Out of necessity, just last week I hooked up a pair of cheap computer speakers to the computer on my desk. In the past, I’d gotten by using the crappy speakers on my laptop whenever I needed to listen to something. In the past couple of years, though, I’ve started to use headphones (I have a pair of Etymotics ER-6s that I love and highly recommend) more and more, as I’ve started listening to more podcasts and the like.

But especially with the emergence of video (hello, Daily Show!), it’s gotten to the point for me that I need to have always-available audio, so I scrounged up a pair of speakers. So, for me, this marked some kind of watershed; from using my main work computer principally as an office device to using it as a media device.

The addition of the speakers, this trivial watershed, has had the very desirable side effect of causing me to start listening to more music at my desk. But, in doing so, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with iTunes; in the past I’ve used it mainly as a way to get music onto my iPod, but as I use it more on a daily basis, I’m coming to realize how limiting it really is. I looked around a bit and the alternatives (Winamp?) don’t seem much better.

The iTunes interface is usable enough, although I don’t like the brushed metal look. And I really like how easy it is to *buy* music via iTunes and the ninety-nine cent per song flat pricing is simple and reasonable. In contrast, I went into a Tower Records in Union Square in Manhattan over the holidays to buy a CD for my brother and I was overwhelmed by the chaos of the place. Admittedly, it was a busy shopping day in a busy city, but I had a real nerd-moment when I yearned for a search box to type in, “Bob Dylan, Modern Times.”

But I don’t understand the way iTunes stores my music and I don’t understand the DRM that lets me have access to most, but not all, of my music. I don’t have five computers but iTunes thinks that it’s authorized music on five computers, which is its limit. And I don’t think that I want to bother figuring it out. So I’m blaming iTunes, which is otherwise a respectable enough piece of software.

So, I says to myself, there has got to be an alternative to iTunes out there. I searched around for a bit and the best I could come up with was Winamp, which works well enough but is clearly showing its age. Another option, Songbird, a XUL-based media player, looks like it will an interesting alternative. It’s still in development, but having an open source extensible iTunes would be great. (The Songbird developer team is awesomely named POTI: Pioneers of the Inevitable.) So for now I’m going to stick with iTunes the application, skip the music store because of the DRM (I’m experimenting with eMusic at the moment), and hope for Songbird.

Thanks to my man Gavin, I’m using my telephone for Internet access while paying a holiday visit to family with dialup access, gasp, only.  It’s very helpful, I tell you. Especially after getting used to 15Mb down at home.  (Did I mention that I have fiber to the home?  For $44/month?)

Ian Hay, who works for Orange in the UK, has an interesting post entitled “Ten Things I Want from You,” about customers’ mobile telephony needs.  Here’s mine:

1. Make voice work better, much better; everything else is secondary.
2. Improve coverage; I don’t want to know where my phone works but my wife’s doesn’t, or vice-versa.  I want them to work everywhere.
3. Give me a great address book, one that is easy to use and easy to sync with other devices and data stores.
4. As others have requested, make battery charging simpler and more consistent: can we please finally standardize chargers? 
5. VoiceML?
6. Sell unlocked phones.  Please.  I’ll even pay a bit more for the ‘privilege.’
7. Design and sell great simple phones. I’m not old, I’m not stupid, I’m not poor.  But I don’t want a radio/camera/nose hair trimmer/flashlight in my telephone.  I’m not even sure why I need a color screen, honestly.  I want a phone that has great battery life, good sound, easy to use keys, a functional address book, and is sturdy enough to stand up to being chewed by my toddlers.  Something like Motorola’s new Motofone seems to fit the bill quite nicely.
8. Give me browser-based control over my telephone’s configuration.  I’ll do the set up in the convenience of my own office with a big screen, not pecking away at tiny keys and absurdly complex one-off menu trees.
9. Likewise, let me manipulate data (primarily address book information) online and then send it to my phone.  I still don’t know how to put photos on my current (camera-less) phone, for example.
10. Fix Bluetooth; it’s too hard to set up, it’s too idiosyncratic in its implementation, and it doesn’t work as well as the wires it tried to replace.  But, really, I’d be happy with the first couple of requests; I don’t need Bluetooth, but I sure do need an address book that approaches the functionality of a late-1990s Nokia.  (Which, now that I think of it, had an infrared port for exchanging addresses.  So If I had eleven choices, my eleventh would be an IR port.)

Johnny Cash and Oscar the Grouch, plus others.

25 Oct 2006

I can’t stop listening to this [YouTube] Tamil Malaysian rap video, “Madai Thiranthu,” which my friend Darshan sent me. The music is stupifyingly spectacular. The big guy in the video is Yogi B, one of the most popular MCs on the Malaysian hip hop scene, according to Darshan.

And here’s the original, which is also spectacular.