through dock socket.) Volume control is two buttons, rather than a more sensible knob. There's no bass or treble or other equalization control—although the sound is so good those don't seem necessary, and not having them keeps down the button clutter. The included remote, while useful, doesn't offer as much iPod control as some competing models. The internal battery isn't easily replaceable.

But the mm50 supports both AC power and its internal rechargeable battery, includes a nice zippered and padded carrying case, has smart stabilizing fold-out metal feet, features a regular 1/8" stereo line input for non-iPod devices, and feels remarkably sturdy. There's a two-year warranty. The "3D surround sound" isn't really 3D, but it sounds shockingly good regardless.

I think the mm50 is a good value, especially if you can find it at a reduced price now that it's a discontinued model. My wife sure likes hers.

Labels: apple, audio, family, gadgets, ipod, logitech, podcast, shopping

Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch ship with a rather limited range of web fonts, and as John Gruber wrote back in the summer:

It's a shame this wonderful display is being held back by such a poor selection of installed fonts.

I wanted to see what this meant in real-world usage, so I hopped over to Code Style's Top 40 Fonts list of most popular available type options on the Web, updated by surveys earlier this month. Here was the result when I compared the font list displayed on my MacBook (left) to the same list on the iPhone (right)—click for a full-size PNG-format version:

Notice how few fonts actually display as themselves. Of the top ten, only three (Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana) show up correctly. Courier is actually the flimsier Courier New, and everything else defaults to one variant or other of the built-in Helvetica or Arial sans-serif typefaces. Here's a close-up:

Further down the list, some of the choices (Marker Felt, Zapfino) are just bizarre to include, while others (Gill Sans, Futura, the Lucida family, my old fave Palatino) are sadly absent. I'm happy to see Georgia in there, and equally pleased that Comic Sans isn't.

Text looks great on the high-density iPod screen—it's a pity there aren't more interesting fonts to try on it. On the plus side, it's quite possible that Apple or others might be able to install some better ones through future firmware updates or software installations.

Here's hoping.

Labels: font, gadgets, geekery, iphone, ipod, macosx, typography

Since I'm on medical leave from work and am sitting at home feeling slightly barfy, I've had a fair bit of time to try out the iPod Touch I received yesterday. My summary: like its sibling the iPhone, it is a fantastic little portable computer. For video, enhanced podcasts with artwork, listening in the car, web browsing, and reading text, it's fabulous. However, as a pure portable music player, I think the other iPods are superior. Here's why.

I miss the click wheel

The iPod Touch and iPhone lack the classic iPod click wheel, or even the round switch arrangement of the iPod Shuffle. The Touch and iPhone screens are big, beautiful, touch-sensitive blank slates—which makes them impossible to use if you can't see them. So when my iPod Touch is in my pocket, I can't skip songs, change the volume, scrub through a podcast, or even pause a track without taking it out to look at it. When I'm on the go, it's therefore slower and more awkward to use than my 5G iPod.

Yes, if you have an iPhone (not yet available in Canada), the headphones include a simple remote to address some of those problems; on the iPod Touch, you need to buy a third-party remote, which I'm seriously considering. Even then, you have only rudimentary, iPod Shuffle–like control over your player.

The click wheel is one of the great genius pieces of design in Apple's iPod lineup, a patented, distinctive component of the iPod's success since 2001. It's brave of the company to ditch it entirely on these new flagship models, in favour of the remarkable new "pinch, tap, and flick" multi-touch interface. But when you're used to the familiar thumb-spinning action of the click wheel, having to hunt for onscreen sliders and scrubbers and virtual buttons is, simply, a chore.

Good for music, great for much else, destined to get better

Don't think that I dislike the iPod Touch. When I use it, it feels like a piece of the future in my hand. I'm hugely looking forward to Apple's promised software development kit (SDK), coming in February, after which programmers everywhere will be able to create all sorts of amazing applications for it, from document readers and word processors to games and screen savers—on top of the already impressive selection of web apps out there. Right now we're limited to the programs Apple ships on it, which are interesting but few.

Because it is a more general-purpose device than other iPods, I find there's more tapping and menu navigating on the Touch, because it does more, but that makes it a little slower to use for most tasks. Some features I've become used to with other iPods, such as using my Belkin audio recorder or setting up the device as a USB flash drive, are unfortunately gone too. Like most iPods, it also feels rather fragile on its own, so I picked up a silicone case and screen protector today from Westworld, seemingly the only retailer in Vancouver with any iPod Touch accessories at all so far.

Compared to the iPhone, it has no camera, speaker/mic, physical volume switch (argh!), headphones with mini-remote, or certain built-in applications (local client email, Google Maps, etc.)—so you have to use them via the Web. The colour scheme is a bit different too. The front bezel is dark, and the back is the usual smudge-o-licious iPod chrome, rather than the flat metal of the iPhone.

