Twelve Black Code Monkeys

My first transaction ever on eBay, back in 1997, was selling an old VCR to some guy in Texas. The guy sent me a bad check, but I didn’t quite understand how banking worked back then and after the amount showed up in my account several days later, I assumed it went through ok and sent the VCR. Then I learned it bounced and I was charged $5. He eventually sent another check which bounced as well for another $5 fee. After that he basically told me that it was my fault for sending him the VCR before the check cleared and I didn’t hear from him again.

I didn’t use eBay again for another year or two. We did trade negative feedbacks for each other, but in any case, I think it’s a little odd that if a buyer rips you off, you can’t mark them as being just as dishonest as a bad seller. Both sellers and buyers have responsibilities and you can usually tell if a seller gave a negative mark just in retaliation to a buyers if that buyer has an otherwise prestine record…

Quoting from techDirt:

eBay has been making some changes lately that aren’t sitting well with eBay sellers. First, it announced fee changes that initially were promoted as “lower fees,” but the details showed were only lower for goods that didn’t sell. The fees on sold goods were actually higher. Now, the company has banned sellers from giving “negative” feedback on buyers.

I’ve only had my Treo 700wx for about 4 months now, but it works very well for me. Now Palm is finally unveiling a decent successor, the Treo 800W. It has just about every enhancement I can think of outside of a multi-touch iPhone interface, and a bigger screen. The only thing I don’t see mentioned is GPS capability, but given that other Palm devices are including this and the wealth of all other features, it seems pretty likely. The only thing that I’m a little sad about is the microSD, since both my cameras and my phones have taken regular SD now for the last 2+ years. But maybe by the time I actually get this phone, the 8GB microSD will be affordable. You can now get a 16GB SD card for half the price of an 8GB microSD… Oh well, I don’t even use more than one quarter of my cheap 4GB SD card in my current phone, so I guess I should stop whining!

http://blog.treonauts.com/2008/01/more-treo-800w.html?utm_source=tnemail&utm_medium=daily

Since Google Maps exposed their API (translation for non-techies: published a way for programmers to interact with the Google Maps site), lots of sites have come out with “hacks” or “mods” to the Google maps interface. There was Frappr , which enjoyed a splurge of popularity earlier this year that seems to have died down a lot. It allowed you to create a map around a common interest or site, where members could put themselves up as if putting a thumbtack on the map with a note with their name, picture, and whatever else they might deem to add. There are all kinds of interfaces which showed various points of interest, and of course there is the housingmaps.com site, a fusion of Craig’s List’s housing classifieds in various metro areas with Google maps - so you can graphically browse a map and see what houses are for sale at what price on what street. There are even sites which came about whose sole purpose was to catalog these various mods to Google Maps, including Cool Google Maps and Google Maps Mania .For a long time with a mapping program I’ve wanted the ability to figure out exactly how far something was from me. I try to walk for exercise when I can, and we also sometimes walk to nearby stores instead of driving when the weather is nice, we have the time, and we’re not exhausted from the myriad of chores and duties that keep us busy most days. Using a standard mapping interface like Google Maps itself doesn’t quite cut it. For one thing it means knowing the address of where you are coming from and going to, which is not always known, so you have to spend extra time looking this information up, and it might not even be completely accurate (for example, according to most mapping programs which use the same data source, my house is actually almost a block from where it says it is!). Secondly, there’s no guarantee that the mapping program will design a route that is the same as the way you walk. It often chooses some other route that it deems faster by car. Of course, this doesn’t even account for some routes which cars simply can’t traverse because of a road that’s one way in the wrong direction or even no road at all! I’ve always wanted something akin to a graphics program where you draw a polymer by clicking multiple times to form the shape. In my mind, the lines would automatically stick to the roads that were closest to them.

More recently, I’ve been trying to get more exercise in during the day, and since it’s been so nice and unseasonably warm here this week, I decided to skip lunch and just walk around the neighborhood. I was wondering how much I walked, but other than the amount of time and a vague sense of how fast I was going, I really couldn’t gauge much. So I thought I’d start looking for something akin to what I’ve described above and maybe, just maybe I’d find something. Well, I was shocked that I found something perfect almost immediately!

Gmaps Pedometer is the site/hack, and it is great for anyone just wanting to know how far it is from one point to another on a map, to someone who wants to get detailed information for a walking program, a cycling route, etc. You can very easily create a walking path and Gmaps Pedometer will show you dynamically not only what the distance is, but even how many calories you will burn on this path. I’m not sure about how accurate the calorie count is, though, since my 3-mile path I created around my office was rated at 368 calories, which seems a bit high. Gmaps Pedometer even gives you a graphic of the elevation levels your path is traversing, but as much as I’d like to believe it, I don’t believe elevation is taken into account for calories. The only forum message from the author about this on the site mentions not wanting to use the elevation markers for anything else because elevation data is not available everywhere - it seems to be available mostly for the U.S.

If you can time your walk, and Gmaps Pedometer gives you an accurate measurement of the distance, you can figure out your speed and then you can plug that, the time, and your weight into some other tool to get a more or less accurate representation of you calories burned. I tried to find such a calculator on the web, but all the ones out will only let you plug in pre-specified numbers for your pace, like 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, etc. mph. I did find one shareware application you can download that does seem to have the degree of flexibility I was hoping for.

