cellio | last few days

Friday at work I completed a big merge of my project's code to the main branch in source control. (Yeah, two hours before leaving for a four-day weekend, but I'd done a lot of testing first.) I've learned some new things about Perforce (source-control system) and our build system. I have also learned that while I can do this sort of configuration management, I really, really want us to hire someone who actually wants to do this stuff on a regular basis.

This morning I was asked if I could read torah next Shabbat. ("How much?" "As long as it's a valid reading, I don't care what you do." "Ok.") This does get better with practice; I don't think I would have been able to learn a non-trivial chunk in less than a week a year ago. Cool.

Thursday we got email from our Hebrew instructor. She is, alas, sitting shiva in Israel, so she sent mail to tell us that (1) class was on anyway as originally scheduled and (2) we'd have the sub again. Only three people showed up; the sub told me that happened at the last class (three weeks ago) too (different three people; that was the night my in-laws were in town, so I missed it). The sub is good, so I hope she's not taking that personally. The bad student I previously wrote about wasn't there, so we actually covered new material. I suggested to the sub that she send email to everyone with the assignment and what we would be doing next week; with luck this will innoculate us some against "but I don't know this!" whines from people who miss classes and don't do the homework. We'll see.

I had a nice conversation with the sub on the way out of the building, and then for half an hour after that, about theology, observance, the local community, learning languages, and the like. That was pleasant. (And hey, we now have each others' email addresses...)

Today we visited with my family. They do Christmas, so Dani and I still do the gift thing with them for their sake. My parents got me two more volumes of Rashi's commentary on torah (yay!), and we got a bunch of other goodies. In a moment of "oh, you did that too? oops", both my parents and my sister got us nice tea assortments. Tonight we cleaned out the tea cupboard (I've been meaning to prune it for a while); who knew that tea had sell-by dates? (This revelation came when considering a box that neither of us remembered buying.) Mmm, new, fresh tea.

We got my sister an iPod (nano), which she was pretty excited about. She does not have a computer, but she has access to several nearby (her kids, our father, and if worse comes to worst she can come to our house, though it's farther for her). She has a long commute and no CD player in her car, so I figure she'll spend an afternoon loading a bunch of CDs onto her iPod and be good for a few months before needing to do it again. Not having a computer of her own shouldn't be a huge hardship, despite the protests of her kids. (We bought her an adapter to charge it from house current and an adapter for playing in her car.)

My father just got a laptop (Macbook), apparently prompted in part by the thought during their trip to Italy that it would have been convenient to have. (Duh; if I'd thought of it I would have lent them my iBook for that trip.) So he's now playing with Leopard, 'cause that's what came installed. He mentioned that he still has a G3 machine (predecessor to his desktop machine); I wonder if it can run iTunes. :-)

Tomorrow I'm getting together with friends to play a game of "Dogs in the Vineyard", an unusual role-playing game I previously wrote about. This should be fun!

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He mentioned that he still has a G3 machine (predecessor to his desktop machine); I wonder if it can run iTunes. :-)

Answer: Yes, but...

It can't run the latest version of iTunes, which means that he wouldn't be able to purchase things from the iTunes store. I'm not sure if Apple makes old versions of iTunes available, for that matter. But my G3 iMac ran iTunes quite happily, back in the day. Or, at least, that's what the part of my brain which is still awake is telling me.

I was thinking of the G3 as a possible path for my sister getting her music collection onto her iPod without disrupting anyone else's iTunes setups.

I had no idea that tea had sell-by dates... Nice update. Thanks for sharing.

Neither did I, though of course it will lose some potency over time if not sealed. Maybe that's it -- the manufacturer's assessment of when the packaging would cease being effective in that regard.

By the way, happy anniversary (a day early).

I'm seriously tempted to buy myself an mp3 player (since it doesn't look as if anyone else is going to!): would you generally recommend the iPod over other formats?

We didn't do a lot of comparison-shopping; my sister isn't all that technically ept, so ubiquity(lots of people she can ask for help if needed) was a big factor. Her kids both have iPods, as do I. (Mine was also a gift.)

