DIGITAL DEVELOPMENTS

I’ve often criticised the way iTunes and the digital music revolution of recent years has shafted us, offering the convenience of downloading our music but reducing the quality of the product: even worse, we don’t even really own it any more – the content is leased without recourse to a high quality hard copy as back up.

Just this last week, however, I’ve made a few very pleasant discoveries.

I heard that venerable art-punk stalwarts Wire had released a new album, and went to their website to read about it. There I noticed that they were offering it for sale not only as a CD and a vinyl album, but also as a high-quality digital download. £6.99 and you can get the songs delivered to your computer in pristine FLAC form.

What does this mean? Well, these files are lossless (unlike shitty MP3′s), and can play ‘as is‘ with good audio/video players such as VLC, but even better, they can be converted to WAV files as well and burned onto a CD, as well as imported into iTunes as MP3′s at whatever bit-rate you choose : in other words, you have the best of both worlds. And, no shitty DRM anti-pirating bullshit which assumes you’re a criminal and denies you your rights to the goods you’ve purchased.

This finally makes downloading music a viable proposition as far as I’m concerned, in which you can directly support artists you like, pay less, and get quality product in return. Now compare this to iTunes, where most downloads are still offered only as laughably piss-poor 128Mbps MP3′s with no hard copy at all and at a higher price.

Next I went over to Richard D James‘ Rephlex Records site to find a similar kind of set up: 30 minute EPs going for £3.50, downloaded as CD-quality WAV files – yay! Needless to say I filled my cart with techno goodies, a very satisfied customer indeed.

Clearly this is the route for established artists and punters alike, a system which cuts out crap like iTunes completely, and rightly so. Shame on you, Apple, for getting it so wrong and morphing from a cool stylish outfit into a hard-nosed corporate behemoth.

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I also blogged recently concerning my misgivings with regard to Amazon’s Kindle. Well, as I suspected, that particular device has been entirely discarded and now lives on the arm of my sofa under a pile of miscellaneous crap. Not only did it not win me over to eBooks, it met with an amusing but somehow appropriate accident and is now inoperative.

A week or so ago I thought I’d bring it out to show to a friend. Somehow, during the course of a long cafe chat session, I managed to briefly sit on it. It looked fine after my arse had made contact, and there was no visible damage, so once home I chucked it irreverently into a corner somewhere.

A few days later I thought I’d try to use it again, only to discover that the top half of the display had vanished, thus rendering it completely useless. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say…

 

MEET THE NEW CAT, SAME AS THE OLD CAT?

Has there ever been a computer operating system upgrade that did not in some way monkey with your settings and generally screw things up?

Apple launched the 10.6 version of its operating system three days ago, and like a true geek I immediately went out and bought it.

"I've come to monkey with your system..."

Now here’s the good news – it only cost about $30, the disc is multilingual and also contains a full version of the operating system, not just the new bits, and the installation was painless, requiring neither product key nor authentication.

Compared with the crap you have to put up with when dealing with Microsoft this is all very refreshing. You are trusted and not automatically assumed to be a criminal.

Now the bad: well, nothing on the scale of past Windows disasters and nightmares, but why can they not produce an upgrade which leaves your settings alone?

Most people like to personalise their machines and have them set up in ways which suit their usage, and after a couple of years that’s a pretty intricate network of customisations, the upsetting of which can be very vexing indeed.

So, Snow Leopard. What has this beast done to offend me? Two small but annoying things, and one big pain in the arse.

This cat has had its paws in the display settings. Starting up Firefox, the letters have all gone tiny, a serious problem if your eyesight is as bad as mine. Sounds like a snap to remedy, huh? No! I go into the preferences and simply increase the size of the fonts, but this just causes a weird pattern of behaviour in which the pages start out with tiny letters, then suddenly shift to the bigger ones and vice versa, for no apparent reason. Annoying as hell!

Next up, upon booting up the big cat for the first time I notice that the screen looks incredibly dull and dark. Finding the brightness control, I see that it’s reset itself to the minimum. Fine, I can just bring up the brightness level, but no setting looks right, and I can’t remember where I had it previously. Why did they have to monkey with it?

"I've come to Snow Leopard with your system..."

Even worse, but probably something I can get used to, is the fact that the colours look all wrong. Everything is darker. Somewhere deep down in the list of changes on the Apple website they mumble something about changing the gamma settings for the displays. Well, thanks a bundle, it was fine as it was!

