So, how do I listen to my music while I’m working? MediaMonkey doesn’t work too well in WINE, it’s OK in Parallels but running a 2nd OS solely for music isn’t ideal…

For a while I used Spotify. I was using it ‘wrongly’ apparently though as I used to listen to albums I already owned rather than for discovering new music. They have recently limited the free version to only play a track a maximum of 5 times so my use has been severely affected.

I’ve been hunting for a method to play music on my MacBook Pro that doesn’t involve iTunes. Someone mentioned Airfoil for streaming music across a network which sounded OK but I would have to physically go to the computer to change tracks / playlists… Then I discovered MonkeyTunes which, put simply, allows you to use Apple’s Remote app on iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad to have full control of MediaMonkey. Sweet!

So, now I have my MacBook Pro running as an Airfoil ‘speaker’, the windows machine running as the Airfoil source and I use my iPhone to control it all. I can also use my Android phone as the remote too, or my iPad.

Another bonus is I can install the free Airfoil speaker app onto my old iPhone 3G and stream it to that if I wanted to connect that to my stereo or the dock when I have guests and the MBP isn’t loud enough.

I’m pretty chuffed! So even with iOS 4.3 allowing HomeSharing of iTunes library, I can still use MediaMonkey for my music AND have all the benefits (and more) of that being shared across handheld devices and computers!

The only thing that annoys me is I didn’t discover all this 2 years ago…

Instead we get to see stupid rumours about Apple things that have so little substance that they are laughable. It doesn’t happen with any other company – I’ve never read a blog/news post about Company A sending an email to Company B therefore Company A must be developing product XYZ but that’s what I see on an almost daily basis with so called news reports for Apple.

The current one is that “Apple have a SatNav service in the works” (I’ve seen this on at least 4 sites now) with their proof being that Apple have big data centres an they bought Siri (a voice recognition company) last year ergo they are developing a SatNav service. What??!!! How the heck can a serious journalist even make that link? Hell, even Eddie Izzard or Ross Noble would struggle to link those things together. Has it even crossed their mind that maybe they bought a voice recognition company to improve the existing voice recognition software currently used in their iPhones? Maybe the larger data centre could be a direct link to them doubling the audio previews in iTunes from 30secs to 1min? Or even the fact that they have more and more and more songs, videos, films and tv programmes available to buy/rent in iTunes and so they need more space?

If this annoys me so much I hate to see how I get when the iPhone 5 feature-list ‘news’ start…

An in other news, last month we got a new cat. Rumour has it that because of this we are moving to Chester. There’s a link there somewhere… Go blog it to the world as fact!

A friend of mine (@echoingsounds) asked if I’d seen ‘Abatoir‘ (I may have misheard him though) to which I answered “yes’ – because I have an I didn’t see the point in lying about such a  trivial thing. He then said “Oooooohhhhhh, wait until you see it in HD!” to which I responded “Why? does it make the story better?”. Completely missing the fact that I wasn’t overly impressed with the film he simply said “No, it just looks amazing”.

Now, my Toshiba TV has some brilliant up-scaling built in and even old DVD’s in SD (Standard Definition [720 x 576]) look great. If you look closely (see below) you can see some pixelation on the edge of Mr Herring’s (@Herring1967) suit and some of the strands of hair aren’t quite distinguishable from each other.

However, it’s very rare that I watch a DVD from such close proximity. Sometimes this might be my view:

Looks fine, doesn’t it? However, in general, this is my normal view:

The extra resolution, on a 42″ TV, is something and nothing. You don’t notice it or need it in normal, everyday use. Anything over 42″, in my opinion, does benefit from HD (although you obviously need a HD source – something else the salesmen never tell the often naive customers) as the pixelation gets to a point where it’s quite distracting.

OK, so, it’s clear I’m happy with DVD’s over BluRay but what about TV? Well, what about it?! I’ve started thinking up more and more random retorts to the Sky HD salesmen in the Kirkgate Shopping Centre in Bradford. Initially I started by being quite polite, “No thanks”, “Not for me” until they started really getting on my nerves by asking me 4 times in the space of 5 minutes – surely a bloke with 2 young kids is quite recognisable after asking them twice in such a short space of time? More random retorts include “I’m a virgin”, “Sky TV is of the devil”, “I already have a credit card”, “I don’t have a credit card”, “Don’t touch me there”, “Stop following me” and “Are you my mum?”. I need to think of a killer retort though for next time… I don’t need HD TV, probably 80% of the country don’t need HD TV. Yet there are a huge number of people forking out a small fortune for Sky HD and Virgin Media HD. In reality though most of the programmes are broadcast in up-scaled SD as opposed to actually being HD programmes. In which case, my TV does just as good a job. There’s an option on Sky HD box to have it display in the EPG which programmes are up-scaled and which are actually broadcast/filmed in proper HD. Last time I looked HD programmes were the minority – admittedly this was about 9 months ago so things may well have changed. The point still stands though that just because you have a HD TV, a HD digi-box (Sky HD, Virgin HD or Freeview HD) doesn’t mean that everything you see is HD.

