Kedar's Log, Stardate 2010

Received Netflix DVD for Wii yesterday.. Details here.

I never thought I would even consider a phone other than the iPhone. I went from the 1st Gen iPhone to the 3GS mainly because my son and I together killed the 1st Gen in a toilet

Once the love affair settled down, I started developing Apps for iPhone and I saw a new world opening up for my programming skills – the world of mobile app development…

Read the actual technical comparison on my tech blog : http://blog.softricks.com/apple-should-be-afraid

Please try, pleeease try.. you need to believe in it.. you can do it.. your family needs you.. your friend needs you.. I, who fed you everyday with power, need you.. I took you places, never left you alone, through thick and thin, we were inseparable, on the breakfast table, in the bedroom, at work, in meetings, while playing with my son, on the Tennis courts, in restaurants, outside the trial rooms in shopping malls, at the airports, in the car, out in traffic jams, at the salon, in grocery stores, in doctor’s waiting rooms, .. you were always the last one to say Goodnight to me.. we were so much in harmony, so much in sync, so together.. and yet.. you forsake me now..

I know I let you down when I fed you power, even when you were still wet from inside after your tragic fall into the bathtub from my son’s hands.. but I promise, I have learned my lesson.. A scalpel is on its way in mail so that I can open you up and try to operate on you.. but I ain’t no doctor, and I don’t wanna send you to one, ‘coz I fear they will just kill you and tell me to get a new one..

so please wake up, and rise from your coma, like a Phoenix.. I patiently await your resurrection….. o’ my dear iPhone!! sigh..

I download a lot of songs. I am no position to brag about having the largest collection of songs, because I really don’t have the largest collection by any standards. Right now, I only have 535 MP3s – some Hindi, some English, a few Marathi songs and Bhajans and a handful of Marathi Stand-up comedy mp3s. Now I am a fanatic when it comes to organizing things! So I have created quite a few playlists such as Old, 70s, 80s, 90s, 200x, New Songs, Fresh, Dance, Disco, Marathi, etc to organize my audio collection.

Here is what I have been doing recently to keep a good backup of my music on an external drive and have it in the same organized manner as the way I am used to having on my iPhone.

Exporting to directories:

I don’t like the way iTunes organizes the physical files because it categorizes by the Artist and then the Album. Sometimes the ID3 tags contain all kinds of crap, and that creates strange directories in your iTunes Music folder. So there are 2 ways in which you can avoid this -

1. Fix the ID3 tags before you import the file into iTunes – I use Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) and Audio Shell Mp3 Shell Extension (http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm) for this. I clean up all ID3 tags to my liking using these tools before I import the file into iTunes. But this just ensures that you don’t have weird directory names. iTunes will still organizes by Artist and Album – which doesn’t work for me.

2. You could use an exporter that can export the PLAYLISTS to physical directories. Now I did not find one that did that. So I wrote my own (iTunesXP). This will soon be available from my site – Softricks.com.

Organizing files into Playlists:

Prior to this, I used to drag the mp3s by hand into appropriate playlists.

Today, I thought about setting the ID3 tag Genre as the name of the playlist and making all playlists Smartlists that look for certain strings in the Genre. What if a song is in 2 playlists? Well, use comma separated names in the genre. The Smartlist can say – where Genre contains “xyz”.

More..

I started downloading some relevant Artwork for every song in my collection. I know it is a bit too much.. but I kinda’ like to see the artwork whenever a song is playing on my iPhone rather than have a blank space.

I realized that iTunes allows for mass updating various ID3 fields. Many downloads come with some junk in the “Comments” field or “Lyrics” field. If you select all songs and do “Get Info” in iTunes, you can, say, blank out “Comments” field for all of them at once!

I know it’s a lot of work.. but I guess I like to have a quality collection!

My iPod FM Transmitter finally worked with iPhone after I bought the 3.5mm adapter for it. However, it is still not very nice and clean. So from time to time, there is some disturbance you can hear along with your music – this is because of the phone interfering with the FM transmission. It is not completely unusable but it does irritate you from time to time. They say the *official* FM transmitter for iPhone that Apple sells does not have this issue – hmm, well it costs about $40/- which I am not quite prepared to spend yet !

