Everything is Rubbish

Last weekend I upgraded my AppleTV to “Take Two” and my MacBook Pro and Mac Mini from Tiger to Leopard. I also bought an Airport Extreme and an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard. Oh boy, that was fun…

Here’s a list of the problems I’ve encountered:

• The AppleTV is now unfit for its intended purpose. After 3-5 minutes of playing a video playback now stops for about twenty seconds before continuing on again. Rewinding back over those twenty seconds and playing again lets me watch what was missed, and playback continues as expected for the rest of the video. Of course, by this point, I’ve been completely taken out of the reality of what I’ve been watching, and it’s ruined for me. This happens for every single video that I watch, regardless of whether or not the Apple TV is connected to the network. It also occurs for both videos bought from the iTunes Music Store and those which I’ve encoded from DVD myself. Prior to the update videos played without issue.
• The AppleTV now seems sluggish to respond to input from the remote control.
• After upgrading to Leopard, iTunes no longer recognised that my iPhone was plugged in. iPhoto would happily still import photos though. This was fixed by reinstalling iTunes from Apple’s website.
• Folder Actions are now borked. They work, but after an undetermined amount of time and without warning they deactivate themselves.
• Trying to view webpages published at http://localhost/~username/ now results in a 403 forbidden error. Bizarrely this also happens on sites set up within MAMP as well.
• After installing Leopard on my Mac Mini the wireless stability dropped horribly. Buying an Airport Extreme for £120 “fixed” this. In fairness my Mac Mini had very weak wireless under Tiger anyway, but Leopard reduced availability to almost none.
• The new Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, whilst having a very nice action, refuses to hold a connection for more than a couple of minutes. When it does have a connection System Preferences says that it has a full battery.

So, there we go. Frankly, right now I’m not looking forward to the iPhone update that should be just around the corner.

So, I bought myself an iPhone. I said I wasn’t going to, but I did it anyway. Unfortunately, from my point of view as a user there are a lot of things wrong with it. Here are just a few of them…

• When signing up, my phone number to be ported had to be input as a purely numeric input - no spaces, dashes etc. As the very first thing that happened as I went to register my phone was to be told I’d done something wrong when I’d simply copied and pasted my phone number from Apple’s own Address Book application, this did not make me happy.
• The headphone socket is recessed by several millimetres, making the use of standard earphones impossible. So, I had to buy an adaptor to allow me to be able to use my nice inner-ear earphones. Obviously this meant that I lost the microphone and play/pause functionality built into the normal Apple earphones. Frankly though, I think that’s a small price to pay to be able to listen to my music properly and not cause everyone around me to have to listen to it. I’m very much looking forward to the first third party inner earphones with the microphone and play/pause controls built in.
• Originally I’d written that my fingers didn’t always hit the right keys on the onscreen keyboard. However, that was before I realised that if I just went with it, then the iPhone’s inbuilt software would pretty much correct anything that I’d written incorrectly.
• My big annoyance with the iPhone, however, is that not everything rotates. Safari does, but Mail.app doesn’t. The music portion of the iPod application rotates, but the video portion doesn’t. However, when you start to play a video then you’re automatically switched into landscape mode, necessitating a rotation of the screen. Then, when you finish watching a video, you’re dumped back into portrait mode. This causes me annoyance, in a device which costs so much money that it really shouldn’t.
• Most of my annoyances actually come from the iPod application, which really does seem like a retrograde step from my previous 30Gb Video iPod. For example, if you have a song with a long title, on the iPhone this title does not scroll to allow you to see it in its entirety. This gets rather annoying as I quite like to be able to see what I’m listening to.
• Another annoyance comes from coverflow. Sometimes when I rotate the screen into coverflow mode, the album artwork of the song I’m listening to changes! Anyone have any ideas why this would happen?

Overall the iPhone is a good device, but there are a good few things wrong with it. Thankfully though, they’re pretty much all software problems, which _can_ be fixed in a later software version.

Bloody Mars.  They’ve only gone and made the joins on their Galaxy chocolate bars all wibbly wobbly.  Chocolate bar joins should be straight, not wobbly!  It makes no sense, you must acquit!

I got one of these beauties two weeks ago, and it’s a noisy bugger.  An energy hog too.

Before I bought the xbox 360, I’d been telling various friends about the fact that I own an Apple TV and that I re-encode my DVDs so that I can watch them on it.  Pretty often they’d turn round to me and ask “what’s the point?  If you’re going to be re-encoding them to watch on a device like that, why not get an xbox?  Then you’ll be able to play games too!”.

My response to those friends then was that firstly I wanted something very simple to use that I didn’mt have to think about, and secondly that the AppleTV was silent.  As far as I was aware, the xbox 360 wasn’t.

Still, a couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted to be able to play on some of these newfangled games that all the kids are going on about nowadays.  So, I caved and bought an xbox 360.  When I got it home I excitedly got it out of the box, plugged it in and was greeted with the sound of a tornado in my living room.

To say I was a little bit miffed was an understatement.  Whilst I’d been made aware by my friends that they did make some noise I’d not been prepared for how much.  And this was before I’d even put a disk in the drive!  After I’d started playing a game my brain started to filter out the constant drone of the console, but it was constantly there, causing me a noise fatigue that annoyed me no end.  Turning the console off returned me to blissful silence.

So, there you have it - the xbox 360 elite is a noisy bugger.  Good to play games on though.

I’m a fan of Fopp. Where I work we had a Fopp literally right across the road from us. I was not a happy bunny when they closed because of “cash flow problems”.

