Paladin Defender

The iPod and the geek: Credit where credit is due

2009-10-21T19:40:42Z

My iPod developed a bug with the headphone jack, whereby I could only hear in one ear. Lots of wiggling of the headphone plug occasionally brought back sound in both ears, but it was only temporary. So I reported the problem to Apple, and a day later, a pre-paid UPS envelope was sitting on my (proverbial) doorstep. I put the iPod in the envelope and sent it off, and three days later, I have a shiny new iPod! Credit where credit is due - the Apple repair service (within the one-year warranty period) is first class, and I hadn't even bought AppleCare or any of their extended warranty packages.

Plunging into photo albums

2009-09-07T14:45:04Z

Inspired by a colleague and a gift I recently made for my sister, I have decided to try making a photo album of a recent holiday, using an online photo-printing service (one of those that provides software to design the photo album on the PC, and then have it printed). I'm getting to grips with the software, which (so far) works very well, but I've found that I am singularly uninspired when it comes to design. I don't know how much to add, how much to write, whether to add stuff other than photos (maps?), or if there's anything else I should be aware / be wary of. For instance, how clearly does text show up on a cluttered background (the software I use doesn't support semi-transparent backgrounds for text boxes, boo-hoo)?

Since I'm certain that I'm behind the times here (as recently as eighteen months ago, I finished my last photo album - done with glue and cardboard), and that many of you have already made photo albums the 21st century way: do you have any tips or suggestions for me? Share your wisdom :)

The iPod and the geek: after the honeymoon

2009-08-25T15:50:14Z

Three months of iPod touch, and time for some more thoughts.

I bought a rubber protector for the iPod, and it's done a very good job of protecting the somewhat fragile (in that the material tarnishes easily, there is no structual damage to be seen) back of the unit, as well as making the iPod less likely to slide off desks and the like. The iPod has held up very well under daily use of being shoved into pockets, rucksacks and desk drawers, and even getting the occasional spray of sand. There is not a hint of a scratch on the screen, and all the buttons work flawlessly.

I also bought myself a pair of Apple in-ear headphones. The headphones are fairly good and very comfortable, but for me the big selling point was the remote and microphone: it's tiny, yet I can use it to increase and decrease volume, pause/resume music, and skip forward/backwards in my playlist. The microphone picks up sound fairly well, and I can understand myself clearly when I use it to record audio memos. Good design on Apple's part.

A month or so ago, Apple released the 3.0 software version for iPods (and iPhones) - even though it's not free, it brough a whole slew of little improvements which all chalk up plus marks in my book. To highlight a few, there is a "back 30 seconds" button for podcasts, and a system whereby you can change the seeking speed by moving your finger vertically (moving horizontally to seek). It's very intuitive and works great for those hour-long podcasts, where a millimeter of movement would normally equate to five minutes of running time! Something else I noticed only recently (it may or may not have been in 3.0) is that when I resume a podcast or video after having left it for a bit (more than a minute or two), it automatically resumes five seconds or so before the point where it left off, making it easier to remember where you were. Also, from the main menu you can now access a search function which searches the entire contents of your iPod (contacts, songs, videos...), which makes finding things easy. It's little touches like this which speak of the quality of the iPod's design.

Speaking of video, the iPod only supports MPEG-4 and Quicktime Video (of course it does, we can't expect Apple to do anything but say "our way or the highway", now can we?), but some googling found MediaCoder, which transcodes AVI files into MPEG-4 files of the appropriate resolution. Once that's done, loading the videos onto the iPod is fairly easy (after some re-tagging to make sure they are listed under the correct heading). Playback is very smooth and the quality (despite the small screen) is excellent, I have watched a dozen TV episodes and several films on the iPod and I am hooked. I even catch myself wishing my commute was 10 minutes longer so that I could finish watching the episode I'm in the middle of! :) As with podcasts, the iPod remembers the place you left off in each video, so it's easy to start off from where you left off.

Using WiFi with the iPod also works very well. It automatically recognises known WiFi networks and logs you in whenever you're in range. With WiFi I've read my e-mails (using the iPod's e-mail reader), surfed the web (built-in Safari web browser) and updated my apps and podcasts. It all works very well, although I remain to be convinced by the iPod as a serious web-surfing tool; the screen is too small and the controls too slow (compared with mouse-and-keyboard) for anything more than a casual check of the weather forecast. The e-mail interface is decent, if a bit slow in downloading messages initially. It also uses hard-coded IMAP folder names, which is irritating if your e-mail provider uses differently-names folders (so I suddenly found myself with a "sent" and a "sent messages" folder - it took me a day to figure out where the latter had suddenly appeared from).

So I am very happy with my iPod, it's a beautiful little device which does just about everything I need from it (plus a lot more), and does it well. What I am not happy with, at all, is iTunes.

