iTunes 8: I find my first bug - divided podcasts

It took me about five minutes to find my first significant iTunes 8 bug.

Really, if Apple were to pay me $100K to test their products prior to release, they'd save a bundle. I have a gift for these things.

The bug has to do with the organization of podcasts.

First, look at this screen, which is what I get if I click on the abstract (older) In Our Time podcast icon. It splits In Our Time into two podcast streams, one with episodes and one without:

However if I click on the icon with Melvyn's face on it, I get this list:

So the Podcasts are in place, and my smart albums display both the podcasts and my other IOT AAC files together. The bug appears to be with a Podcast that is somehow split over time into two parts. The first screenshot displays both icons, but the episodes associated with the top icon are not displayed. If one clicks on the titlebar that seems to have no children, however, a podcast will still play.

So it's a bug.

Appigo Notebook is coming to the iPhone

I saw that the new version of Appigo's ToDo.app mentions something called Appigo Notebook. I quick Google found this: Upcoming App - Appigo's Notebook. (Update: official site)

Ahh. Yes. Good. I will be looking for it -- as soon as I get iPhone 2.1 and, I hope, get beyond the !@#$ Apple bug that prevents me from time effectively updating my iPhone apps.

Farewell Evernote, good-bye data lock.

Update 9/27/08: Toodledo has introduced Palm/Outlook Memo/Task import to their notes as CSV files. So now I can fully use Appigo Notebook.

Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed

Only a year ago Bloglines beat Google Reader in my tests. Alas, Bloglines stayed about the same (save for a very flaky beta), and Reader kept improving.

Eventually my iPhone moved me to Google Reader, and I discovered the joy of shared posts.

There are still a few things I miss from Bloglines - like the disposable email feeds, the package tracking, and the very easy to share bloglist. Overall though it's no contest now, Google Reader is far superior.

Every Reader account has one 'shared' post feed. The shared post feed is dynamically created by clicking an icon while reading a post. Here’s my shared post list. It’s not obvious or well documented, but this share has its own feed (FF reveals it) [1].

You can embed the shared post feed in web pages, such as in the side bar of my Tech and Notes blog, or in conventional web pages. Alas, the embeded Gadget doesn't show the optional annotations one can attach to a shared post. Only the web view or the feed include the annotations.

 Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to universally share the Friend feed [3], so I can only see those of people on my Gmail contacts list. Even so, it's great.

I read Jacob Reider's feed regularly, and that spares me hours of reading the tedious journals of our shared industry. Jacob reads them for me, picks out the good stuff, and shares it. I owe you some beers Jacob.

 Play with shared feeds -- you won't regret it. It's a lightweight form of blogging, without any authoring anxiety. Now if only my good friends were about 20 years younger, I might be able to enlist more of them in this shared processing and shared memory task ...

[1] Reader won't allow you to subscribe to it as a conventional feed, but other clients will. The feed shows your annotations.
[2] I'd much appreciate it if one of my readers were to try adding the undocumented feed to their Google Reader -- I'd like to know if it shows up as Shared Feed from a "friend". Please add a comment to that effect. Then you can delete it of course!
[3] Apparently due to complaints about privacy?! The default mode is private, so this feels like a user error problem.

Newest Sansa SanDisk STILL doesn't support AAC - weird

File under weird.

My SONY car radio plays AAC. My Nintendo Wii supports AAC. My wife's BlackBerry plays AAC. But the newest Sansa SanDisk still doesn't support AAC ... (note the As in AAC do not stand for Apple).

SanDisk Sansa e200 MP3 player

... Sometimes ,there are some unsupported audio format musics you like very much,such as a favourite video movie song.So ,what can you do? Don't worry,there are a lot of audio/video converter softwares which can help to solve the problem. For example ,Xilisoft Audio Converter 2.1. provides an easy and completed way to convert between all popular audio formats, such as MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, FALC, OGG, APE, MP4, M4A, MP2, VQF etc....

Yeah, right ... convert. Ever tried it? Takes ages, terrible results. I'd look at these Sansa things for my kids if they had AAC support. Does Apple pay SanDisk to avoid AAC?

Video conferencing tools - state of the Windows market

I'll claim the best low cost video-conferencing solution on the market today is iChat.

It's OS X only of course. On the Windows side, this review lists about 16 iChat wannabes. It's just a list though, it doesn't tell you which are any good and which are on life support. I suspect all but Skype will be gone in a year or so.

