...more recent posts
Hi Carol. Thanks for lunch.
An edited extracted from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to the new Plume (Penguin US) edition of George Orwell's 1984.
Apparently (here and here) the new iPods have an undocumented recording mode. But why is it hidden?
Hot off the press (thanks Chris!): ServerStore, an iTunes 4 internet playlist sharing database.
I also spotted this one recently: iPod tracks -> desktop. I haven't had a chance to test this yet, but apparently it lets you copy tracks from a connected iPod (right from the iPod playlist in iTunes) to your desktop. This would be a big improvement over something like Podmaster which does the same, but has to be run as a cumbersome and slow seperate application.
"Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled."
Wardriving is the strange (and somewhat unfortunate) name for driving around with an 802.11x wi-fi equipped notebook computer looking for open access points. In a place like Manhattan they are everywhere. If you find one, you might want to engage in a little on the spot documentation with a graffiti language created to tip off fellow searchers: warchalking.
But why limit yourself to just wi-fi? The air is full of all kinds of signals. Check out these do it yourself plans for remotely monitoring wireless video cameras: warspying.
I'm working on a full report of the new apple music service, as well as iTunes 4.
This afternoon I've been trying to get iTunes to share music over the net. This is the cool new ability in iTunes 4. Apple calls it rendezvous, but that is just the apple branding of the open source project zero conf. This aims at establishing networks of computers with zero configuration. In other words, if networks are possible (over ethernet or over wi-fi or whatever) they will just be established automagically. No fussing with IP addresses or any other networking arcana.
And it actually works. Or pretty much. Machines running iTunes 4 on our office ethernet indeed connect to each other, and music on any one computer shows up as a seperate play list in the iTunes jukebox on every other computer. So I can play music off any other machine in the office, and anyone can play music off my machine. Very slick.
But I should also be able to do this over the internet! That is the real amazing thing. But I could only sort of get that to work. iTunes can see my dial up machine from the office over the internet, but I can't see the office from my dial up machine. No doubt this has to do with the router and switch my office machine is sitting behind. So the afternoon was filled with lots of reading about router configuration and port forwarding. But so far to no avail. I'll try some more tomorrow.
Rough transcript of the Chandler presentation at ETCon. This is the most information I've seen yet on Chandler.
There is a satellite broadcast of today's Apple event (1pm eastern time) but no webcast. Or at least none was announced. But someone said this might be it. It loads for me, but there is no content there at the moment. Maybe at 1:00.