Taking the tablets

Almost exactly a month since I posted about my new tablet.

I'll be taking it back today.

No, I haven't dropped it! Nor am I bored or disappointed with it. Far from it, especially since I discovered Miniclip 8-ball pool for Android which I've been playing every evening since downloading it a couple of weeks ago. Every evening, that is, except yesterday evening, when the Nexus flashed a low battery sign and turned itself off.

Funny, I thought. I'm sure I left it on charge last night. I plugged it back in and spent an hour watching Pointless and the news (national and local). You can get through all that in an hour when you're fast-forwarding through the boring bits. It's amazing how many boring bits there are when you're not listening to the TV in the background while playing pool.

After an hour, the Nexus flashed its low battery sign and turned itself off. I suspected it was failing to charge, so I left it plugged in overnight. This morning, it flashed...  well... you get the picture. The device is only just 5 weeks old and it won't charge. Not a good sign.

The crux of the matter

Here we are at a nexus...

Literally. A Nexus 7. Following the rapid and unexpected demise* of my iPad on Tuesday last, I was faced with a dilemma. Stand and fight (aka get it mended) or run (to Android, or away from Apple).

A friend of mine has previously been heard to say "I haven't picked up my iPad since I got the Nexus." Well… I've now had mine for almost a week. Long enough to get over both my initial flush of enthusiasm and the almost immediate early disappointment at the reality of its limitations.

There's no doubt that once you're used to the differences, the Nexus is a lovely device. With my limited experience with this month's book club book, I'd have to say the reading experience is better. The Kindle app is identical on Android, but the Nexus is more book-sized, easier to hold, and altogether more comfortable. And it has auto-brightness, so you don't need to keep adjusting it to read in bed vs daylight. It's also (hardly surprising) beautifully integrated with Google. Google Now and Google Play, to name only two, are really cool.

Much of the other stuff that I did regularly on the iPad is pretty similar. With dedicated apps for sites like eBay and Facebook - their image is *almost* identical. The few games I play (Sudoku, Spider Solitaire) are available on both platforms (same app in each case) and perform pretty much the same if they're not hampered by the smaller screen size. For sudoku, particularly, the smaller screen isn't really an issue and I'm even beginning to get used to the small cards on Spider, although it IS easier to play on the iPad. And I'm loving the Android 8-ball pool game that lets you play in real time against a real human opponent selected from those who happen to be online at the same time. That was quite a find.

The major drawback I've found is with browsing. Much of the time, Chrome on the Nexus delivers you to the "mobile" version of a website owing to the smaller form factor. I've always utterly hated this image and find it next to unusable in the majority of cases (especially Facebook, eBay, Amazon, searching, etc). The iPad gives a more "regular" browsing image, much more acceptable for me. I discovered today (thanks Annie!) that there's a setting to force Chrome to serve up the desktop image of a website rather than the mobile version, so I'll be trying this out later.

The only other slight niggle is with the Metro. I got into the habit of reading the daily Metro via the iPad app rather than the printed version, and it is a REALLY good app. It exists for Android, but has a number of limitations including being stuck in portrait format, and displaying one article per page. So LOTS of scrolling on the Nexus. iPad better. I hope the developers will sort out the portrait/landscape issue soon. I'm sure it would be more readable/usable the other way round. But for now, not so good.

So in summary, I'm currently leaning towards keeping both devices. Horses for courses. If I'm reading, or out and about, the Nexus is the stronger candidate. If I'm browsing, at home, or playing games with fiddly pieces, the iPad wins out. I don't think I want to adopt my mate John's "Nexus for everything" approach, especially if I can wangle a cheap fix for the iPad (thanks AGAIN Annie! :o))

Ouch

I never learn. It's always when I'm most distracted that I ignore my little voice, and it never turns out well. In the past I've cut myself, broken an ankle, smashed crockery, shattered glassware, tripped and fallen, and each time I've had a prior warning via the little voice, ignored it, and come to grief. Over the years I've grown better at heeding it, but then there's some days, like today...