You may have gathered this sentiment from my previous posts on the subject, but some more things have come to light since. Starting with no support for AVI video files - I can understand the reasoning somewhat (AVI is a container format which can be used with any number of video and audio codecs), but at least give us a converter?

Next, audio normalisation - as anyone with a digital music collection drawn from a variety of sources knows, songs can vary greatly in volume (depending on the settings used when encoding the music file). The solution to this is called normalisation, giving all your sound files the same volume. There is a wonderful open standard used by almost everyone, called Replay Gain... everyone, of course, except Apple, who use their own SoundCheck algorithm. Except it's really lousy (peak clipping vs gain control, you can read about it if you want), it's never obvious when it's been run and when not (so I don't know which tracks have been normalised), and, worst of all, it encodes its information in cryptic hexadecimal codes in the audio file metadata. Way to be transparent, Appe - not only do you give us a crappy algorithm when there's a much better (free) standard available, but you stop us from using anything else (as iTunes obviously only recognises its own SoundCheck metatdata and ignores everything else)!

And as a final example (there are more, but I'll leave it at that for today), contacts synching is unreliable. I have yet to figure out what gets synched and what doesn't, as some changes made to contacts get synched back to the computer while others don't; I haven't figured out the pattern yet. Does anyone know more about this?

In conclusion, the iPod is a wonderful piece of equipment, but I am hard-pressed to find a redeeming feature in iTunes. There is nothing it does which some other programme doesn't do better. If the developers of Songbird manage to code (reverse-engineer?) full iPod support into their programme, I'll ditch iTunes like a dead monkey liver full of Ebola virus. Apple, great industrial designers that they are, are just as monopolistic as their friends in Redmont; we may use their products, but heaven forbid we try to use them in a way other than The Apple Way (tm).

How to import podcasts into iTunes

2009-06-13T21:22:25Z

That's it, it's official - I hate iTunes. The number of hoops it makes me jump through to import podcasts already saved on my hard disk (which might not necessarily be downloadable from the internet - for instance, if they are too old to feature in the RSS feeds) is just plain ridiculous. Simply importing the .mp3 file isn't enough, you need to tell iTunes to treat it as a podcast and not as a regular music file. iTunes is obviously living in a bubble - no podcasts exist which are not in the iTunes store.

To do this, you need to set some ID3 tags - nonstandard ones, obviously, so you need a program that can read/write these. I use mp3tag, but anything that can read extended ID3 tags will do.

You then need to set the following tags:

ITUNESPODCAST = 1
ITUNESPODCASTURL = the URL of the podcast's RSS feed

That's the bare minimum for iTunes to properly file it under "podcasts". But if you want everything to work properly, you also need

RELEASETIME = the podcast's release time/date, so that iTunes knows in what order to put your podcasts in. It's in the format YYYY-MM-DD (eg 2009-08-17). You can also include a time, in which case the format is YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ (eg 2009-08-17T06:25:00Z), the Z standing for GMT - but this is optional.
SUBTITLE = the podcast episode's description. Note that this only shows up in iTunes and not on the iPod. Why iTunes doesn't recognise the COMMENT or ITUNESPODCASTDESC fields for this is a mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, if you look at the ID3 tags of files downloaded from the iTunes store, you come across a whole range of mysterious ID3 tags. Of course, it would be far too much to expect Apple to document these, no?

COMMENT ITUNNORM = a long string of hex numbers. Something to do with normalisation?
COMMENT ITUNPGAP = probably related to gapless playback?
ITUNESPODCASTDESC = seems to store a copy of SUBTITLE, but I can't see it being used anywhere in iTunes
ITUNESPODCASTID = this is the URL of the podcast file itself

Is some documentation too much to ask, Apple?

Note that since iTunes only reads in ID3 data when the file is played (or its properties window is opened (right-click -> Get Info), any changes you make to the file's ID3 tags won't appear immediately.

If there was another program which replicated all of iTunes' functionality when it comes to interfacing with my iPod, I would switch to it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, there isn't... and given Apple's obscure and closed architecture, I doubt there will be one anytime soon.

Elections

2009-06-07T13:35:29Z

I voted! I am pleased to report that I experienced no voter intimidation, and saw no evident of ballot-box stuffing or other irregularities.

The iPod and the geek: Actually using it

2009-05-28T13:40:25Z

After all this faff, time to use this thing for real!

The iPod fits comfortably in one hand, I can use it one-handed with no problems (although, if I want to use the more advanced multi-touch, that will need two hands, as I only have one opposable thumb per hand). The shiny metal back of the iPod seems to be very susceptible to smears and scratches (I'll probably get a rubber protector for it), while the screen feels very solid. I like the feel of the hardware buttons (on/off and volume) - they have a good, solid feel to them, are responsive and easy to identify only by touch. I'm glad they added some hardware buttons to the iPod, I would have been irritated to have to unlock the unit and fiddle with the screen just to change the volume. Full marks for that.

