It’s been a while since I’ve had a rant about something on here, but this one has been bubbling for a long time.
I’ve read several articles over the last few months relating to how Apple always seem to be ‘working’ with record labels and movie distributors to improve sales of albums and movies on the iTunes store. Most recently is the news that they may be looking to include better ‘digital booklets’, or some kind of ‘interactive digital booklet’. Now, dont get me wrong, I like iTunes. I regularly buy my music from iTunes, but mostly, it’s just singles, or the odd specially-priced EP. Sometimes even a music video. I’ve not bought a single movie or music album from the iTunes store. I also know that I’m not alone with this. There’s a very good reason I don’t buy movies or music albums for download, and one that Apple (and the record companies/movie studios) seem to be ignoring.
As an example, let’s look at the top 5 albums currently in the iTunes music store:
1. Now That’s What I Call Music!, Vol 73 – Various Artists
iTunes Price: £16.99
CDWOW CD Price: £ 10.99
Firstly, I’ve been using NearlyFreeSpeech for years, and they’ve always been great. They’re a very low cost hosting method, working on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, they’re not the best hosting environment for those that prefer things to ‘just work’. You need to be a little more technically minded to host your site with NFS, or at least have some patience.
For the last couple of years, I switched hosting of my main site (this one) to another hosting provider – BlueHost. However, in the last few months of my time with them, the level of service slipped considerably, to the point where large portions of my site would often disappear or fail to work properly. I switched back to NFS recently, and I’m so glad I did. Their hosting is quick, reliable, and affordable.
However, as I mentioned, it really is a bare bones solution. There’s no cpanel here. They wont install WordPress, etc, for you. You need to roll up your sleeves and get geeky in the terminal.
I’m liking the look of Google’s latest product announcement: Google Wave.
The developer preview from Google I/O 2009 is well over an hour long, and as I dont have time to watch it right now, I’ll update this post a little later once I have.
I recently bought an O2 Mobile Broadband ‘Pay & Go’ dongle. The Huawei E160 variety. Its a neat little dongle, which also has a slot for a MicroSD card.
A colleague of mine wanted to get some kind of mobile broadband solution for his netbook – an Acer Aspire One. Brilliant little machine. I fancy a Samsung NC10 myself, or maybe an Asus 1008HA Seashell.
Anyway, he’s running the standard Acer OS – Linpus. He already had the ‘Mobile Partner’ application installed, which is required if you want to connect using a Huawei modem. We plugged the dongle in, and it was recognised by the software within a few seconds, albeit as a Huawei E220 (technically identical to the E160). It picked up a perfectly reasonable O2 3G signal considering we were indoors. Next came the creation of a ‘profile’ for the connection. We set up a new one, called it ‘O2′, and attempted to enter the settings. Continue reading 'O2 3G Mobile Broadband on Acer Aspire One Netbook'»
My iMac broke a few months ago. Nothing too serious, but annoying nonetheless. The Superdrive decided that it would eat any disc that you put in the slot, and would not eject it. You could hear the mechanism whirring away, but then a nice stressful ‘clunk’, as the disc was eaten again. The disc never even making a minor appearance. So I decided to finally get it fixed while my AppleCare is still valid.
But what’s this got to do with UK Broadband, I hear you – imaginary guy that I’ve borrowed from Wil Wheaton – asking? Shh…I’m getting there…
As I have a lot of personal files on my iMac, I wasnt going to trust it as-is in the hands of my local Apple reseller, so I backed it up with SuperDuper!, formatted it and installed a fresh copy of OS X 10.4 Tiger (via a USB DVD drive). The iMac went off for repair, came back fixed, and then came the time for installing OS X 10.5 Leopard.
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1. Now That’s What I Call Music!, Vol 73 – Various Artists
2. iTunes Price:Lungs – Florence & The Machine
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