Tag Archives: iPhone

Olive O4HD

John | 30 January, 2011 - 12:27 am

If one has been collecting CDs for as long I have (about 25 years), the collection can grow to unmanageable proportions. I have CDs in various plastic cabinets, and on shelves and in piles scattered throughout 3 rooms in my unit, and even in places I’d forgotten that I’d stored CDs – until I did a thorough search last week. My concerns over the years have been that I have no idea where to find most of the CDs if I want to play a particular one, so it’s too daunting to do a search. I find that getting up to put on a CD and changing it when it finishes, is tiresome, so I don’t do it often (and especially in the case of works that spread across several CDs. And perhaps the biggest concern of all, at my age, is that I will probably never get to hear most of my CDs again. It’s just too hard: and it’s not so easy and convenient to play them that I’ll do it because I can, and can quickly and easily explore the depths of my collection.

Enter the second exciting gadget I came across on Thursday. In this case I read about it in an article in The Age Green Guide headed “Music lovers don’t cut corners” (see featured image).  For the record, I didn’t read the article in the physical newspaper.  I read it on my iPad in the digital edition, which is a 100% facsimile of the actual newspaper.

I’ll quote parts of the article that aroused my interest:

Music lovers — those who can pick Pavarotti in 1965 from Pavarotti in 1985 — have always had a love/hate relationship with iPods and the electronic music storage they represent.  Most of them wouldn’t touch an iPod with a five-metre baton.

This is because the signal is compressed so more music can be squeezed onto the hard drive and in this compression process, much of the original signal is deleted, especially in the upper range. The music sounds similar, yet is not the same.   It sounds as if it’s all there and yet it no longer brings tears to your eyes. All the nuance has been lost.

But what music lovers secretly like about iPods is their convenience.  An album, or a particular track, can be found in seconds and played immediately.

The music is categorised and indexed automatically. And it’s all in one place.

Now those serious about their music can have it all; the music quality of a CD with the convenience of an iPod.  Modern solid-state hard drives have the capacity to make electronic music storage a viable option for people who refuse to compromise on sound quality.

The unit is shown above.  Here’s a further description:

Store up to 20,000 high-resolution HD tracks (6000 CDs) in 24-bit on this award winning music server – with more than 250 times the resolution of CDs, you’ll hear the HD difference immediately. Experience it right out of the box, the Olive O4HD includes over an hour of music with 12 of the best Chesky Records’ HD Tracks for Free!

Everything from 24-bit HD files to 16-bit converted CDs will be at your fingertips. Convenient storage, easy touchscreen access and the ability to play it all in any room of your home with the addition of an Olive 2 (see below). Now you’ll enjoy your music collection more than ever.

You can even turn your screen into an oversized color display and use the Olive remote control to see music details or select songs from across the room. It’s a great alternative to navigating with the touchscreen or our iPhone App.

Why does it sound so good?

The Olive O4HD will deliver exceptional sound quality from all of your digital music sources. Maximize your signal transfer with the 24k gold RCA connectors and use the Olive O4HD as an outboard DAC. With 24-bit/192kHz oversampling, noise and distortion are ultra low resulting in incredible purity in both high frequencies and low-level detail.

A quote from a review:

Exceptional sound; approachable and easy to use; quality build and finish; sheer value…this is 21st century hi-fi: the Olive O4HD is superb to live with and listen to’ (What Hi-Fi magazine February 2010)

All this plus a free iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app to control playback (as well as the supplied remote control).

The Olive O4HD has a wonderful final trick up it’s sleeve.  You can add a slave to every room in the house where you have a system through which you can play audio – and you can do it wirelessly with your Wifi network.  Wunderbar!

For this feature you need an Olive Melody 2 in each room where you want it.

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A New Interest – but for how long?

John | 1 September, 2010 - 12:54 am

Late Sunday night, for some unknown reason, I bought a crossword puzzle app for my iPad.  I’ve no idea what brought this on, because I’ve always been hopeless at doing crossword puzzles and I’ve therefore had no interest in them.

The thing is that I’m having a fresh look at crosswords now that I have an iPad and iPhone that have apps that can help solve clues – such as dictionaries that can do wild card searches, Google and Wikipedia apps.

I’m only one day into this new interest and I’m not sure how long it will last, or how long I’ll let it last.  I spent a large part of today involved doing crosswords in three trial apps, instead of spending the day as planned.   The New York Times app puzzle for yesterday is shown above.  This is a free app, but after 7 days you have to subscribe to get puzzles for the app.  This is typical of all newspaper crosswords to access them online.

