What Noisy Cats Are We » Nerd

Let’s Begin Again

feedmittens — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:20:31 +0000

It was time. After many, many years I have finally decided to retire my old alarm clock. This thing has lasted me through countless years and apartments and has lived in three states. It’s held steady through countless ‘Snooze‘-s, and still faithfully wakes me up to NPR’s Morning Edition daily. The dual alarms and casette player seem aincent by today’s standard, but back in the day (I’m guessing mid 80′s?), it was state of the art and freaking awesome!

My new phone, a Motarola Droid, has a great alarm clock feature, and also has a great multimedia dock so I can set it up on the shelf above the bed (Fancy Ikea Malm with the sliding bookshelves on either side – wicked economical and useful) and use it as my morning wake up call. It also grabs the temp. so I can tell what to wear in the morning without checking the Internets, the outside, or the other digital thermometer hidden somewhere across the apartment.

The only problem is that the Droid alarm clock only wakes up to ringtones, and I really want to try to get it to wake me up with music or something. As with all these newfangled things, I’m pretty sure there is an app for that.

So, out with the old and in with the… whatever. I fear change, so we’ll see how this goes.

Before:

And after:

I Love My Job Today

feedmittens — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:59:35 +0000

As it’s well known, I’m in IT. Today at the office we were experiencing some Internet slow-downs. Read: people could not access their NFL Pool stats and Facebook fast enough so they were complaining to me. This is not new, and my first step is to investigate to be sure that the slow down is real instead of PerezHilton or whatever site they were surfing when they noticed it wasn’t the culprit. To do this, I check an online bandwidth meter. Today, I checked out the one at Cnet and got some awesome results. The two pics below demonstrate:

Our bandwidth under a normal-ish to high load:

And our bandwidth when I checked it this morning:

INFIINITY! I win!!!

* headdesk *

iTunes 9 Love

feedmittens — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:22:20 +0000

I hear people ranting and raving about iTunes on a regular basis. Apple’s media player software has gotten criticism from all sides, and some of it rightly so. With the recent release of iTunes 9, Apple has taken some steps to alleviate people’s concerns and show that they actually are listening to the criticisms.

There have been many write-ups on the new iTunes, and I am not here to do a full review. I recently purchased the Snow Leopard upgrade for my little MacBook, and downloaded the iTunes 9 update from Apple for free. There are three new features that I think deserve mentioning.

1.) The iTunes Store Wish List: For many years, I have had an Amazon.Com Wish List. Though their prices for music can be less than the iTunes Store (I always find it a good thing to compare and buy the least expensive when it comes to this), it has always been much more convenient to purchase directly from Apple. For instance, we bought the first season of ">Sons Of Anarchy from the iTunes Store this past Friday night for $19.99 and it downloaded and we were watching it yesterday. Awesome. Anyway, the iTunes Store now has an ‘Add To Wish List’ function, and you can just bookmark away all the music, videos, and whatever else you want to buy there for another day when you actually have the cash to purchase. Great feature. (I would like to find a way to export all the music and videos I have on my Amazon.Com WishList and import to the iTunes Store wish list at some point, maybe.)

2.) The Automatically Add To iTunes Folder: Maybe people have been complaining about a lack of this feature for years. WinAmp always had it, and so have many other media players. Apple has added this feature, and you can find documentation of it here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3832

3.) Play Next in iTunes DJ: A lot of times I am listening to a random shuffle in iTunes and think of a song that I would like to hear. There has never been a way to ‘play it next’ in iTunes, so this added feature, part of the new iTunes DJ, which I am trying to learn about now, has been a boon to my iTunes playing.

All in all, it is still lacking in some features that people want, like out of the box third part device support, &tc. But for me, it fits the bill just fine, especially with it’s $0 asking price and pretty good Apple support for the product.

PandoraFM – great mix between Pandora and Last.fm

admin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:35:58 +0000

For active users of Last.fm and Pandora comes PandoraFM. I first used this a year or so ago and it wasn’t working right. Lots of time-outs and things like that. Essentially what it does is allow you to list all the songs you played on Pandora to list over on your Last.fm lists. Very, very useful. It’s working great now and I’m back to using it regularly. Rock.

While I’m at it – I highly recommend the album ">Wood, by Moxy Fruvous. Great listen.

Pandora.Com now charging .99 per month for heavy users.

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:50:57 +0000

According to this post on Pandora.Com, they will now start charging .99 per month for users who go over 40 hours a month on their service. I have been both a Pandora, as well as Last.Fm (as you can see by the sidebar here) user for a long time, and I totally understand why they need to do this. Maybe it speaks for the service’s longetivity, and I will not be too happy to hear about all the Internet bitching that will happen because OH NO A COMPANY NEEDS SOME INCOME TO OFFSET THE ROYALTEES AND IT WILL NOT AFFECT MANY USERS AT ALL! OMGPONIES!!!!! I’m already sighing that the sheer amount of tilting at windmills I’m going to be seeing on Digg and other sites.

Whatever. Pandora rules. It took like five songs to get from The Fiery Furnaces to Letters To Cleo. If you know me, you’ll understand why I find that impressive.

MySpace staffing cuts

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:36:44 +0000

Honestly, I didn’t think they were that relevant anymore. The new media/web 2.0 people have to realize that things are constantly evolving, and building a company around something like MySpace is a bad strategy for longevity. I’m not quite the demographic for the site anymore, but to the best of my knowledge, the main reason to go there is to look at bands’ pages.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/technology/companies/17myspace.html?hpw

Awesome story about a hydraulic computer.

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:14:15 +0000

This is awesome: http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/guest-column-like-water-for-money/

Annoyed with Apple today

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:02:53 +0000

I have an iMac G5. It’s a couple of years old. The logic board died as a result of a known Apple defect. Apple actually covered this defect by an extended warranty: http://www.apple.com/au/support/imac/repairextensionprogram/. Of course, I am 5-6 months beyond this warranty. I would understand if it’s a warranty from other things, but this is a well known defect that they will not cover. An issue that is their fault, not that of the end user.

There are some online petitions regarding this issue, and I’m too lazy to post links to them. Apple: if you created a bad product you should fix it, even if it’s just a few months after the warranty is up. It’s good business. Was I asking for something for nothing? In a way, yes. Was it a reasonable request? Absolutely.

Will I recommend an iMac to anyone anytime soon? Absolutely not. I like the longevity of Apple products, and obviously this particular one was not made to last, or even to be fixed if it does last.

Don’t ask Jack about the home page.

admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:01:17 +0000

Auto Tuning from Casey D on Vimeo.

Apple’s new announcement

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:05:45 +0000

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard