I want to use it (and will) because it’s freaking awesome. The bitrate thing doesn’t massively concern me… generally speaking, I can’t tell the difference (though I will continue to rip my CDs as lossless, mostly in case I lose them). What concerns me is the potential undermining of my CD-store perusing ways as a result! I haven’t had to consider this until now because mainstream music simply hasn’t been available in a relatively open (don’t give me crap about MP3 patents, anyone can read them), DRM-free format.

It ships with artwork but that so doesn’t count.

Oh, so apparently this post was a waste of time. Of course, it’s only licensed for US sales. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me, but it didn’t. Now I’m grumpy. And irrationally craving popcorn.

Well, if you’re in the US and using iTunes… stop. This is pretty cool for you guys, meanwhile I’ll keep buying my grey-market imported CDs (which is completely legal in Australia and morally fine). All that’s standing between me and Amazon’s MP3 music is a US shipping address for invoices, presumably, so I totally could just make one up. Not breaking any law that I’m under there. But whatever, it’s all too messy.

Yeah, that’s right, record companies screwed it up again.

We’ll get there, one day…

And people wonder why I refuse to buy music online.

More significantly, though, is Windows Media Player 11. It’s got a new interface, plenty of usability tweaks, a bunch of music store enhancements (eugh, sorry, I can’t be positive about this one) — notably URGE — and probably more DRM to go along with it, and an even-better-than-version-10 CD-ripping interface.

It’s designed as a one-click process, but makes selection of format, bitrate, etc. completely quick, easy, and painless.

It’s great.

My only qualm is that it’s impossible to select any other format than the ones originally presented. Sure, this is a Microsoft product and it’s targeted at computer-illiterate types the world over and having an “add your own command-line encoding option” option probably isn’t great from a usability for all perspective, but what’s wrong with having the option there? I’m not going to rip my music in a DRM format, ever.¹ It’s just not going to happen. I’ll sooner be stuck listening to CDs and scratching them to death and then buying new ones. You already give me the option to rip an MP3, so why not other formats you can’t control?

The only reason I can come up with is that other, competing, formats are technically superior. You feel threatened by FLAC (were it to become widely adopted) as it is superior to WM Lossless… probably because it lacks DRM. Justifiably, you don’t feel so threatened by MP3 as it is, in general, inferior in every way (except it lacks DRM) — even though it has massive penetration.

Even that penetration is slipping because people don’t change defaults and are ripping their music using Windows Media Player or iTunes. So, you know, there’s less to be lost by letting the geeks play with their zany open source formats. The proles will never actually know or care enough to embrace them, you keep your control, and an underclass (or silent ruling class?) benefits and is endeared towards your brand. And, of course, geeks are vocal about products: I love Windows Media Player 11, but this little thing really gets to me. If you give me that, then I will be so happy with it I’ll be constantly trying to convert iTunes users — admittedly, I’ll probably fail because their collections are under proprietary lock and key and their hardware has bound them to it, but in a couple of years when their iPod batteries die they’ll see the error of their ways.

Geeks will too readily prostitute themselves and become product evangelists — but, beware, we are notoriously given to infidelity.

1. I will, however, rip my music in non-rights manage formats and let software convert it as necessary for playback on retarded hardware devices. I haven’t required hardware that has such draconian requirements yet, but if I ever do, this will be the closest I get to compromising.

If I bought DRM’d music, I could have it now. If I wait a few days, I can have it DRM free. This applies as much to obscure artists on indie labels as it does to top 40 hits: even so-called ‘enhanced’ CDs are close enough to Red Book spec that you can rip the guts out of them to beautiful lossless FLAC files without much difficulty.

That’s what’s so bloody illogical about this whole conundrum: I can still get content in better-than-iTunes quality without DRM. I just can’t have it now.

Why not just let me have it now as an MP3 (OGG or FLAC would be nicer, but I’d settle for less ;-)) whilst I wait for the CD to arrive? What about this model doesn’t make sense? I would buy so much more music if licensers played to my at-computer (or, in this case, in-room at-radio) impulse buying tendencies. I doubt they’re ever going to get it.

Via a ZDNet blog via Slashdot

See also my angry post from last week about copyright and digital media in Australia.

Even if you’re not a geek this STILL AFFECTS YOU. Own an iPod or any other MP3 player? Have iTunes on your computer?

