Locked-in in cell block A or B?
Scoble writes in this piece why people should choose to get locked-in in microsofts drm rather than apples (via gen kanai). Cory doctorow thinks “…that this blog entry of his epitomizes the sloppiest, worst thinking about digital-media in the field today” in this post and i agree with this statement.
Obviously an awkward decision customers shouldn’t have to make. Funny that microsoft tries to promote its drm system as the one giving customers more choice where you clearly loose your choice as soon as you accept any kind of drm. Their reasoning alone makes me more than just a little suspicious. I don’t trust both microsoft and apple enough to allow them to control how i’ll use my music.
Gesture-Operable UI
Article on gesture operable appliances. I’m very interested in this stuff and already wrote a long post about how much eye toy and especially its menu system impressed me. Besides the famous eye toy you can find more examples of such innovative interfaces in the article. If i hadn’t tried one of them myself i wouldn’t believe that they actually work in reality, but now i’m convinced that this is some important stuff to watch out for in the future. In slightly related news: emotion-aware computers (both via gizmodo).
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
I finally started reading down and out in the magic kingdom by cory doctorow a few days back (late to the party, as usual). I finished it shortly after, something happening rarely to me, and i love it. It kept me awake till 5 a.m. for several days as i usually start reading quite late in the night. You can grab a free, drm-less ebook version here or just order it @amazon. I read the free ebook version on my trusty 7650 but will most likely order a hard copy to show my support (and it’ll make a great gift to hook more people on the author). Cory doctorow’s a well recognized name in the blogosphere, not only does he write for boingboing.net, but you can stumble across his name in quite a lot of posts, references and articles.
Over the last year i’ve got more and more impressed by him and his views, but after reading this book i think he’s one hell of a young science fiction writer at the very cutting edge of time who got some great ideas. The premise of the book isn’t too challenging, but it definitely got some thoughts bouncing around in my head. After sticking to some more “classic” cyberpunk lately (namely william gibson, bruce sterling and neal stephenson) i found this book refreshingly different. I usually prefer reading authors i know already quite well, but after this pleasant surprise i’ll be a little more adventurous in my reading choices. Highly enjoyable and highly recommended.
Sony PalmOS software prototype
Sony playing around with the palm os ui. Looks interesting, some things mentioned sound like overdue improvements of shortcomings i experienced back in the days when i used a palm os pda. I’m not so sure about the new launcher stuff though. I tried quite a lot of third party launchers, and always ended using the default launcher, primarily for it’s simplicity and unobtrusive design. It also looks like sony tries to converge all basic palm os apps and i’m fairly certain i wouldn’t like that. It also appears that sony will introduce new desktop syncing software and i bet it’s windows-only. With my plans to get an ibook in the next few months, clies are more or less out of question…
iPod inearphones
Now that there are some reviews of apples inearphones (introduced on mwsf04) online i’m pretty sure that i’ll pick them up. The reviews aren’t that praising, but audiophiles tend to discard any sub-$200 headphones as unbearable. I currently only own rather cheap, portable headphones, namely sennheiser mx400 earbuds and koss ksc 50. I really like the koss cause they sound pretty decent, but almost exclusively use the sennheisers (which aren’t bad either, but not in the same league as the koss) because the koss are open and therefor simply too loud for public usage.
I always wanted to try out inearphones and almost ordered the shure e2c, but they aren’t that cheap and i wasn’t sure wether i’d like popping something that deep into my ear or not. But with the apple earbuds going for $40 there’s not much to risk, so i’ll just try them out and hopefully like them (and i’ll finally have headphones matching the white color of the pod again). The reason i post all this is that i thought there might be others interested in a review of these inearphones, so here’s a list of what i found:
I’m back
I spent the last few days learning for a dull exame i took yesterday, sorry for my absence. After three days of being more or less offline (ok, i checked mail and read lots of java api stuff online, but nothing else), there’ve been waiting approx. 450 unread posts in my aggregator. Catching up kept me up till 4 a.m. yesterday and i’m still not finished. There’s lots of stuff i wanna write about, but don’t really know where to start. However, expect some more activity soon.
Perl scripting language for Series 60
The register reports that nokia will release a perl port for series 60. This makes some people very happy, while others are less impressed. In the meantime you should check out opl if you’re looking for a rather easy-to-learn programming language for symbian devices.
Nokia 6620 Series 60 smartphone
In other gadget news (this feels a lot like back to the roots), nokia announced the 6620 for the us market, an update to the series 60 powered 6600 with twice as much ram and edge support. Sounds great to me, now what i wanna see is a umts capable series 60 device for the european market. With nokia taking series 60 to the next level, i’m now so not getting a 6600, and i’m certain that 2004 will be a great year for symbian, series 60 and nokia.
New Sony Clies coming
It’s been rather quiet around sonys clie line of palm os pdas. The last big news (the announcement of the peg-ux50) date back to july and since then there’s only been the announcement of two hardly impressive mid- and entry-level clies (the tj25 and tj35).
But apparently things are speeding up on the clie front again: the fcc leaked information of three new sony clie models ranging from entry- to pro-level. Find out more about them @brighthand, pic.
I currently feel a lot like getting the tj37 or th55. I abandoned using two mobile devices a little less than a year ago and settled for a series 60 smartphone instead, but wifi connectivity makes pdas quite interesting again. Most pay services here in vienna are too expensive for my budget, but we got a pretty decent wifi network at our university that any student can use for free. I tried it only once yet cause lugging around a 14″ laptop isn’t for me, but a slim, lightweight pda with integrated wifi would be great for checking mails, feeds and sites. And with the integrated cameras present in both models this would be a nice moblogging device as well.
iPod trouble
Had some minor ipod trouble yesterday. Everything’s working well again now, but it sure scared the hell out of me. My ipod more or less froze and reacted very slowly to any system input. A soft reset later the “OK to disconnect” screen didn’t disappear, even after plugging it into my laptop, ejecting it in itunes and disconnecting the firewire cable, so i went for a full restore. I followed the instructions in this document to the point were the ipod updater asked me to plug my ipod into a power outlet to copy the firmware into the flash rom. The “OK to disconnect” screen still remained and i got pretty nervous by then. I tried to follow the restore procedure another time, with the same result. My nerves were pretty thin by then and i figured another soft reset couldn’t hurt my darling anymore at this point. Thank god, when my ipod came up after the soft reset, it performed the flash rom update. A quick (literally) sync with itunes later everything was up and running again.
Lesson learned: i won’t activate the disk mode again. I think my problems were somehow related to the disk mode (i don’t have any proof for that, i just assume this) and i don’t use my ipod as an external hard disk anyway.