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

2. iTunes Price:Lungs – Florence & The Machine
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

3. Number Ones – Michael Jackson
iTunes Price: £5.99
CDWOW CD Price: £5.99

4. The E.N.D. (The Energy Never Dies) – Black Eyed Peas
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

5. La Roux – La Roux
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99

iTunes albums have been getting cheaper, but the £6 difference between the prices of the ‘Now’ album is staggering. Out of the other 4 albums, there’s no difference between the Michael Jackson album versions, and the remaining 3 all cost £1 less for a physical CD. If you prefer the instant gratification from instant download, then the iTunes version may be preferable. Personally, I think that the short wait for a physical CD to be delivered is worth it for original-quality backup purposes alone.

Now, lets look at my biggest issue with the iTunes store – Movies. Again, going with the top 5 movies in the iTunes movie store:

1.Marley & Me (2009)
iTunes Price:  £10.99
CDWOW DVD Price: £10.99

2. Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)
iTunes Price: £3.99
Amazon DVD Price: £4.98 (Double Pack)

3.  The Dark Knight (2008)
iTunes Price:  £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £5.98 (2 Disc)

4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
iTunes Price: £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £3.98

5. Borat (2007)
iTunes Price: £6.99
Amazon DVD Price: £3.98

I’m impressed with some of the lower priced movie offerings from iTunes, especially the Ice Age pricing. However, for less than £1 more, you can buy the Double DVD version, which includes the first Ice Age film! With the exception of Marley & Me (a new release), which is the same price for both download and DVD, all of these movies can be purchased cheaper in DVD format. Not only that, but some are even the 2 disc versions, offering much more than just the movie.

How can these download prices be justified? Whilst I appreciate that there are hosting, admin and bandwidth costs to consider, these are inconsequential in comparison to the manufacturing and distribution costs of physical media. In my opinion, Apple need to stop worrying about bundling unnecessary ‘digital booklets’ and other such gimmicks, and just make these downloads cheaper. If they truly want to stop people from illegally downloading music and movies, stop making them so prohibitively expensive! I’m a big believer in the KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Why keep trying to add all the superfluous nonsense in order to keep the price high? It’s the movie/song that people have come to your store to buy.

Rant over

Note: I’m not affiliated with Amazon or CDWOW, nor endorsing their services, I just mentioned them as they were the cheapest I could find at the time.

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.

The biggest issue i’ve faced since moving my site back to NFS, is the inability to upgrade plugins successfully through the dashboard using WordPress 2.7. Every time I try to upgrade a plugin, I get a set of warnings along the following lines during reactivation:

Warning: include_once(/f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-content/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: Inappropriate ioctl for device in /f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-settings.php on line 473

Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘/f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-content/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/nfsn/apps/php5/lib/php/:/nfsn/apps/php/lib/php/’) in /f1/content/xxxxxx/public/wp-settings.php on line 473

It also squirts these warnings into the top of my webpages. Not good! The only way I could work around this warning was to deactivate the plugin, then delete the plugin, and then reinstall the plugin. What a mess.

Although I’ve not yet found a fix as such, I have found a decent workaround, which is far easier and quicker than any of the other suggestions I’ve come across:

1. Deactivate the plugin
2. Upgrade the plugin
3. Activate the plugin

Seems simple enough, but this is the only consistent way I’ve found of upgrading plugins and avoiding the warning messages. If anyone else has any suggestions, please leave me a comment as I’d be grateful to hear about them.

UPDATE 15/06/2009: This workaround seems to work very intermittently for me. However, I have noticed a much greater success rate if the ‘all in one SEO pack’ is deactivated EVERY time I try to upgrade ANY plugin.

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

Links:
http://www.140characters.com/2009/06/02/how-google-wave-shrinks-the-short-form/
http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

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. This is where we got a bit stuck. O2 dont provide any help for this OS. There is software available for Windows and Mac OS X, but that configures your connection settings for you. We needed the settings for a manual setup. A quick Google or two later, and we had found a variety of suggested settings. We tried all of them, but to no avail. In the end, I remembered that when I set a manual connection up on my Mac laptop, I didnt need usernames or passwords, just the APN. So I went ahead and set the APN to be ‘m-bb.o2.co.uk’, with a phone number of ‘*99#’. I’d read that the username of ‘o2bb’ with a password of ‘password’ may be necessary, but I didnt enter these. I left the authentication method as CHAP. As with the other settings we tried, we just kept being presented with the ‘Connecting..’ message, but it never seemed to complete the connection. The light on the dongle (green for GSM, blue for 3G) went solid, which suggested to me that it was completing the connection, but maybe not authenticating?

A bit more Googling, and someone suggested that the Mobile Partner software recently had a bug introduced, which meant that the ‘Connecting…’ message would remain on the screen, even once it had made a successful connection! The workaround is to just minimise the Mobile Partner software once  the light changes to solid. Then you can just load up your web browser, etc, and it should all just work! It certainly did for us.

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.

Still not seeing what this has to do with UK Broadband… Shhhhh!! I’m getting there!…

After installing Leopard, I went straight for the software update to get the latest patches. The Mac OS X 10.5.6 update alone weighed in at a monstrous 675MB. This was without the Airport, Java and other updates, which took the total way over 1GB. At this point, I havent even installed the iLife suite, or Microsoft Office, which will also require some hefty updates.

I also wanted to upgrade my laptop running Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. The amount needed to be downloaded for this upgrade came in at a hefty 607MB.

Anyway, the point of all this, is that I have recently had a new phone line fitted, with O2′s home broadband service. I was considering going with Sky for their ‘free’ broadband, but with a monthly download limit of 2GB, I would have punched through that in one evening alone. God forbid I even consider watching something on the BBC iPlayer service! HD? Don’t be silly! Luckily, the O2 package that I have (which is their lowest package), comes with ‘unlimited’ downloads. Fair use policy aside, this is how all broadband providers should be offering their services.

A quick look at the moneysupermarket.com comparison site, shows that there are still lots of broadband suppliers offering monthly download limits. They’re not even decent limits either. Going back to the ‘free’ Sky broadband. You get a 2Mbps line, with a 2GB download limit. This immediately takes you out of the running if you want to watch BBC iPlayer HD. Even if your 2Mbps line could stream the video to you (which it cant), you’d almost hit your monthly limit from watching one hour-long programme.

I suppose the purpose of this post rant, is just to highlight my frustration at how progress of digital services in the UK, is being desperately hindered by the greed of our lacklustre communications companies. Get it sorted!