Launched very very quietly about a week ago. It’s hardly content-ready but that should hopefully come over the next week or two. We’re keeping busy and hopefully there’ll be blog thingies going eventually. It’s currently built around WordPress, which is a choice I made a few months ago [and now… you finish this sentence]. The content was taking ages to get perfect so our staff team decided it’d be best just to launch it and replace the old thing. So now we’ve got an incomplete new website! ;-) But it’s getting somewhere, praise God for the gifts of technology for communicating!

The upcoming events thing doesn’t have anything yet (and should), and will be incredibly interesting. I think the calendar system is probably still too counter-intuitive (it’s a WordPress plugin designed to link to blog entries) so I probably need to look at other options for that. There’s also a distinct lack of media library aspects that could mean more work when graphics or other documents need uploading, but we can address that in good time. By address, I mean change to a real content management system. Sigh, no-one but myself to blame, really.

Speaking of church websites, I found one in the Sydney Anglican diocese that I actually like! Shock, horror! It belongs to St Peters Church Cooks River (located in St Peters the suburb, that is). I’d probably make the navigation square on the corners and if I were to use anti-aliased text make it something legible, or just plain HTML nav, but other than that I quite like the feel of the site. The less I say about markup the better, I think. It’s all done with Dreamweaver templates, which is an awesome option I’d be tempted to embrace but for the cost which we really can’t afford for the flexibility it doesn’t give compared to a multi-user CMS. One other new website of note is Moore College’s recent update. Semantically beautiful, solid design, okay CSS implementation (it… really doesn’t work too well at higher resolutions in Opera at least, I can’t be bothered opening another browser right now)

Anyway. Ours is good for the minute. It’s getting better, promise. And we’ll have half-decent creatives for it sometime in the hopefully-not-too-distant future once the one or two graphic designers in our midst are politely roped into creating such things :) I’d love to see more blog content, publication of more material we produce internally (most recently is the sheet on “How to choose a good church”, but there are plenty of others), a high-quality kid’s/youth ministry section (not just for youth — Dave Blowes is trying hard there with the JAM website — but for sharing what we’re doing with parents and childrens/youth programmes at other churches), greater multimedia stuff (mostly for those who aren’t regulars at Matthias and want to see what we’re doing, but also for archival purposes), electronic giving to make that easier, and online partner database that would effectively be a searchable church directory (secured, obviously).

I’m just praying we don’t slide down the slippery path into technology dependence along the way, because it scares me so much. I’m not afraid of us turning into a church that embraces technology and uses it effectively and extensively: I’m afraid we’re going to wake up one day and will be playing a video that’s all about a passage from scripture instead of actually reading the bible itself in a meeting. I’m not afraid of the power of media under God: I’m afraid we’ll see the power of media and slowly God could slip from the picture as we think we can evoke a response using it without turning to His word.

This is the single most difficult thing for me about being involved with technology implementation in an Evangelical church in Sydney. We’re new to this stuff. The difficult thing is that it hasn’t been done before (except in Pentacostal/‘charismatic’/AoG circles, which are slightly different — I won’t comment further for fear of saying anything divisive here), and even where it has been it’s not been done holistically. Approaching media is approaching the world’s way of communicating, which is so deceptive and shallow and often ill-informed. The challenges that face us are relatively new, though their essence is not. We must hold onto what we believe whilst trying to communicate those beliefs as clearly and effectively as possible — but our communication is nothing without the growth provided by God.

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

– 1 Corinthians 3:5–9

Planting and watering can take the form of a DVD or a website or a sermon in MP3 format as readily as it could a book or an evangelistic sermon: none of these things are anything without the growth provided by God.

Woot. The best bit:

Schools, universities, libraries and other cultural institutions will in the future be free to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes.

Dubious bit:

In a big win for recording artists, the laws will include the removal of the legislative 1 per cent cap on copyright licence fees paid by radio broadcasters for playing sound recordings.

Dubious because I’m really uncertain as to how that’s going to pan out… I’m thinking it’s actually going to further inhibit the scope of the music we hear on commercial radio! Non-commercial radio… well, who knows? Is that a “cultural institution”?

