the (un)real thoughts of realbt

Apple is doing some pretty neat things these days. And it’s interesting that I’m writing something positive about them, considering I spent the better years before MacOS X complaining about schools using primarily Macintosh computer systems.

Of course, I have always liked the iPod. It always made a lot of sense to have a portable device that was capable of storing lots of music without having to downsample your audio collection. The biggest drawback was always the price. $400+ always seemed like a lot of money for such a device.

When rumours started circulating about the iPod Mini, I was quite excited. Rumours on Slashdot suggested that prices could be as low as $100 USD, which seemed ridiculously cheap for a 2GB device. When Apple finally made the announcement, we found out that the new iPod Mini would retail for $249 USD with a 4GB drive.

Outrageous, I thought. There’s no way I’m going to buy it now. Sure, it’s pretty small and light (probably smaller than my cell phone). And it would hold about 1/3rd of my music collection — still more music than I would ever really want to listen to anyway.

The Canadian iPod Mini prices haven’t been released, but I suspect that it will run somewhere around $300 CAD. The regular 15GB iPod retails for $399 CAD — but students can quality for a education discount, which brings the price down to just $365 (plus they’re throwing in free custom engraving on the back for a limited time!).

I’ve been wanting to get a portable audio device for some time now. Of course, one of the biggest things is cost. I can’t really afford one — so I’m going to wait until my next co-op work term.

What do I really want in a portable audio device? Well …

(1) A nice interface. This one’s obvious. I should be able to quickly browse through the file system (sorted in folders to my choosing) and build playlists easily. I should also be able to load playlists directly on the device. And the player’s UI should have good support for mp3 tags so I know what I’m listening to.

(2) Ogg Vorbis. Well, okay, so this isn’t a requirement — especially given the lack of hardware available (more on this later).

(3) FM tuner. This would be nice, but it won’t break the deal.

(4) FM broadcasting. Even better. How many times have you been stuck in a car with nothing but a radio and wish you could listen to your portable audio device? Not widely available, and I do wonder how well these actually work. Plus, you can always buy add-ons to do this for you.

(5) Probably the most important factor: good Linux support. I’m not that picky about it — as long as I can mount the file system in some way, shape or form and be able to synchronise, merge, etc. with my mp3 collection on my harddrive then it’s fine.

(6) Portability. Another obvious one. It should be small enough to slip into my pocket, and light enough that it won’t pull my pants down. My camera weighs about 600 grams, so I don’t expect the device to weigh anymore than 200 grams (and preferably much less).

As far as media goes, I’m not terribly concerned as long as I can store at least 512MB of data on the device at once. So be it flash media or a microdrive/harddrive, I don’t care.

So I started my search.

Ogg Vorbis hardware is few and far between. The 20GB Neuros device has a nice price, has an FM tuner and broadcaster, as well as a decent interface, and it supports Ogg Vorbis. That’s a check on most of the requirements. The biggest drawback with this particular device is that it’s quite big and bulky (especially compared with the full-sized iPod, which is already on the hefty size). It weighs over 250 grams, and it’s 5″ wide!

Rio and iRiver also make 20GB portable models that support Ogg Vorbis — the cheapest of which is $349 USD. Seems a little expensive when you can get a 15GB iPod for the same price in Canadian, eh?

Of the cheaper products on the market made by companies like Rio, Yepp, Samsung, etc., most of these are flash-based, which as I said, isn’t such a big deal. For one, they’re certainly a lot smaller and lighter than the iPod is. However, for a relatively good device with 256MB built in, you should probably expect to pay at least $200CAD, plus the cost of additional media.

That being said — that means if the difference between 0.5GB and 15GB is around $100 — why wouldn’t you buy the iPod? (or even the iPod Mini — which now seems quite reasonably priced!)

Unfortunately, it’s probably quite unlikely that the iPod ever will support Ogg Vorbis. Of course, 99% of my music collection is mp3, and those that aren’t, can be easily converted to mp3. But you never know — if Ogg really takes off, maybe it will become more mainstream and Apple will support it one day.

So now I just have to wait until the iPod Mini is released in Canada so I can check that out. If the smaller size and cheaper price warrants the loss of 11 GB, than that might be the way to go. Plus, from what I’ve read, the iPods are quite easily supported on Linux.

So we’ll see what happens …

Should I ever want to go into (secondary) Education, a computer science major is not enough. It will only count as a teachable subject major if used in conjunction with another concentration (like math, for example). However, if I had a major in math that would be sufficient on it’s own to enter into the education program. This is lame. I’m sure it’ll change at some point because computer science will become more common at the secondary level, and then they will no doubt be short of qualified teachers.

Anyway, I don’t actually have any specific plans to go into education. Just a thought. So don’t worry.