It does have a YouTube app and, best of all, Apple's Safari browser. Most websites work perfectly, and the ability to zoom, rotate, and manipulate the display makes everything from using Gmail or WordPress or Blogger to reading blogs and news sites simple and surprisingly pleasant for such a small screen. The onscreen keyboard doesn't beat something real to type on, but particularly in landscape mode it works tolerably with my largish fingers. (Someone who builds an external keyboard for this thing will sell quite a few.)

I think it would make a great e-book reader, but right now there is no easy way I know of to load up text or PDF documents for reading. The Touch can display PDFs and text files from the Web very well (though I wish text files would word-wrap more neatly), but unless you want to set up your own web server (not hard for webby geeks like me) or email yourself a book (feasible but awkward), we'll have to wait for the SDK before that's easy.

Early in the revolution

The multi-touch interface is a revolution, though an early stage one. My fingers are finding themselves a bit confused. I still instinctively try the circular motion of the click wheel when wanting to adjust the volume, pause, or change tracks.

And when I get back to my MacBook laptop, I'm really flummoxed, because there I can scroll with two fingers on the trackpad too. But the scrolling direction is (quite logically, but still contradictorily) completely the opposite of the flicking motion on the Touch. On the MacBook, to scroll a page down I put two fingers on the pad and drag them down; on the Touch, I use one finger on the screen and flick the page up. The transition is like switching between two languages you're fluent in—it takes a bit of time for your brain to make the change.

The cool factor of the iPod Touch is certainly hard to beat. The screen is super-sharp, and photos and video look just great on it. The Touch also works perfectly with my car FM adapter, and in that context it's better than the old iPod because you can see the screen better—but I had to turn the brightness down when I tried it last night, because it was like a searchlight compared to the dashboard instruments!

A device unsure of itself

When the iPhone first came out, many people wanted one without the phone part. The iPod Touch is pretty close, but that also makes it a device that isn't quite sure what it wants to be. Is it a portable computer? A music player? A video device? A web appliance? Well, yes and not quite. Apple positions it and the iPhone as their top-of-the-line models, but if you listen to a lot of audio, or need to record, or like to store data too, think carefully. The massive storage and reliable old click wheel of the iPod Classic or the miniscule convenience of the iPod Nano might work better for you.

Despite that, I suspect that I'll be carrying and listening to the iPod Touch a lot more than my old 5G iPod. When I wake the screen from sleep and slide the virtual switch to unlock it, or flip the iPod sideways and watch the screen display flip too, or grab a chunk of web page and move my fingers to zoom it, or flick a list of podcasts and observe the carefully-calibrated ballistics of how the list decelerates to a stop, there's something amazing about that experience. It's a new kind of computer in my pocket.

A few niggles here and there don't negate the amazement. And I get the feeling that once it's no longer amazing, that experience will simply be something I expect, and almost everything else will seem old-fashioned.

Labels: apple, design, gadgets, geekery, ipod, macosx, music, video

UPDATE: See my review of the iPod Touch.

The company I work for, Navarik, has been amazingly supportive during my medical leave for cancer treatment. It has always been a great place to work, even in the darkest depths of the dot-com bust in which the company started in 2000 (I did freelance editing work for them back then, and started as a proper employee in 2003). That's because the company's founders—university colleagues of mine—created a culture where people are important. It's the main reason I wanted to work there originally, because in the technology industry, you can't necessarily predict what kind of work you'll be doing in the future—but you can judge the culture of your employer pretty easily.

While I've been here at home recovering from surgery and pumping my body full of chemotherapy poisons, everyone else at Navarik has been working incredibly hard on some fascinating and powerful software that will help many people in the maritime shipping industry and elsewhere around the world do their jobs better.

This afternoon my daughters and I dropped by the office for the first time in some months. Coincidentally, it was the same day that the management team presented each employee with a Navarik-personalized iPod Touch (what's the plural of that? iPod Touches? iPods Touch?) as thanks for that effort. Amazingly, I received one too. The accompanying handwritten note from our CEO brought me (and my wife, when she read it) pretty close to tears.

This is not a new thing, nor a token attempt at recognizing the great people who work for the company. I'll write about my impressions of the iPod Touch tomorrow, but my impression of Navarik has only been reinforced: it would be hard to find a better place to work.