We’ll see how it pans out. I’m now keen on getting an MP3 player/phone that plays MP3s (and has at least 512MB on an SD card, none of this super-tiny-memory stuff you find in phones). Orange stop operations at the beginning of August, I think, so I’ve got until then…

Stupid DRM. My computer, of course, gets around the copy protection on this CD instantly. My DVD player (which I use as a CD player: shut up Steve, CD players don’t sound a-few-hundred-dollars better, so I don’t care! ;-) ), on the other hand, can’t play the damn thing. As of right now I’m ripping it to my computer (losslessly with FLAC) and will have a prestine, non-DRM copy on a burnt CD for my use in a matter of minutes.

And if a friend ever asks if they can borrow my Yellowcard CD (bought on a whim knowing only one of their songs, I’ll add), I’ll be sure to lend them the version that works better: The one I burnt myself, without your stupid-arse software all over it.

Oh, yeah, and I’ll hesitate to purchase EMI CDs in the future. All other DRM-encumbered crap I’ve bought in the past has at least had the courtesy to work in my DVD player (this one made detection take ages, then picked it up as a VCD with wierd timecoding) — this is the barrier at which point it becomes infinitely easier to use Peer-to-Peer than buy things that look like they might be interesting in a CD store.

With physical media, I can (read: should be able to) toss it in anything and expect it to work instantly (no ripping required, etc.).

And, you know, if I wind up using Peer-to-Peer for this kind of stuff, my lossless (yeah, that’s CD quality, not MP3 junk) audio collection will be shared back with the rest of the world. Yes, even the CDs you make it harder for me to use legitimately. I will figure out a way to get them onto my computer (or someone else will with another CD), and I will use sharing networks if scumbag content providers provide me with sufficient impetus to do that.

(Incidentally, if anyone wants to borrow a non-DRM-encumbered Yellowcard CD…)

So, one of the readers, Phil “Mumbles”, discovered a tool that works for this stuff. He’s sent me the file after having cut it down from 8MB for a few apps to under 300KB for the just new sound convertor tool.

You can download it here — please post if it works or doesn’t work with your MP3 player/recorder so that other people looking for information on their device can find it.

One closing note from Phil:

and BTW,

It appears to hang if you don’t let it run its course (gives a not responding msg). the “hang” grows accordingly with the .act file size.

Cheers

Phil

Dean picked up my post via Technorati, a blog search engine that uses RPC update services to track what people are talking about in real-time. I was suitably impressed by this diligence and apparent desire to hear what the market has to say about their product: could this be the same company whose birth was so marred by a spat of cyber-squatting, in what Dean Jones was reported to have described as a fit of “youthful exuberance”?

Apparently so. Ansearch’s beginnings, though marred by dubious practices¹, received praise from various quarters of the mainstream press — or, at least, those quarters not controlled by News Corp, whose domains had come under threat. However, the Internet community responded quietly, and those voices that were heard were mostly of disdain at Ansearch’s domain practices.

Strangely enough, my original post wasn’t about any of that. I hadn’t heard of Ansearch until I read an article on them in the SMH — an article which reads a little too much like a rehashed press release for my liking: the telltale sign is in the closing sentence “Ansearch is the search engine division of Optum Ltd.” — if it were filed in the Business section of their paper, I’d understand, but it wasn’t.

I wandered over to their site, played around for a bit, and decided their offering was mediocre. In hindsight, it probably didn’t help that I wasn’t shopping for anything in particular — according to a ZDNet article, “In the short term [Ansearch] is focusing very heavily on the commercial end of the market.” — but at that point in time, I also don’t think they’d tuned their listings particularly well, as a search for DashLite turned up my WordPress hack over commercial listings for the actual Dashlite brand I inadvertantly used.

I say “at that point in time”, because it appears to have substantially improved since, as per Jones’ claim: “Much has changed since your first article on us some 6 months ago.”

Much improved, it seems, on several fronts. Their core offering has shaped up nicely, and some facets of my initial complaints regarding accessibility have been met. Their ancillary product offerings seem to have developed nicely: Ansearch CEO Jones claims “Each of [our properties] goes through up to 7 stages ranging from an initial, simple SERP/Directory style page through to a more involved service, mini portal, search tool, etcetera.” He went on to say that these ancillary properties (such as http://www.picsearch.com.au/, http://www.videosearch.com.au/, http://www.thefreedictionary.com.au/ and http://www.messengers.com.au/ amongst several others) are currently being actively separated from the core Ansearch site (he described it as “quarantining”), and the exact direction of a number of these projects would become clear over the coming months, with the appointment of a full time manager of these online properties.