In addition to what I’ve mentioned so far, Gmaps Pedometer also lets you save a given route, so for example, this is one route I created . Also, it lets you export to GPX format with a third party bookmarklet . GPX is a format for sharing GPS data, so potentially you could load this into your GPS and use it as a way to navigate. This might be very valuable for hikers, or just walkers or cyclists who are unfamiliar with an area and want to make sure they are taking the right path. Theoretically, one could use Gmaps Pedometer to design city walking tours and make those available for people to download, along with a set of MP3’s for each of the points of interest on the path. Really, the possibilities are endless with this thing!

It was only maybe a year ago when I first started looking at Digg.com, a “social bookmarking site” which lets users submit links to articles of interest that then get “dugg” (rated) by others. The idea was that if your story were very interesting, it would get dugg by many other Digg users, and then become more visible by getting on Digg’s “front page.” This seemed to work well for the most part.

In the last few months, however, there have been numerous controversies possibly due to the increasing popularity of Digg.com. First there was talk about how the top 100 users of Digg submitted more than half of the stories, and so had more influence than the rest of the community who could not spend 10 hours a day submitting stories.

More recently there has been a slew of commentary on how Digg’s system for dealing with duplicate entries has been breaking down. This most recent one got to Digg’s front page and generated a huge amount of comments.

Personally, I’ve found the duplication problem getting worse. I used to go to Digg and it would take me a while to get through just the first page of stories, so much so that I often didn’t even get to the second page. But more and more, I’ve been going to the second, third, and fourth pages. Part of this is due to articles on things I’m just not interested in, but a lot is due to repetition.

I’ve also been trying to submit articles here and there and when I do searches before submitting I sometimes find not one or two, but half a dozen or more articles on the exact same news item. And these weren’t even items in the top (and up until recently only) category on Digg, technology.

The problem, I think, lies what gave Digg its initial power - that “social” in “social bookmarking. People are submitting articles so that they are dugg and recognized by others, be they friends or strangers. It’s been called “ego” but whatever you call it, it worked well when there were fewer people because the chance that you were creating a dupe was not as high. Now that Digg is so popular, chances are that if a story has only been out for an hour, it’s already been submitted. I think this makes some people desperate (since they can’t find good articles that haven’t been dug) and so they don’t search for duplicates and ignore Digg’s own warning that their story might be one.

Digg’s other tools to prevent duplication don’t seem to be working either. One can mark an article as a duplicate, but what isn’t clear is how many of such actions it takes for the duplicate to be removed, or if they are removed at all? It must be a lot because we still see many of these. One can comment in the article itself that it’s a duplicate, but chances are this won’t do anything, other than possibly getting your own comment “dugg down” meaning that your overall rank on Digg goes down.

The problem seems to stem from the idea that people want to be recognized as being special, and that this impulse has superceded the idea of making Digg a better place for the community at large. I think part of this has to do with what’s probably a fairly young demographic at Digg, and we all know that when we were young, we tended to think about ourselves a little more than when we got older and realized the world didn’t revolve around us. Then again, there are plenty of people for whom age has not meant added wisdom in this area! Anyway, you can be recognized on Digg in at least a couple of different ways. You can do this in a couple of ways on Digg. One is to have a high ranking of diggs; the second is to get a story you submitted onto the front page.

If we agree that the motivation is simply to get recognition, then I think the only way to solve the issue is to remove this recognition. Otherwise, people will always figure out ways to “game” the system, and given a finite number of new things happening every day, and new articles published on the web, people will simply post duplicates hoping that they can some how pump up their ranking and get their submission on the home page by getting their friends to digg it, or creating duplicate accounts, etc. But how do you remove recognition from a social site like Digg.com?

Well, one way to do it is to make the ranking system specific to the person ranking you. So, for example, if I rank X as being digger whose articles I think are reliable and like to read, then I give them a digg, and if I think they are obnoxious, then I “bury” them (give them a negative digg). But my ratings are only for me. They don’t get posted anywhere else, save at most on my profile page, but maybe not even there. The point is, that removing the ranking removes one of the purely selfish reasons for people to submit stories. You could also opt to make invisible those stories that have been submitted by users who you’ve previously buried, and highlight stories of those you’ve dugg. Or simply have a color-coding scheme to easily pick out the buried users’ stories from the dugg users’ stories and all the rest. As for users overall ranking, I think Digg could still tally this, but it would only be for their internal use. Possibly, people could see their own rankings, but not those of others.

The second idea is to remove credit to the person who posted a story as soon as it goes on the front page. That way, no one could say - “hey look, my story was posted to the front page, aren’t I great? Love me!” However, you could still be dugg or buried by a given user, so your articles might be seen by more or less people depending on how reliable you are.

Whether these suggestions or something else entirely are adopted, I think the problem needs to be addressed by Digg. We are now seeing “duplicates” submissions of articles about duplicates! And this blog entry itself is contributing, of course! Kevin Rose or Jay Adelson, the founders of Digg, need to come out and talk about the issue, be it on Digg, or wherever, or if not talk, then simply do something. The latest news is about how they are in negotiations now to sell Digg, so this issue, even though it seems to be escalating daily, may not be the first thing on their minds! If Digg is sold to a large company like News Corp, or another, the problem may get worse before it gets better. Then again, if we see a massive influx of cash, these guys may have the resources to get their programmers some reinforcements to make some necessary changes.

I know the entries haven’t exactly been spilling out lately. Chock that up to parenthood I guess, which tends to take up most of the free time at home I used to devote to blogging, and the time that is left over is just an opportunity to catch up on sleep!

