Crossed Wires

Vic’s Blog

Archive for category Hardware

Laptop hard disk replacement, part one

May 4

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

A couple of weeks ago I had bootup problems with my old Sony laptop. I had replaced the hard disk in it last year (February), and everything was pointing to another busted hard disk. First time I’d had a machine outlive two hard disks! :(

Sure enough, I put a different disk in the laptop and it worked, and the original disk in a USB caddy failed (but only after working successfully a couple of times, leading me to think it was a transient problem and reassemble the laptop, at which point it failed again… sigh).

Through persistence and determination (and a couple of goes in the freezer) I managed to get a copy of the disk onto another drive. I then went shopping, but decided to check the warranty on the dud drive: lo-and-behold, it still had nearly four years of a five year warranty to run. Better yet, unlike the Western Digital I had to send at my own cost to Singapore for replacement, Seagate have an address in Australia that can be used.

Sod it, I said, anything more than the original 80GB (since for less than what I paid for the 80GB a year ago I’m looking at 160GB or more!) is wasted on this particular machine, so I completed the RMA, found a box to pack the drive in, and sent it off.

The address in Australia is a mail forwarder to Seagate in Singapore. I had to keep that in mind when I checked their order status page, which a week later was still showing “awaiting your return”. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before the page changed to “shipped”. Looking a bit closer I could see that my 80GB drive must have put on a bit of weight on the way to its birthplace, as Seagate was sending me a 100GB drive in return!

Having left Singapore last Thursday the drive arrived on Monday, but due to work commitments (plus having to fix the Slug first) I wasn’t able to do anything with it until today. Stay tuned for the recovery exercise…

MythTV fun and games

Apr 1

Posted by Vic in Hardware, Linux | No Comments

Bad things don’t always come in threes. For my MythTV setup, four bad things all happened at once. First was that the governments of the Australian states that run Daylight Savings Time (DST) decided to jump on the energy-saving bandwagon and change the end-time for DST this year. Second was that the OzTivo folks changed the API for connecting to their program guide data, and closed the old API interface on the same weekend that DST was originally due to finish. Third, for some reason that I’m still investigating, my run-an-emerge-world-at-least-every-fortnight MythTV backend had an old timezone-data package, so any times it handled that should have still been DST weren’t. Fourth, Shepherd isn’t quite as smart as I thought it was, and I didn’t find out until too late…

Let me get something straight: Shepherd is the bees-knees of EPG grabbers for Australian MythTV users. If you’re a MythTV user in .au and not running Shepherd, stop reading this right now and go and update your system to use it–you’ll be glad you did. If I had just looked at some of the output it has been generating since OzTivo announced it’s changes, most of the agro I’ve suffered the last few hours would have been avoided.

In a nutshell, Shepherd is a “meta-grabber”. It includes code that can get program data from a dozen or so sources, and keeps looking up sources until it fills your listings with data goodness. It automatically updates these individual source grabbers as well, so you should never need to worry about its up-to-date-ness (more on that later though). It also fetches extra program data from IMDB and TVDB, and can even automatically grab station icons for you. Highly, highly recommended.

I could see that some of my EPG data was coming from OzTivo because I had seen the notes that they had put in the program data advising of the API change. The weird thing I saw was that for a program I was recording in the same timeslot each day, sometimes the message would be there and other times not. While I thought that this was a little strange, I figured that the OzTivo folks were just being overly cautious and trusted Shepherd to do all the updates it needed.

Then, ever since Sunday morning when the southern states *didn’t* switch back from DST, I’ve had recording times out by an hour–programs trying to record an hour early. So as I mentioned, I had ye-olde timezone data on the backend, which can’t have helped depending on the data source (although I’m trying to work out if this actually is a contributor as I would have thought it would send the recordings an hour late… plus, others who have confirmed their timezone data have had the same problems). For a couple of programs, I actually had double entries: one an hour too early, then a second one at the right time. This was weird, and I still can’t explain it!