Happily though, HMV decided to buy u pa few of the stores and run them as Fopp stores, with the values of variety and low apparent low price still intact. I say apparent…

Today I went into my local Fopp for the first time since it reopened on saturday. The first thing that hit me was the increased number of chart items (at chart prices, except using Fopp’s “whole pound” pricing) that greeted me as I walked in. No matter, I thought - I can live with that. Then I delved further.

Walking downstairs I saw a vast array of DVDs priced at £5. Obviously £5 isn’t much for a DVD, but in the past there had also been a good chunk of £3 and £4 DVDs as well (on closer inspection upstairs I managed to find eight £3 DVDs). It looks like as part of HMV’s taking over of the store, a lot of items have been increased in price slightly to give a less flexible, and more profitable, pricing structure.

I didn’t venture upstairs to look at the CDs, but I’m expecting a similar situation. Put frankly, this newly Reopened Fopp just doesn’t feel the same as the old one, and I for one am not happy! It just feels like HMV have taken their prices from HMV and ported them over to a Fopp look and feel. As Mike said at work, the store is a prime location for HMV to take over as one of their own stores.

The thing that annoyed me most though was the “HMV exclusive” sticker that I saw on the IT Crowd DVD. Fopp isn’t HMV. It might be owned by them now, but it isn’t HMV.

I guess I’ll be going back to buying my DVDs and CDs online then. It’s a pity, I used to like Fopp.

So, a little while ago, Apple brought out a couple of new keyboards - one wired, one wireless. The whole web community went a bit nutso, proclaiming them to be the best thing since sliced bread, gorgeous and so very very thin. After a little bit of internal agonising I decided to buy one (this was helped by the fact that whilst I was moving house one of the keys on my then current Apple keyboard got snapped off).

At this point I should probably note that I have a couple of edge case (ish) requirements from my keyboard. You see, I have a Mac Mini. A few months ago, because I was getting a bit sick and tired of the constant beachballing, I decided to buy an external firewire disk to run the OS off since it would be a bit quicker than the painfully slow disk the Mini comes with.  As a consequence, whenever I restart my computer I have to hold down the ‘ALT’ key so that I can choose the FireWire drive as the disk to boot from.  If I don’t, the Mini’s internal disk is used.

This is something I’d been doing very happily using my previous wired Apple keyboard.  Just as you’d expect any keyboard to, it worked as the machine was booting and allowed me to  choose the disk to be booted from.  Not so from the new wired Apple keyboard though.  It steadfastly refuses to allow me to type any characters at all until I reach the login screen.  Yes, I’ve installer the updated keyboard drivers.  Yes, I’ve tested the ‘ALT’ key once the OS is loaded.  No, it will not work at the required time.

So what does this mean to me?  Well, I’ve spent £30 on a new expensive keyboard that doesn’t even work properly.  I still have to have my old half broken keyboard plugged into my Mini so that when I restart my machine I’m able to let it start up properly.

This is a terrible regression for the Apple keyboard.  Like I’ve said, the previous generation of the official wired Apple keyboard works perfectly happily on startup - why doesn’t the new one?

So, for a while now I’ve been using FaceBook. I’m enjoying the site and I’ve got back in contact with a good few people I used to know in school, so that’s all good. What’s not so good is the way that their regional networks.

FaceBook has the concept of networks. You can be a member of many work/school/college related websites, but only one regional network. For most people being a member of one regional network makes sense - you tend to live in the same place that you work. However, if you’re a university student you quite conceivably might live in a vastly different place during term time than holiday time, and quite happily feel that you “belong” in both places.

So it is for me. I currently live and work in London, but in a couple of weeks time I’m going to be moving to Bedford, a town outside of London, and then commute in every day. In doing so I feel that I really will belong in both networks. Because of the way FaceBook works though, I’ll have to choose.

So, yesterday I decided to go and have a look at the Bedford network. I popped along to the page that lets me change my regional network and typed in “Bedford”. A dropdown appeared and I selected “Bedford UK” from it and told FaceBook that I would like to join that network. The next thing I knew, I’d been added to the Leicester network! Sacre Bleu! So, I tried again. Once again I found myself in the Leicester network.

Realising that I probably wasn’t going to actually make it onto a Bedford network, even though I was being told that one existed, I decided to cut my losses and go back to the London network. At this point I discovered that I couldn’t because FaceBook has chosen to implement a completely arbitrary limit on the number of times you can change your regional network to twice in 60 days! So, now I’m stuck with “living” in Leicester for two months. Bloody hell.

I’m furious about this for two reasons. Firstly, I was not told that I wouldn’t be able to change my regional network a third time before I attempted to change it to Bedford the second time. When you’re going to restrict what a user is going to do, you need to tell them about it first so that they can make an informed decision. Secondly, I didn’t actually change my regional network twice - the second time I attempted to change it I was left on the same network as I was already on!

I’ve asked FaceBook to update my regional network so that I am once again part of London. In the mean time, I’m fuming. Bah.

Cobblers - another word for rubbish.  So, who’s going to go and register everythingiscobblers.com then?

It turns out that two thirds of students think that using the web on their mobile phones is rubbish. Quel surprise there really…

A study carried out among students at five UK universities has concluded something we’ve known all long: the mobile web is crap.

Two-thirds of the 1,000 students surveyed said the mobile web was such a poor experience they gave up trying, says InfoGin.

Why do they mention user generated content? Most of it is rubbish with low-grade production. I don’t see user generated content as value-add, it’s just other peoples content and it doesn’t marry well with high production value television content.

Read all of Jon Folland’s critique of Joost.