entertainment

Awesome idea: Do-It-Yourself iPod Stand, based on a printable PDF template.

I just noticed that one of my favorite Industrial bands, Project Pitchfork, is offering a downloadable version of their latest album “Kaskade” for sale, in addition to the usual CD edition. Apparently the downloaded version consists of high quality 192kbps MP3 files without DRM or anything. A PDF version of the cover is included as well. At $9.99, the price is reasonable (the current price for the CD at Amazon is $15....

Yesterday afternoon we drove back from San Diego to San Francisco. Overall, the trip was pretty smooth - except for one major annoyance. I had brought my laptop along, and the day before the trip back I had downloaded some podcasts for myself as well as my kids. However, when I synced those to my iPod using iTunes, something went wrong, resulting in a corrupted iPod. The iPod still showed that it was half full, but none of the music showed up....

While looking for some quality examples of applications built using the Ruby on Rails framework, I came across Odeo. This San Francisco based company organizes, synchronizes, and publishes podcasts (although it it still in beta and the publishing part isn’t live yet). I’ve only briefly looked at it so far, but it looks very promising. Individual podcasts are tagged, similar to the way bookmarks are tagged at del.icio.us. I have not tried this, but apparently signing up allows users to assign their own tags to podcasts....

Maybe I should have checked Apple’s website before posting my previous blog entry. It turns out that the iPod update that came out a few days ago does in fact address the problem with compilations that I mentioned. This makes a huge difference browsing music on the iPod!