DigitalHobbit

TechCruch’s Michael Arrington posted an interesting (and controversial) article on the future of the music industry: The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free

Definitely some good points, and an interesting read (although I haven’t had the patience to troll through the numerous comments…). I am not sure I completely agree with the fact that the [...]

Call me a late adopter, but I have finally gotten rid of all CRTs in my house (partially as a space saving measure in preparation for our upcoming move to a smaller house, although this may just be a subconscious way of justifying the expense ). I replaced my 32″ CRT TV with a [...]

This morning I turned on my iPod after not having used it over the weekend, and I was surprised to find that it had been completely erased, as if I had restored it to factory settings using the iPod updater. It prompted me to select my language, I had to re-enter all my settings, and [...]

I just had a chance to catch up with the tech news from the past week or so, and I almost couldn’t believe what I read about Sony’s trojan-horse rootkit that was shipped on over 50 CD albums. Apparently this malware searches your computer for illegally downloaded music and reports this to Sony. And not [...]

For a little over half a year now, I’ve enjoyed owning the top of the line iPod model, the 60GB iPod Photo. Sure, there had been a few interesting new models (such as the iPod Nano), but if you were looking for a large storage model, the 4th generation 60GB iPod Photo was the best [...]

Awesome idea: Do-It-Yourself iPod Stand, based on a printable PDF template.

Yesterday afternoon we drove back from San Diego to San Francisco. Overall, the trip was pretty smooth - except for one major annoyance. I had brought my laptop along, and the day before the trip back I had downloaded some podcasts for myself as well as my kids. However, when I synced those to my [...]

While looking for some quality examples of applications built using the Ruby on Rails framework, I came across Odeo.

This San Francisco based company organizes, synchronizes, and publishes podcasts (although it it still in beta and the publishing part isn’t live yet). I’ve only briefly looked at it so far, but it looks very promising. Individual [...]

In addition to a new iPod update, Apple also released an updated version of iTunes (4.9). The main feature that this version adds is built-in support for podcasts. This is awesome! Podcasts can be selected and subscribed to using the Music Store interface (don’t worry, they’re all free). Once subscribed, podcasts can be configured to [...]

Maybe I should have checked Apple’s website before posting my previous blog entry. It turns out that the iPod update that came out a few days ago does in fact address the problem with compilations that I mentioned. This makes a huge difference browsing music on the iPod!

Now that I’ve gotten pretty far with ripping my CD collection and properly tagging the MP3s I already had, I ran into a minor iPod annoyance. I have about 20GB and more than 3300 songs in my iTunes library at this point, all of which I sync to my 60GB iPod. A bunch of my [...]

I just set my Linux box up as an iTunes server. After seeing how easy it was to get this working (not least because of Gentoo’s excellent package management), I’m almost annoyed at myself for putting this off for so long.

The HOWTO Apple ITunes Server document on the Gentoo Wiki was absolutely on [...]

Today I went to the Apple Store and bought an AirPort Express Base Station. I had been looking for a good way of listening to MP3s in the living room, and after my boss mentioned how we was using an AirPort Express and a set of PC speakers to stream music into his kitchen, I [...]

I haven’t tried it yet, but it is possible to set up Linux as an iTunes server, allowing any Windows or Apple machines on the network running iTunes to browse and play any music on that server. This sounds ideal for me, as my music collection lives on my desktop PC that usually runs Linux, [...]

I am currently using both Linux and Windows with my iPod. So far, I have found iTunes to be far superior to any of the Linux applications for syncing songs to my iPod, so I usually dual boot into Windows for this purpose (which isn’t all that often these days, now that I’ve got a [...]

I received my iPod on Wednesday and wanted to briefly share my first impressions (mind you, I have only used it for about 2 days now, and I haven’t really had a chance to load it up yet).

The iPod is a very nice gadget. It is extremely well made and has a very intuitive user [...]

I finally gave in and bought an iPod, kind of as a belated birthday present to myself… Most of my colleagues have one, and I guess I was feeling left out.

I think my timing was pretty good, as Apple just restructured the pricing for their numerous iPod models. In particular, the regular 40GB [...]

iRiver recently announced the impressive PMP-120 audio / video player, which looks very exciting and has a long list of features. It plays all the relevant audio formats (including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA), as well as video formats (including Mpeg, DivX, and XviD). It has a built-in speaker as well as a 3.5″ TFT [...]