A manual run of mythfilldatabase showed why I was getting the repeated OzTivo API messages. Shepherd had downloaded the updated grabber alright, but the new version has a Perl dependency that wasn’t satisfied and it couldn’t run. Rather than bail out, Shepherd elected just to keep running with the old grabber. Given the circumstances, I’m still deciding how I feel about that. :-

So once I was confident that the grabbers were working okay again, I decided to get the EPG straight. I remembered that mythfilldatabase will not replace any existing data it thinks is valid, which is why only data post-April-5-or-so looked nice again. So, with a mailing list post or two as encouragement, I truncated (database-admin-speak for “deleted all the data from”) the “program” and “programrating” fields in the mythconverg database and ran mythfilldatabase. After about 20 minutes, voila, fixed guide data!

So now I’m thinking of how I can alert myself to a problem with Shepherd. I used to just check the result of the last mythfilldatabase run through Information Centre or mythweb, but since Shepherd ends cleanly so does mythfilldatabase. Looks like I might have to come up with something hackish to look for Perl runtime errors in the mythfilldatabase log and do a Nagios passive service check or something… Sigh, as if I needed another little project to keep me busy… :)

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Cisco XML apps: things made of fail

Jan 22

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

Since I have a few Cisco phones around here, I’ve played with XML apps. I have written a timezone calculator, an LDAP phone directory lookup utility (which hooks into the “external directory” function of the phones), an app that uses Qantas’ WAP interface to get flight arrival/departure information, and the obligatory RSS reader. They work, in some cases very well, but the inconsistency of the XML interface between different levels of the Cisco firmware makes it a trying exercise.

My latest exercise was an update to the RSS reader I’ve used for ages. I found RSS2Cisco ages ago and have used it quite successfully, but I’ve never really been satisfied with its way of displaying the whole feed in one text page. It works well for news feeds, where all you get is a headline and a teaser, but for things like blogs it’s not suitable (you’re lucky to get through one posting before hitting the limit of a Cisco XML text page). I wanted an interface like a “normal” RSS reader, where it lists the items in the feed in a menu and you then choose an item to be displayed.

Sounded simple, and wasn’t too hard to hack rss2cisco around to make it do my bidding (it’s not optimal yet as every time you read an item it pulls down the entire feed again). The problem I faced was in making the thing work consistently between the 7960 phones and the 7970s.

All my phones are running fairly recent SIP code, but for some reason the 7960 has an ancient XML parser. By ancient, I mean that the level of the XML SDK it supports is tied back to Call Manager 3.0. The 7970s, on the other hand, have support for a much more recent SDK and support some of the fancy operations that you can’t do on a 7960 unless you’re running SCCP firmware. At first I thought that there might have been a hardware limitation and that Cisco couldn’t fit the extra smarts of a client for later SDKs, but the SCCP code can’t be that much simpler than SIP that they’d have more room to fit a better XML browser and all the other features the SCCP code has over SIP…

So the SIP firmware for 7960 has a junk XML browser. You’d think, then, that the 7970 was easier to work with than the 7960… Wrong! Valid XML that worked quite happily on the 7960 would fail with a cryptic “XML Error[4]: Parse Error” message. It took quite a bit of time and quite a bit of trial-and-error to work out some of the dependencies (32 seems to be a magic number, folks…).

Call Manager XML (CMXML) is supposed to be really simple, but I can only imagine how complex it might get to deliver an app with a consistent interface if you had a number of different phone models to support — I have only two, and I’m looking at two different versions of my app!

In their defence, Cisco have provided a way for the phone to identify itself and its SDK level when it makes a request. A set of HTTP headers identify the device, and one specifically states the SDK version supported by the phone client. Reading these headers would allow a developer to adjust the output of their app to cater for the various phones — one app, but multiple output capabilities.

It strikes me though as a heck of a lot of work for limited return. These are phones intended for corporate installations, so it’s almost a given that there will be a full-function computer at the same desk. Why would a company invest that much effort developing and supporting an internal application for a single platform that’s tied to desks, when they could write it as a web app and deliver it practically anywhere? I’m starting to see why the Internet is not exactly awash with sites selling CMXML apps…

Having said that though, I love my timezone calculator. With three button presses I can find out the time in any of my six favourite timezones, and I can find any timezone in the world with only a few more presses. An application somewhere on the web couldn’t be anywhere near that speedy for me, and a desktop app would have to be some kind of widget already running and configured (or be the KDE Clock applet, all it takes is a mouseover… shame I’m stuck with GNOME for my work desktop).