I was heading out to the dentist, intending to drop in at the charity shop afterwards and then grab a coffee and finish off this month's book club book while waiting for a later appointment at the doctor's (nothing major, don't worry). The book is on my Kindle app, so I was taking the iPad with me. Little Voice suggests it's probably not a good idea to balance it on top of a box of charity shop fodder, as it could slip off. In a hurry and not wanting to turn loading the car into a marathon, I ignored it. The iPad slipped off and took a nosedive onto the front path. A backward glance suggested it was OK so I dropped the box on the back seat and returned to pick it up. Then I noticed the shards of glass on the path.

Yeah. Apparently even Gorilla Glass™ isn't strong enough to survive a header onto a stone path from five feet up. Especially when it lands on one corner.

Never mind, I thought. Instead of nursing a coffee and reading in between appointments, I'll head off to the Apple Store and see if they can fix it. Can they fix it? Yes they can. That'll be £199 please sir.

Hmm. Well. Coincidentally that's only £1 less than our home contents insurance excess >sigh< so I'll be forking out one way or another, dammit. Apparently there are cheaper places to have your glass replaced than Apple, so I might suss one of those out, but right now I'm feeling very tempted by the Nexus 7. A whole new tablet that *isn't Apple*, and comes in at or below the cost of a new screen. All my apps are available on Android too. Seriously tempted.

The February of technology

Which is a whole lot different to the march of technology.

Because our February (and our January come to that) has seen the wheels start to come off of our tech-filled home. Or at least, that's how it looked at one stage, with the freezer developing a problem where it wouldn't, um, freeze, and the pile of expensive TV equipment refusing to display any of the HD channels.

You know how it is when things go wrong. You reach for Google to find out what they're saying on the forums. Or at least, we do. On the subject of our freezer a small number of people had been very vocal about what a pile of shit it was. Well to be honest that's not been our experience. We've had it over 6 years and apart from a problem with the auto-defrost element shortly after it went out of warranty ( O_O ) which was soon fixed, we haven't had a moment's bother with it. That's the thing about review forums. If you've had a bad experience you're more likely to gripe about it than you are to go and give a glowing review if you've owned something that's given years of trouble-free service. A bit more digging uncovered a slightly larger number of folk who HAD gone into print about how happy they were with our freezer, so we decided in the end it was worth repairing.

Which was a good decision because the fault was a simple evaporator fan, replaced in less than 15 minutes and all's well again. No more spongy "frozen" bread or slightly soggy fish food. And better to pay £80 for a year's service cover than £700 for a new model!

The TV thing was slightly more frustrating and hard to track down. Since installing it (at the beginning of December) we've had an intermittent problem where the screen would go blank, flash "No Signal" and then recover in 1-2 seconds. Only ever happened when watching HD programmes or, if recording them, the recording would freeze for 1-2 seconds while the PVR tried to cope with the loss of signal. I replaced the coax aerial leads. I replaced the HDMI cables. I bought an aerial signal booster. Nothing made any difference. Then a couple of weeks ago I retuned the PVR and it lost the HD channels altogether. And then it lost ALL the channels.

Aha! I thought. That intermittent fault was on the PVR's tuners, and now it's gone hard. Plugging the TV directly into the aerial, bypassing the PVR, allowed us to view HD again thus proving (I thought) my theory.

We took the PVR up to Warrington (the closest service centre) where they plugged it in, tuned it up, and it worked perfectly.

Their tech guy listened to our tale of woe, and opined that we had an aerial fault. I've always been a bit suspicious about folk who work on roofs. Roofers and aerial installers. You never can be quite sure what they're up to up there, can you? And you can't check it out very easily. AND we've had bad experiences in the past, with both. *AND* I was well ready to blame that new aerial. We'd paid for the top quality HD high bandwidth jobby and probably had a coat hanger up there. Tech guy recommended a local firm of aerial riggers (local to us, not him) that handle all their installations and they paid us a visit last Friday.

This is already a long story, so I'll cut to the chase - our problem lay not with the aerial, which was delivering a signal "five by five" (or strength 10 as it's actually called on the TV and the PVR) - but with how we were conveying that signal to the equipment. All those brand new cables I'd bought were... well... shite.