The user interface is... glorious. Not only is it really responsive, but the design is slick (can anyone see a pattern here? :) ) and I found almost everything I was looking for within half a minute the first time. The exception to that is a more detailed battery meter (only a tiny icon in the corner of the screen informs me of the state of the battery), but that's hardly a major problem.

Accessing my music worked really well. I can easily switch between selecting by artist, album or song title (although a search feature would have been nice :) ). The fast-forward and reverse were very slow, but I soon found out why: I can do a direct seek by tapping the screen to bring up a slider representing the track, where I can then drag the cursor to the place on the track where I want to listen from. Fabulous! Unlike the W850, the iPod touch had no problems with tracks exceeding 1 hour in length (the W850 would display all tracks longer than 59'59" as having length 00'00", which made seeking difficult).

My fingers being the size of... well, large, I occasionally don't hit what I'm aiming for on the screen (in particular with the on-screen keyboard). However, I think this is more a matter of practice than anything else. The fact the screen reacts only to fingers (and not pens, keys and such) is great as it virtually eliminates the problem of the iPod unlocking itself in my pocket (the screen locks automatically after a minute, or after I briefly press the power button). The UI reacts well to my finger movements, although I don't think I've discovered all the tricks of using it (for instance, I discovered I can delete stuff by sliding my finger on its name left to right...)

I was a little sceptical about the headphones, I've used in-ear headphones for a while now and they always worked very well (especially when walking near roads; the road noise makes listening to podcasts difficult). However, to my surprise, the iPod earphones were pretty decent. Since they sit outside the ear canal, they don't have the same dynamic range as in-ear headphones, but they still did well and sat securely in my ears without falling out. Too bad the standard headphones don't come with a remote or (more important) a microphone - I know that Apple sells these for an exorbitant price, but maybe they can be had elsewhere for less money. I wish Apple had gone the way of Sony and split the remote / microphone from the headphones, allowing me to buy the headphones separately from the remote / microphone - but then they probably wouldn't make such a profit on the headphones, so... (I wonder if anyone is making third-party headphones for the iPod with the remote / microphone? It shouldn't be too hard to reverse-engineer the signals the remote sends to the iPod - and it would free me from the ghastly white headphones which announces to anyone in the vicinity that I have an iPod).

When playing around with it I noticed a wonderful feature - the iPod keeps track of the last place I was for podcasts! Oh happy day, I have been looking for this feature for ages, and didn't even know the iPod had it. It will show where I got to on each podcast, and whether or not I have listened to an episode or not - even if I take a break and listen to some music in the meantime. Full marks to Apple!

I haven't played with the Wi-Fi (and everything that goes with it) yet, but I'm sure that will happen soon!

The iPod and the geek: Plugging in

2009-05-28T12:27:10Z

Right... as per the quickstart manual... "install iTunes, plug iPod into PC, follow instructions on screen".

iTunes... I'm wary. I like my PC to run in very specific ways, and almost always prefer small programs that do one thing without trying to become Your Gateway To Your Music/Data/Whatever. For this reason, iTunes worries me, in the same way that I'm not a fan of Adobe Acrobat, QuickTime¹, RealPlayer or Windows Media Player - they do too much to my system without telling me.

I played around with it for awhile, looking at ways to sync my iPod without having to install iTunes. Several alternatives all failed, and in the end, I gave up and installed iTunes. Grumble grumble. The install went smoothly, but it asked almost no questions (I want programs to ask me before installing stuff on my system - I don't need the service to listen to wireless Apple AirPort speakers, so don't install it, damn it!).

At least, after iTunes implanted itself into my PC, it immediately recognised my iPod... and asked me to register it. The explanation given was vague. I'm sorry, Apple, I don't trust you - so no registration for you until you explain to me² why I should hand over my personal details to you.

iTunes is, no surprise, also very slick - I now see where Songbird (my new, favourite media player) gets its interface from. However, I find that it's often very short on explanations - how, exactly, does it build its "Library"? Why is some of my music displayed in the library and some of it not? Which folders did it check (it claimed to only check ~\My Documents\My Music, but it obviously checked more than that)? How does it distinguish between "podcasts" and "music", and how are they handled differently? Some digging around and experimenting answered some of these questions, but left me with the distinct impression that iTunes was doing an awful lot without telling me... which I'm not too fond of. At least it didn't do what it did to a friend of mine, which was grab her entire music collection, moved it to the iTunes directory, and reorganise it without saying anything.

After plugging in the iPod, iTunes immediately wanted to "synchronise". Fair enough - I started with some music. Ah, you can't sync tracks, you can only synchronise playlists? Okay then, create a playlist with some songs... sync... Wow, the connection is fast! My W850 phone only supports USB 1 (I think - in any case it's ridiculously slow) so that transferring a handful of albums takes half an hour. Not here, in under a minute, everything was synchronised; full marks on that count. iTunes' "smart playlist" function also gets a thumbs-up from me, even if, to use it to its full potential (such as filtering by "number of times played" and "star rating") requires me to switch to iTunes as my primary media player, which I'm not willing to do just yet.