I’m a tad concerned about his description of their strategy with regard to these — he said this would become clear over the months to come, and I’m hanging off two words here: distributed portal. Whilst I can see this as being of value to users (especially for generic, non-brand-specific/legally dubious domains such as jokes.com.au and the ones listed above), it doesn’t seem to fit Ansearch’s core strength as I perceive it: as a commercial portal, and not as another Google. “We are not aiming to be another Google… we don’t have their budget and, to be frank, there are enough people trying to clone them: why build another?”

In fact, Jones suggested that Ansearch’s strengths lie in that it is not the ubiquitous search behemoth, and that its index is “something unique… something faster… [and] against the so called “arms race” of search (my SE has more links than yours etc…)”. I’d agree this is indeed a strength, and also a reason for them not to try and be a portal. Australia already has Yahoo! and NineMSN for domestic portals, and I’m struggling to see what Ansearch will do to differentiate themselves in this: but I’m happy to be surprised!

Ansearch apparently holds an index of only 500,000 websites considered by its metrics to be “most popular”. I argued that this was potentially a bad thing as relevant content might lie outside this realm: for example, this website performs well when people search for reviews of the HP 2610 or information about Apache on Ubuntu linux or ACT files from MP3 players that record audio, but isn’t included in Ansearch’s core index.

Which is perfectly valid, for a commercially-focussed site, I just think they could be missing out a little bit. They can leverage on my content for their advertising impressions and potential clickthroughs, because they have more valuable content showing up in their listing alongside advertised products. If someone reads my HP 2610 review after having found it in Ansearch, and decides they’d like to buy it and remembers having seen a “Buy HP printers!” ad on Ansearch, they’ll most likely click “back”. It’s abstract, behavioural stuff, but valuable nonetheless.

Whether it’s valuable enough for them to bother is another matter. “We spider our own content… something that over time will be done daily,” says Jones. “Having only 500,000 websites will allow us to index sites more often, and as is the case with the ‘site info’ pages, provide far more info on these pages.” Which is a value-add, and worth preserving. If that’s all resources permit, I think they’re doing the right thing as is. Jones openly admits Ansearch’s index of popularity “has a commercial flavour to it” — and rightly so. Given their much-touted gender and age demographic based search feature, this makes sense.

Their index of popularity seems to be fairly slow-moving. “Monthly we add around 20,000 sites… and take out 20,000.” I’d guess this would be the lowest 20,000 that gets shuffled, and this seems to make sense. One has to wonder whether all the higher-ranking pages can have substantially fresh content month after month, but presumably they do — it’s one of the things the SEO experts have always cried from rooftops.

It was interesting to hear Jones speaking about these people, too: amusing, even! Web developers the world over often join in speculation as to what exactly makes search engines tick, such that we can boost our clients (or employers) website’s performance. It seems the reverse is also true: search engines all over the world similarly speculate as to what those horrible developers are doing to screw with their indexes day in and day out!

I don’t say this in jest, and I believe they’re right to complain: “The larger SE’s are having a very tough time coming up with clever ways to index content to counter SEO… only to have SEO’rs quickly find ways around it. Cat and mouse…” I think “counter SEO” was a poor choice of words, given that relevant content should hopefully still be rewarded, but his point stands.

Just as interesting is Ansearch’s strategy to avoid falling prey to dodgy SEO tactics:

By only indexing the root page, we remove almost all SEO trickery. This works in 2 ways. Firstly, people rarely put spam on their home page — that is, doorway pages, link farms, etc. usually reside away from the main index… and, secondly, it deletes multiple results from the same website. It also stops the site owner/webmaster from saying they are relevant to 100 or 1000 keywords or phrases.

Kids, we just found a new argument against clients who love their splash pages!

Content rich front pages aren’t, however, an absolute solution (at least, not in Ansearch’s index). According to Jones, Ansearch’s policy of “ranking sites in true usage popularity, both on and offsite” is “SEO proof… or at the very least, extremely resistant.” I’d agree it’s a powerful metric, but my reservations above still stand.

One caveat of Ansearch’s algorithm that appears potentially exploitable is its failure to exclude content in the from indexing. I don't just speak of standard meta author/keywords data, but of something else.