New aerial guys whipped us up some new cables in double-quick time and within minutes all our signal strength bars were fully green and everything was tickety-boo.

Anyone want to buy a signal booster?

Could that have been any easier?

Nikki's been talking for a few weeks about what a good idea it would be to take some of our films with us when we go away, just in case (unlikely I know *cough*) the in-flight movies suck. I've been procrastinating, because all our media - both DVDs and BluRays - are ripped to MKV format and this won't play natively on the iPad, but with the trip imminent the time for procrastination ran out yesterday and I started doing some research. It didn't take me more than a minute or so to find GoodPlayer.

With a "best video player for iPhone" recommendation from Lifehacker, many positive forum postings and a price tag of only £1.99 it wasn't a hard purchasing decision. Little did I realise that the traditional simplicity of getting my hands on an app from the App Store was only the start of this easy ride.

I launched GoodPlayer and it instantly found two media sources. Well actually it's the same source but GoodPlayer supports a variety of access formats, so it gave me the option to connect to our film collection via SAMBA/CIFS or UPnP/DLNA (apologies to those of you who don't speak geek).

Clicking on the first took me to the file share list and I navigated quickly down through the folders - multimedia / video / movies - to our list of 400+ movies. Choosing one at random, GoodPlayer asks if I want to stream it, or download it. I chose stream (for now), and the movie started playing.

Just like that.

The whole process from finding the app to watching the movie took less than five minutes. Sometimes, computers and related technology get in your way. Sometimes they can even make you tear your hair out. Other times they *just work* and this was one of those times. Brilliant. Vibrant colours, crisp almost-high-def stream (from a standard definition movie file) and no buffering or streaming problems at all now that our downstairs network has been boosted by the TPLink Powerline adaptors.

It took Nikki less than five seconds to declare she wanted a copy too, and half an hour later we both had a download queue of 4 of 5 films which our NAS was happily serving up to the iPads at 3MB/sec (download time for an average film about half an hour) as well as delivering a film to the TV. Should help the flights pass more enjoyably :o)

Kitchen fit: Day 14

A day of surprises. A day that, I thought, would be wall-to-wall painting, but which turned out to be hardly any painting at all and other much more exciting things like downdraught extractors, induction hobs and putting the fridge and freezer back into place.

Neff induction hob, with de Dietrich extractor (in "deployed" mode). Ooooh. Finally, after all the waiting we can... er... boil a pan of water. But! Never was boiling a pan of water *quite* so similar to being on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Touch sensitive surfaces and a whizzy little dial thing that is held in place with a magnet and taps and spins to control the hotplates.

The extractor raises itself out of the depths with the touch of a finger and sinks back down again when it's finished sucking.

All this more than satisfies my life-long fascination with knobs and buttons.

Nice to have the fridge and freezer back in the kitchen too, even if it does mean that for the next three or four days we'll be performing a reversed version of the dance we first started back in July. Now the usable cooking facilities are in the dining room and all the food is in the kitchen. Back then it was t'other way round. Not for long though.

Well, I SAY not for long, but as we discovered today it'll be slightly longer than expected. Here's a photo that gives you a bit of a clue, even though the main reason for including it is to give you another perspective on the lovely new hob (purr, purr)...

See the problem? Yes, that's right. No knobs. No, I mean on the cupboards and drawers. The hob is supposed to be knobless. The drawers aren't. Slight delay in delivery. Slight as in "the week after next."

Well, we can't wait THAT long to get into our new kitchen, so the fitter's going to come up with some Heath Robinsonesque solution involving screws and masking tape apparently. Lovely.

iBeer

Here I am in the living room, with an iBeer, doing an iBlog on my new iPad. Crikey. Saturday nights will never be the same.