We use Freeview for our TV – I’m from Yorkshire therefore I’m tight-fisted and, hence, reluctant to pay for extra TV channels that I will never watch. To be perfectly honest most Freeview channels look good on my TV (the ones that don’t are ones I wouldn;t normally watch anyway) – admittedly because of the very good up-scaling algorithms that Toshiba use. The ‘pixelation’ seen with Freeview isn’t so much the fact that it is not HD but more the fact that there are too many channels on a single multiplex. For those who are not aware how Freeview works, basically there are 6 frequencies/”channels” that are broadcast – these are known as Multiplexes (Mux for short). Each Mux contains multiple TV channels which your Freeview device decodes and splits up into the normal everyday ‘channels’ that you are used to. That’s why with a poor signal you don’t lose one channel – you lose a group of channels which are all broadcast on the same frequency. In order to fit more channels onto a single Mux the broadcasters have to reduce the quality of the video and audio – this is most noticeable via ‘artefacts of compression’. Have you ever saved a jpeg photo in really low quality and seen the ‘blocky’ effect that arises? This is caused by the compression used to keep the image file size small. Freeview images are, essentially, lots of jpeg images thrown together to make video and they suffer the same form of compression ‘blockiness’. See below for an example of jpeg compression (click it for full size!):

In the top photo you can make out a lot of the detail, you see nice gradual fading of colours and nice sharp edges. However in the bottom you can see ‘blockiness’ where the compression tries to reduce the number of colours; the end results are that subtle shades are lost, sharp edges become blurred and the picture, overall, looks pretty crap. Now, imagine this in every frame of a video broadcast – you’ve probably seen it yourself if you’ve ever had the misfortune of watching football on the telly. Sometimes the pitch is very blocky instead of a nice subtle, varying shades of green like it should be – this is due to the compression.

Now, different Mux’s have different numbers of channels and, therefore, different rates of compression – you can only fit so much data into a single Mux broadcast due to bandwidth limitations. Mux 1 with 5 TV channels (BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, CBBC, BBC News, BBC Red Button and a few BBC Radio channels) has noticeably less compression than Mux 2 with 8 TV channels (ITV1, Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV 2, Channel 4+1, More 4, E4, ITV1+1 and a couple of text and radio channels).  [NB: I am in  pre-switchover area so these Mux's and channel listings will differ elsewhere]. HD TV or not, the Mux2 channels will always look worse. [For a fairly concise explanation of bitrates/compression/bandwidth have a read of this from UKfree.tv]. So when a salesman or demo TV shows you a comparison between a Freeview channel and their Sky HD set up you might like to point out that it’s not a fair comparison. They are implying that Freeview is bad and Sky is great – you would see exactly the same difference between normal Sky (not HD) and Sky HD – and seeing as a lot of Sky channels are actually really only SD, are they really any better than Freeview? They are selling you a few channels and programmes in HD but not everything you get will be HD.

I’ve heard a few people say that you need HD to be able to see the real beauty of some of the amazing BBC wildlife documentaries. I beg to differ. On Freeview (SD, not Freeview HD) on my 42″ TV those documentaries STILL looked absolutely stunning – a lot f it is the camera and filming techniques used. Admittedly if it was broadcast on, say, ITV on Mux2 with more channels resulting in more compression then, yes, the HD boys would have a point – the fact is, though, that ITV don’t make nature programmes like the BBC do anyway so it would never happen so it’s a moot point.

After the digital switchover (September this year for me) the analogue channels will be removed which will effectively give Mux’s 1, B, C & D 33% more bandwidth (i.e. they can use less compression) then Freeview video SHOULD look better anyway – i.e. the same as ‘normal’ Sky or Virgin TV. Still no need for HD.

Personally I think that HD is very over-rated. Most people simply do not need it and are buying into the very clever marketing people. The number of channels and programmes broadcast in HD is pretty small too so, in my eyes, not worth the extra cost to get it. There is a plus-side to this though – the more people that use BluRay over DVD, the cheaper DVD’s (both new and 2nd hand) are for me!