In the past I’ve never been able to do crossword puzzles, probably because I’d never thought about why they are called puzzles and why the Across and Down clues are called “clues”.   I think I’d assumed the clues were just a list of general knowledge questions to which I had to provide answers, if I knew them.

No wonder I had so much trouble trying to solve them.  I could only do the entries which were fairly straight questions.

I’m now starting to get the hang of the general idea, but I have lots to learn, and I’ve fund that as with playing Hangman, I have to become more lateral in my thinking.  For example, one clue I encountered today was “Editor’s strikes (5)”.  My initial thoughts were that it might have something to do with an editors strike in the USA.  Then I decided it was more likely to be marks that an editor makes on drafts.  But I had no idea what any such marks were called.  After a time, I completed adjoining parts of the puzzle (on my iPhone) that gave me the last 3 letters of the word – ..UTS – so I did lots of wild card searches and couldn’t come up with a word that worked.  Later on I’d narrowed it to – .OUTS – but my many wild card searches still didn’t come up with a word that worked with the clue.   I should have paid more attention to the clue, and the word “strikes”.

Just imagine an editor reading a draft article and he makes a strike.  It’s not a small correction or change, but a strike with his pen.   Try it.  You are the editor and your left hand’s palm is the page, and your right hand holds the pen.  Make an editing strike to a paragraph on the page.   How would you describe it?  You crossed something out.   The plural form is cross outs.  And how do you mark a cross on a voting paper, survey etc.  With and X.   The answer:  XOUTS

As I said, I’ve got lots to learn about crossword puzzles and lateral  thinking; let alone even thinking of trying a cryptic crossword puzzle.

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New iPhone Apps

John | 7 June, 2010 - 11:47 pm

Today is a great day to write about some iPhone apps, because Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, announced the iPhone 4 today.  It’s a sensational update, and the good news is that the new iOS 4 software will be a free update for 3G and 3GS iPhones.

It might seem a little odd, or at least conflicting, that I’m writing about the new iPhone apps I bought last Saturday night, on my blog pages, when I have a page dedicated to iPhone apps on my home website.  The difference is that in my blog posts I mostly write about current or recent happenings and thoughts, such as the purchase of two new iPhone apps a few days ago.  By contrast, in the iPhone Apps page on my home website, I’ve mostly written about apps after I’ve used them for many months and find them invaluable, or especially interesting (such as the Remote control for iTunes on the computer).

The thumbnail image for this post is a scan of the front cover of the Mark Bittman book “How to Cook Everything” which I’ve had since it was first published in 1998.  It’s a big book – 944 pages.

Mark Bittman is a columnist for The New York Times who writes under the heading of “The Minimalist.”  You can read about him on his blog at http://markbittman.com.

In the past year or so when I’ve seen his book on the shelves at Borders and other bookshops I’d noticed that the cover was now red instead of yellow, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.

Well, not until last Saturday night, when I discovered that the Mark Bittman book is available as an app on the iPhone.

It’s not the yellow cover book that I bought in 1998.  It’s the 2008 completely revised 10th Anniversary 2nd edition, with a red cover – and 1056 pages.  There are whole chapters of the 1998 book that are not in the 2008 book – such as the chapter about Beverages and other drinks.

You can read more about Mark Bittman at the New York Times website at

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/mark_bittman/index.html

* trying recipes

* app features such as search, filters and shopping list

The iPhone app is great and a delight to use, and it has features that the books can’t have, such as searches with filtering, and a built-in timer in the recipes.  When the recipe calls for you to heat the frypan for one minute, you click on the time in the recipe,  and up comes a timer set for 1 minute.  The timer alarm sound is worth the price of admission.  A very useful feature is that if you’d like to cook a recipe that sounds tempting, you can click on an icon to add its ingredients to a shopping list.

So far I’ve tried three recipes.  One was for fried eggs, which I’ve been cooking for 45 years, but Mark Bittman’s way of doing it was different to the way I’ve always fried eggs in the past.  It’s such a simple dish, and I’ve always loved bacon and eggs for breakfast since I was a child (when Mum did the cooking).  But in my retirement I’ve only cooked bacon and eggs a few times a year because it has always given me indigestion for a few hours and has tended to ruin my day.  I always vow never to have it again for breakfast, but months later I forget the discomfort and try it again.  Perhaps it’s the way I’ve fried the eggs, so I’ll try it again one day using the Mark Bittman method, as the result of my first trial was very pleasing and tasty.

