recent things of minor awesomeness

• Costco's super-giant pack of paper towels no longer has each individual paper towel roll shrinkwrapped for retail sale inside of a giant shrinkwrapper. I wonder what genius figured that one out. Forget the environmental benefit and savings to the manufacturer in materials and incremental shipping cost. Now I don't have to tear into one every time we run out.
  
• More flavors for Fiber One bars. Really, I love these for the taste, not just the fibery goodness (don't tell John McEnroe.)
  
• Nightshot video cameras, X10 wireless video senders, Picture-in-Picture, a PowerBook, and ustream.tv
• Scrabulous
• The fact that I have 90% of the new iPhone features when I updated my iPod Touch with the new generation of software. That never happens.
• GPS provided by Mr. T
• Google Alerts
• Thanks to twitterbook, cronjob.de, net2ftp.com, and e-rice.net, my "status" is everywhere whenever I update Facebook.
  
• Sleep

(I told you it was minor awesomeness.)

Oh, and if you're a regular AdamTV viewer, please know that he's going on summer hiatus for a little while. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming as soon as possible.

between a rock and iPod place

Apple's big iPod announcements today all seem to have a "throw them a bone" factor involved. What Apple wants is to give you a "phone-less iPhone" with a ton of storage, but flash memory prices haven't caved to the point where they can do that. So what do they do for this Christmas? Flashy shuffle colors, a pudgy little feature-laden nano, the "old" iPod with ludicrous amounts of storage, and the "phoneless" iPhone with double the flash storage of the iPhone, sure to tick off hundreds of recent iPhone purchasers who didn't really really want the phone, and are now slaves to AT&T.

Where's the "iPod Touch" with the 160GB drive? I'm sure folks wouldn't mind a slightly weightier and thicker device that could store 3400 hours of music.

the original iPod, c. 1980

This prototype music player is part of the DigiBarn Computer Museum's collection of computational artifacts.

I guess it fit the notion of a "portable music player" when the notion of a "portable stereo" was this.

Powered by ScribeFire.

totally ripped

The project is complete. Last CD ripped into iTunes: U2 "Please" (the single.) Now our entire library of CDs is sync-able to our iPod.

Oh, did I mention that we got a new iPod? After a couple of great years of service, our 40GB iPod photo gave up the ghost with a clicking hard drive. We decided to replace it with the new 80GB 5.5 generation model. It's so pretty. Right now, we have 34.43 GB of music on it.

Also, I got a deal on Toast 8, so we can move Tivo shows to the iPod. Look for the other 40GB-ish (after formatting) to be filled up quick.