As highlighted in the screenshot above (click for original page, link may expire), Ansearch’s listing is including content between <style> tags. This presents potential for SEO abuse², as most browsers happily overlook errors in CSS — and <style> tags can be placed towards the top of a document: if we are to believe the SEO myths, increasing their relevance in engines. Of course, it’s entirely possible the content bears no weight at all — but the question of why it is stored in their index at all remains unanswered.

This is another reason to reward websites that use semantic markup properly, though at this stage that would exclude disproportionate amounts of the web, so I understand engines’ hesitance to embark on anything like this. It’s not something a lot of sites use”, says Jones, before continuing “but it will be used more and more in the future.” Well, so much of the web community hopes.

This formed part of Ansearch’s defense for not having embraced semantic markup from the outset. According to Jones, it’s built on a technology developed for a pre-April 2000 (dot com crash) search engine — so that partially excuses the markup at launch time. Jones’ first comment on their failure to use semantic markup was simply that “The majors [Google and Yahoo!] don’t use it” — something I’d dispute the validity of, as Ansearch isn’t a “major” player, and, as has been established, is chasing a fairly different market sector. Their core business is search, but it’s a different breed of search conducted in a different way: and semantic markup and accessibility is a different way. Encouragingly, Jones sees the potential for embracing semantic markup in the future on both technical and commercial grounds: “It makes sense to use it and as it does open us to a wider audience with various devices used to browse our site.”

He didn’t cite the “reduced bandwidth expenditure as a result of lightweight code” reason, presumably because their host, OzHosting/Destra charges only for the link, not for transfers over this, on their dedicated server range.

Irrespective of their reasons, the future of Ansearch in terms of markup is promising:

Our long term goal is to have Ansearch website designed without any tables and heavily styled using the CSS, which eventually will gives us more control on how we present our site to different media types.

Ansearch has gone through several minor enhancements over the past 6 months with the releases of versions 1 to 1.3. We are currently planning a major update for version 2.0 and the issues [of semantic markup and separation of presentation and content] will be addressed.

But as we know, markup isn’t everything: content is what ranks well in search engines erm… content is what draws an audience. Ansearch’s exploration into the development of portal environments is something to be watched with interest over the coming months, as well as its other business aspects, including an advertising network known as Soush that remains slightly enigmatic, and the mysteriously named “Factory” division.

An announcement is expected to be filed with the ASX later this week outlining something of Ansearch’s future direction: At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that the future is a positive one, as Ansearch distances itself from its much-criticised practices at launch, to a diverse range of product offerings that uniquely fulfil the needs of Australian Internet users.

Update: A followup to this has been posted, in response to a criticism that this review was overly technical in nature. Read on!

Notes

¹ Justified with the catch-cry “MSN do it, so we can, too!” — to which the only sensible reply is, “yes, but MSN do it with Internet Explorer, and as soon as you go and write your own web browser, feel free to hijack as many unused pages as you want.“
² I notified Ansearch of this shortly prior to publication in the hope that, if this is indeed an issue, it will be resolved before this post is noticed and widely acted upon. One hopes this potential problem disappears quickly.

I also wrote briefly of how Tori told me about a very cool media service called GarageBand, which publishes music from independent artists free of charge, even going so far as to offer (shock, horror) un–DRM–encumbered MP3 downloads of the vast majority of tracks.

So where does Flash fit into all of this?

Well. About that. GarageBand has this nifty Flash player thing going, which is very cool, except for when you’re using Firefox: every time I have it running whilst trying to do anything in the background (that is, within Firefox, in another tab or something), the audio buffer dies until whatever I’m doing in the background has started to render (or maybe resolved a host, or something… whatever).

Opera, on the other hand, handles this flawlessly. The window pops open, Flash loads faster (notably, using exactly the same plugin as the Mozilla family, if I recall correctly), and I can do whatever I want in the background without it skipping a beat. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a browser should be.

Update: The software listed here doesn’t appear to be working for newer hardware. There is updated software available in a more recent post, here.