However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio. First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I’ve listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening. Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it’s hard to start reading history books when there’s lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn’t listening to books at that point, and didn’t want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer. There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible. I thought I’d spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books. It’s odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven’t read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn’t feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible. But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be “out of touch.” Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May. I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships. I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I’d ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book “credit” cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible’s Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay. Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There’s some fine print at the bottom which says “Offer valid for new Audible customers only.” Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account. Yes you can do this. Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want. I don’t think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts. The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can’t. Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts. You can’t activate more than two accounts on a given player. I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose. In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn’t read and really wanted to. So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn’t enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits. What do I do with those credits? So far, the only ones I’ve used were for a podcast! Well, that’s what Audible calls them anyway. They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address. Unfortunately, as I’ve found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod. Yes, I still speed things up! Although I do this via the iPod’s built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier. I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine. Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible. Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books. Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times! So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account! I can’t escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn’t done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn’t going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that’s fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn’t have the confidence that these were books worth listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I’ve also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me. But I’ve also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?
The point of this is that I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I’d start posting them here as well, since I’m not posting much else these days! So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

Growing up as I did in Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Empire State Building and with the World Trade Center visible through my apartment Windows, everything seemed big. Even as an adult, I still hadn’t grazed the surface of what that big city had to offer. My mom would read the entertainment section of the New York Times, but I never got a sense of how much the city had to offer, other than movies, plays, restaurants, street fairs and museums. Eventually I learned about concerts, and of course there were events at our building or at our schools, etc. But I’m sure there were countless other events going on that we just didn’t know about. The thought of having a list of all of these in a pre-web era wasn’t really imaginable, at least to a young kid.When I moved to the Washington DC area, I marveled at all the events that were taking place on a daily basis. While DC is smaller than New York, if you take into account all the outlying areas, which had their own community events, you couldn’t do half of what was out there even if you didn’t work and dedicated all your free time to going to these things around the region every day.

Yet, whenever I had guests come to visit, I would often look in the Washington Post and not really find anything that interesting. Sure, there were museum exhibits and concerts, but after a while, trekking through the same museums gets a bit tiresome, and concerts can get expensive, and the smoke and noise eventually made them not the best venue, especially for older guests.

A couple of years ago we moved out to a suburb of DC called Vienna (Virginia). It’s a cute town that isn’t filled with the big box stores that you find in many other places. It does have some small strip malls, but about the only chains are a few grocery stores, and fast food restaurants, a Michaels, and that’s about it. Most of the stores are small one-shop deals. While it’s not old compared to many New England towns, at over 150, it also isn’t like some of the newer suburbs not far away that are filled with townhouses and McMansions. Among the more unique businesses in Vienna is a place that’s a coffee shop, music store, and concert venue in one, called Jammin’ Java. There are a couple of high-end wine stores that have just opened up this year. There are some great bicycle stores (The W&OD bike path runs right through the center of Vienna), some wonderful bakeries, a surprisingly large collection of ethnic restaurants, and also more high-end gourmet places in addition to the fast food, diners, etc. There are a number of gardens and parks in Vienna, some of which host outdoor concerts or movies, and there two weekly farmers markets. Vienna hosts street fairs, parades, a large variety of classes and events at its community center, town hall, library, and various businesses around the town.

The feel of Vienna to me, at least, is that of a “small” town, but it has a lot of resources, and things to do and see. The charms of this town weren’t lost on Money Magazine, which recently named Vienna it’s 4^th best place to live in the country.

Vienna’s website lists some of the more official events like parades, town meetings, etc., but I always thought there should be some organized list of events that was more comprehensive. Of course, we don’t just stay in Vienna all year, but travel around the region, and to other states, but the idea of having a list of things to do within walking distance or slightly more had some odd appeal to me. Maybe this had to do with growing up in Manhattan and being able to walk to many things. Or maybe it was just the fictionalized places on TV that charmed me – like Sicily, Alaska, or Everwood, Colorado.

Still, even for this small town, compiling such a list would have been a big pain. There have been online calendar systems out there for a while, but when Google launched theirs earlier this year, it impressed me as being easier and more powerful than previous ones. You can create your own calendars for private use, or use with a select group, or have one that’s completely public. You can have as many calendars as you want displayed, or you can “filter” out the ones you want to see at any given moment.

A bunch of people or businesses have started public Google calendars meant to help promote a business or resource and aid clientele. So, I thought, why not create something for Vienna? I searched for something like this but couldn’t find anything. I searched for calendars by Vienna businesses or associations and the only thing I found was one for the large concert arena called Wolftrap, whose address is technically Vienna, but which is still even further from the Vienna town center than the large business and commercial center called Tysons Corner whose postal address is McLean, VA.

So, I decided to start my own Vienna Google Calendar. Luckily some businesses like Jammin’ Java and the local Wholefoods at least have an online calendar, and of course there is the Vienna Virginia website’s calendar. To these I added some other events that I found from the local Michael’s, the Vienna-Tysons Regional Chamber of Commerce, Fairfax County Parks & Recreation, etc. I’m sure I’m missing a lot, but even so, it seems there’s stuff going on just about every day of the week, and usually multiple overlapping things, forcing you to pick and choose. Now I’ll admit that some of these things may not be of interest to many people, but still, it’s nice to know that there are lots of things going on just a few minutes away.