Next up, podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and the W850 is grossly under-equipped to handle them. Not only does it truncate track titles so it's often impossible to tell which episode is which (the screen reads "Amazing Podcast Numbe..." - helpful!), but its sorting algorithm is a mystery, so I can't even rely on it to listen to my podcasts in some sort of order.

But back to the iPod. I have over a GB of podcasts stored on my hard disk. Surely it's just a matter of importing them into iTunes so that I can sync them to the iPod.......... no sir, no can do. iTunes can only play and sync podcasts which are subscribed in iTunes and downloaded from the iTunes website. Plus, the iPod in its normal configuration is not recognised as a USB mass storage device, so the only way to access it is through iTunes.

This kind of thing drives me batty - Apple is as bad as Microsoft in this regard. It's all well and good that you provide a great centralised service for people to enjoy their music. But don't lock them into only using it and nothing else! Don't presume your users will use your devices only in the way you intended, and block them from doing anything else! *grumble*

So, for the second time in as many hours, I bit into the sour apple and subscribed to my podcasts in iTunes and started siphoning them off the internet - thank heavens for my fast and uncapped internet connection. At least, iTunes seems to do a reasonable job as a podcast aggregator (after I figured out what some of its more cryptic settings meant), although (understandably) it can't retrieve episodes older than the ones listed in each podcast's RSS feed. This is irritating for (in particular, but not solely) the BBC podcasts, which only ever list the latest episode in their RSS feed, forcing you to sync frequently or miss episodes. Of course, I have all the episodes saved on my hard disk, but with no way to import them into iTunes...³

Anyway, enough ranting. The podcast sync was just as fast as the music sync, and, after I ticked the right box, iTunes grabbed all my Outlook contacts⁴ and synced them as well. It looks like my iPod could become my new address book, too!

Just before the upload, iTunes wanted me to create an account on the iTunes store to... wait for it... "download album covers". Let's just pretend I repeated the rant from eight paragraphs ago and move on. iTunes also gave me the option of synchronising TV shows, but at this point I only had time for a cursory attempt to import some AVI files on my PC into iTunes, which (surprise surprise) failed miserably, before having to leave.

¹ I use QuickTime Alternative and RealAlternative to play these formats when I come across them - compatibility without all the bloat, hurrah!
² Or I look it up on the internet...
³ Some Googling found a hack which would perhaps solve this problem, involving setting some metadata fields for each podcast episodes, but I haven't tried it yet. It's a hassle at the least.
⁴ Using Outlook as my contacts manager is an unfortunate hold-over from my foray into Windows Mobile-powered PDAs. Even if I have to admit that Outlook is a darn good contacts manager - if only it didn't hog my system so much.

The iPod and the geek: First impressions

2009-05-28T11:42:36Z

After much to and fro I finally caved in to the glamour and bought an iPod touch. My Sony Ericsson W850i has, for awhile, been my main source of audio entertainment (as well as, obviously, a phone), but the slow and clunky interface, the small screen and other limitations were starting to get on my nerves. With the iPhone being completely out of my budget, the iPod touch seemed a sensible choice to replace the music-player function of my phone. Here are some of my thoughts on this little gadget...

First impressions

Apple sure knows how to make things stylish. The package that arrived in my mailbox was pitifully small (thank you, Amazon!), half the size of a paperback book (about the size of an A6 sheet of paper). My first thought was "this can't be right, it can't all fit in a box this small?". Turns out, they can - encased in a plastic case, there was an iPod, a quick start guide, a USB cable, and a set of headphones. The presentation is nothing if not slick - although getting the plastic case opened was a ten-minute exercise in scraping tape off with fingernails. Getting the iPod off of its "display stand" in the box took another five minutes, I was constantly afraid that I would break something! (The culprit turned out to be yet another piece of transparent tape).

When I finally got the iPod out of its case, it's another example of sleek, slick design (sorry for the alliterations :) ). Very thin and light, with minimalist styling, a "home" button at the bottom of the screen and three very solid buttons for power and volume control. The headphone jack is squeezed into the bottom - the unit is barely thick enough for the 3.5 mm plug!

There is no AC adapter, so I'm guessing it will be charged solely through USB. Hm, I wonder how this will affect me when I go travelling without a laptop...

Thoughts on time and Star Trek

2009-05-10T12:32:40Z

Went to see Star Trek (the movie, for those of you living on the dark side of the Moon) last night.

I'll keep this spoiler-free for those of you who haven't seen it yet, but I wanted to air some thoughts.