I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to do a direct digital transfer of voice recordings made on my little MP3 player thing. Turns out it is. This applies not only to my Pavo PM-505, but also to BenQ’s Joybee range (obviously only those capable of voice recording), and any other player which saves files with an .act extension. The utility I’ve found also handles .rcd and .rec files, however I’m uncertain as to what players save files with these extensions by default… I know I could set mine up to save with different extensions if I fiddled with configuration files, but I haven’t, as I see no point in this.

As you may have imagined, I’ve come across some software which is capable of converting these formats into something rather less obscure, namely WAV or MP3 file formats. The software, named “Sound Convert Tool 2.0″, is available freely for Windows systems from a Geocities website, at http://www.geocities.com/sound_converter/. In the interests of longevity, and given the ability of Geocities to come and go faster than Cities and Thrones and Powers according to Rudyard Kipling, I’ve mirrored the application here. (418.4 KB ZIP archive)

If you’re the rights holder to this application, and would prefer this utility wasn’t hosted here, I’d request you contact me and I’ll take it down. There is a notable absence of any and all attribution on the Geocities page, so not only did I have no-one to contact, I also don’t even know for sure that the Geocities page was the original place this software was published. Dubious ground, and if you know any better, please, get in touch to clear things up.

The readme is fairly self explanatory, and it converted a recording slightly over an hour long (one hour and three minutes twenty-five seconds, to be exact) to MP3 format (which involves converting to WAV, then encoding an MP3) in probably around five minutes… I wasn’t clocking it, though. Tis nifty.

Other manufacturers who may have branded this equipment: JP’s, JNC, Acer, BenQ, Pavo, iRiver, EFX, .BXCUTE, Digital, DX, Speed, Datum and probably others. Yes, that was blatant Search Engine suckery, but there’s a distinct lack of clear information out there regarding this conversion, and these MP3 recorder type things are popping up everywhere. If your player/recorder isn’t there, and records ACT, REC or RCD files, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

I had, of course, planned (and publicly announced) my intent to buy memory sometime this morning… so that part is okay. I failed to clarify just how many different pieces of memory I’d be purchasing. I bought the cheapest possible 512MB stick of DDR-RAM (PC2700) that my favorite stockist had in store, despite it being cheaper next door.

I walked into Computer World, to the desk of someone who was desparately trying to look busy (as they do in that place, in an attempt to avoid actually having contact with customers), and lent across his work area asking “How much is your cheapest 512MB stick of PC2700 RAM?”. He answered, somewhat reluctantly — “$125″ (this is Australian dollars, for any foreigners who think this is ridiculously cheap/expensive: exchange rates are crazy things). I said thankyou, turned, and left the store. Just to clarify for those who haven’t been reading my online ramblings for too long, that store was the bane of my life for a few weeks over warranty issues… I’ll now never buy anything from them, but maintain that they are a useful resource for bargaining leverage at other stores. Like the most excellent THX (or TX, they seem to be having an identity crisis at the minute) across the foyer.

I went next door, and asked the same question… they were, of course, far more helpful, so no leaning-across-desks was required. The price was $139, from memory.

“Over there can do it for $125, how much lower can you get it?“
“Hang on, I’ll check for you.” She looks at the screen for a few seconds. “Sorry, the lowest I can go is $130.“
“That’ll do!” I shout, ever eager to avoid the perils of Computer World after-sales, should something go awry. To me, avoiding those people is worth far more than five dollars, any day of the week.

The inevitable question cropped up, as it always seems to in retail, “Is that all” or “Can I help you with anything else?”. In recent times, I’ve been more and more dissatisfied with my clunky Walkman in which the tape player doesn’t work, and I use exclusively for listening to radio. Not only that, I never did own a portable CD player, so all my music stayed at home, and the radio went with me. Motivation for an MP3 player? You bet.

The MP3 player part of my spending was the “impluse” element… I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but if there were something with a nice feature-set, I’d buy it. My requirements were simply that it be solid-state, compact and DRM-incumbency free… and preferably under $150. With this in mind, I was expecting to get some MP3/USB drive thingo with 128MB of storage, towards the $100 mark. Admittedly, I ended up spending more ($149 — right next to my limit!), but it hits my requirements pretty nicely… not only can I carry my music (and 256MB of it, no less!) with me, I can also get FM radio on this thing. That’s okay, but the “killer feature” on this thing is that it doesn’t need external batteries.