I’m trying to update the calendar as often as time allows, but for one already busy person, it can be a challenge. That’s why I’d like to make a request for some help. If you are a Vienna resident and come across this blog entry and would like to help out with the calendar, I would be grateful!

You can view an html version of the Google Calendar by clicking on the following link:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=0819geutosia1q06k831pnokv8%40group.calendar.google.com

But I recommend a more powerful way to view the calendar – create your own Google Calendar account. You can create your own calendar(s) for personal/family/friends, etc. And then you can search for public calendars of some interest and add those as ones you “subscribe to.” In addition to my Google Calendar, I also subscribe to Wolftrap’s, to one for Washington Cultural Events, and one for another eclectic coffee shop in Falls Church, VA. To find the Vienna Google Calendar, just go to Settings/Calendars/, hit the Add Calendars button at the bottom of the page, and then enter “Vienna, VA” in the Search Criteria, and it should be the first one that comes up.

In any case, it is kind of ironic that I’m doing this now, since I have an 11-month-old child that demands most of my free time and the only place she likes to be taken to is the neighborhood park!

Oh, I forgot you can actually embed Google calendar’s in web pages, so here’s an embeded version of the calendar:

Those of you following my blog for a while probably know that I write a lot about two gadgets in particular that I own – the Treo 650 phone (which I just upgraded to a Treo 700P) and the iPod (which I currently own the 5^th generation 60GB model capable of playing video). While I love both devices, my ultimate goal as a gadget freak is to only have one to carry around. You know, the whole “convergence” thing taken to it’s essence.

Some recent studies have suggested that most people want a phone that’s just a phone and doesn’t do a zillion other things. This may or may not be true, but if it is, I think it’s partly due to the current set of phones that “pretend” to be all-in-one devices. These phones are not the “smartphones” that comprise the Treo, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones, but rather are tiny stylish devices like the Motorola Razr which have cameras, calendars, and now often MP3 players built in.. The small screens and limited space for buttons and controls, not to mention a tiny batteries that have to cope with more demand for power, means that these devices end up being mainly good for novelty uses compared to dedicated MP3 players like the iPod or full-fledged digital cameras – even the sleekest compact of these.

For those of us who are too old or geeky to care about looking fashionable and don’t need the smallest phone on the block, the Palm (and previously Handspring) Treo have long been a great phone that combines a huge array of other uses due to its sporting the PalmOS operating system, the one used on Palm personal digital assistants for more than 10 years. Thousands of programs, many free and many others inexpensive shareware, have been written for this platform to the point where you could almost compare Treos to tiny PC’s.

For example I used my Treo 650 as a GPS (along with a tiny GPS receiver that hid in my glove compartment and which the Treo would connect to wirelessly) in order to get constant indications of where I was on the road, turn-by-turn directions to a destination, and even dynamic rerouting if I missed a turn – all communicated via both the Treo’s screen as well as a large choice of audio voices. I had all my contact information, schedules, to-do lists, and notes that I could sync with my MS Outlook and hosted exchange account. I had a version of Quicken (“Pocket Quicken” as it’s called), so I could record transactions on the road and sync with my main Quicken program when I got home. I had a program that allowed me to view my desktop of my PC at home and control any aspect of my computer no matter where I was. I got my email, of course, and was able to communicate via instant messages, text messaging, etc. I could also view full web pages and access most websites with no problem. Oh yes, and there was a phone too!

While the Treos had several MP3 players, none really gave the same degree of elegance as the combination of iTunes and the iPod. Many had features that the iPod didn’t, though. Pocket Tunes is the best known of these programs and has probably the largest array of capabilities - in addition to playing MP3’s, it can play Ogg Vorbis format files (an open-source format that has better quality and smaller files than MP3), and Windows Media Audio file format (a proprietary format that MS developed). Within the last year it also started supporting DMA-protected WMA files from music subscription sites like Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and Napster To Go. This allows you to subscribe to a service for a $10-15/month fee and download an unlimited number of songs to your computer and subsequently to your portable device. Pocket Tunes in its Deluxe version also has had the ability to stream a type of internet radio called Shoutcast (MP3 streams), so you could listen to live radio, although until very recently not at a very good quality level due to the network speeds at which cell phones have been able to communicate. If you are an audio book fan and have an account with the largest digital audio book company out there, Audible.com, Treos, as well as all PalmOS and PocketPC-based phones and PDA’s have long been able to sync Audible format files from your computer and play them. More recently those who have a phone with a cellular data plan or a PDA with a Wifi connection could also download programs from their Audible library on the fly via a program called Audible Air.

Most of the MP3 players for the Treo have traditionally done their syncing, at least on Windows PC’s, through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player which is free and built in to the Windows Operating System. Alternately you can simply copy files directly onto an external memory card on your Treo and then let the program search for these files and add them to its library. While this works, it’s far from ideal now that cards with very large capacities are being sold inexpensively and for those of us who have tens of gigabytes of audio files, be they music, audio books, or podcasts. Some people fare well with Windows Media player, but in my brief time trying to use it to sync with my Treo, I had numerous problems, ranging from it recopying files that were already on my device each time I synced, to not copying files that should have been copied, etc. It simply wasn’t reliable.