I enjoyed the new Star Trek film (there, I said it). However, for most of the film I couldn't help but compare it to one clip from Stargate SG-1's episode 200 (for those of you who don't know the episode, it's a pastiche of the series, pitched as a producer who wants to make a new version of Stargate SG-1, but "edgier", with a "younger cast". Hilarity ensues.). This, to my mind, fits the new Star Trek film very well - this is TOS¹ for the 2010s.

For one thing, Kirk is ridiculously young. This is a guy in his late 20s, who is (by a series of events which I won't spoil here) put in command of the fracking Flagship of the Federation (think of it as a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier if that helps to make the point). There must have been most of a crew more qualified for the job than him! And this is right after his involvement in a series of events which probably did little to endear him to the command hierarchy.

Plus, whilst it's true to character that Kirk was not exactly a man who played by the rules, in this film he not only breaks but utterly smashes so many of them (as well as spending at least 10% of the film involved in fistfights with someone, usually with another member of his crew!). In a quasi-military organisation like Starfleet, that should have some serious repercussions, but of course it doesn't, because this is Kirk we're talking about here. I guess I'm just annoyed that his "punch, blast, blow it all up, what the hell" attitude seems to yield positive results.

This is where I think my rose-tinted glasses are impairing my judgement, but I'm sure that Star Trek was never this... blatantly over-the-top. Maybe I'm just getting old, and my standards for what I consider over-the-top have moved down. Or maybe Star Trek was never very subtle, just that, when I was younger and more impressionable, it didn't occur to me to think of it as over-the-top.

It's a wild ride - the special effects are jaw-droppingly gorgeous (possibly the best I've seen in awhile, and coming from a sci-fi geek, that's saying something), and the film has bucketloads of references and in-jokes for all the geeks in the audience (Admiral Archer's pet beagle? :) ). Often, getting all the references is half the joy for me, and this film provides it in droves.

Also, it's clear the actors are having a blast - Simon Pegg as Scotty and Karl Urban as Dr McCoy (he even gets a "I'm a doctor, not a..." line) are a joy to watch. Even the very post-feminist Uhura gets some good moments (and smoochies! That's all I will say about that...).

To close, here's a badly mangled quote from Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters fame:

"Jim [Kirk] wants big boom."

¹ The Original Series, the first Star Trek television series (with Kirk, Spock et al)

Sunk costs and high speed human powered transport

2009-02-12T15:21:45Z

Late last year, soon after my move to the (glorious :) ) city of Hamburg, my bicycle started having... issues. This bike (nicknamed the Tankmobile by a friend who shall remain nameless *grin*) has been with me since before university, and has clocked over seven thousand kilometres. It's a tough little thing (mmmh German engineering :) ), and I've replaced most of its parts over the years (several more than once - normal wear and tear), but soon after its introduction to the frozen wastes of northern Germany, several things went wrong at once.

First, the forward brake pade wore through. No problem, replaced them, 15 €.

At this point I decided to upgrade my bike lights from a sidewall dynamo to a hub dynamo. After a few weeks in Hamburg I found that the sidwall dynamo was not only noisy and very inefficient, but failed whenever it was wet (this being Hamburg... it was wet a lot), and since it got dark so soon in the evenings I badly needed good lighting. So: lighting upgrade. All parts, no assembly (that engineering degreee has got to be good for something, right?), 140 €.

Then the rear brake pads wore through (all that grit from the snow-covered streets, perhaps?). 15 €.

Then the rear gear hub failed. Not spectacularly, but after so much wear the one-way rotation mechanism died, leaving the hub to free-wheel in both directions. Since the hub is a part of the wheel that meant a new rear wheel. And a new gear hub, which had been badly worn by all the free-wheeling and slipping chain. New gear hub with worn chain = baaaad, so throw in a new chain. Plus assembly (I can assemble a chain and gear train, but it's an enormous pain, especially since I'd be working in my apartment hallway): 100 €.

So far, that was all (touch wood), although the front gearshift is starting to give signs that it's about to go, and even the frame occasionally makes creaking sounds it probably shouldn't.

Throughout this process I kept asking myself if I was doing the right thing, whether I should just have bought a new bike. I'm well aware of the sunk cost fallacy, but I had trouble applying it here. The cost of a new bike obviously exceeded the cost of any one repair, but when taken in combination... (I'm not there yet - a new bike of the sort I'm looking for would probably set me back 500 €, but if things keep breaking...).

So, a question to you, dear readers - when something starts breaking and needs to be repaired, at what point do you throw it out and replace it? And what would you have done in my place?

Postscript: Hub dynamos, especially if you've known nothing but battery lighting or sidewall dynamos, are a godsend. They generate almost no rolling resistance (at least, I can't notice any), are completely silent, run in all weather conditions, and don't wear out. You control your lights by a switch on the front lamp, and even mid-range models have light sensors which switch your lights on and off depending on how light it is outside - so they turn on automatically whenever it gets dark or you enter a tunnel. The same mid-range front light is wonderfully bright (much brighter than my old one, even when I'm going slowly), and the rear light has a capacitor which will keep it burning for about three minutes when I' stopped at a traffic light.