(Back on the old - well, new - desktop now). We went out shopping today. Nikki wanted to change our pillows. So... four pillows. That's what we needed. We came back with seven movies, Kasabian's new album (it was playing while we were in HMV and we both quite liked it), a funky clever folding chopping board (Chop2Pot by Joseph Joseph) and a set of ice cube trays, two bags of food from M&S for a "picky tea", a 32GB iPad, an Apple TV box, black leather smartcase, camera connection kit, and... four pillows.

These may well be the most expensive pillows I've ever slept on.

Lovin' the iPad though :o)

Sand(ing) in my eyes

It's done!

In the end, power tools were the answer. Or, a power tool, to be precise. A detail sander:

A recent purchase intended to speed up the task of smoothing off large areas of unfinished purlin (at which it excelled), I was always going to use it on the front door panels. They stretch the entire width of the hall and would have taken an age to do by hand. Once I got started with this little wonder and a pack of 25 sanding sheets, I thought I may as well carry on. It made short work of the dado, skirting, and door frames, allowing me to finish in a single afternoon an area almost double that which has already taken two weekends to do manually.

Power tools. Always the answer. Yes, I did wear a mask.

4K2K

Over the past ten years we've built up a fairly large DVD collection. 443 titles at the last count, although to be accurate approaching 100 of those are in the "eBay" pile. We like movies, there have been some irresistible deals during that time, and we actively enjoy watching well-loved films over. Something, incidentally, that my mother could never understand. To me, a good film is like a good piece of music. If you can listen to the one over and over again and enjoy it every time, why not watch the same film more than once? Fair enough if it's something - like Unbreakable or Sixth Sense - that pretty much relies on the shock value of a single scene for its impact, then subsequent viewings will not have the same impact. But the story is still there. The cinematography, the dialogue, the plot, etc. And for many of our favourites the emotional journey remains unabated after several repeats.

We were late onto the High Def, BluRay bandwagon. Having lived through the VHS/Betamax wars of last century I didn't want to be bitten again by backing the wrong technology, and it was pretty clear from early on that one of them would win, eventually. In the end I think that win was brought forward by the manufacturers' realisation that the uncertainty was causing most consumers - like us - to avoid purchasing at all until there was some clarity in the market.

Once BluRay won, we did start to buy the odd High Def version. Not exclusively - the picture quality from an upscaled SD disc is still perfectly acceptable - but for blockbusters where HD really makes the action pop; and for well-loved movies that had not yet been added to the collection and were available on a deal, then we would opt for BluRay.

But wait! What's this? I hear we may as well all abandon any attempts to replace our DVD collections with BluRay no matter how relaxed an approach we were taking to it. They're already obsolete. Or, if not quite "already" then soon. For here comes "4K2K" - the adopted handle of the next level of definition, offering 4096 x 2160 pixels (so an alternative nomenclature comparable to the current 1080p would be 2160p) on screens of increasingly ridiculous size.

So as well as allowing, for instance, Panasonic to develop a mind-boggling 152-inch plasma screen to exploit the new definition, it will allow crisper images on more prosaically-sized sets, although there is some debate about whether the difference will be noticeable on home-sized screens. More philosophically, the availability of the next technology curve always implies a reduction in price for the "old" technologies, so those who've waited for their HD 1080p screens may soon get their chance to pick one up much cheaper.

At the moment, and predictably, the format is not compatible with BluRay, and for us, with probably another 10 years life left in our 50-inch plasma, it's a technology leap too far. We will be watching interestedly from the sidelines though :o)

Predictions of the non-cephalopod variety

Around this time of year it's traditional to publish predictions of various kinds. Although nowhere near as accurate as those of Paul the Predicting Octopus, most of them stretch beyond the limits of football match results, so I find them considerably more interesting.

Take, for example, these "20 predictions for the next 25 years" from yesterday's Observer. Lose yourself in the plethora of "experts" from twenty different industries, groups, or spheres of human endeavour. Erudite and influential though they no doubt are, commenters have already pointed out that few if any of them take account of the full impact of climate change over that period. At least one of them alludes briefly to the likely effect of oil shortages in terms of protectionism and conflict, but there's an even more precious liquid resource that we'll be fighting over sooner or later: water.