While there were certainly limitations before that made the earlier Treos not the ideal choice of everyone as an MP3 player, many people have and do use the Treo 650, 600, perhaps even earlier ones still as their only portable music player. The Treo 700P, Palm’s latest version of the Treo, has features that make it a much more powerful device, all the more capable of replacing your primary MP3 player. The main feature that helps make the phone more powerful is its ability transfer data at much higher speeds than previously via a newer wireless (cellular, not Wifi) network technology, called EvDO. While the version of EvDO that’s currently available and accessible via the 700P is still not quite as fast as what most people have in their homes via their DSL or Cable Internet connection, it still ranges from three to ten times the speed of a dial-up modem. This speed will improve, especially when future versions of EvDO get deployed. The difference in speed means that your Treo can now stream live video and high-quality audio. You can download applications in seconds rather than minutes. Surfing the web is now a lot more like it is on a broadband connection on a PC, albeit with a much smaller screen. Just as broadband on the PC gives you more freedom to explore the Internet on demand, EvDO on a phone gives you more motivation to use it for accessing the Internet. It used to be that for many uses I would just delay what I needed to do until I got home because doing it on the slow data connection on my phone was too painful. It was only when I knew I wouldn’t be near a PC for a long time and I really needed to get some information on the web that I would use the Treo for accessing a website.

Another key new feature is the Treo 700P’s ability to handle memory cards that can hold more than 2GB, the limit of previous Treos. Although installing a hack could let you work around that limit on those older models, it required some degree of technical expertise to do. Now you can just plug in your 4GB SD card and it will work as a 4GB card without any extra work. Presumably when 8GB SD cards and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards come out in the next year or two, these will all work as well without additional software or hacking. While 4GB is still low compared to the storage on some MP3 players, it’s large enough to hold dozens of albums worth of music, not too shabby for a card the size of a postage stamp.

With these (and many other) new capabilities and a couple of new applications from third-party developers, it looks like the Treo 700P could easily replace an iPod for many people, myself included. The third party applications that I speak of are Motion Apps’ mOcean, CodeWave’s myTunesRSS, and Softick’s “Softick Audio Gateway.” There are additional applications that enhance the Treo’s multimedia capabilities worlds above the current iPods, but I’ll tackle those later.

Motion Apps’ mOcean is an MP3 player for the Treo that syncs with your iTunes library and actually has an interface that looks and acts a lot like an iPod. Obviously the Treo doesn’t have the famed iPod “clickwheel,” so instead mOcean provides a graphical version of the clickwheel that you can use via the Treo’s touchscreen. In fact, Apple is rumored to be coming out with similar touchscreen clickwheel interface for a future Video iPod that will do away with the physical clickwheel in order to recoup space for an expanded screen. It almost feels like I have a future iPod in my hands when I’m using mOcean! mOcean actually improves on the iPod in some ways due to the Treo having a keyboard – for example you can skip to the S’s in a large list of songs my just hitting the ’s’ key, rather than have to scroll with the clickwheel until you got all the way to the s’s. Although though there are some minor inconsistencies that probably in many cases only advanced iPod/iTunes users would notice, for the most part it is an extremely close replica of the iPod/iTunes experience, and Motion Apps appear to be constantly working on new features and functionality. The only obvious shortfall is the lack of ability to play AAC files and video files, but other programs are available on the Treo that that will do this, like the free TCPMP.

MyTunesRSS is a streaming server that you run on a PC that’s connected to the Internet. It syncs up with your iTunes library and makes your PC a streaming server for any audio and even video content that is in your iTunes (although for video you have a really good, fast connection for it to work well). For those of us with tens of gigabytes of audio and video files in our libraries, this allows you to have immediate access to your entire library without having to go out and buy ten or twenty 4GB memory cards, or have to wait until they come out with larger capacity cards. Of course, your ability to play these files is dependent on being in an area where you can get a data connection, and probably even an EvDO connection, which is still mostly in major metropolitan areas. So, for those who spend any time traveling or in more rural areas, this may not be a great solution.

The other piece of this content puzzle is something that isn’t quite as obvious, but for me was an important factor in realizing that using my Treo for listing to podcasts, audio books and music might be a better solution that using my iPod. If you have an MP3 player like an iPod and you’re listening to music and your cell phone rings, you have to shut off the iPod, take your earbuds out, and answer your phone, all before the caller on the other end hangs up. It can be a bit of a hassle, and if you have to use a handsfree device for your phone it makes it that much harder still. The 700P comes with a handsfree headset that doubles as stereo headphones. This allows you to listen to audio on your Treo, and then when a call comes in, it interrupts your music or podcast or audio book and prompts you to answer the phone, at which point the stereo headphones simply become a handsfree headset through which you can have a conversation. While this makes things a lot easier than having a phone and an MP3 player as separate devices, it still means you need to take the Treo out of your pocket or off your belt in order to answer the call.

Earlier this year, a company that has been making other well-known and useful software for the Treo and other Palm devices for years came out with a way to do this all wirelessly. Some quick background first. The wireless technology which I’m referring to here, and which you’ve undoubtedly heard of by now, is called “Bluetooth.” It was designed specifically for devices to communicate with other devices at short range (30 feet or less) and at relatively slow speeds (much slower than wireless networking known as Wifi). Probably the most popular use for this technology so far is the wireless headsets for cell phones that you might see planted in or over people’s ear. If that ear is on the side of their head that’s not visible to you, it’s easy to initially think they are talking to themselves when they are actually having a phone conversation. While Bluetooth has been very useful for this use, it does not, as you might expect, allow you to listen to audio other than that of a phone call. To listen to stereo music, you need to have a phone and a device that implements something called an Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, or A2DP, which allows wireless digital streaming of different types of digital audio formats fromone device to another. Unfortunately even the latest greatest Treo does not support A2DP. Fortunately for us, the genius programmers at Softick worked around this lack of capability of the Treo so that it could actually do A2DP with compatible Bluetooth stereo headsets that have started to become available in the last year or two. So now you don’t even have to bother with taking the Treo out of your pocket or off of your belt to answer a call while your listening to something. You can do everything wirelessly, including pausing the audio and skipping to the next or previous track. I can see one really nice use of this for me – I can now do yard work with a headset on and keep my Treo on the deck, safe from getting wet or full dirt!