So I’m not too keen to apply much development effort to my XML apps. I will stick them on my development site some time soon, but I don’t think it’s worth the effort to keep them functional. The Qantas one, for instance, is totally dependent on the URL and query format of the Qantas WAP application, which is obviously subject to change at any time. I wonder sometimes if a WAP-XML gateway would be useful, but then I think about the effort of writing a system to translate pages delivered over a dying protocol to an interface that never got off the ground…

In case you’re curious what the RSS reader looks like:

and something a bit more voluminous from my blog:

Yes, I am a bit proud of it, even though it’s rubbish… ;)

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Which Nokia device to get?

Jan 7

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

I’ve developed a very strong desire to be connected to people recently. In the last fortnight I’ve reawakened my Google account and regularly sit on Google Talk, reawakened an old Free World Dialup account and plugged it into my home phone system, and signed up to Twitter. I also found a mobile IM and SIP client called fring that looks good and works really nicely. I’d love to use fring constantly, thanks to its integration to Twitter and Google Talk (heck, it might even make me find my old Skype ID) but…

My current phone is a Nokia N70, which has served me well for a couple of years, but I’m not keen to use it too much for fring because I don’t have a mobile data plan (and my phone company charges fairly steeply for casual data). Besides, it’s only UMTS 3G so the data rate is not great (better than GSM data, but only occasionally so). What I really need is one of the newer devices around that has Wi-Fi built in. Something like the N80, new N82 or E51, or N95. That way I could use fring at home (which is where I am most of the time nowadays) and not have to worry about data costs.

Thinking about spending that kind of money though (again, my phone company is happy to talk to me about upgrading my handset, but the kind of plan I’d have to go onto to get a phone like that would be insane) makes me wonder about other devices. Something like the N800, or even a new N810. I don’t think fring is available on Nokia’s tablet devices, but with the alternate OS platform on the N8x0 I could install just about any kind of IM client I want. Plus I’d have a nice device to web-surf, program MythTV, check mail, and various other tasks.

What about other devices? The Asus EeePC has tweaked my curiosity, but I think it would end up being just a bit too large to fit in with the kind of usage I’m imagining for this type of device. Blackberry is a bit scary to me, it doesn’t really seem to be a general-usage consumer-oriented device (more a corporate connect-back-to-the-proprietary-box-in-the-server-room kind-of thing). The iPod touch is out as well: it’s closed nature would frustrate the heck out of me (it’s got a browser, but you can’t load anything on it…). The only other manufacturer I’d think about for a mobile device right now is Sony-Ericsson: Ericsson manufactured a couple of the nicest phones I’ve ever owned, but Sony has ruined them for me. I’m just not interested in getting back onto the hardware-to-lock-users-to-the-Sony-tower treadmill.

It’s all just navel-gazing, unfortunately. Realistically, I can’t justify dropping a wad of money on some new shiny just to satisfy what is probably just a bit of a personal fad. I think I’ll wait a bit longer and see how quickly the newly-released N95-8GB drops in price, or how far it pushes the price of the old N95 down — ditto the N810 and N800.

Oh, and I’ll wait for fring to fix my biggest issue: no support for Jabber. Queries on their forum on this have gone unanswered for almost a year. Technically it can’t be a big leap for them, as they have support for Google Talk!

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PoE again: this time, success!

Dec 31

Posted by Vic in Hardware | 3 Comments

I had pretty much forgotten about improving on the Power over Ethernet progress I mentioned previously. A couple of weeks ago I bought another 7970 that I successfully converted to SIP to run in the study, and I was considering buying a few 7961s or Linksys PoE-capable phones to use in other places. However, I got an e-mail from a reader whose success at using a hacked cable with his 7960G prompted me to have another go.