I know that hub dynamos are not available everywhere (the bike shop salesman in France had never even heard of them), but if you do any cycling in twilight or darkness, I can't recommend them enough. Gorgeous pieces of engineering.

Post-postscript: Tuesday's snowfall turned to ice by Tuesday night, and that ice probably hid a nice shard of glass somewhere... flat tyre. Curses.

(Un)intentional humour

2009-01-05T08:57:57Z

Getting back to the office after the holidays always involves sifting through piles of e-mail. As efficient as my employer's spam filter is, some spam unfortunately still gets through, and provides some (un)intentional humour to brighten up the first day back at the office with subject lines such as

You can travel East or West but you'll stay so manly blessed.
The dimensions of your tool will grow to a duel.
Use our promotion and change your proportion.

What's next, spam in trochaic pentameter?

The joys of urban mass transit, done properly

2008-12-10T16:02:05Z

I recently moved from Toulouse (France) to Hamburg (Germany). It's been exciting and interesting, but leading on from a few articles I was reading last night I wanted to rave about one aspect: public transport.

It's simply fantastic. For my daily commute to work, I walk or cycle to Altona, one of the main bus terminals near the city centre. From there, an express bus route ("express" meaning no intermediate stops) takes me to a ferry terminal at Teufelsbrück in about 10 minutes for a distance of about 6 km. This route is served by bi-articulated buses which run every 4 minutes at peak times. These monster buses can carry over 150 people (that's a fully packed A320 plane!) and seem to have no problems turning corners, as their the wheels on the two rear axles are steerable. At the Teufelsbrück ferry terminal I board a ferry (often one of the Type 2000 ferries, which can carry about two busloads worth of passengers). These cross from Teufelsbrück to the Airbus dock about every eight minutes - they turn around so quickly that they don't even moor to the dock, they just swivel their azimuth thrusters to the side and thus stay pinned against the dock during loading and offloading.

The capacity of this system is staggering - the buses and ferries operate at peak intervals from 6 AM to 9 AM and 2 PM to 7 PM, they can move an insane number of people. Given that the Airbus factory in Hamburg employs something like 15,000 people, and its only road access is via a two-lane street winding its way through a Hamburg suburb, virtually everyone who lives on the north side of the river takes this route to work. From Altona bus station it takes me around 25 minutes to get to work, with no stress, time to read or listen to a podcast, and the pleasure of crossing the river Elbe, with the wind to wake me up, watching the massive container ships gliding by in the mist.

For these high-capacity routes they have thus come up with a very effective solution (just imagine how many cars it would take to move that many people). But the Hamburg transport network doesn't stop there - its buses and light rail cover the whole metropolitan area, with light rail lines (S-Bahn and U-Bahn) going even further afield. These run throughout the night (at most, at 20-minute intervals), and even though most bus lines stop running around midnight, there is a network of night buses to cover the gap. During the day, most buses run at 10-minute (often much less, especially at peak times) intervals, so you never have to wait very long to catch one.

The result is that, save for trips to Ikea, my car hasn't moved in the last three weeks. A monthly ticket (covering most of the network on weekdays and the whole network on weekends) costs 50 €, which is less than what I was paying for fuel in Toulouse. I can send a text message with my location and my destination, and I will get a reply with the next available, fastest route. It's simply great.

Admittedly there are a few downsides - as in most urban rapid transit schemes, route density falls off as you get further into the suburbs. If you live far outside of Hamburg (particularly south of the river Elbe) it can be a bit far to walk to the nearest bus stop. Also, strangely enough, the airport is very badly connected, with only one or two bus lines - but that should change by the end of the year, when the S1 S-Bahn is extended.

Having lived in cities with inadequate (Toulouse) or nonexistant (Houston) public transport, I am enamoured with this well-thought-out, smoothly-running system. Mmmmmmmh :)

green_jedi @ 2008-09-27T13:13:00

2008-09-27T11:14:46Z

Portal is so very very cool, truly original. :)

A plea to my American friends

2008-09-24T23:01:28Z

Even though I'm living on the other side of an ocean from you, I'm still watching developments on your political scene with great interest - we live in an interconnected world, after all - and there is something I would like get off my chest. It concerns, unsurprisingly, the upcoming election, the campaign for which is taking ever more alarming turns. In November, you will be choosing a new leader for your country, and there are a few things which I would beg you to remember.

Stop putting down "elitism", "intelligence", "education" and "experience". When someone builds you a house, would you rather it was built by someone competent, who has studied the subject extensively and worked in the field for many years, or by the average Joe down the road? Who would you rather have operating on you should you fall gravely ill, the best surgeon you can find, or the guy who barely scraped through medical school, yet who is a riot at the neighbourhood barbecue? Running a country is amongst the most difficult jobs on the planet, and the fact that being intelligent, educated and experienced seem to count against a candidate is mind-boggling. Should a country which prides itself on greatness not be run by its best and brightest?