The real message is that affordable video conferencing may finally escape from the icky home porn and the annoying 'young-geek-seeking-mate' industries.

Now if any of the competitors can provide an iChat like experience (esp. as with the original iSight firewire), we might get to save some gas money. I have a hunch we'll need either USB 3 (I miss firewire) or on-camera MPEG-4 like compression to really get where we need to go.

Nerdvana now: Our family calendar is working – and how Gmail parses Outlook invites

A year ago I was struggling to reach the nerdvana of family calendar integration.

Now the end is almost in sight.

Emily’s Blackberry Pearl syncs reliably and near instantly to her calendar in our family domain Google Apps suite. My iPhone syncs reliably but only once daily, via Spanning Sync and iCal to my family domain calendar. Our shared Google Calendars allow both of us to see a joint calendar.

Meanwhile, work/home calendar integration may be possible – someday, at some price. For now, however, some appointments need double entry.

I’m pleased to say there’s an easy way to do that – it works far better than expected.

When I create an Outlook appointment that I want on my personal calendar, I invite my family domain email address. Gmail processes the structured message and creates a meeting invite that moves with one click to my Google Calendar.

From my gCal, the next time I sync with iTunes, the appointment will move to my iPhone. It will immediately be visible on my wife’s Pearl.

Wow. We’re making progress … slowly, but it will happen.

Now when iPhone 2.1 comes out and Emily inherits my iPhone 2.0 ...

Update 1/6/10: We did reach Nerdvana, though Emily got the 3GS and I stuck with the old 3G. All of the family calendars are on Google (mixture of Google Apps and personal for historic reasons); we use CalDAV to sync to our iPhones. My iPhone has push sync wiht my work calendar by connecting to my corporate (Microsoft ActiveSync) server and through my iPhone I can integrate all family and my work calendar. I also do a one way reflection of my work calendar to Google using Google's calendar sync -- that's read only.

The Lunarpages to DreamHost transition – summarized

I’ve moved my last lunarpages hosted domain and all my web services now live on DreamHost.

It was a technically challenging migration for me, though having worked through it I could probably do the entire thing in two evenings. Below is a list of the key posts and explanations if you have to ever do this. Note that the posts are updated as I learned things, so you really do need to read ‘em through to avoid my mistakes.

• Migrating a domain with related Google Apps and hosting files to a new service: This one worried me the most, but turned out to be straightforward. I learned a lot about how DNS works.
• The DreamHost migration moving the first domain
• The DreamHost migration getting a transfer authorization code: This stuff works well, I recommend creating a spreadsheet/table to track dates and migration stages for each domain. (Ex: review email settings on domain, get TAC, unlock domain, fill out DH form, get email from DH, authorize, get email from domain host, authorize, get confirmation from DH)
• DreamHost a better Google Apps choice than Google: You get everything Google Apps provide, with more control, a consolidated domain management environment, and the ability to add additional services.
• How to move files from one web site hosting service to another: This was where I floundered the most. I could have done it all in a few minutes of my time (hours of computer time) if I’d understood the archive transfer process.

I’m very pleased with DreamHost – all of the issues I had with Lunarpages seem to have been resolved.

I do want to mention that Lunarpages was very cooperative during the migration; Network Solutions resisted one domain move a bit, but Lunarpages never kicked. They also provided the ability to download an archive of my entire Lunarpages site collection – a good example of data freedom.

Lunarpages is not, by any measure, the worst company I’ve worked with. For several years they provided reasonable service at a good price. My read is that Lunarpages failed to invest in their core business and people, and focused too much on short term returns and cash flow versus long-term health. In the end they weren’t providing enough DNS control to customers, they didn’t stay on top of Google Apps integration, they didn’t provide WebDav services, they weren’t quite honest enough with customers (ex. automatically upgrading customer plans to reflect decreasing costs would have been wise) and they got trapped in a spiral of decreasing quality and increasing support burdens. They’re in a tough spot now, where they need to focus aggressively on customer retention and quality improvement, while taking a large cash flow hit.

Now for my next set of projects: upgrading our main workstation from 10.4 to 10.5, implementing iPhone 2.1, then returning to the synchronization and calendaring wars. (Hint: Our family google calendar is really working – with help from spanning sync).