While I did a heap of research about PoE and IEEE 802.3af, the hints I got about using a hacked cable with a standard 802.3af switch to power a Cisco phone came almost exclusively from the voip-info.org wiki. Everything I’d seen about this trick relied on the use of a crossover cable to fix the problem where the phone using the Cisco pre-standard expects the power in the opposite polarity to that delivered by 802.3af.

When I’d had a go previously, the info I had told me that I had to get power onto the spare pairs in the Ethernet cable, because the Cisco pre-standard used the spare pairs for power and not the data pairs. This was a problem as my switch provided Type A PoE, which is power-over-data-pairs. In the end I figured that I’d have to come up with some kind of electronics to get the power off the data pairs and onto the spare pairs.

My friendly reader informed me, however, that Cisco pre-standard phones take power from the data pairs as well as the spare pairs! Nothing I’d seen indicated that this was a possibility. So I pulled out the hacked-up cable I’d used previously and gave it another try… but it didn’t work.

I tried a bunch of alternatives that I probably tried before as well. I tried putting the sense resistor across the spare pairs instead of the data pairs, I tried switching the spare pairs around. But, since others had only ever reported success with a crossover cable, it had never occurred to me to try a straight cable instead. A bit of resoldering later, another try, and it worked!

Tried it with all my 7960s and it worked fine. So it looks like some 802.3af switches put power on the pairs in the opposite polarity to others (which is not a problem usually, as 802.3af devices have a bridge rectifier that allows them to handle either polarity).

Thanks to my friendly reader, I now have a way to power all my Cisco phones via PoE! Yay! The only caveat (one that I’ve only seen briefly mentioned anywhere) is the extra load placed on the cable by the 25kohm sense resistor — doubt it’s significant, but over a few phones it might add up.

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WIP330 progress: it’s a… phone

Dec 7

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

A while back I posted about my grief with the Linksys WIP330 WiFi SIP phone (it doesn’t happen often, but it’s a surprise when the ONLY hit you get on Google about a problem is your own blog post discussing it).  The unit is still a bitter disappointment, but thanks to a firmware update it seems like it’s finally at least usable on my network.

My previous post talked about problems I was having with the network connection dropping out after an hour on a WPA-PSK network.  When last I checked, the most recent firmware was no improvement in that regard.  However, I checked again last week and a couple of new updates to firmware have been released.  You need to go to Linksys’ US site to download the recent firmware though (Australia only has the 1.02.12S version that is a problem for me, while 1.03.18S is on the US site).

I also had problems using the phone menus to do the upgrade.  The WIP330 has a menu selection that lets you enter a URL for the phone to download its own firmware update, but this didn’t work for me.  I suspect it’s because the Linksys site that the firmware is hosted on is using an expired SSL certificate…  Downloading the file to my desktop and uploading the firmware through the phone’s web page worked fine as an alternative method.

The phone has been on my WPA network all day continuously now, and it makes and receives calls without drama.  I’ve never had the problem that some folks report where the phone ignores incoming calls.  So, as a phone, it’s functional and I’ll be including it in my ring groups and queues now.  As a Wi-Fi device, though, it’s still short.  For something that’s supposedly built on Windows CE, there’s precious little PDA or network function in it.  

The two things I thought I could do with the unit (other than just use it as a phone) have both come up busted.  First was to use the “web cam” function to grab rain radar images from the Bureau of Meteorology — but the function only seems to work with actual web cams that generate a Windows Media stream, and not just an image that refreshes at intervals.  Next, when I found that you can use the web interface to upload and download data such as the phonebook, I thought I could write something that dumped my LDAP contact database into the right format to upload to it.  I still could, if I could hack the crappy VB/.NET encrypted file format they use on it.  Bah, humbug.

There’s talk on the ‘Net about folks who load CE device drivers and play with it from Windows, so maybe if I was a Windows user there would be more I could do with it.

One thing I will do with it is try it on public Wi-Fi.  That’s the only differentiator I can see between it and a normal cordless phone attached to an ATA — you certainly shouldn’t buy one of these just to use at home.  If it’s fairly easy to strap up to public Wi-Fi then it becomes much more useful (but then I have to wonder how often I’m near public Wi-Fi and needing to make a call I couldn’t make on a normal mobile… it might have been useful when I was stuck in Melbourne airport for three hours the other week though).

