Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Two months with an Apple TV

    I bought an Apple TV in an attempt to free my huge home video library from its Mac-shaped prison: I can’t be bothered unplugging everything and moving the Mac downstairs when I want to watch a clip of Baby Bigmouth, and life’s too short to burn your own DVDs. It’s been in daily use since then, so here are a few thoughts.

    It’s great if you have kids, and Handbrake
    Kids like films; kids also like scratching DVDs. Slowly but surely I’ve been using the combination of Fairmount and Handbrake to copy our various Pixar discs to the Apple TV. It takes forever – DVD ripping, no matter how good the software, is never anything but a pain – but it’s cheaper than having to buy Wall-E all over again.

    It’s surprisingly good
    720p HD video over Wi-Fi? No problem. If you absolutely, positively have to have 1080p, don’t buy an Apple TV yet. It doesn’t do it. Me, I couldn’t care less. My TV isn’t big enough to tell the difference between HD and True HD.

    It’s really good with the iPad
    The novelty of watching something on YouTube on the iPad and hitting one button to put it on the TV hasn’t worn off yet. Once iPlayer etc can do it too, things will be fun.

    It’s buggy
    I’ve never had to reboot an Apple product as often as I have to reboot the Apple TV. If I get two days out of it I’m happy. Luckily the reboot is simple and quick, but we’re not quite in “it just works” territory here.

    It can be desperately slow
    I’ve had to divide my home movies into individual years, and even then the Apple TV takes between two and five minutes to load details of a 100-clip library – not the video, just the folder listing and thumbnails. To say this pisses me off would be an enormous understatement. I don’t know if it’s the Apple TV or iTunes, and I don’t care.

    It needs iTunes
    Apple TV is crying out for a media server, I think. Having to leave iTunes running on your Mac is a pain, and I hate to think how much energy the combination of Apple TV and running MacBook Pro is using up. I hope it isn’t too much, but I’m scared to see what my next electricity bill says.

    Movies are still ropey
    Is there such a thing as a good UK video on demand service? The catalogue on Apple TV (and in iTunes, and on the Xbox, and…) is still very patchy.

    It needs iPlayer
    If Nintendo can put it on the Wii, Apple can put it on the Apple TV. This one’s right at the top of my wish list.

    It doesn’t do many video formats
    If you’re the kind of person whose television aerial is bittorrent-shaped, expect to spend a lot of time converting those AVI and MKV files to M4Vs or MP4s.

    YouTube is great, but I can’t favourite anything
    Anyone else have this problem? I’ve been getting the temporary-error message for two months now.

    I can’t see my own Flickr photos
    Flickr support is nice. Flickr support without login, not so nice. I keep my personal pics in Friends and Family mode; Apple TV can’t login to display them.

    It’s great for music
    Or at least, it is if you’re willing to faff a bit. My Apple TV is hooked to an AV receiver, which in turn is hooked to the TV. I’ve got HDMI control on so that when the TV goes off, the DVD player does too; unfortunately that means the process of listening to music without the TV is this:

    * Turn everything on
    * Turn AV receiver to Apple TV
    * Find playlist etc on Apple TV, start playing.
    * Turn off the TV
    * Turn the AV receiver back on again (it’s gone into standby)
    * Take the Apple TV off pause (it goes into that automatically)

    It’s not elegant, but it gets there eventually.

    It’s worth £101
    Provided, that is, you don’t mind swearing at it from time to time and rebooting it every few days. It’s a clever bit of kit but if you want something as simple and as reliable as a basic DVD player, get a basic DVD player.

  • Thunderbolt and iPads

    Apple’s unveiled some new MacBook Pros, and the big news is Thunderbolt, also known as Light Peak. It’s very clever, and could enable some very interesting things:

    The new Macs look like iPads with keyboards. They’re clearly the latest iteration of Apple’s current design language, but what if they’re more than that? What if the iPad-ification of OS X and the iPad-like design of the MBPs are a sign of where this is all heading?

    We’ve seen how quickly mobile processors are progressing, and it won’t be long before it’s possible to put the specs of today’s MacBook Pros into a MacBook Air-thin iPad. Quad or six-core processors, oodles of RAM and a couple of Thunderbolt ports in an iPad could produce something really interesting.

  • Bits won’t save music

    In the early 2000s, when internet piracy was killing the recorded music business, some record companies had an idea. “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing,” they suggested. “But let’s do it with slightly better sound quality and a much bigger price tag”.

    Enter DVD Audio and Super Audio CD. They offered better sound quality than CD, and they were miles ahead of the 128Kbps MP3s being swapped on Napster and Kazaa. But as formats they’re footnotes, loved by the odd audiophile and completely ignored by the mainstream.

    Meanwhile, piracy continues and the business of recorded music appears to be in terminal decline. Not to worry. Some record companies have an idea.

    “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing”, they’re suggesting. “But let’s do it with slightly better sound quality and a much bigger price tag.”

    I think I’ve heard this song before.

    More cowbell

    This time it’s not about a physical format; it’s about a bitrate. Labels are considering providing music in 24-bit format, and they think we’ll be willing to pay more for it.

    We won’t.

    There are three reasons for that. The first is that people who don’t currently pay for 16-bit music on CD aren’t suddenly going to go “woah! Eight more bits! I renounce my piratical ways!”

    The second is that there isn’t that big a difference between 16-bit and 24-bit anyway, especially not if you’re listening on Apple earbuds, through your Xbox 360 or via your mobile phone.