A couple of caveats about this should be mentioned, though. While Softick’s program works on previous Treos, it still doesn’t quite work on the 700P. Palm updated the Bluetooth implementation on the 700P, breaking the compatibility, and so now Softick is hard at work trying to come up with a version that will work on the 700P – something that they are hoping to get out in the next week or so. Also, to be fair, you can buy Bluetooth headsets with an attachment that plugs into an iPod. This does add a considerable amount of bulk, though, to the otherwise fairly small iPod, making it a good deal larger than the Treo, although you could also use these on the much smaller iPod Nano.

When Apple came out with the Video iPod, it was the biggest leap in functionality since the first iPod debuted in 2001. The success of the video capability has convinced many movie and television companies to offer video for sale on the iTunes Music Store, or even for free over the Internet. And while mOcean still doesn’t sync video content yet, you can watch both streaming video as well as video files you’ve transferred from your computer to your Treo via a cabled hotsync. Not only that, but you can watch video in many more formats than you can with the iPod. The iPod allows only for a couple of types of Mpeg 4 formats, whereas programs like TCMP and Kinoma allow for AVI, DivX, XviD, and various Mpeg formats.

Finally, through yet additional third-party software and services, you can listen to or view a slew of additional content on your Treo that will not be possible on an iPod unless Apple actually develops an iPod phone that does EvDO, or an iPod with Wifi built in. Orb is a product that lets you use you stream all your audio, video, and even pictures to any computer capable of receiving them, and it has been tested successfully with the Treo 700P. Not only that, but if you have a TV Tuner card in your PC you can actually stream all the live channels you get through that tuner card as well. A similar service/product called Slingbox also will also let you do this, although they are still working on the software that will let you do this with a Treo. For those who subscribe to Satellite Radio, there is a way to use your Treo to stream your XM or Serius channels directly to your Treo. There are other streaming servers like Gloonet, and I’m sure ones that I’ve not even heard of yet, but the ones I’ve listed are probably the best known.

The iPod has become so popular for good reasons. It’s not just that it’s had a great marketing force behind it (although it has), or just great looks (that too), or that it was one of the first players to incorporate a hard drive that could store hundreds (or thousands) of songs. It’s also that the user interface on the iPod is for most people a very easy and intuitive one to operate. Its syncing abilities are also easy to set up and understand, at least compared to most other platforms out there. iTunes, the PC part of the iPod, is also pretty streightward and manages music (and now video) in a simple and powerful way.

I realize that some people truly don’t want anything but a small device to play their 30 favorite albums on, and for them, I suppose, an iPod (as well as many other MP3 players) is still a great choice. Heck, for them, anything more than an iPod Nano would be overkill. However, for those of us who are always looking for more powerful gadgets, ones that can serve most if not all of our requirements for a portable device (be they to listen to audio, watch video, make phone calls, read email, etc., etc.) the Treo 700P really is a powerhouse of convergence. With the services and software I’ve mentioned in this article, it can do everything and much more than current iPod models, and with mOcean can even look and act like an iPod. It does this at a price that’s at least equivalent to the top 60GB iPod model (if you buy the Treo 700P along with a 2-year cell phone contract), or at most for a couple hundred more, if paying buying at the top retail price with no discounts. The main disadvantage to the Treo, other than what some people would consider to be it’s inferior look fashion-wise, is the fact that it doesn’t have a big built-in hard drive. While 4GB is a lot for some people, and certainly is still the most you can have on an iPod Nano as of now, it still pales in comparison to the mammoth 60GB hard drive in the top-of-the-line iPod model. With myTunesRSS and other streaming solutions, you can get around this, but you are still dependent on having an EvDO signal, which is still far from ubiquitous. EvDO coverage will increase, of course, as will memory card capacities, making this less of an issue, but for now, some will still consider it too much of a limitation to give up their iPod altogether. Plus, as coverage and storage capacity increases on the Treo, it’s unlikely that the iPod will stand still. The rumor is that a new video iPod with a much larger screen will come out later this year and will make watching video on the Treo look weak in comparison. Along with that bigger screen may come additional features that will remove more advantages of the Treo, such as Bluetooth or Wifi capability.

For right now, though, the Treo does still seem to win in all but storage capacity. Heck, even its battery is replaceable, unlike the infamous non-replaceable iPod’s! I for one am going to ditch my iPod. That doesn’t mean I won’t be tempted by future ones. If a new one comes out that has a screen twice the size of my Treo’s, it’s going to be hard to resist. Then again, since I don’t watch nearly as much video as I do listen to audio podcasts, audio books, and music, it would be hard to justify having both of these. Hopefully, though, Palm’s next Treo will also sport a larger screen, or at least a video output as the iPod does which allows for plugging in video goggles that make screen size irrelevant!