There is some light at the end of the tunnel -

1. Apple has announced it will open up the iPhone for 3rd party apps in Feb 2008. Hope they stick to it.

2. Hackers! So many of them..

i. http://www.hacktheiphone.com

ii. …<will add more as I find out>…

Don’t get me wrong.. I love my iPhone! But when a device is showcased as something close to being the coolest thing to have ever happened, I think it should – at the very least – be able to do all the cool things that other devices in the market can do. And somehow I had thought iPhone has the ability to satisfy this basic expectation. But AT&T and Apple have completely failed at that – in my opinion. It is one thing to stop people from getting around things, but it is another matter altogether to purposely block them from doing things that are legitimate.

I am sure I will know that some of these can be done in some hackish way.. but this is no way to generate interest in your product IMHO (I don’t claim to be a geeky type – although I’d like to think of myself as such – but being in this industry for the last 15 years, I think I am not stupid either – I can figure things out fairly quickly). So here is the list of my annoyances (there are already bigger lists – check this http://www.appleiphonereview.com/iphone-features/25-things-wrong-with-the-iphone/ )

1. You can’t easily use DUN or PAN using your iPhone? Now what kind of ridiculous geekiness is there in that?

2. The bluetooth on this doesn’t offer any services – can’t transfer a file etc? This is so 20th century!

3. Doesn’t support Java or third party apps? Stupidity unlimited! You have to something like ‘Jailbreakfree’ your iPhone for that? This is like you have open up your DVD player and solder in a replacement for a register in order to just play a DVD!!

4. Standard FM trasmitter or for that matter even a standard 3.5mm plug doesn’t work. I have heard that the phone scrambles FM transmission – what?? – would love to know who is this *genius* at Apple that had this *wonderful* idea!

5. No copy/paste or selecting a chunk of text.. that totally sucks!

6. No voice dialing.. grrrr

7. The camera doesn’t have a zoom or there is no video recorder? How basic is that?

YouTube videos are .flv files when saved. But how do you save them in the first place?

If you use Firefox, you are lucky, just install the DownloadHelper plugin (my version is 2.5.1). Now go to the YouTube URL with your favorite video. Let it load completely. Now click on Tools in Firefox, select DownloadHelper and you should see the file there. Click on it and download.

Or, there are online tools – try http://converttube.com

Now you are not there yet. iTunes will not work with .flv. So you need to convert it to some mpeg or avi. I convert it to MP4 using StreamClip (http://www.squared5.com/) StreamClip is especially good when you want to convert VOB files to MP4 and the VOB file audio is muxed. It seems it can also download/convert YouTube videos directly. So no need for the Firefox plugin if you are an IE fan!

Now that you have .MP4, just go to iTunes and Import this video into the library and sync with your iPhone/iPod.

Doing more with iPhone..

• Just found out that the iPod Headset jack is shallower and more standardized than that of the iPhone. Most plugs have a body that is too large to fit in the jack inset of iPhone – and that’s very mean of Apple to do that to make the iPhone unfriendly to most but the Apple headphone plugs! So I can’t use my FM transmitter with iPhone till I get a standard 3.5mm Adapter.

• My experiment with being able to use iPhone as iPod Touch+ is ongoing. First test was successful. So I pulled out the SIM from iPhone and shoved it in my old phone which then worked with that SIM. The iPhone worked as iPod touch without the SIM.

• Next step to this is to see how long it will work without the SIM. So what happens after your AT&T contract expires? This experiment started on 11/29/2007. So far nothing bad to report. Both, my old phone and iPhone (as iPod touch) are working as expected. I am guessing I cannot use the data plan I signed up for iPhone on my Treo ‘coz it specifically says ‘iPhone data plan’ and I am not sure if it is the same as ‘Media Net’ or not.

Conclusion: My iPhone worked fine as a iPod Touch for more than 4 days. Next target is to test it away from its SIM for a week or two.

I simply never disappoint myself when it comes to being stupid sometimes! So I have been feeling angry, cheated and disillusioned about technology in general for the past 3 hours and look what I find on the Phillipine Mac Users Forum – someone just suggests removing the plastic over the iPhone (which covers the earpiece as well) to fix the low volume issue. And Voila! There I have it, an iPhone that actually has some volume!! It really made a big difference..

Now what do you say to that? A human, not smart enough for the technology!