But my main issue with predictions like this is not that they go too far with their postulations, nor indeed that they don't go far enough. Extrapolating likely outcomes from current conditions takes a certain degree of understanding the subject in question, but beyond that there's no magic to it. The real question - and the most fascinating area of prediction - is not what will happen to the stuff we know about. It's what will be the next Facebook or Twitter? Or come to that, the next World Wide Web. Things which, before they were invented, no-one could have predicted. Things which, shortly after they were invented, no-one (or at least very few people) really understood how ubiquitous they would become. But things which, now they're established, large sections of the populace wouldn't know how to live without.

Another area I find fascinating might be called "Inventions whose time is past almost before it starts." When first developed, DAB radio (for instance) was widely predicted to replace traditional analogue broadcasting within a similar time frame to the 20 predictions above. Lack of available bandwidth, technical problems with mobile receivers (in-car DAB, etc), high price of early models and a general distrust of the product or a perception that it delivered limited benefit all contributed to appallingly low initial take-up. Now that many of the teething problems have been fixed, and the price has reached a sensible level, the need for DAB has evaporated. Replaced by Internet radio. Vastly more choice for anyone with a PC, equal or better quality, and with the increasing prevalence of home wireless networks, dedicated Internet radio devices are springing up to first supplement and soon no doubt supplant DAB in the home.

Where the bodies are

I love predictive text. I know a lot of people don't get on with it, but it's like any other technology - once you get used to trusting it, it's great. And not only quicker, easier, and - on my phone at least - intelligent (it learns my patterns), but it also occasionally and unintentionally comes up with some real howlers.

Like recently when I was sending a text about 'Andy', the first suggestion the phone came up with was 'Body'. Hardy har har.

Kindle Edition

November's book club selection, voted in last night, is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Many thousands of reviews of this online, it was highly controversial and acclaimed when first published, it's been around for 25 years, and it was a runaway winner in our monthly poll, the other choices only managing one vote each. Sounds like it will be a cracking read, if a little... grim... in parts.

So here I am on Amazon first thing this morning, putting in my order, rather disturbed to discover the following...

Formats:
Kindle Edition £4.51
Paperback £4.75

Huh? You're telling me all that paper manufacture, typesetting, print run, ink, cutting, binding, packing into boxes, shipping to the distributor, storage, shipping to the store, that is no longer necessary because of "the wonder" of Kindle... all that... translates into a retail saving of 24 PENCE???

Good grief.

Not that saving money is the main reason for buying a Kindle, but I'd have expected a bigger differential. At that rate and assuming I went for the non-3G version, I'd have to buy 455 books before I'd made back the outlay. Something which, at recent rates of purchase, would take about 20 years!

Let there be light...

I mentioned recently that we've been living in the shadows for a while. On the landing, at least.

A couple of years ago I installed a security light switch. A clever little beast with a built-in timer and a photocell which provided a wealth of options on when it would turn on, and off, and how many times, and on what days. Versatile enough to make even the most observant tea-leaf believe there really was someone in the house on those all-too-rare occasions when we go away.

Shame then that those clever electronics weren't also resilient electronics. Call me picky, but I'd have thought a light switch should be able to withstand something as simple as a blown light bulb. I'm not talking massive electrical storm, direct lightning strike, or rat-inspired short-circuit. Sooner or later, your light bulb is going to turn up its toes. A light switch whose electronics are fritzed by such a common occurrence shouldn't, to my mind, be allowed on the market. But there you have it. First dead light bulb... one dead light switch.

In my normal procrastinatory fashion it's taken me several months to shift my ass into gear but today I finally coughed up the £1.48 for a replacement switch - and fitted it! Not another electronic one, mind. No, that would have set me back at least ten times as much, and probably gone pop again the next time the bulb blew, so it's back to the relative simplicity of a standard two-way for us. Let's hope there are no burglars watching.

Bloody Region Codes!