Why Game Center is the worst social network… ever:

1. You can’t send/receive annoying/amusing messages to your friends
2. You can’t see any information about your friends
3. That trumpet sound when friend requests are received
4. There are no games for it (and hence no way to see what animal your friends have just rescued on their farm)
5. There’s actually no networking or social aspect to it (meaning you are unlikely to spend much time skipping work to ‘just check Game Center’)

And now for the good parts;

Why Game Center is the best social network… ever:

1. You can’t send/receive annoying/amusing messages to your friends
2. You can’t see any information about your friends
3. That trumpet sound when friend requests are received
4. There are no games for it (and hence no way to see what animal your friends have just rescued on their farm)
5. There’s actually no networking or social aspect to it (meaning you are unlikely to spend much time skipping work to ‘just check Game Center’)

Congratulations, Apple, on pleasing everyone – those who love, and those who hate, social networking!

Lots of people are talking about product recalls or free bumpers (cases for the iPhone 4 that, because they stop direct contact between sweaty fingers and the phone’s antennae, stop the ‘reception issue’ from showing as much). However, my theory is quite different:

When you update the firmware on the iPhone you are given a great big End-User License Agreement (EULA) that no one ever reads. Ever. Yesterdays iOS 4.0.1 release will likely have said something along the lines of:

…by installing this iPhone software update you are hereby acknolwedging that there are no issues with the iPhone 4′s antennae and there is no reception issue. Ergo, you cannot sue us or complain any more. Ever. About anything. Love from Mr Jobs.

So, later today, when Mr Jobs stands up in front of the worlds media and blogosphere he will stand there all smug and say “Well, 4 million iPhone 4 users just updated to 4.0.1 and, by doing so and agreeing to my terms, have confirmed there are no issues. Please go home and relax. Good night.”

There you have it, how many times have you been told to read everything before you agree? Now you know why.

At the back end of 2008 I acquired an iPhone 3G through PocketGPSWorld – the idea being that it would be used once they started developing their iPhone App (it’s called CamerAlert, if you’re interested, and is available in the AppStore). It was a Pay As You Go so I only really used it for mobile internet and that was pretty much it. My T-Mobile contract then got expensive and, to be frank, the signal in my home village was shockingly bad with frequent drop-outs during calls etc. Many calls to technical support resulted in me being told that our local mast was overloaded and could not keep up with the number of users in the area (which explained why my wife’s mobile signal also did the same). As such I got my £35/month contract for £17.50/month for 15 of the 18 months I was contracted to. Early 2009, at the end of the 18 months, the signal had not improved and I was reluctant to pay full price. So I decided to get an O2 SIMplicity SIM card for £20/month with unlimited internet and a tonne of minutes and text’s. I’d been on O2 before getting the T-Mobile PDA so knew the signal was fine. I used this SIM card in the iPhone…

I hated it. Actually, genuinely hated it. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was but I hated it. After a week or so if fiddling about with the iPhone I actually sussed out what it was – I simply couldn’t fiddle with it. OK, you can change a few settings, install apps from the AppStore etc BUT there were no little settings you could really fiddle with; you couldn’t, at that point, send MMS messages; there still isn’t any bluetooth file transfer… It bugged the hell out of me but for financial reasons I couldn’t (still can’t) afford a new phone or the cost of a more expensive contract with a ‘free’ phone. So I was stuck with the iPhone. A few generous friends offered to take it off my hands, but I needed it for work…

Gradually though, as I used it more and more and also used my MacBook Pro more and more I got used to the Apple way of things. Simplicity CAN be a good thing. It means things are less likely to go wrong as there are less variables that can be changed. I actually started to go from hating the iPhone to loving my iPhone – note the use of the word ‘my’, the more I used it, the more it became a part of me. I still use it as my main phone now, and actually like the simplicity of it all. It is probably the best UI I have used on a mobile phone – it’s easy to use, although not massively customisable, it works really, really well.

So, move on to the end of 2009 when I was given a T-Mobile G2 Touch (HTC Hero) Android phone – again for PocketGPSWorld.com app development. The default version runs Android 1.5 so some of the features are missing (such as bluetooth file transfer, text to speech etc) but, in general it’s a good phone with a lot of features. I should love this phone more than I do though. While it is great that it is highly customisable, the whole UI and user-experience is… how can I say… different. Perhaps I’ve been spoilt by the iPhone’s simplicity but I have to try hard to want to use the Android phone. It’s not that it’s bad in any way, it’s just not my iPhone. Had I not had my iPhone in between my WinMo phone and the Android phone I doubt I would have felt this way about it.

I do like using my Android phone, don’t get me wrong, but my whole outlook seems to have been changed in that I no longer wish to fiddle too much – I just want a phone that works and as simply as possible. There are some things I would like to see done differently in Android, but then again there are things I would dearly love to change on my iPhone too. I’m going to use my Hero for a while this time and see if my outlook changes again. I suspect though, like last time I tried, I’ll stick it out for 2 weeks then just need my iPhone back again! We’ll see – maybe I’m just addicted and I need to break the habit!

