Coffee is my EPO
As just about every tech blog has alerted us, Apple have released a video guided tour of the iPhone. There were two interesting observations for me:
I noticed this post about a new WAP site that Youtube has just launched. I fired it up on my E61i:
Looks good, except for one thing:
The URL linked to looks like this:
rtsp://rtsp.youtube.com/youtube/videos/fp2FKUOM83U/video.3gp.
My E61i’s browser recognised the MIME type in the URL correctly, loaded up the default 3GP video player (RealPlayer Series 60) which doesn’t appear to do RTSP.
This highlights the pitfalls of mobile content. We’ve just about got it right on the desktop browser with Flash being cross platform, but it seems that we’re back to square one when it comes to media content on phones. There’s Flash lite, RealPlayer, etc. all vying for our attention, and no mobile web browser willing to support any one of them. Doesn’t it feel good to be back in 1996?
I don’t think the iPhone will be the panacea either, but it will definitely help. Besides, there’s no Flash support in its version of Safari either. Oh and who hates that ad claiming that the web is the Internet? (that’s another topic for a blog post).
I wanted to check out the iTunes plus tracks so I upgraded my music which only happened to be one album, Ben Harper’s Both Sides of the Gun. After numerous download problems (which I accounted for as everybody doing the same as me) I finally got all the tracks and noticed something funny. All the tracks were labeled incorrectly. It seems that disc 1 was mixed up with disc 2 (isn’t it funny how we still call them “discs”). Here’s a screenshot of the album in my library.
With the corresponding track list.
As you can see from the song times the song names have been switched around. It seems that the songs are mislabeled on the store itself.
I wonder how many other stuff-ups there have been with the switch to iTunes Plus?
I don’t listen to commercial radio in Australia so I don’t have a comparison point, but I was shocked upon hearing how many ads there are on commercial radio here in Seattle. The worst offender for me at the moment has to be KJR FM and it’s covert advertising.
I’ve heard the following twice so far on KJR FM. It goes something like this. The announcer starts talking about the latest James Bond movie and then uses it to introduce a Bond girl. All she then talks about is a new resort in Las Vegas. There is no indication that it is a paid for comment, yet it is clearly a pre-recorded advertisement. It’s funny that they tie this in with Casino Royale considering the amount of product placement in the movie.
This reminds me of the cash for comment scandal in Australia a few years back. It’s appalling. Am I simply not well-versed in commercial radio? Is this fair game?
I’ve been completely frustrated all day attempting to connect to my hotel’s wifi service and the Starbucks T-Mobile hotspot nearby. Along with all the other issues with bluetooth dropping out and battery problems ever since I’ve had my MacBook, I assumed that this was the next thing to cause me issues. The problem manifested itself in not being able to get an IP address via DHCP.
Well it seems that my “Preferred” wifi networks list must have gotten corrupted somehow. I turned off my airport card, removed the T-Mobile hotspot from the list (System Preferences -> Network -> Airport -> see screenshot below) and turned it back on. I got assigned an IP address staight away. Opening up a browser dropped me into the hotspot login screen.
Sometimes all this automagic stuff on the mac drives me crazy!
Update:I got back to the hotel and still had problems. It appears that the hotel’s wifi went down also. I guess I assumed that since I couldn’t connect to the T-Mobile hotspot also that the problem was at my end.