Now the big weakness of the Mac, for me at least, is that it has been so stable and hassle-free over the last couple of years that I’ve never had to learn how to go into the guts of the beast to tweak things. Windows was so totally crap that you had to do this all the time so that it became second nature, but now I’m at a loss in this respect.

Europa Universalis III

The big annoyance is a very Microsoft-ish one: my favourite game, Europa Universalis 3, no longer works!!! This game has been my salvation over the last few months, and is vital to my existence. OK, this might not seem like such a big deal, but see, most niche games don’t get the luxury of a Mac version, so this is a rarity indeed. Doubtless the company behind the port will eventually put out a patch, but still, a junkie needs his fix, right?

OK, so apart from these issues everything else is working fine, but the question I find myself asking is what was the point of this upgrade? The hype has it that it is more of an underlying code rewrite aimed at speed and efficiency than a feature-packed bonanza. Well, in all honesty I haven’t noticed any differences in speed at all, and the only new features in evidence are a slight change to some minor aspects of the interface and an updated version of the video player Quicktime, which appears to be just as useless as its predecessor (get the infinitely better freeware VLC player for all your video needs, folks).

So there we have it – an utterly pointless upgrade from my point of view, and one with annoying issues which make me wish I’d never installed it.

And guess what – you can’t uninstall it, once it’s on (not without freshly installing the previous OS, anyway).

So, if you’re thinking of upgrading, first check the lists of incompatible software that are around, and perhaps hold off until the problems have been ironed out, since it looks as if us early adoptors are going to be doing the beta testing for Apple.

GOODBYE, WINDOWS! (Sort of)

I’ve had three computers since 1998, the year in which I entered the wonderful time-wasting world of the PC. Although that’s not strictly true, since as a young lad I was there in the early days of Sinclair ZX 80s and dodgy Texas Instruments models, programming primitive beat boxes and rudimentary games before giving it all up for over a decade.

Anyhow, that’s an average of one computer every three years, so of course, last December it was time for my lovingly hand-crafted AMD-powered hi-tech bundle of cyber-goodness to cough, splutter, and go belly up. Fortunately, the cough and the splutter were picked up by my radar-like sound engineer’s lugholes, and a Big Hard Drive was hastily connected to the shuddering white beast, with just enough time to pull the entire contents from the smoldering ruins, thus preventing a serious descent into mental disarray for your humble narrator.

Oh Lordy, three weeks without a computer! Three weeks of having to sneak in all awkward-like to ‘Media Cafes‘ and book a couple of hours in a tiny overheated cubicle among fat pimply adolescents whacking off to jazz flicks and cheapskate fresh-off-the-boat gaijin furiously emailing their mate Baz in Spalding. And, unprotected by lovingly trained Beyesian filters, having to sift through 500 plus missives concerning the size of my manhood before accidentally erasing the one ‘real’ email which was probably offering me some fabulously remunerated sinecure in Tahiti.

But a feeling had been a-growing these past years. Already an avid iPod devotee before the stinking herds were let in on the secret, I had begun to cast admiring glances at the Apple products, their sleek and sexy forms calling out suggestively for a sea change. Or was that a sex change – my typing skills are rudimentary, dear people.

And then in a rush it was upon me and I could contain myself no more. Why avail myself of a reeking ugly and cheap Dell PC, when I could solve my computer woes by plunging in at the deep end and going all Mac? Why go through all that hassle with language-specific Windoze operating systems and heinous activations when a multilingual non-phoning home Apple product would do the job, and look much more coffee table too?

In short, it was the perfect opportunity to make the switch – the sexy new iMac had just been unleashed along with the new Leopard operating system which seemed slick and user-friendly, and then I discovered that the new Intel-based Macs allowed a dual boot with Windoze which would mean that all my nerdy wargames could still be enjoyed on the new Apple rig! Yippee!

And so now, dear readers, I type this upon my 2.6Ghz dual core CPU 2GB RAM 20″ shiny screened iMac, wirelessly connected to the internet, smiling smugly in a slate grey Armani jacket as I find myself part of that small but growing band of creative cognoscenti who have thrown off the shackles of the Gates and are now basking in the brushed aluminium glow of the Jobs (so to speak).

Hallelujah!