We've had a PS3 for a while, you might remember. Aside from the fact that the copy of PS3 Monopoly I ordered from play.com went AWOL after New Year and never actually arrived, we've had a lot of fun as a family playing Buzz and Trivial Pursuit, the girls have enjoyed playing Avatar, Oblivion, etc, we've really appreciated being able to stream the upscaled BBC iPlayer on the plasma screen, and naturally the Bluray movies are awesome and even the upscaled SD movies are pretty good. All things considered we were pretty happy with it.

Until yesterday, when we tried to watch The General's Daughter and got nothing but a terse little "beep" and the message "this disc cannot be played as it has the wrong region code."

Not this bollocks again? I went through this with our old Samsung DVD player, having to hack it to play non-region 2 disks. We never had the problem with our chipped XBox, because the people who write XBMC have sense enough to ignore the corporate control-freak mentality of the whole region code crap. Must have just been a coincidence that in the months since we bought the PS3, we've never chosen to watch any of the DVDs we bought in Canada.

I jumped online to search for "PS3 multiregion hacks" - expecting it to be a simple matter of casting some kind of arcane spell through the remote control - and was amazed to discover that after three years, no such hack exists. The region encoding of the PS3 remains intact and, worse, no-one has really bothered to try and crack it because, as most forum-dwellers complain, Sony would simply annul the hack at the next (automatically downloaded) firmware release.

So it looks like around 20% of our DVD collection is unwatchable on the new system. At least, in its disk-based form. There are plenty of instructions online on how to rip DVDs to MP4, or AVI, or VOB format, any of which will play quite happily on the PS3. Which, if anything, makes me even more angry. It confirms the pointlessness of the regional encoding, but forces me to jump through hoops in order to watch a huge chunk of our collection that we BOUGHT LEGITIMATELY.

Is it any wonder the big media companies are losing money to pirates when they put this kind of barrier in the way of legitimate users?

The silver lining to this cloud is that it simply brings forward the day when we move our movie collection onto a media centre, where it can be accessible from anywhere in the house and not subject to these pathetic restrictions.

The ecstacy

I love the Internet. It didn't take much more than a few minutes online research this morning to give me a clue why the PS3 wasn't talking to the telly. Armed with this information we took our second cups of coffee downstairs and I got busy with the various remotes (of which we now have FIVE - strewth!).

Along with its built-in digital (and now totally redundant analogue) tuner(s), the Pioneer's media box has four AV inputs. Four SEPARATELY CONFIGURABLE inputs. This is the key piece of information I'd forgotten. My excuse is that you only ever need to do this stuff once in a while (about once a year seems to be the average) so it's easy to let something slip the shackles of your mind. It may look like the box is configured correctly but if you hadn't first selected the correct input then you're actually looking at the wrong set of settings.

The HDMI interface (this box is so old that there is only one) is hard-wired to INPUT 3. So select INPUT 3 first, scroll down the options and what do you find? HDMI: DISABLED.

No real surprise then that the screen is blank! Flip that setting to HDMI: ENABLED (having first disconnected the other cabling options, and removed the XBox from INPUT 3 to avoid confusing the issue) and everything burst into life. Into glorious, technicolour, full HD life.

Well, not quite full HD. 1080i, in fact. Back when we bought this TV, 1080p was only available on really high-end gear costing more than twice as much. But easily good enough to blow yer socks off. We finished the rest of our coffee watching last week's Casualty on the iPlayer, streamed effortlessly and wirelessly to the PS3 and with a quality indistinguishable from a regular broadcast.

After that, it was off to the PlayStation online shop to download some game demos. The wireless connection held up brilliantly, despite the router being one floor up and on the other side of the house, and within minutes I was rattling a pinball around a high-def table in the demo version of Zen Pinball. Awesome.

The agony

Had a small windfall the other day, so we decided to treat ourselves to a PS3 Slim. We've been umming and ahhing for a while over BluRay players, and we know from mates' experience that the PS3 is one of, if not the best player on the market.

What really swung it for us though was a couple of recent examples where our Toppy failed to record some favourite programme or other. Not only does the PS3 come fully wireless enabled, but it also plays BBC iPlayer directly on the telly. The fact that it also "does games" is nothing but an added bonus. We've had this massive plasma screen over four years and never once had a High Definition signal through it, so the prospect of The Dark Knight in HD was positively mouth-watering.