Labels: apple, cancer, friends, gadgets, ipod, navarik

It's not all that likely that any of the long-term side effects of chemotherapy (fatigue, hair loss, numbness, etc.) will show up on the first day, so it's no big surprise that I feel fine tonight after a few hours of medication at the Cancer Agency, and now a slow-infusing "baby bottle" hookup for the next two days. Here's the bottle:

Here's me wearing it:

I did have a bit of reaction at the Agency, but rather than the worst-case diarrhea, I merely developed a slightly runny nose and clammy, sweaty skin, which Lisa the nurse quickly handled with some atropine injections. Oddly, my blood pressure was also quite low (105 over 50 at one point). The systolic value isn't strange for me, but my diastolic is usually more like 70 or 75.

I'm also not sure whether I felt nausea. I was a little bleah a couple of hours after dinner, so I took an extra anti-nauseant just in case, but so far I feel much as I did yesterday. We'll keep an eye on that stuff.

For today's wacky links, we have:

• Vintage colour TVs (in the mid-1950s, a 19" colour television would set you back about $1100 USD—in 1950s dollars!)
• How to identify your iPod model (Apple has released between 32 and 34 in six years—the exact number depends on whether you count the latest Shuffles as new, and if the iPhone is an iPod or not)
• Colorectal cancer death rates are dropping (good news for me)
• Aquisition 2 is out
• Good quote: "Teaching biology without mentioning evolution is like teaching astronomy without mentioning gravity."

Labels: apple, astronomy, cancer, chemotherapy, evolution, fatigue, iphone, ipod, pain, science, television

When I was learning to play in a band, back in the mid- to late '80s, there was a 1960s revival going on. We even had an AM radio station in Vancouver that played almost nothing but sixties music, from the British Invasion to the weird one-hit wonders like the Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird." So it's no surprise that I ended up even today playing in a faux-sixties cover act.

But despite Austin Powers, that revival did fade in favour of seventies and eighties revivals. And while there is no grunge revival yet that I can see, there does seem to be another small sixties revival underway. It's most obvious in TV commercials.

The new "Joe" clothing line has a full-on go-go dancing crowd shimmying to the Kinks' "Everybody's Going to Be Happy" (not a particularly well-known number of theirs). Similarly, Canadian retailer The Bay has a new "Boom" line of women's clothes and accessories, and the TV ad includes a Yardbirds-esque version of John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom." Even Mini Wheats cereal has gotten into the act, with moppy-haired psychedelic retro animations behind its catchy singing wheat square belting out groovy Scooby-era pop.

I don't know if it will become more widespread, but commercials often plant the seed for new musical discoveries by kids who buy music. My nine-year-old daughter (who admittedly already calls the Beatles her favourite band, and wants to meet Paul McCartney someday) discovered the Kinks through that Joe commercial. And of course there's the success of Amy Winehouse singing tunes that sound like Dusty Springfield.

If Apple adds an old track from "Nuggets" to an iPod commercial, you'll know the sixties are going mainstream again, baby!

Labels: apple, band, ipod, music, sixties, television

I've mentioned here before that having cancer is something like knowing you could get hit by a bus, and having to dodge buses rather than not knowing at all.

Sadly, sometimes people really do get hit and killed by a bus, without any warning. I'm sad to say that blogger and TV Squad reviewer Adam Findley had that happen last week. He was only 30.

Labels: cancer, geekery, ipod, tvsquad, web

It's remarkable how Apple simply announces new products and instantly makes its previous generation seem obsolete. Check out today's new iPods, for instance.

The iPod touch is the obvious standout, essentially a marginally shorter iPhone, without the phone or camera. But the newly christened "iPod classic," which succeeds the fifth generation video iPod I own, which has been around for almost two years, now has an all-metal case and comes in 80 GB (large) and 160 GB (insanely large) capacities.

The iPod nano (disbelievingly nicknamed the "iPod fatty" by those who saw mockups before today) is like its predecessor chopped in half, with a new interface and colours. Only the iPod shuffle hasn't changed too much, with new colours including the AIDS-benefit red.

The iPod classic is the sweet spot if you have a lot of music and don't want the huge touchscreen and Wi-Fi of the iPod touch. I'll be interested to see how they sell—the iPod touch is way cooler, of course, but only stores 10% of the stuff.

For lots of people it will be an expensive Christmas, from the looks of it.

Labels: apple, gadgets, geekery, ipod

One of the complaints that many people have made about the Apple iPhone is that the headphone jack, while a standard size, is so deeply recessed into the case that nothing but the extra-thin Apple headphone cable will actually fit.

That was also true of the weather-resistant Sport Case for the original, stick-of-gum iPod Shuffle, but that case came with a nice little adapter cable, of which we have a couple kicking around the house. I use them for the extra-chunky end of my big Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones.

So, rather than shelling out a lot of money for third-party headphone adapters, I'd recommend that you hunt around for a discounted Sport Case, whose adapter looks more elegant and might end up being quite a bit cheaper.

Labels: apple, headphones, iphone, ipod