The second iPhone app I bought last Saturday was Things.  It’s a task manager with a difference.  It’s also a project manager, in which your tasks can be broken down into all the steps needed to implement the project.  Things is the iPhone app of the week on the iTunes App Store this week.  However, it’s the type of app where I wouldn’t post a review until I’ve been using it for many months to see if I’ve found it genuinely useful – or whether I don’t bother looking at it and have, in effect, I’ve stopped using it.  For example, MS Outlook has a To Do list section which I entered all my task into last year – and this week was the first time this year that I looked at it.

Tonight I used my Kuhn Rikon  frypan pressure cooker to cook rice in 4 minutes, and then use it to cook stir fry beef and vegetables.  It’s so convenient and time saving.  It reminds me that one day I must write a blog post about pressure cooking.  Perhaps I should make a note about it in Things.  [superemotions file="icon_smile.gif" title="Smile"]

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Learning Italian 2

John | 14 March, 2010 - 12:00 am

Colin was spot on in his comment to my last post when he wrote that learning a language from a desk calendar was novel. What I didn’t mention in my post was that the desk calendar not only gives a new Italian word every day (with a guide to pronouncing it), but it then uses the word in a short sentence in Italian, with English translation.

I soon found that I needed an English Italian dictionary to look up the words used in the example sentences. The English translations were not always all that helpful. The quickest solution was to check out the apps on the iPhone to find a good dictionary, and my first choice was the MSDict Italian Dictionary. From what I could see of it on iTunes it looked the most promising, so I bought it. I had no idea that I had bought the prestigious Oxford Paravia English Italian dictionary 2nd edition which is some 2,800 pages in print. It’s a large book costing up to $150.

However, I found that the Oxford Paravia didn’t have a lot of the Italian words used in the sentences on the desk calendar. And it didn’t have “dorma” from the aria “Nessun Dorma”. So I decided to buy the Collins English Italian dictionary (the big one) for the iPhone. This also didn’t seem to have any of the words missing from the Oxford Paravia, but it rather oddly always came up with a positive result to searches for these words, but with a different word.

Eventually, I learned that most dictionaries only list the infinitive form of verbs as headwords, and not any of the conjugated forms. The words that I couldn’t find in the Oxford Paravia were verbs, but they were not in the infinitive form – so the Oxford search couldn’t help me find “dorma.”

What I didn’t understand when I bought the Collins is that it has a feature which lists all the conjugated tenses and forms of verbs, indexed, so when I search for “dorma” it brings up the verb headword. Dormire.

Once I figured this out, it was a major breakthrough, and the big Collins on the iPhone remains a very useful dictionary to find the infinitive form of a verb when I only have a conjugated form to work with.

The verb conjugation issue led me to buying “501 Italian verbs” so that I’d be able to easily check out all the forms of the main verbs, together with examples of them in use.

That’s enough for now.   There’s more to come

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My New Interest – Eat Real Food

John | 15 February, 2010 - 11:39 pm

A few weeks ago when the Apple iPad was announced, a friend of mine showed some interest in it as a way of buying and reading books.  She’s an avid reader of books, and I got the impression that her main interest was that electronic books don’t take up any space in your home or add to the clutter.  They’re also cheaper and more eco-green-friendly.

I’ve been reading books on my iPhone since I bought it in November 2008.  In fact, in the past year, it’s the first time I’ve read any novels since my teens, at home in Mt Gambier, before television.  There is one exception, The Da Vinci Code, which I read when it was the book of the day.  I also read two small novels (for ladies) written by a lady friend of a friend of mine.

The iPhone has opened up my reading because I’m retired and like to have a variety of ways to fill in my day, apart from things I have to do because I don’t have a wife.  The iPhone app written up on my website provides a selection of 200 classic books that now sell for A$2.49 for the entire collection.  When I bought it, I paid A$12.99 for only 50 books. But at least I haven’t been charged for the updates that have brought it to 200 books.

I also think that my new interest in reading novels is also partly due to the fact that my home in Melbourne does not have lighting that suits reading for pleasure – but reading on the iPhone has it’s own lighting, and you can set everything to make it easy to read.

Anyway my friend’s interest in the iPad for reading books lead me to discover Kindle for the iPhone, and I couldn’t resist giving it a try.  The Kindle app is free, and it makes it easy to buy modern books that are not in the public domain, which you can buy and download from Amazon.  I bought two books, and the one I’m going to write about is “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan (a journalist).

I’m not going to review the book, or even tell you what it’s about.  You can find all this out for yourself by looking up the book on Amazon.com and read some of the pages, and readers’ reviews.