My killer feature for the iPod is something that probably doesn’t appeal to you. Ok, maybe some of you, but not many. It’s the feature that Apple introduced with the 4G iPods back a couple of years ago. The feature is the ability to speed up (or slow down) audio without changing the pitch (if you are familiar with variable speed tape recorders, you understand that simply speeding up the playback of something tends to also make the speaker sound like a chipmunk).

Why is this a killer feature? It lets you play one minute and fifteen seconds of audio for every minute you listen. In other words, you get an extra 25% of content. I listen to a lot of spoken audio – audio books and podcasts – and this means that I get to enjoy a lot of extra content in the same stretch time. It’s a time saver. You get to save countless hours by listening at faster speeds, just as a speed reader gets to read many more books in the time a normal reader would.

There are some downsides, but I don’t think they are significant for most audio. One is that you have to pay closer attention, since drifting off a bit will mean that you will miss a lot more than you would normally, plus it just takes more concentration to comprehend everything at a higher speed. There are some audio artifacts that sometimes occur as well. Those artifacts aren’t jarring, but do degrade the sound quality slightly. Oh yes, and of course you just have a different listening experience. For some audio, timing and cadence can be a big part of the narrator’s performance. Speeding this up can wreak havoc on it - especially for dramatic naration of audio fiction. On the other hand, I’ve gotten so used to listening to nonfiction at this speed that now when I listen to podcasts at the normal speed, the speaker sounds like he’s talking in slow motion! So to some degree it’s just a matter of getting accustomed to it.

While the iPod is the only (or one of the few) digital audio players that has this functionality built in, it doesn’t let you just listen to anything in this fashion. Nope, you can listen to Audible.com audio books (or Audible’s other paid content like radio programs, newspaper transcripts, etc.), and you can listen to files in AAC spoken word format (.M4B). Since most podcasts are in MP3 format, you have to convert them. This is one reason why I use Doppler Radio as my podcast program, or “podcatcher” – it is the only podcatcher that I’ve found wihich converts files to .M4B. Some others convert to .M4A, but you still need to rename them and that implies updating iTunes with the new filename – a manual and cumbersome process.

While Doppler’s conversion works well, it has its disadvantages too, the main one being that iTunes (which is the program actually doing the conversions) can take a while to convert files. The fastest I’ve seen it work is 20X (or 20 times real time). So an hour-long show will take about 3 minutes at that speed. But most of the time, it seems to range from 5 to 12X, or 5 to 12 minutes per hour-long show. iTunes can only convert one show at a time, and so if you have a couple of hours worth of shows downloading at a given session, this could take upwards of 25 minutes to convert! It’s far from ideal.

Now, while I do have this killer feature with the iPod, I would rather that such a feature existed on other devices so that I wasn’t forced to only use an iPod. Don’t get me wrong, I like my iPod, but there are certainly things I don’t like about it as well. The main thing that irks me about it is that you can’t use music subscription services like Yahoo! Music because it won’t play Windows Media files. Apple’s system is built to be proprietary – you can only use the iTunes Music Store to download music (other than free MP3’s from independent artists or your own ripped from CD), and the iTunes Music Store only supports Apple devices. For those who need the speeding up feature, unfortunately, the iPod still seems to be your only choice.

While I could not find other players with this functionality, I thought I’d see what I could find out about speeding up audio in general. My main find proved quite interesting. It’s a Windows software program that does this very thing called, inappropriately enough, Amazing Slow Downer (or ASD), by Roni Music. I guess the name is somewhat appropriate because it can slow audio down, but it can also speed it up. I’m not sure about the utility of slowing things down, but my guess would be so that musicians can listen to a song at a much slower rate in order to pick up notes and chords more easily?

ASD allows you to take any MP3 file (or other formats as well), speed them up or slow them down arbitrarily with a fine degree of control, and then rip them to MP3 (or another format for other encodings). You can control the pitch yourself, although it seemed to automatically handle that. You can also control the audio qualities via an equalizer in order to yield the best quality sound. I played around with the trial version I downloaded from Roni Music’s site and was able to speed up a sample podcast by 42% and still follow everything. I figure you could probably train yourself to understand higher and higher levels of speed.

This was a great find and maybe there are other such applications out there but I haven’t found any yet. As nice as it is, though, I can see using it for major jobs, but not on such a regular basis as Doppler. Much of the spoken word audio I listen to is downloaded via Doppler on almost an hourly basis. So when I listen to something, it’s often only hours or at most a few days old - an ongoing stream of current podcasts. Unfortunately there’s no way to have Doppler “talk” to this program and have it automatically convert these podcasts into faster ones. Neither is there a command-line interface as far as I can tell, so even if Doppler could issue external commands (which I’ve seen in some other podcatchers), this wouldn’t work. What you would have to do is dump all my podcasts into one directory (Doppler puts them into separate directories named after the podcast’s title) and before uploading them to the iPod you would have to run this program and tell it to convert all new files – also determining which of those files were new so that you weren’t reconverting already converted ones (you could change the names or put them in different directories but this would then mean having to go into iTunes and tell it where those new files were, or what they’d been renamed to – otherwise iTunes would remove them from the iPod). Neither will ASD do anything with Audible files, which is to be expected since they have a proprietary DRM. Then there’s the issue of speed. The trial version of ASD only lets you work with 3 minutes worth of audio. I was able to rip this to a 2-minute-long MP3 in a matter of seconds, but it’s hard to extrapolate this to a 30-minute podcast, let alone a bunch of podcasts of various lengths adding up to a couple of hours worth of listening.