Now that it stays on the network I can use it as a phone.  Fine.  I still regret not knowing in advance about the iPod touch, because I would rather have put that money toward the touch…

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I did it again: damn you ATI!

Nov 25

Posted by Vic in Hardware, Soapbox | No Comments

In this post only about six months ago I berated myself for buying an ATI-chipset graphics card for use in a Linux system.  I titled that post “Why I probably will never buy ATI again…”, as if I knew that I’d make the same mistake again.  Sure enough…

I had problems with my MythTV frontend playing particular recordings; I eventually worked out that it was HD recordings it couldn’t manage (this helped me discover the switch to HD of a previously SD stream coming out of Ten).  I figured that a swap of hardware under the frontend would be nice, to get a better CPU platform and better output capability under it.  I went shopping at my local friendly poota-shop’s website, and came up with a couple of contenders.

Looking at their site (and at the ASUS site), most of the integrated-video boards I saw seemed to be using nVidia chips.  Confident I was going to be making a sound decision, I set off to the store and ended up leaving with an Asus M2A-VM HDMI under my arm.  The clincher was my need for a real S/PDIF output, which the M2A-VM board has on the little riser-card it uses to provide HDMI, S-Video and Component video out.

Some of you will already have seen my error.  :)

The nVidia board with HDMI I had seen on the ASUS site was the M2N-VM HDMI.  The M2A-VM HDMI is obviously an ATI chipset board.  In my quest for S/PDIF, to save myself a few bucks for a header adapter, I again shot myself in the foot with the ATI bullet.

Sure enough, I had huge problems getting the thing to work.  Frame rates in MythTV, no matter what I did, were abysmal.  I tried installing Mythbuntu again to see if later drivers would help (compared to those on the existing Knoppmyth R5F1 build I am running), to no avail[1].

I was considering lumping it, and sitting on it until things catch up and I can make it work, but I think I’ll just go back to the store and try and switch it for either the M2N-VM DVI (no S/PDIF) or M2N-VM DH (this has onboard S/PDIF but also costs an extra AU$40 thanks to all the WiFi and other guff it comes with).  Unfortunately the store doesn’t have the M2N-VM HDMI, which would let me keep the future capability for  a HDMI-capable display, but by the time I look at needing HDMI I’m likely to be needing to replace the thing again anyway.

To add insult to injury, when I put the old MythTV frontend box back I used a low profile case which meant I had to leave out the old nVidia FX5200 it was running off and go with the onboard Via graphics.  I had heard that some of the Via chips had MPEG2 smarts, and it seems to be true: this old box with what I thought was the crappy cheapo onboard graphics chip now seems to have no trouble with HD output to VGA.

Sigh.

[1] Apparently some victimsowners of the M2A-VM HDMI have had success downloading the very latest drivers directly from ATI rather than sticking with those provided by their distro.  If I get time to give that a run I’ll report.

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Nokia sync software for Mac!

Nov 24

Posted by Vic in Hardware, Operating Systems | No Comments

I managed to fill up the multimedia card on the N70 — the only thing that’s surprising about that event is the length of time it took me to do it. :)   So I went looking for ways to get photos out of the phone into iPhoto.  I can’t believe it took until the third page of Google’s responses to come up with this little treasure: Nokia Multimedia Transfer.

It would seem that the good folks at Nokia have finally discovered Mac.  Nokia Multimedia Transfer allows you to browse your phone’s contents in a Finder-like window (similar to how the Nokia Phone Browser on Windows is Explorer-like) with full drag-and-drop support, sync music from iTunes to the phone, and have iPhoto treat the phone as a camera.

I installed the software (which is still labelled as a beta) and started it up… and straight away iPhoto lit up and told me that photos were ready to import.  I had already set up Bluetooth connectivity to the phone for iSync, and the Nokia utility just used it.  From this aspect alone, the integration of this software with the OS beats the Windows experience hands-down[1].

