JBL On Time Time Machine Alarm Clock/Dock for iPod - worst purchase ever

After some research I bought the JBL Time Machine Alarm Clock/Dock for iPod - White (JBLONTIME).

Here's a quick list that I'll expand on over the next week or so, after which I'll put this on Amazon.

• It does not work with my 5G iPod. The iPod wakes up and starts to show the last song played (as designed), but it then starts playing the first song in the Library. It is unacceptable that the vendor sells this device as though it worked.
  
• With my old 3G iPod it behaves as designed. It awakens to the last song played. I use it with my 3G iPod so I won't return it.
  
• It has a really dumb eerie blue glowing LED at the top. I guess that's for those who want to dream of alien abduction. It serves no purpose, it doesn't even illuminate the clock controls (that might have been useful). I taped over it.
• It starts quietly and the volume ramps up. You can't control this. That's the worst "feature" so far (and a surprise -- so much for the Amazon reviewers!); I'd prefer disable this depending on how I arrange my playlist. A remote would have compensated a bit, but ...
• There's no remote. I decided that was ok because it's one less thing to lose, one less set of batteries, and one less place for designers to move controls to. This thing is, after all, an alarm. We don't get to sleep in. Ever. The volume ramping does make me miss this more than I'd expected however.
• The documentation is weak with multiple typos and grammatical errors. It doesn't tell you what the RDS On/Off setting does, for example.
• The sound is ok, very acceptable for an alarm clock. It's not a high fidelity system but it's fine.
• The buttons seem flimsy and cheap.
  
• It has a big, heavy, wall wart power brick. At least the color matches.
• It's not documented, but if you have young eyes and good light you'll find text describing the matching iPod beneath each of the cradle inserts.
  

The system reminds me of the gulf between Apple and most other consumer goods manufacturers. Apple stuff does not have ugly wall warts, mistranslated manuals (of course their printed manuals are rather brief, but they're good), ultra-cheap buttons and gratuitous glowing diodes. Apple would have given us the option to disable volume ramping.

So how come design nuts like me are so rare in the world? Grump. Two stars for users of older iPods.

Update 2/16/07: Since I bought this thing about 6 months ago it's been no end of bother. The internal OS would crash every few weeks, then it began losing time. To make the alarm reliable, I have to mount the iPod, press the mysterious "on" (really is a Play button, not an On button) button, and double check that the play state of the JBL is in sync with the "play" state of the iPod. I'll eventually check out the warranty. Blech.

Update 11/30/09: This was one of the worst purchases I ever made. It was so bad I couldn't get it to die. The horrible UI, the frequent crashes, the missed alarms ... Today, after my son was late for school, we bought an extremely crummy clock/radio and the JBL became a basement mini-stereo. Ironically, as a mini-stereo, it's not bad. I've got an old, unused iPod in the cradle loaded with music, an aux-in from one of our two half-broken combo DVD/VCRs, and it gets FM and AM stations. My kids may get some use from it at last.

Call Recorder for Skype

I tried using Audio Hijack Pro once to record a Skype call. It as a real nuiscance.

So this interests me: Ecamm Network: Call Recorder for Skype - Automatically Record Calls On Your Mac. I own AHP and know it, so I might not buy this, but if it works it would have real value.

Nikon 18-200, Canon ???

My friend torments me by flaunting this Nikon lens - he knows I have a Canon D-SLR. The Amazon review, sorted as always by lowest to highest, are very positive. It's dirt cheap by lens standards - $700.00. The vibration damping at 200 mm is astounding.

Canon doesn't have anything to match it. Hmpph. Canon, have you no sense of shame?

OS X Leopard: my one wish

Leopard will be preannounced in the next few months. I have only one wish for it. No, not XP virtualization -- we have Parallels and that will suffice for me.

I want a remote access capability that's at least as good as Microsoft's ancient remote desktop protocol. This is a capability Windows has had built-in (XP Pro) for eons. True, Apple has something called 'Apple Remote Desktop', but I've never seen it in action. I don't have a trusted source to tell me if it really works for remote control. Not to mention that it costs more than a new version of OS X.

I believe Jobs has decided not to do this (ever?), and I expect to be disappointed. Other than that, there's not much in Leopard I'm likely to care about. (Vista? Surely you jest.)

Phil Bradley on search engines - from Exalead to Grokker

Phil Bradley is a Library science guy who blogs about libraries and search. I've read him for years, he's great. Now that Google's Firefox sync has made bookmarks useful again I'm using his web pages to rebuild my collection of search engine links. I always start with Google, but if Google and Google Scholar and Google Government disappoint, where should one go next? (Ok, so he doesn't discuss Bloglines Search yet ...).

Phil has two great resource pages on this topic:

• Search Engines on Squidoo: Squidoo is some kind of social network ranking site ...
• tabular representation: Same material, very succinct presentation.

I'm picking a few of my favorites from the collection, like Exalead (Bradley's fave), Brainboost, MSN Encarta Search, Dogpile, Thumbshots, Clusty, Ask.com, Wisenut, Yahoo Mindset and Grokker.

Update: Turns out I've written about this before! What's new is I can now sync these bookmarks across four machines - painlessly.

Bloglines Advanced Search: this is very cool

Bloglines was acquired a while ago by Ask.com, a 2nd tier search engine. Bloglines has its issues, but it's never sunk to the level of Blogger. It remains my primary blog tracking and reading tool.

Today they announced a new blog search suite, including Bloglines | Advanced Search. The neat part is they've delivered something I once asked Alta Vista to do -- back before there was a Google. The key is constraining search to a trusted subset of sites. If Alta Vista had followed my advice they might been able to fight off Google!

Bloglines offers the option of restricting search to one's blogroll. In other words, instead of searching all blogs, you get to search the blogs you like. No spam blogs of course. This is so valuable I may add back some of the very geeky blogs that I quit a while back. For pre-purchase reviews of technical products, in particular, this may be significantly better than a Google search. I'm going to see if I can embed the search box into my blog pages.

Replacing a defective Tungsten E2 with an old Samsung i500

My Tungsten E2 is dying - 10 days past the 90 day warranty. The Amazon reviews of the T/E 2 are scathing, and there's no shortage of quality issues with the Palm TX (1 year warranty) either. I'm disgusted. The PDA marketplace is dying -- what's a geek to do?

Reminds me of the Newton users gasping until the Palm arrived. Windows Mobile has always been awful and I don't want anything to do with the "modern" Palm hardware or software. I might try BlackBerry, but in the meantime I've an ancient smartphone (Samsung i500) that runs PalmOS 4.1 (the last good version).

I'm thinking that since DataViz's BeyondContacts will work on a Samsung i500 I'll dump ePocrates and squeeze my data onto that old Smartphone. Then I'll exercise my AMEX extended warranty and get the money back for my Tungsten E2.

Maybe I can limp along with that praying that Apple brings their smartphone to market before 2020, if the Samsung dies I'll just have to survive with a Blackberry.