The box itself was delivered yesterday and the rest of the gubbins (HDMI cable, various controllers and a game) arrived today. Even so, I'd intended to wait until tomorrow to set it all up, but certain of the younger members of the family were already visibly drooling so I cast caution to the wind and set about cabling it up after dinner. I should have listened to my inner paraskevidekatriaphobe. Friday the 13th is no day to be getting complicated electronical paraphernalia hooked up.

It all sounded so simple in the book. Connect up the HDMI cable - OR the component video cable - and Robert is your mother's brother. Only with the HDMI cable connected the telly showed nothing but a whole lot of black, and with the component video cable the result was a different set of black that looked almost indistinguishable from the first lot.

Our screen being an older version of the Pioneer PDP505-XDE, all of the connections go through a media box, which has two sets of connectors for component in. I tried the other set. Bingo! Er... well... not "bingo" exactly. More "go bin". The picture from the PS3 was in black and white! And very grainy. Still, it was enough to run through the set-up procedures, download the odd firmware upgrade and that sort of thing. We even tried The Dark Knight for a few painful seconds.

Four years' waiting for this?! It's enough to make a grown man cry.

Beware the camcorder

We never need much of an excuse for a get-together with mates, but when there's a holiday in the offing then there's also the obligatory "planning" meeting, which duly took place yesterday. The actual planning part didn't take much more than ten minutes - where and when are we going to meet up for lunch on the way there; who's cooking what meals on what nights; a grocery list for the initial shop (mainly breakfast items and snacks); and are we all having the same bedrooms as last time; and we're done.

So when we started in on the wine at shortly after 4 in the afternoon, I should have known the direction the rest of the evening was going to take. Wine, especially Zinfandel (or rosé of any kind, tbh), is just too easy to drink. Before you know it, your glass is empty and, with excellent hosts like Ian & Gill, it's mostly refilled again without you even asking. Or noticing.

Which makes it incredibly easy to lose track. That's my excuse anyway. Not to mention that we popped around the corner for short pub session before the main meal.

From what I remember of the rest of the evening, we all had a fabulous time. We proved beyond doubt that Ian & Gill's table will seat eight, and I proved that if you sit me in front of a cheeseboard for long enough then eventually there'll be nothing left of it except a few crumbs. I'm not going to write in adolescent fashion about how drunk I got. Certainly drunker than I've been this year. If I'm being honest, drunker than I can remember being since... umm... well, you get the picture.

Trouble is, these days, I don't need to *remember* how drunk I was. There's evidence. Firstly, the email from Ian which arrived this afternoon. And I quote:
"Sober viewers must be warned these people had drunk quite a bit (18 cans, 12 bottles of wine + 2 rounds in the pub) which may explain hangovers on Sunday."

And secondly the video footage which that email introduced showing, among other things, Ritchie and I at around 1am drunkenly singing Supper's Ready at the top of our (slightly out of tune) voices. I hope they have understanding neighbours.

We have a week of similar, although hopefully not quite so intense, evenings to look forward to. Let me just check we've put paracetamol on the shopping list...

That syncing feeling

Woke up to a little message from iTunes to say 8 tunes had not been copied because they couldn't be found.

Which, out of 1930 tunes, isn't a bad hit rate, but it still surprised me. I thought I'd sorted everything out. Turned out to be songs from my old "Caraoke" folders (yes, I know it's spelled karaoke. These songs were for listening to in the car. Geddit?) some of which I'd already spotted had been *moved* into the folders from their original locations, rather than copied. Don't ask me why; I must have been having an off day.

Anyway since the magic of playlists means I no longer need duplicates for the purposes of practising my karaoke warblings while on long drives, I'd decided I could delete the Caraoke folders. All three of them. Which explains the missing eight tunes. Damn.

Luckily they're all songs from compilation albums currently gathering dust in the top room. At some stage I'll need to dig them out and re-rip the missing tracks. For now, the other 1922 will just have to keep me going.