Google has a lame cache. Hello, wake up Google. beta.realbt.com doesn’t exist anymore. Try caching realbt.com. Are you spidering yet?

I was introduced to LiveJournal a few years ago when I realised a few of my friends had journals on the system. I was never particularly interested in joining the sytem (or “community” as it were), and not very long after, ended up writing my own sort of journaling software for my web site.

Today, as you probably can tell, I run b2evolution. While I like many things about LiveJournal, I like the flexibility that a stand-alone blog provides me. But let’s talk for a minute about what LiveJournal does that other systems don’t.

The biggest thing is that it has a community. A huge community, in fact. Unlike any other stand-alone blog system in existance, LiveJournal connects friends in a completely seamless manner. And it connects friends to friends-of-friends. Things like this take off and pretty soon you have an online clique. People on LJ spend hours reading and writing things about their daily lives. It’s quite interesting reading the postings of other people’s friends on LJ. You can be instantaneously connected to people who are reading the same journal your reading — and see what their friends have to say.

My own experience and observations would suggest that this is the biggest different between standard bloggers and people using LiveJournal. LiveJournal users tend to write more about esoteric things, in terms of what their friends (and I do literally mean LiveJournal friends) are doing, or things specifically for them. While traditional bloggers can do this, I find that bloggers generally write about more general facets of life, and if they are specific to people, etc., the style somehow differs from that of a typical LiveJournaler.

LJ supports threaded comments, and comment notification that far surpasses anything I’ve seen in any blog software I’ve personally used, and a much better profiling system. While stand-alone blogs support things like commenting, they don’t generally develop into anything much more than a few short comments. And very rarely do I see threaded comments. But this feature alone helps build community, as it further encourages people to comment and have a discussion of their own on someone else’s journal. It can happen where comments develop into their own entities, and exist apart from the original post. It’s kind of neat. Things like pingback and trackback are a great start with standard blogging tools (and something LiveJournal does not even yet support). But they don’t have the same power of connecting people that the LJ community does.

It would be interesting to contrast the demographics of more traditional bloggers to users of LiveJournal. My suspicion is that LJ users are generally younger, less technically savvy, and more social. But I really have nothing to base this on other than my own observations, and even then I can thing of a handful of LJ users that don’t meet these characteristics.

It will be interesting to see how LiveJournal develops over time. Maybe we will even have some sort of merging between LJ and other blogging communties. Maybe us traditional bloggers will be able to more easily integrate with some of the LJ features without hosting our journals on the system. I’m not quite sure what I have in mind, or how it would work — but it would be nice. I do like some of what it has to offer — but I wouldn’t give up the flexibility of my own blog.

When I switched to Linux, the first thing I did was play around with the various desktop environments Linux has to offer. Many exist, but KDE and Gnome stood apart from the others as they were much more than just window managers — but full graphical shells with standard native applications like text editors and such.

I started with Gnome. I liked Gnome because the PIM suite I was using at
the time (Evolution) was
written using GTK for Gnome (though, of course, it will run under KDE as well). It was also relatively fast and widely used. The biggest problem I had with Gnome/GTK applications was that they weren’t pretty. And while I have never been one to talk much about GUI vanity, I did find myself becoming increasingly more frustrated with Gnome’s lack of common look and feel, something I later found KDE excelled at.

Take for example the standard GTK file selector. It was plain, and quite ugly. It was not quick to navigate by any means. And it wasn’t terribly intuitive (especially for a former Windows user, and I don’t just mean myself).

KDE, as I noted, has a vast look and feel movement. Applications written for KDE (using the Qt GUI libraries) generally feel the same. Whatever they’re doing — they’re doing something right. Maybe there’s a few things that could be made easier, simpler, or whatever. One of the biggest complaints people make about KDE is that it’s bloated.

Though I’m very unlikely to switch to Gnome from KDE, I’m still glad to see that there is being some development on the GTK+ libraries. There are a variety of mock-ups of what the new file selector dialog should look like in a recent OSNews article.

And of course, the file selector is but a mere example of widgets and dialogues/selectors that could do with some improvement in GTK/Gnome.

Why does this matter so much to me?

While I don’t use Gnome, I still use some GTK applications. GIMP is a great example. While I wish there was a KDE/Qt-based port of GIMP, there isn’t, so I’m forced to use the standard GTK version. Another is XMMS, a relatively good mp3 player for Linux. The only reason that these two applications have succeeded with me is the quality and function of the application itself. There are few
things that I like about their user interfaces (of course, XMMS is skinable, so that helps a bit), and there are even fewer things in common between their user interfaces, despite both using GTK. Two applications using Qt will look and feel the same to me. But two applications with GTK? About the only thing that stands out in my mind is the ugliness of the widgets.

So here’s to hoping for success of GTK+.