What I am going to tell you is that reading the book has had an impact on me.  The Publishers Weekly describes the book as a “treatise” on the industrialised Western diet and its detrimental effects on our health and eating culture.  It is  particularly aimed at the American food industry, nutritionists and the processed foods that many American apparently eat; but much of it applies to Australia and the food we eat.

You only have to look around our supermarkets and perhaps in your own pantry and fridge to see many examples of processed food.  Did your bread come already sliced and packed?  It only takes flour, water, yeast and salt to make a dough from which a loaf of bread is baked.   If your bread came already packed, try counting the number of ingredients in your bread.  How many of them do you would your grandmother’s generation recognise as food?

When reading the book, I wondered if it is a work to be taken seriously, or if it was a journalist’s rant about a subject in which he has no credentials or formal training.  Should I ignore the advice of my doctor to avoid butter and only have skim milk; or go back to eating butter and full cream milk because they contain more nutrition, and butterfat which Pollan says helps the body absorb the nutrients.

Pollan goes into detail about the milling of flour and the industrialisation of bread making in the 1800′s, with the removal of many of the nutrients and vitamins from the flour.  But I did some research and I think he writes about this piece of history with a slant towards the general thrust of the book, rather than as an objective observation.  I understand that the industrial revolution saw a move in the population from rural areas to the cities and jobs in the factories.  This created problems in feeding the city populations, and this lead to innovation, in a time before anyone know of the existence of vitamins and nutrients.  White flour. I suppose, was seen as good flour that didn’t turn rancid.  In his more recent book “Food Rules” Pollan warns against white bread and states “the whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

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The impact of the iPad

John | 29 January, 2010 - 7:41 pm

The iPad has now been in the news for a couple of days, so it’s time I made a few observations. My first sight of it was when I got an email from Apple  introducing the iPad.  The following image was at the top of the email, and it gave me concerns about the impact the iPad might have on bookshops that you can walk into, and the online newspapers and magazines that are currently free.

The iPad looks quite good, and it seems harmless enough, but why did Apple choose to show The New York Times on the iPad screen in the introduction to the long awaited Apple tablet.  I”m sure Steve Jobs would have approved the choice.

An article in The Age online newspaper stated today:

The Apple chief gave credit to Amazon for doing a great job, adding: ”[But] we’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit further.” Books – including textbooks – will be able to be downloaded from Apple’s new online iBookstore shop and read using a new application.

Mr Jobs said five of the world’s leading publishers – Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan – had already signed up and that more would follow.

Among other content partners in the presentation was The New York Times, which demonstrated a rich and interactive digital version of the paper, using an iPad application.

The paper’s head of digital operations, Martin Nisenholtz, said he was delighted to help ”pioneer the next version of digital journalism”.

Note the reference to  The New York Times being a content partner involved in the presentation by Steve Jobs and the comment by the paper’s head of digital operations.   I’m sure the newspaper didn’t come on board at the last minute before the presentation.   But I haven’t seen any mention this week of a report last week:

(Reuters) – The New York Times Co Chairman Arthur Sulzberger is close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, New York Magazine reported on its Web site citing people familiar with internal deliberations.

TECHNOLOGY

A final decision could come within days and a plan could be announced in a matter of weeks, Nymag.com reported.

“It will likely be months before the Times actually begins to charge for content, perhaps sometime this spring,” the report said.

Apple Inc’s tablet computer is rumored to launch on January 27, and sources speculate that Sulzberger will strike a content partnership for the new device, which could dovetail with the paid strategy, the magazine reported over the weekend.

“We’ll announce a decision when we believe that we have crafted the best possible business approach. No details till then,” the report quoted a Times spokeswoman as saying.

The New York Times went through a period where it charged a subscription fee which I thought was far too high in $A terms  for a newspaper that I might only visit now and again, because it’s free.  It might be different if I lived in New York.

The question is:  Were the NYT considerations to start charging for access to its website because of the impact that they thought the iPad would have on readers?

There is a very interesting article in The Age here about what former NSW premier (and a director of Dymocks bookstores) has to say about the effect of digital reading devices on book sellers in Australia, because of the over-pricing of books here.   Some of the reader’s comments are very interesting, as there is a discussion about the type of screen that the iPad uses compared with the Kindle and its readability and effect on eyesight.  Mind you, those comments are all “off post” (not what the article is about), so while I’d take all their comments into account, I wouldn’t base a purchase decision on them.

Former NSW premier Bob Carr says the arrival of digital book reading devices such as Apple’s iPad make it imperative for the Federal Government to lift bans on book sellers from buying cheap stock overseas.

Posted in Gadgets, General, Media | Tagged , , | 4 Comments