I'm starting to sync

Almost three weeks after I started on this tagging/album art business, I think I'm finally ready to go. To... you know... plug the damned thing in and let it rip.

The last item on the list, and easily the most tedious, was finding art for every single one of the tracks that I'd called "Singles" and Paul had lumped together as "Tunes." Removing the duplicates, listening again to the Tunes I didn't recognise, airbrushing some out of the picture, and deciding whether to go with a grainy scan of the original single's cover, or the album sleeve the track is from, or just some random picture associated with the artist.

But now, it's all done. And I'm syncing fast. Well, as fast as iTunes can manage, which looks like it'll be done sometime in the early hours of tomorrow.

More iTunes madness

When Paul came to stay last year, I took the opportunity to dump his iPod onto my PC. That was 16 MONTHS ago and as yet none of that music has found its way onto mine. Not that I've been doing nothing. It takes a while to listen to 80GB of music and decide whether it's something you'll want to listen to again and, Paul would be the first to admit, he does listen to some weird shit.

Having jettisoned the weirdest of the weird, there's considerably less than 80GB of the original stuff left, but even so what I added to the pile virtually doubled my music collection, and along with the fact that I've bought quite a few new albums recently, I was coming in for some serious nagging (well, exasperated sighs anyway) from some quarters at the fact that *another* car journey was taking place and there was *still* nothing new on the iPod. I'd already ticked the WMA to MP3 conversion box, so I was running out of excuses.

It's been a while since I used iTunes and I soon remembered why. Sure, I'd had some pretty bad experiences with it when I first loaded up the iPod, and since then I've avoided it as much as possible. It didn't help that every time I opened it up it would tell me a newer version was available, and then pretend to download that newer version but never get anywhere.

I decided that upgrade had to be first on the agenda. A newer version *might* be more stable, and if the auto-upgrade wasn't working for some reason, I'd just have to go over there and drag it off the Apple site myself. Installation complete, I set version 8.2.1.6 off on its crawl through my hard drive again, to find all that lovely new stuff from Paul, and those purchases from the last sixteen months.

One of the things I really, really wanted to sort out was the lack of Album Art. I've always had a thing for album covers (I even bought Roger Dean's book ferchrissake), so it was a source of some irritation that almost none of the music I copied over that first time had any art associated with it. I'd done some research and discovered the iTunes Library album art fetching thingy, which looked like an obvious first step since it involved no effort on my part beyond a click or two.

Sadly - a common experience by all accounts - iTunes managed to find less than half the album art I needed. For one thing it's extremely sensitive to naming inconsistencies, and beyond that it simply doesn't have a very extensive collection. So here's where I trip over the first of today's stupid iTunes annoyances. See, being an Apple product, iTunes has to pretend it understands nothing about Windows, or how the Microsoft Media Player rips CDs to your PC. Most CDs come with their album art stored on the disk as JPEG files, and Media Player conveniently copies these to the same folder as the music, and calls the files "album art." That's too subtle for iTunes. It pretends it can't find them. OK, so they're hidden files. Don't get technical on me. If I can see them, so can iTunes.

I reverted to the manual method - dragging the (hidden) Album Art files into iTunes. But what about all those albums from Paul, that I didn't have files for, hidden or otherwise? Two words: Google Images. Just typing the artist and album name into Google Images, in most cases, resulted in several thousand copies of the right picture file being presented for my selection. Brilliant. Brilliant and tedious, but brilliant even so.

Did I say "the first" of the iTunes annoyances? Yes. There's at least one more. Track numbering. iTunes will interpret ID3 tags correctly, and list the tracks in the right order if they're there. If not, tracks are listed alphabetically. But once again iTunes deliberately ignores, or pretends to have no knowledge of, the standard Media Player method of naming the music files it has ripped. "01 First Track Name" "02 Second Track Name" and so on. So even in the absence of correct ID3 tags, there is the smallest CLUE there as to the correct order, and I REALLY didn't want to have to trawl through the majority of my music collection telling iTunes what it should already have been able to work out.

Still, you know, it's not like I've got anything else to do.