Stop unquestionably glorifying military service. Militarism as an assertion of a country's greatness is a concept which died at the end of the last millennium; technology has made sure of that. Recent history, or indeed all of history, should have more than convinced you that war is a horror beyond belief - not only should you think long and hard how your choice of candidate will affect the road your country takes in this regard, but, more importantly, stop regarding service in the armed forces as some kind of qualification for political office. In the military, situations are reduced to absolutes, whilst the real world is full of shades of grey. I will not insult your intelligence by citing examples where mistaking one for the other has led your country into hot water over the last decade. Note that I am certainly not saying that military service should be counted against a candidate, far from it, but the extent to which it is glorified without question, and trotted out as some kind of demonstration of aptitude for politics makes me shiver.

Demand depth. Running a country is not like watching a Hollywood blockbuster, where the hero is stalwart and true, the villain shady-looking and French, and all ride off into the sunset after a hundred and twenty minutes of run time. To quote President Bartlet from the West Wing, "every once in a while, there is a day with an absolute wrong and an absolute right, but those days almost always involve body counts. Other than that, there aren't too many un-nuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten word [answers]." Do not be lulled by slogans or punchlines, by vacuous labels such as "patriot", but look behind the façade. Ask tough questions. Do not be satisfied with a ten-word answer to a question whose answer could fill an essay or even a book. Pull back the curtain to find out if there's really a wizard or just a small, bald man called Oscar.

In the same vein, do not be satisfied with appeals to emotion without any substance behind them. So many campaign ads, slogans and speeches are chock-full of vacuous emotional appeals which, when it comes down to it, reduce to nothing but dust. Whilst these may attest that the candidate is an excellent orator and/or has hired excellent speech- and ad-writers, are these the skills which should be foremost in your mind when considering someone's eligibility for political office? Wouldn't you rather want to see the substance behind the smokescreen?

Check your facts. One would have thought that the information age would have provided the means for absolute and rapid fact-checking by anyone with an internet connection, yet twisted truths, questionable interpretations and outright lies and coming so thick and fast during this campaign with nary a raised eyebrow that it makes me shudder. Hold your politicians accountable for what they say, and call them on it if they misrepresent something or lie outright. Sure, mistakes can happen, and moulding information to their advantage (from framing to "spin") is almost irresistible to politicians, but the upper ends of this practice are questionable at best, and outright lies should result in verbal crucifixion. Demand honesty from your politicians, because if you don't, what makes you think they will suddenly be honest with you once elected? How would you feel if the reasons you voted for a candidate turned out to be lies?

Please, my dear American friends: Vote with your brain, not your heart.

There is no such thing as magic?

2008-09-17T10:10:13Z

Whilst perusing the internet the other day (a dangerous activity!), I came across the "controversy" over role-playing games, particularly, Dungeons & Dragons. Innocent as I was, I read further, thinking "what could possibly be controversial about D&D?". I found out about moral panics in the 1980s, in particular, that D&D was seen as "a feeding program for occultism and witchcraft".

For obvious reasons I consider these claims ludicrous, and have filed them away under "deluded idiot of the week". However, there was one thing which stuck in my mind - their seemingly open and unquestioning acceptance of the existence of real-world magic and witchcraft. That aspect got them a double mention in the above-mentioned category, but it did leave me wondering - are there really people who believe "magic" exists in the real world? That, by uttering some words in pig Latin, perhaps burning some incense and drawing a pentagram on the floor in mouse blood I can fire magic projectiles from my fingers, fly on a broomstick, or cause my neighbor to lose his job? I am willing to account for a lot of stupidity and ignorance amongst my fellow humans, but this is one idiocy I hadn't heard of (although the fact that their supposedly infallible and divinely inspired sacred scraps of parchment include an explicit condemnation of it might go some way to explain this gullibility).

Should I just shake my head in despair, emulate Vernon Dursley ("there is no such thing as magic!"), and silently hope these people enter the running for a Darwin Award? Or is there something more to all this?

Water and electronics II

2008-05-26T12:38:12Z

As a follow-up to the previous entry on this subject, I have received a reply to my letter to KLM. This was after I had sent them a letter requesting compensation for my damaged camera, which the local Canon repair shop charged me 25 € to pronounce "dead as a dodo". As I (half-)expected, they said no, although they were fairly polite about it.

I had expected to get bitten by force majeure, by the 7-day deadline for reporting damaged luggage, by the need to prove causation, or by the liability limit of the Warsaw Convention. I did not expect to get bitten by KLM's General Conditions of Carriage, specifically §9.4.c:

(c) The passenger shall not include in checked baggage
fragile or perishable items, valuable items, money, keys, jewellery, electronic equipment such as laptops, pocket computers etc., cameras, cellular telephones, negotiable instruments, business documents, securities, medications, medical documents, passports and other identification documents or samples.