Where ASD might come in handy is if you find a bunch of MP3 spoken word files that you want to listen to - say open source stuff from Librivox or Project Gutenberg. Or possibly if you find a podcast that you’ve never heard but has been recording for many months and you want to catch up and listen to all the old episodes. Or you buy a new audio book on CD and want to rip it to MP3 to play it on your portable device. I can see using this for such things because they are one-shot deals rather than a constant, ongoing process.

We can dream that Erwin Van Hunen, the creator of Doppler, will put this type of functionality into Doppler 3.0, but considering how busy he is with other things, it’s hard to imagine that he could devote such resources to what is essentially donationware.

Despite the probably small number of people who find this functionality irresistible, perhaps there are enough of us to encourage a developer out there to create a podcatcher that has similar functionality, or maybe the developer of ASD will actually consider developing a podcatcher with it? Or perhaps we can get Roni Music to partner with Erwin and come up with a premium podcatcher that has this functionality. Well, we can dream!

Apple’s 30th birthday came and went Saturday without a word from the company on any new products. No shiny new deluxe Video iPod, no 30th Anniversary Mac. Late last night, though, Apple unveiled a new software product that will allow their new Intel-based Macs to boot Windows:

Quoting from Engadget:

I think this is a great step forward. Finally, one of the big players, Apple, is allowing their machines to run both OS’s. Then again, MS doesn’t make machines themselves so they weren’t exactly preventing this. In a sense, the ball was really mostly in Apple’s court all along. And there were ways to run Windows in a slow emulator mode, but now that Macs come with the same Intel-based CPU’s that have been running Windows all along, it was that much easier to get this to work. And hackers did get it done. Thankfully, instead of being obnoxious and trying to sue or putting up more technical roadblocks, Apple wisely saw that potential users still needed Windows for some applications which are not available for the Mac.

Personally, this makes me a lot more likely to buy a Mac as my next computer. I have been using Windows now for about 15 years, and am completely comfortable with it, but much of what I do with my home system now could just as easily be done in OSX. Having the added protection from a better security model that guards against viruses and zombifying and such is a big plus. Oh, and of course some of the applications on the Mac I’ve heard about also appeal (Final Cut Pro and iLife come to mind). But there are still applications that only exist for the PC which I need - specifically ones I use for programming. So until now, I couldn’t go completely Mac without having a second computer with XP on it.

There are a couple of downsides though. One is that you can only run one OS at a time. This is expected, of course, but wouldn’t it be great to plug in two monitors and have one running XP and the other OS/X off of one system? If it were even possible, it would probably be sluggish even on a pretty high-performance machine. A more realistic downside is the price. Apple’s systems generally have come at a premium due, no doubt, to lack of competing forces as with PC’s. Apple is the only company making Mac hardware. Some argue that you get what you pay for and the quality of Macs isworth the extra money. Yet, there have been hardware problems with Macs that even I have heard of (not being someone who keeps up with the Mac world), and while I’ve had my share of problems with home-built PC systems, some systems I’ve bought, say from Dell, have lasted many years without problems. I know others who have had constant problems, so most of this is anecdotal I realize. I’m not that concerned either that my computer having to look stylish. I just want it to work well and not to have to spend a small fortune on it. This summer, my Dell laptop, which serves as my main (only) computer, will turn 3 years old. It got a slight upgrade a few months back when I added a gig of memory, but typically three years is about the longest I’ve gone before upgrading over the years. With a new child, though, that may have to stretch a bit longer, and as much as I might love to get a new Intel Mac, I fear that I really couldn’t justify the difference in price at this point now that my money goes to feed more than just my own mouth. Maybe I’ll just have to settle for getting a bare bones Mac Mini? Then again, in another year, both that Mac Mini as well as my 2Ghz plain P4 laptop will be even more noticably sluggish as I continue to challenge them with more video and photo editing tasts, video encoding, etc.p>

In any case, for many of you out there, I think this may become a turning point where people no longer have to pick and choose wich platform to use. They can have both Mac and Windows. With MS delaying Vista even longer, this becomes that much more tempting for those getting frustrated with Windows’ security issues or those simply being curious to try out the Mac. Now all Apple has to do is allow their OS to run on non-Apple hardware. This would allow people to buy much cheaper machines and I think could only increase Apple’s market share. Then again, Apple is constantly saying that it is a hardware company first and foremost. Perhaps, though, with their foray into media with the iTunes Music Store, their collaboration with Disney and other media players to bring digital video to the masses, etc., they will see that they aren’t mainly a hardware company, but a company that has many facets - an OS company, a hardware company, a software company, a media company, etc. I doubt this will happen any time soon, but part of me feels like Apple’s need to control the hardware end of it is a confession from them that they can’t produce hardware that competes in terms of value. Instead they need to artificially limit competition so that consumers only have one choice. Oh well, at least they are now giving people the choice of what OS to run on their Macs!

Since last week none of my NPR podcasts have been retrieving anything - any that are being retrieved from NPR.org domain anyway. There’s no indication in their directory about this, nor can I find any commentary on the net anywhere. Am I the only one having this problem? I’m using Doppler Radio 2.0.0.3, but I’ve tried looking at the feeds via a browser and still get an error:

We’re sorry, but there’s been an error delivering this podcast. Please contact podcasts@npr.org for updates and more information.

I did email them but of course havent received a response. I’m just wondering if anyone else besides me is having difficulties? I would assume that a decent number of people subscribe to these podcasts…