A Yankee in Texas

So yesterday Amazon launched the beta version of their DRM (Digital Rights Management) free MP3 store. So this morning I decided to try it out. I decided to download the song from the iPod Nano commercial: 1234 by Feist. I’ve had the song stuck in my head for days.

The process is very smooth. You install a downloader application. When you buy the music the web site prompts you to open a file which tells the downloader to go get your music. All in all I was pretty impressed with the process and it’s DRM free so there is no hassle with how many devices you have it on or how many times to can burn it to a CD.

The song and album prices are competitive with iTune and in some cases a little cheaper. I still think it’s a bit crazy to pay $.89 or $.99 for a song that isn’t on physical media, but DRM free is a step closer to the record companies understanding what we the consumers actually want.

As far as selection goes I did a quick search and I found pretty much every artist I was looking for except one. I searched some main stream and some independent bands. My buddy Steve’s band Small Arms Dealer is on there. If you like punk music go buy this album now. It kicks much ass and they are great guys.

The Mp3’s are encoded at 256kbs, which from what I understand is pretty high quality for an MP3. In case you didn’t know MP3 is a form of compression for audio files and what that basically means they are trying to make a copy of the an audio file that is smaller (ie has less data) than the original, but sounds very similar. To do this they have to remove bits of information. How many bits get removed is determined by the encoding. I am sure there is much more to it, but it’s not my area of expertise. I personally can’t tell the difference between different encoding settings, but I know of many audiophiles that can.

Anyway like they say “Money talks…” So vote with your dollars. If you think that this is a step in the right direction go buy music and show the record labels that this is what we, the consumers, want.

– Jeremy

 So my good friend Pat was asking if the Nano has the same menu structure as the old Nano. I said no, but I couldn’t really explain to him in words the new menu system. So here are some pictures :

There’s a reason people are calling this Nano the “Fatty”.

It is however a little bit thinner.

Here is the “Music” menu….

This is “Cover Flow” if you’ve used iTunes recently this should look familiar to you.

This is browsing via the “Albums” menu…

The “Videos” menu….

The”Photos” menu…. (as you can see I have yet to put any photos on the Nano.)

Yes I named my Nano “Fat Nano”…..

The “Games” menu…

– Jeremy

Straight out of the hands of the Fed Ex man. The Nano was shipped directly from China to my doorstep. So it’s probably covered in lead.

I was surprised to see the very custom shipping box, but knowing Apple I shouldn’t of been that surprised.

Unfortunately this isn’t the greatest picture, but it’s of the Nano in it’s retail packaging.

Again gotta love Apple’s flair for style.

The contents of that packaging. Quick start guide, iPod Earphones, Apple Dock adapter, Nano, and iPod usb cable.

And last but not least a photo of it turned on. As you can see the screen is bright and beautiful.

I quickly loaded some video on it and watched a few minutes. My first impressions are while the screen is small the colors are vivid and the picture is very crisp. I could definately see watching a movie on a plane or in a car, but it might not be for everyone.

Now I am hoping for some imaginative folks to make a case or a stand that will let you prop up the Nano with the headphones plugged in. Since the headphone jack is on the bottom you can’t just prop it up with the headphones plugged in.

– Jeremy

I decided on the new 8 gig iPod Nano. I really like the look of the new Nano and the fact that it can now play video has me very excited. I wish i would of had this 3 months ago when I first started doing all the traveling for work.

Oh the downside I realized my beloved car stereo adapter will no longer work since it was specifically designed to work with the 1st gen Nano. It’s a great little dock that is attached to a cassette tape adapter by a thin piece of hard plastic so when the Nano is docked its right there by the radio. It also has a power adapter so when the Nano is in the cradle it would charge it. Oh well I guess I will have to find a new solution.

When the Nano comes I will take some pictures and post them. After I’ve had a chance to use it a bit I will post a little review of my impressions.

– Jeremy

I can hardly wait. Rumor has it that Apple will be announcing their latest generation of iPods today. I am very excited to see what the new line up has to offer.

– Jeremy

So I went paddling on July 4th with the mindset that I would take some photos and then geocode them using the track data from my GPS. This process takes the time stamp from the photo, finds the closest track point entry and then stores the lon/lat information for that photo in the image file itself. Then I wanted to upload them to Picasa and be able to see on a map where the images were taken. After going through all the steps I still couldn’t Picasa to display the image locations on a map automatically.

I even tried uploading a few images to Flick, but still no luck. I found bookmarklet that would set the GeoTags for you (Flickr seems to support adding the lon/lat as part of their tagging system) and then it would show the images on a map, but there was no batch process. You had to visit each image page run the bookmarklet and so on and so on. The process is fine for a few images, but I had 52 images from the July 4th paddle. The whole process seemed like a hassle for that many photos.

So today during lunch I did some searching and found the in Flickr there is a setting that turns on auto GeoTagging. Finally a viable solution. I tried it out and it worked perfectly. I was a little heart broken because I like Picasa and I am huge fan of most of the tools Google has developed lately. I originally switched from Flickr to Picasa for two reasons the free Flickr account only allows you to have 2 folders, or as they call them Sets, and I started using the Picasa application to edit my photos. It’s very easy to upload your photos to the Picasa Web Album from the Picasa application.

Today I decided the future (if it’s not already) of digital photos is online storage and sharing.  And at the moment for what I need and want Flickr is the solution. I shelled out the $24.95 for a pro account. $2 a month isn’t bad considering I plan on doing a lot of paddling and exploring in the next year which will produce a lot of photos.

I am going to work on a “Geocoding for Flickr” Tutorial. So if your interested keep an eye out for it.

– Jeremy

I was thinking about it while driving to work this morning and Google has worked its way in to many aspects of my life:

I use Google pretty much exclusively to search, I use Picassa to edit and upload my digital pictures, I have started using Google Calendar, I use Google Maps to get directions t, I use the Google Maps API to create things like the Apartment Mapper and to plot my GPS data, I use Google Analytics to get track web stats for this and my other websites, I use gTalk for IM, and for the past several years I have been using Gmail exclusively for my email.

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

– Jeremy