Just a brief addendum to the previous posting about iTunes, iPod Touch and Rhythmbox. Since then, I've ended up with updating iTunes on two PCs. I intended to shift everything to the new Win7 PC (though in truth I rarely boot it into Windows), as I though its higher spec might enable iTunes to run at some speed other than glacial.
Anyway, I tried updating my iPod to iOS 4.0.2 with the new computer and it threw up some cryptic message about losing all my downloaded apps. So back to the antiquated laptop, where I bit the bullet and went through the whole rigmarole again. I really don't know why I'm compelled to install Quicktime, nor do I understand why an application which exists solely to manage a bunch of files on a device connected by USB comes as a download of around 95Mb.
I'm pleased to report that the iPod ugrade, while going at a bit of a snail's pace appears to have worked. Disappointing that the voice memo app is still there (given that as far as I know, iPods have no microphone. I can see visual changes throughout, particularly in the music player.
And the app that started me down this road - iScrobble Premium? It seems to work better under iOS4. Next up, to try pairing the iPod with Rhythmbox. I came across this tech site with instructions on updating a bunch of stuff related to allowing Rhythmbox to sync with iPods running iOS4. So the battle with iTunes may have been lost, but I've got my eye on the outcome of the war...
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I've had an iPod Touch for some time now (it's one of the 2G versions, with 32Gb storage), and the device is exactly what I need - something to play music from, to access my email & calendar, and to run a few apps. I don't often use it for twittering or blogging or browsing the web, What I don't particularly like is iTunes, for which I have to boot into Windows (and it's one of the few things I would be using Windows for), it's always seemed rather clunky to use. In fact, because until recently Windows PCs were in rather short supply in my house, I've been running iTunes on a small partition on a dual boot laptop, with the actual music files on a USB hard drive.
So. The latest version of Ubuntu (10.04) uses Rhythmbox as its default music player, and this (it turns out) can work neatly with an iPod Touch. At last! I can add and remove music without going near iTunes. I've since bought and uploaded several albums. Now, I like to scrobble my listening to last.fm - so how to do that? Well, not problem when playing music from the iPod through Rhythmbox as there's a scrobbler plugin.
I noticed there was an app in the App store, iScrobble Premium (there's also an advert-filled free version). Being rather tight, I thought I'd install the free version to try out. I decided the purchase price of the premium version was worthwhile, so I did so. Well here's where my problems started, as I decided to hook the iPod up to iTunes to remove the free iScrobbler app (and one or two other apps).
Booted up the WinXP laptop, plugged in USB hard drive , started iTunes. Nothing appeared to be untoward. I removed some apps from the iPod, and did a sync. Some warning messages appeared, which seemed a bit confusing. I did notice that the space consumed on the iPod seemed a bit reduced. Only later, when all the cover artwork had disappeared from my iPod did I suspect a problem: it turned out the USB hard drive hadn't been recognised by the laptop. Ho hum, I thought, I'll remount the drive, restart iTunes and re-sync the iPod. Well, that took a few hours, and at the end about half the artwork was incorrectly associated with albums.
So now I've removed all the music, and I'm re-syncing once again to see if that will cure the problem. Hope so, this is going to take some time!
Update: well that sorted the artwork. Now to wrestle with iScrobbler!
Update 2: tried using iScrobbler, and all the artwork vanished!
Update 3: reloading all the music. Again!
At the beginning of July, Rupert Murdoch's press empire moved to charge for access to The Times and The Sunday Times web sites. Up to now, this has been at a charge of £1 for a day's access, or £2 for a week's access. Perhaps I'm just a cheapskate, but when I'm referred to these sites I decline to pay to read it, moving on to other sites. I was interested to see that Media Week has some interesting statistics on the effect of the new paywall strategy (Times loses 1.2 million readers - Media news - Media Week). The numbers are quite startling:
News International launched its separate Thetimes.co.uk and Thesundaytimes.co.uk websites on 25 May. It made registration compulsory and began redirecting users from the old site on 15 June and started charging for access to both sites on 2 July. According to ComScore, the combined number of unique visitors to the two new sites has fallen to 1.61 milion in July, from 2.22 million in June, and 2.79 million in May. The average number of minutes each user spent on the site was 7.6 in May, 5.8 in June and 4 in July. Page views have dropped from 29 million in May to 20 million in June and 9 million in July.I imagine that this reflects the casual page viewers such as me choosing not to pay to read a page they're not absolutely desperate to view. On the one hand one could view this as a huge drop in web page visitors, but as Jack of Kent pointed out via Twitter, one could view this as a gain of 1.6 million paying visitors. I guess it remains to be seen how advertisers react to this, and whether any decline in advertising revenue is more than made up for by the subscription income. It seems that some newspapers are banking on the appearance on internet/media consumption devices such as the iPad, and the soon to be launched competitors running on Linux-related and Windows-related operating systems to reinvigorate the newspaper business. But it seems to me that the joy of newspaper browsing on the web is that I can collect views from across the political spectrum of newspapers, while only buying into one. What's interesting is that the readers don't appear to have defected to other newspapers' websites: presumably supporting my supposition that the deflected readers are casual browsers rather than dedicated readers. Personally, I think that it's too early to conclude anything from the data available to date - I expect executives over at News International are poring over the figures in quite some detail. After all page view numbers aren't the only statistic in town.