    I’m told that the key music provider for The Kids these days is YouTube, which happily combines points one and two: we’ve got a generation whose expect music to be there for free, and they’re listening to it on crappy laptop speakers.

    The third reason is that a lot of popular music is so ridiculously compressed that better quality files will actually make it sound worse. I once listened to Oasis’s debut album on a stupidly expensive bit of audiophile kit, and the recording was so harsh it felt like my ears were being stabbed. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ famously overcooked Californication sounds progressively worse the better the audio equipment, and any music that’s been involved in the the loudness wars will suffer from the same problem.

    It’s not all bad, certainly, but music that’s been tweaked to sound really loud on clothes shops’ PAs, Capital FM and YouTube is not music that’s going to enthral you with its subtlety and grasp of dynamics. For the overwhelming majority of popular music, moving to 24-bit won’t make the slightest bit of difference.

    What we’re seeing here is an old music business strategy: take what you’ve got and try and sell it in a slightly different wrapper. It worked with CD, so they tried it again with DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD. That wasn’t so successful, and I’m willing to bet that 24-bit downloads won’t be either.

    I blogged a link to some graphs about the decline of the music business a few days ago. The message from the numbers is simple: the music business profits depend on albums, and nobody’s really fussed about albums any more. Boosting bitrates – and upping prices – won’t do anything to change that.

  • It’s the end of the recorded music business as we know it

    Not a surprise, I know, but the graphs in this article are still eye-opening. Short version: the recorded music business makes its money from albums; people don’t buy albums any more.

  • If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like

    Long-time readers will know of my borderline-obsessive love of Irish band The 4 of Us, so I’m quite delighted to see that the solo album from their singer, Brendan Murphy, has made its way to iTunes. If you like low-key, late-night acoustic songs, it’s definitely worth your time. More details and previews here.

  • Content farms and Google results

    A wee piece by me on Techradar:

    Google’s success has created a new kind of industry. Content farms are firms who produce what Google’s Matt Cuts calls “shallow or low-quality content”.

    Cutts is a funny guy, and his screenshots show the parody site The Content Farm, but the point is a serious one: often, when you search Google for something, you don’t necessarily get content that’s been created for you; you get content that’s been created for Google’s search algorithm.

    There’s nothing unethical or illegal about content farms – they’re not wicked, or dishonest, or evil – but their prominence in Google results means they can be an enormous pain in the backside.

  • Nokia. Connecting (Microsoft) people

    I wrote about Nokia’s fading fortunes a few months ago and got into trouble for suggesting Nokia should embrace another OS – Android, say, or Windows Phone 7. Today, Nokia announced that Windows Phone 7 would be the central plank of its smartphone strategy. Naturally I think that’s a great idea, and I explain why over on Techradar.

    Nothing in tech is certain, of course, and the whole partnership could end in disaster. But I’m really excited about this. Nokia makes stunning hardware, and Windows Phone 7 is a really nice mobile OS.

  • If I were the sort of person who used the phrase “paradigm shift”, I’d use it here

    Me: why the HP TouchPad is another nail in Windows’ coffin.

    What’s happening is incredible, and it’s happening incredibly quickly. Until very recently, personal computing generally meant Windows running on Intel, with a smattering of AMD, Linux and Mac OS X to keep the internet in arguments. Now, though, personal computing often doesn’t involve traditional computers at all.

  • Bye bye Microsoft Word

    I’ve been using Word on the Mac for a long time, but since Office 2008 I’ve encountered an extremely annoying problem: documents get corrupted. It doesn’t happen very often, and it appears to be connected to the Send File button: when I send a file by email, Word does something to the document that means it can’t be opened: it’s not a valid file any more. It won’t work in Word for the Mac, Word on PC, any Office clones or anything else. It’s a dead file.

    It’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world: I can retrieve the emailed copy from my Sent email folder and resurrect it.

    Still, it’s annoying enough that I was ready to buy the New! Improved! Microsoft Office for Mac to stop it happening again.

    Unfortunately the problem hasn’t gone away in the new version; it’s got worse. Yesterday I was working across eight Word documents. Nothing fancy, just plain text. Several thousand words in all. And Word corrupted six of them beyond repair (I don’t have Time Machine running at the moment so I couldn’t roll back time, unfortunately). The files couldn’t be moved, or copied, or emailed, or anything. They were completely and utterly screwed.

    It’s a known problem, it seems, and it *may* have something to do with unusual characters in filenames or folder paths. However, my documents didn’t have unusual characters in filenames or folder paths, and no other program on my Mac does this. Just Word.

    I like Word, but I can’t have the electronic equivalent of a family dog that mauls the kids. So it’s off to Pages I go.

  • Reports of the Kindle app’s demise have been somewhat exaggerated

    The hills are alive with the sound of tech writers going “OMG! Apple will kill the Kindle app!” I’m not convinced.

    The bit about Apple refusing to “let customers to have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store” isn’t a quote from Sony. It isn’t included in the Sony Reader blog’s explanation either.

    Since such a policy would make Apple look quite exceptionally evil, you’d think Sony might have mentioned it.

    I think the NYT is right and wrong at the same time. When it says Sony users can’t access content they’ve already bought, it’s perfectly correct: if you can’t have the app, you can’t have any content that’s delivered via that app.

    Apple hasn’t banned the content. It’s rejected the app.

    Of course, the fact that so many people think it will kill the Kindle app doesn’t say much for Apple’s public image…