Paul Howard

tagging problems pretty much solved

Posted by Paul Howard - 20/02/08 at 08:02:26 pm

A few days ago I posted saying that I was in two minds about local tagging as the tags didn’t get copied up to various online services.

Well, today I noticed that an updated Picasa Uploader that was released last October now adds the ability for you to duplicate iPhoto tags (or keywords as they call them) into Picasa Web Albums.

I tested it out and it works very well. Nice one Google.

itunes tv series too expensive

Posted by Paul Howard - 17/02/08 at 11:02:29 pm

With the updated Apple TV more and more people are going to want to start watching TV/films via the Internet rather than using traditional media such as DVD.

I even attached an older, G4 powered, mac mini to my TV this weekend and have been copying over ripped DVDs to it so I can get the boxes out of my living room.

Just out of curiosity I went to the Apple store today to have a look at the price of UK TV shows. Let’s just say I was not impressed with what I found.

As an example, let’s take The West Wing season 2. Amazon has the DVDs for £17.97 while the Apple iTunes store has the same series for a whopping £31.99, which is just madness.

Why does Apple insist on charging such ludicrous prices? I can understand putting a premium on their hardware but downloads of a TV show?

If they want people to stop buying physical media and trust them to deliver good quality content, the first thing they have to do is make sure that the pricing of their downloads reflects real world pricing.

enhance your n95 while driving

Posted by Paul Howard - 15/02/08 at 08:02:39 pm

I’ve been using Nokia’s flagship n95 for a few months now and up until recently I have been using it with a bluetooth headset while in the car.

About two weeks ago my old, and up till now trustworthy, Motorola headset finally gave in and decided to hold no more than 20-30 minutes worth of charge. At the same time my wife was looking at getting a cheap sat nav unit and an MP3 player to use in her car. The obvious answer for me was to give her my ipod nano and my old sat nav and to use the n95 for both of these tasks in may car.

The first thing I had to do was get a universal car kit for the n95. All it needed to to was hold the phone. I managed to pick one up on Amazon for about £5 including shipping. Not bad at all.

I already had a decent FM transmitter so my setup was complete.

Having used my old ipod with the transmitter I was fully aware of the quality and what to expect. What I did forget is that once you plug headphones, or in this case the transmitter, into the n95 it takes over all of the audio.

It was great using the n95 as my mp3 player, synced with itunes using the excellent synctunes app. What I didn’t expect was that when the n95 was in sat nav mode that the audio would come through the FM transmitter too. The result was excellent. Instead of having to listen closely in case the sat nav gave me directions when a loud bit of music was playing, the sat nav spoke directly over the music. Very cool indeed.

Now for the best part. If a call comes in while you have the transmitter attached, the callers voice is piped through your speakers too. So it turns the transmitter/car cradle into a fully working car kit for your phone.

So rather than looking for a new bluetooth headset I am just working with my cheap cradle and transmitter. You do lose the privacy element of taking calls with a headset but I’ll take full handsfree kit over a BT headset any day.

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