It’s not perfect, mind…  It took a looong time for the iPhoto import to prepare (although it was looking through about 160 items, over Bluetooth 1).  It finds all the supplied stock media as well, and wants to sync that (again, not really the tool’s fault, I probably should clean all that rubbish out some time or other so that it doesn’t show up in the phone’s Gallery either).  And I still had to go through each photo to make sure the timestamp was correct and fix it if it wasn’t (there seems to be no pattern to this problem, a group of photos taken all at the same time had some with correct timestamps and others that were wrong).

Despite the problems though, it still beats sending photos via Bluetooth file transfer and manually importing them to iPhoto!  Good stuff, Nokia.

[1] Okay, so Nokia doesn’t really get the bouquet all to themselves for that… the brickbat has to go to Windows’ stupid arrangement with third-party Bluetooth stacks and how hard that makes it for Nokia et-al to write their software.

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Sorry, AMD

Nov 4

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

I haven’t switched sides, really… but four cores for AU$330 was too much to resist.  :)

I’m doing the cascading hardware trick…  But instead of buying the new top-end rig and finding something to do with the surplus gear, I found something new to do with my existing desktop and had to replace it.  AMD’s 4×4 stuff looks good, but by the time I got two CPUs, a Socket F board and some new RAM I’d be in for around AU$1500 which I just can’t justify at the moment.

A colleague at work posted that the Q6600 was at his fave online store for AU$340.  Not believing this could be true, I went to my fave online store — which has a shopfront just down the road — and saw it for AU$330.

Beads of sweat started to form on my upper lip…  My left eyelid started to twitch uncontrollably…  Well, not really, but I’m sure you know the symptoms of Shiny Mania!

So I have some Intel kit again (not counting laptops).  The last Intel chip I bought was a thermonuclear 2.4GHz Pentium 4, and it’s actually running the system that will get replaced in this project.  Ever since I bought my first Athlon I’ve wanted to be AMD-only, but it seems that the performance gong belongs to Intel right now.  I’m confident that AMD will get it back with the next Opteron generation, and that will likely be what I replace the current Opteron server with one day.  For now, I’ll console myself with building a system in an architecture called “amd64″ on an Intel chip. ;-)

I’ll save the details of the buildup for another set of posts (what I’m building now is the P4 replacement, not the new desktop) but I will say this: It’s Quick.  And it’s got four cores.

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iPod touch: device lust

Sep 7

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

They’ve done it to me once more, those folks at Apple.  In 2003, while I was in the US for a residency trip, I fell in device-lust with the third-generation iPod.  I brought one home, and I’m still using it (on its original battery, I might add, although there’s a bit of a telltale bulge developing on the rear casing).  Now, a new range of iPods has been released, and I’ve got that familiar tingling in the back pocket… and an unexpected reflection on technology’s progress (or lack thereof).

A little while back I decided that my next portable audio device would not be an iPod.  I really don’t want to be tied to the Mac for something as simple as music and podcasts, and figured that I must be able to do these things with Linux.  To this end, I experimented with using Amarok to talk to my iPod but it just didn’t work well — corrupted playlists, Amarok refusing to simply unmount the iPod without giving it a soft reset, which caused it to reboot and remount again.  Tools like Rhythmbox and gtkpod were no different, which is hardly surprising since they all use the same libraries for actually talking to the iPod.  So, I decided that as long as the iPod still lived it would be enslaved to the Mac, and my music would stay managed by iTunes until such time as I could justify replacing the iPod.

Creative nearly had me a few months ago: the Zen Vision:W (I think that’s what it’s called, their wide-screen video device) has a good feature set…  but it just didn’t look right.  The 60GB version was too chunky — too thick, mainly — and the interface just felt wrong (although I concede that a little bit of time cleansing myself of iPod interface conditioning would probably have got me right).

Now, Apple has released a new range of iPods… and has again made the competition look old.

Many of you out there will be unfamiliar with the hype around the iPhone — as it is a North-America-only (USA-only?) device at this time, that’s not surprising.  However if you have seen it (or even only pictures of it) and you are outside iPhone-owning territory you may well have wished that the iPod functionality of the iPhone was available as a standalone device unencumbered by the regulatory crap that a phone has to comply with.