Sadly the phone was locked to the T-Mobile network… So that scuppered my plans until I came across a link at the XDA Developers forum to Unlock Now, a site dedicated to unlocking Smart Phones. It was reasonably priced and within 20 minutes of placing my order I had the SIM Unlock code waiting in my inbox. Needless to say it worked (they buy the codes direct from HTC) and it is now an O2 G2 Touch!

I have to say I am massively impressed not only with the phone itself (it feels nice and weighty and has a nice, slightly rubberised, feel to it) but also with Android as a phone OS. It’s running Android 1.5 (Cupcake), it’s nice and fast, it’s very customisable and has some nice touches added by HTC such as contacts automatically integrate with your Facebook friends and their Flickr feeds.

The Android Market is still fairly young but there are some good apps in there. It’s not as easy to search as the AppStore is nor does it have a ‘recommend this app’ email link which is a handy feature in the AppStore to let friends/family know about new apps they may be interested in. My other bug-bear with Android is the lack of back-up. The HTC software syncs your contacts and calenders but that’s about it. Maybe I’ve been spoilt with Apple’s complete ‘backup and restore’ via iTunes?!

So, onto the good bits! The HTC Sense UI used on this phone is simple to use and I love how you can add widgets onto any screen and relocate them as you see fit. The Android browser is based on WebKit so handles AJAX and other fancy web stuff perfectly adequately as well as full on CSS support – which is a good thing! Screen real-estate is maximised by the phone having six hardware buttons (plus the scroll ball / button) so extra functions in apps are reached by pressing the ‘menu’ button whereas on the iPhone with it’s single ‘home’ button (that closes apps) any app controls need to be on the main display itself. Moving from iPhone to Android does take some getting used to though, especially when I’ve been using my iPhone as a main phone for about a year. Still, it’s easy to get used to and on moving back to the iPhone it seemed strange not to have the extra buttons.

My final praise for Android is it’s use of cakes and buns for their codenames. I like cakes. So far there has been Cupcake (1.5) and Donut (1.6) . So, roll on Android 2.0 (Eclair) [HTC seem to be skipping 1.6 and going straight to 2.0) with all it’s extra features! In the mean time I will probably be using my iPhone for two weeks then the Android for two – I like it that much!

So Monday and Tuesday of this week have been spent juggling work, phoning the police, phoning insurance companies, phoning and emailing O2 and getting used to my T-Mobile G2 Touch as a temporary measure. Today is Mrs-MaFt’s birthday and if she doesn;t like the Happy Meal toy I’ve bought her then I reckon things can only get worse…!

Armed with my iPhone, a couple of goodies (you can leave items for other geocachers in some of the larger caches or do swaps for items already in the box) and a thick coat (it was blowing a gale, but at least the rain had stopped); me and Mini-MaFt headed out across the field towards our local alpacca farm for our first ever cache.

Thankfully this one was relatively easy to find so it was a nice start to what could potentially become a time-consuming hobby! The caches was a clip-lid box with a few goodies in it and a notepad/pencil to record our find. Mini-MaFt got a sliding puzzle from here which he swapped for a toy bear he had brought with him. I logged the find on the geocaching website via the iPhone app and we decided to try and find more ‘treasure’.

A bit of a walk through some more fields back to a road I drive on most days a week. Following the clue took me to a wall where we were looking for a ‘micro-cache’ – i.e. something far smaller and with no room for swaps. This one took a lot longer to find mainly due to the fact that there was a car parked right by it!! I did feel a bit dodgy though routing around next to someone’s car but I figured with iPhone app in hand and son in tow it would be proof enough that I wasn’t doing anything dodgy! I found it in the end though, added our details and fired up the app to see which one to go to next!

Our next cache involved a short walk along a narrow road – thankfully with Mini-MaFt in tow there was a path! Although as we were pretty exposed it was hard not to be blown off the path and into the road! Down a short public footpath through a field with a fantastic view (I love living in Thornton!) and we got to our destination. This time I missed it and it was Mini-MaFt who located the ‘treasure’. Again, this one was a box with a lid so room for some swaps. Mini-MaFt got another little toy which we exchanged for a Pocket GPS World keyring and business card. While we were filling out the log book Mini-MaFt spotted a nasty pirate trying to find our treasure; technically he was a farmer checking a bit of fence that had been wind-damaged but that’s not so much fun to a 4 year old! We quickly hopped over the stile and sat on the other side to get the cache all packed away safely without it being seen.

By this point our hands were numb and the next nearest cache was half a mile away down a steep hill going away from home. So we headed home to warm up, waited for Mrs-MaFt to get home and then let Mini-MaFt let-rip telling her all about the treasure hunt! He was still talking about it on his way to bed later on too. I can see this becoming a new hobby and maybe soon we will place our own cache for you all to find!