I find the iPod (nano, in case that makes a difference; mine's the older, pre-video, model) pretty easy to use in general, but the much-touted control wheel seems a little flaky to me, and I wonder how it will hold up over time. Sometimes I press play/stop (it's a toggle) and nothing happens, so then I have to press harder and it works, but I thought the first time was hard enough. Sometimes I'll be going for that control but hit the center one (menu) instead, or vice-versa; placement seems a little sensitive to me. or maybe I just have fat fingers. :-)

I find the display easy to read. If I had a full iPod (one of the big ones that could hold my entire music library), being forced to scroll through the options (sort by album, by artist, by song, by genre) could get annoying; there are no shortcut keys. (No alpha-numeric entry of any sort.) For what can fit on a nano, it's fine.

I hate having things in my ears, so I've never used the earbuds that come with it. I use my iPod for commuting, playing over the car stereo. I assume I could also plug a pair of conventional (small-plug) headphones into it, like those I used with my Walkman (remember those?) so long ago.

Caveat: I'm working from a tiny sample size here ...

My impression is that the iPod's user interface is so much better than other MP3 players' that it makes a very big difference in how enjoyable the device is to use, and how much 'better' a product it seems to be overall, but there are other devices that look better on paper and may be better suited to some users based on features. Ones that inlude an FM receiver and a recorder, for example, which my (old) iPod doesn't.

My 40G (uh, 3rd gen??) hand-me-down iPod is huge and heavy next to

anniemal's Creative whatchamacallit, and lacks the radio and in-the-field recording capabilities that I would find quite useful, but I like it a lot more despite those limitations because it's so easy to use, so intuitive that I never really think about it (I like a powerful interface for powerful tools, which often means mastering complexity -- give me a shell and vi on a computer -- but for a pocket entertainment appliance, intuitive and easy seems more sensible). Her gizmo, on the other hand, seems to require a round of figuring-stuff-out every time you want to do anything different, and frequent games of "guess how this designer's brain works".

I've also stumbled across various discarded players of various shapes and sizes, whose owners have said, "Oh, that stopped working ..." My iPod, given to me because the previous owner upgraded to a photo/video one, has outlived its own battery (I got an add-on battery booster that holds a regular 9V battery to tide me over until I can afford to replace the internal rechargeable battery, which is down to only about an hour of use per charge).

My only complaint about the iPod is the difficulty of using it with Linux (I need to reformat it to use NTFS or non-journaling HFS+, or I need a version of Linux that can write to HFS+ with journalling turned on; my Debian box can write to Mac file systems without journalling enabled but treats the journalling filesystem as read-only ... but I want to make sure I won't make a mess of things in the process). I expect that problem to go away eventually.

Note again, please, the warning about the really small sample from which I'm drawing these sweeping trends, as well as the bit about different features being more/less important to different users.

I've bought both iPods and some of the lesser-known alternatives. I am in an odd situation: I am buying the mp3 players for my wife, who is not particularly computer-saavy [love you, dear], so ease of use is of high importance.

Both of the iPods I owned broke quickly and were hard to use. The installation of software took me several hours the first time (including downloads of updates and a new BIOS) -- the second time around it went substantially more smoothly due to my prior experience. Neither iPod lasted 6 months (one rusted and the other just stopped working completely). Apple has a very frustrating return policy that required me to brush up on my Hindi. So, I'm not a big fan of iPods (or Apple in general).

Early versions of Creative's Muvo had a lousy interface, in which you had to look at the device to see whether it had finished downloading the songs. The new devices are drag-n-drop. They're really just flash drives with earphones. There is no software to install, and no setup needed. Drag the songs onto the folder in Windows, and then hit the play button. Much more rugged design than the iPod, but you don't get a video screen -- just an LCD display. There are all sorts of deeper interface options, but I haven't really explored them. The goal was a portable device that would play music, so I stopped there.

As for ease of use, all of these players are pretty intuitive. You might have to look something up in the manual the first time you use it, but the interface designs are pretty mature by now.

If you're downloading songs, there is an additional complication: not all players are compatible with all DRM formats. For example, if you download songs from Walmart, you can't play them on an iPod. The details change with time, so that example might be outdated, but you should know what the answer is before you plonk down the money.

Summary: iPods are cool, and most have a video screen. iPods work well with iTunes. Muvos are easier to set up (on a PC) and are less fragile.

Thank you to everyone for these really helpful replies - and to

cellio for allowing me to hijack her LJ, too!

You're welcome! I have no problem with the "hijacking"; one of the big features of LJ, IMO, is the opportunity for actual conversations to spring up. It's many-to-many, not many-to-one as in the comments of most blogging sites. It feels like more of a community this way.

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