After Wednesday's puncture, I inspected the rear tyre on Saturday evening, and decided to ditch it in favour of a new Velofex Record in view of the number of cuts I could see. I popped in an equally unused Vittoria inner tube. On Sunday morning I topped up the tyres with a bit more air, and noticed that I'd snapped off the threaded nut off the valve core. Oh, well I thought - at least the air that's in will stay there. Well, so I thought, but this was merely the prelude to a comedic series of minor disasters that afflicted my ride in today's '25'.The weather was OK, though a little autumnal with a light and lifting mist. More annoying was the rising north wind that promised assistance on the southbound outward leg of the course, but would be correspondingly troublesome on the return leg. Tony and I had travelled over, very conveniently our start times were only five minutes apart - I was #21, Tony #26. Not too bad a start, reasonably warm as I lined up. At the appointed moment I departed, quite briskly, off to the roundabout and slip road to join the A1 southbound from Tempsford. I even negotiated the potholes at the little flyover roundabout. The wind wasn't giving me as much help as I'd expected, as I proceeded south through Girtford and across the Sandy roundabout, where I unfortunately got slowed by traffic.
On again, and safely and cleanly across the next roundabout. I was feeling pretty good, and reeling in riders ahead of me when I became aware of the bumping so characteristic of a rear wheel puncture. Groaning to myself, I pulled into the slip road of the BP garage just short of the Baldock roundabout turn (so about 12 miles from the race HQ). Well, I thought, at least I brought a tube and gas inflater along with me (which had amused Tony no end back at Tempsford). I removed the wheel, which is a pretty dirty business with the Cervelo due to the rear facing dropouts, and started effecting a repair. I saw Tony come by, and he shouted that he'd come and pick me up in the car.
Nevertheless, I decided to carry on with the repair, not least because is was something to do! I got the tyre off and removed the tube. Popped in the replacement tube and refitted the tyre. Next I tried inflating the tyre with the single CO2 cylinder I had for the inflator. This proved an unmitigated disaster - it was hard to use the inflater chuck on the trispoke (but this reflects cack-handedness rather than an inherent problem), and the inflater chuck had come apart in my seatpack. Once all that was sorted, I proceeded to contribute to global warming by releasing the entire cylinder contents into the atmosphere. At least Tony was coming to rescue me.
Which he did, having ridden to a 56:28 result. Back to the HQ to have a cup of tea and see what other riders had managed. Matt Bottrill looked to be the clear winner with 50:52, an astonishing performance and indicative of good chances for a placing at the forthcoming British Time Trial Championship in three weeks' time.
Postscript. Back home I went to pump up the repaired rear tyre, only to find the tube was defective and wouldn't hold even a smidgen of air. So the CO2 would have all dissipated even had I got the inflater attached correctly.
So there I was, on my own with plans to get out on the bike somewhat thwarted by heavy rain showers, and very much at a loose end. So I took it upon myself to tidy up this website.
I've checked over the menu links, which now all seem to be properly functional. I deleted some that were merely hangovers from a prior incarnation. A few new menu items were added.
In the Main Menu:
- Recently Played Music - now links to a page with information from my Last.FM page, in turn derived from audioscrobbling from my Squeezebox (so it doesn't include CDs and LPs that I play, not anything I listen to on the iPod
- Books from my Library - links to a widget from LibraryThing that scans through my library 25 books at a time, randomly selected. This replaces a sidebar module that used to show books currently being read, but which was usually out of date.
- About flies&bikes - explains abit about the websites I maintain.
- Recent Publications - properly integrates a feed from an institutional publication repository.
- Why Study fruit flies? - link now works!
- Links tidied up to point to a new browser window/tab.
- Added link to the Team Grumpy website.