Well, wish no longer — that’s pretty much what the new iPod touch is.  All I’ve seen about this thing is on web pages — firstly on Wired and then on Apple’s web site — but I am head-over-heels in device-lust with this thing. :(

There isn’t much I can say about the features that Apple can’t say better (besides, this wasn’t meant to be a ra-ra post for the thing).  Check it out at Apple’s site: locally to me, that’s here at Apple Australia.  Of note though are the fact that it has Wi-Fi built-in, and comes with the Safari web browser, integrated YouTube browser, and integrated connectivity to the iTunes Music Store (you can buy music from the Store on the iPod, and when you next sync to iTunes it will merge the purchased music into your iTunes library).

I have to say though, the biggest surprise I got was when I went to the Apple Store to check the price.  While waiting for the page to load, I did a swift estimation and figured that the 16GB version would be over AU$800.  I nearly fell on the floor when the figure came up: AU$549.  My current iPod cost me around US$420 at a time when the Aussie dollar was lucky to fetch 60 US cents.

The one feature which took my breath away is probably one that I will never see though.  Apple has penned a deal with Starbucks to hook the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store component of the iPod touch into Starbucks free Wi-Fi.  Whenever you walk into an enabled Starbucks, the iPod touch automatically recognises Starbucks’ Wi-Fi network and hooks up.  Wait, it gets better.  When this happens, your iPod touch will show the details of the song playing in the store at the time, and give you a link to the iTunes WiFi Music Store to buy the music.

Why did that take my breath away?  Because right back to when I was at Uni, this kind of integration has been foretold but has always been “somewhere in the near future”.  The petrol pump that would automatically register the car’s chip and charge the fuel to the owner’s account.  The food packaging, fridges and pantries that would update the shopping list on your wristwatch, and the supermarket trolley that read the shopping list and displayed the layout of the supermarket with the locations of your needed items shown.  This is the “vision of the near future” that I was given by technologists (and instead we got RFID).

I was once standing in the Borders bookstore in South Yarra and heard a lovely song that moved me deeply (and no, I’m not prone to being overcome by store music).  A fortnight later I was in Singapore and heard the same song while having breakfast with Susan in the hotel restaurant.  On both occasions there was no-one around who would have been able to assist me locating the song — such is the way of telco-piped ambiance — and I was left to Googling remembered fragments of lyrics (successfully, I must say, for that’s how I was introduced to The Sundays).  I’ve never bought music online, but if I could have looked at the device in my pocket and instantly known what that song was, they’d have gotten a sale for sure.

Thinking about the technology behind it, it really is madenningly simple (says he with perfect hindsight).  Something like a DAAP server (wouldn’t even have to be one in each store) streaming to the store’s Wi-Fi, and an AirPort with an amp and speakers attached (instead of the usual piped music affair) picking up the same DAAP stream.  Regardless, to think that at least a little bit of that “vision of the future” is at last a reality is, well… nice.  I feel a little older, but in a good way. :)

Alas, the iPod touch guided tour video shows the start of the rollout of the “Starbucks” feature: a map of the continental USA, with New York City marked for September, Seattle in October, then LA February 2008 and Chicago in March.  Apple’s iTunes Starbucks site says “major metropolitan areas in the US by the end of 2008″.  No mention of internationals.  Sigh.  Oh, but the feature works with iTunes on a PC and with the iPhone too (so now we have three ways to miss out, right?).

The new iPod range is available now, with the exception of my new objet d’adore which is on the Apple Store for advance ordering with availability at the end of September.  Other newcomers are massive capacity iPod Video: now called “iPod classic” and starting with 80GB capacity or go to a whopping 160GB version, new iPod nano that’s shorter and wider than the old one but now does video, and new colours for the iPod shuffle.

So much for my tech spending freeze…  I figure I’ll spend the next few weeks researching what life would be like with one of these — whether going down to 16GB storage would actually hurt or not; how movies really look in H.264; whether I’d have to re-encode all my movies, or worse, encode them in H.264 as well as MP4 (since the few times I tried to play back H.264 encodes using XBMC were less than joyous); whether the video functions would even be relevant since all I ever do is listen to podcasts.  Then, when the thing is actually in stores… just go and get one anyway.

Tech addiction sucks like that.

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