I know, I know: if it’s anything like an iPod’s battery, it’ll bite me in two years. Big deal! I think I’ll have moved on from 256MB in a few years, but that’s a problem for then. Right now, I can have 12 hours of usage between recharges via USB. How cool is that?

I’ve got three gripes with the thing right now:

1. The interface is seriously crap.
2. From the speed of transfers, I’d guess it’s only USB 1 — no blazingly fast uploads, which is a shame
3. Tuning digital radios really gets to me. I need knobs and dials!

Of those three complaints, only the first is significant. I’ve taken to dumping music in the root folder, because it’s easier than screwing in the menu until I figure out how to change folders for playback. Admittedly, I’ve only been using it for a few hours, and I’ll probably get used to it later, but it seems a tad prohibitive. That’s what you get when there’s only a five buttons (“Menu” and playback controls), I suppose.

The worst thing about the design is the positioning of the 3.5mm audio socket. It’s designed so that when a cable (or headphones, whatever) is connected, it’s amazingly difficult to press the menu button in a natural fashion. Whilst human physiology would dictate our fingers press buttons from the side, the positioning of the button is such that you’d need to stick your finger through the audio connector to get to the button comfortably. It doesn’t look so bad, but believe me, it’s irritating.

It also does 20 hours of voice recording (in what format, I have no idea), and yes, it is tiny. I just grabbed a ruler (I don’t think dimensions were listed on the specs sheet, which is generic to the firmware and whole line of models in different form factors), and it’s about 56mm x 38mm x 11mm — about half the size of my phone. What can I say, I like small tech!

This computer is noticeably more snappy with three quarters of a gig of memory… I like it! I’ve got the GIMP sitting editing about 10 moderately large files, with two windows of Firefox filled with tabs, a WISH app, my email client, an RSS reader, and my code editor of choice open, and it’s still zipping along. Sweet.

See, unlike certain people (no offense to anyone ;), I only keep *one* diary and calendar (admittedly, they are separate physical objects, but I make a habit of checking BOTH before scheduling anything), with the theoretical goal of not having to be in two places at once too often.  And then there were parents.  Well, specifically, a mother, with her OWN calendar, and her OWN agenda when it came to scheduling meetings with certain dental workers.  Insert a pun about going “mental” here… haha.  Or not.

My mobile is another source of angst.  Apologies to everyone who’s sent me an SMS recently and hasn’t got a reply — this is a case of PEBPAWIBM (Problem Exists Between Phone And Whatever Is Behind Me) in conjunction with an ingenious feature that will cancel any message left too long half-written.  No, really, thanks Samsung.  Geez, it’s so useful returning me to the main menu of the phone — if I were to leave a phone in my pocket with a message half typed, that is far more dangerous than an unlocked phone at a dial screen, of course.  And it would be, of course, completely irrational to dump me from my message, forget it, and then *actually lock the phone so something doesn’t happen by accident* — no, I was using the phone, you couldn’t possibly lock it.  Dumping me to a menu is greatly appreciated, though.

Samsung deserve an award for usability.  I propose the award be supplied in an un-openable box, as an example of how accessible products should be in recognition of their most excellent achievements in this field.

On a completely unrelated note to any of the above, thanks Ben for lending me your 40GB harddrive… I now have room to breathe in my home directory again (although I have somehow managed to ALREADY fill 20GB of that 40… go figure), at least for the next few months.

It’s kind of funny, that.  Six months ago, I would have said that at my current rate of consumption, it’d probably take me about three years to fill 40GB.  Nowdays, I go through about 1GB a week (much of which is simply deleted or burnt to CD, but still) of storage space on various mediums… admittedly, this is largely due to my storage of the raw audio captures from Platform Seven for streaming and archival purposes, but a lot of it is from other stuff as well… Platform Seven accounts for less than half of that 1GB/week usage.

So yes, I now have my music back!!  Yep, I had it before, but my CD’s are in the next room — technically, we’re not allowed to convert copyrighted material between mediums here in Australia, but MP3’s (and, in the near future, OGG files) are just so much more convenient for me that I am past caring.  I’ve never heard a complaint from anyone about this usage, anyway, even from various record associations — of course, the issue of “fair use” has never been a prominent one, since everyone ASSUMES that Australia has identical copyright laws to the US.  Just for the record (haha, get it?), this is not so, and if you’re in a position to do something about getting our laws changed, or know what to do about it, let me know/do something.