Well, there you have it - since I was in contravention of their general conditions of carriage, I am not eligible for compensation. Rats. I do wonder how they define "fragile items" - for instance, would a suit (which I would have had to take to dry-cleaning following its passage through the Dutch rainstorm) qualify as "fragile"? Books (most books I know don't appreciate being soaked)? In short, they're saying "don't put anything in your suitcase that won't survive being squashed, drenched, heated, frozen, and depressurised". I think bricks may be OK.

I have been very cavalier about this in the past (several times having my laptop in my checked luggage), but I will be much more careful from now on. Lesson learned, and may you all have better luck than I did!

The end is nigh

2008-05-15T19:22:40Z

It's a Thursday evening in Toulouse. For most of the day, the sun was happily shining, the temperature in the low 20°Cs, sunglasses-and-short-sleeves weather. I'm happily munching some dinner, when there is a strange light from the window, and a deep rumble. Looking out the window, I see an ominous-looking cloud bank, eerily lit by the setting run, moving in from the west. It starts to rain, then to hail.

Five minutes later, the street below my apartment starts to flood, carrying with it a floating mass of hailstones (most about the size of peas). The street turns into an ice river, deep enough to spill onto the pavement, and yet it continues to hail. Nearby rooftops are turning white from the accumulated hail. Being the foolish child I am, I grabbed a raincoat and went outside, only to have the rain soak through the raincoat and begin to wet my t-shirt within thirty seconds.

Since my poor digicam has gone to gadget heaven, I only had my little dinky camera phone with me - but the picture should at least give an idea of what it was like.

If this is the end of the world, it is sooooo coooooool..... :)

(update 21:45 - the Deluge will have to wait for another day; it stopped hailing eventually, and now, half an hour later, all that is left is some patches of white on the cars and the pavements. But, as far as weather goes, this has been one of the coolest things I have seen in recent months :) )

Water and electronics

2008-03-29T14:27:04Z

I flew to Berlin last weekend (wonderful place, even if it was pouring almost the entire time I was there), and on the way I changed planes in Amsterdam. We landed in the middle of a deluge (the walk from the plane to the bus soaked me, it was impressive), and so, almost to my resignation, I found that when I picked up my checked baggage at the end of the flight, it was utterly soaked. Fairly impressively, it was soaked almost the entire way through, and almost everything inside was dripping. "Everything" included my digital camera, my trusty Canon PowerShot A700. The fact it was wrapped in a towel and inside its case didn't faze the water in the slightest.

I scoured the internet for solutions to the "help, my camera is wet!" problem, and after sifting through a fair number of ideas I distilled the information down to what seemed to be the consensus. Basic idea: Dry the cameras as completely as possible. Remove the batteries and memory card immediately, and wipe down the camera with a soft cloth (I used the cloth which comes with my glasses). Then let it dry out in a warm, ventilated place - I didn't have such a place handy, so I used a desiccant (material which absorbs moisture). The best solution would have been those little packs that come with electronic gadgets, but the best I had at hand was uncooked rice. An air conditioner (the air that comes out is very dry) or a hair dryer on a "no heat" setting would have worked too. I sealed up the camera and the rice in a plastic bag and left it to dry for a week. Does anyone else have any bright ideas of what to do in this situation?

All this wasn't enough - now, over a week later there is still no sign of life from my camera. Maybe I had left it wet too long (distracted by all the other wet things in my luggage I didn't notice the camera until some time after arriving), maybe by attempting to turn it on at the beginning I fried some circuitry (as great as the temptation is to "check if it works", I probably should have taken out the batteries right away). In any case - it don't work no more. :(

When they open on Monday I'll see about getting a quote from the local Canon repair shop, although I imagine it will probably be exorbitant. Which leads me to my second question - I'd like to try and squeeze some money out of KLM, but I have no idea how to go about this or how likely I am to succeed? Has anyone ever had any luck being compensated by an airline for baggage damaged in transit? By the Warsaw convention and the fine print on my ticket, the airline's liability for baggage damage is about 200 EUR (it's calculated per kg of luggage), but the damage must be "proven", and this is where I see the sticking point. I can prove I flew on the plane, but I can't prove that the camera broke during the flight (it could have happened before or afterwards), or that it was even on the flight with me. If I had gone directly after picking up my bags to the KLM representative I probably would have had a better chance, but what do they expect me to do? Unpack my bags in the arrivals lounge after every flight to make sure everything is intact? How might causation be proven in case like this? (Can you tell I'm anything but a lawyer? :) )

I know it's a long shot, but I was hoping someone might have some good advice for me... :)

Internet connections in London

2007-09-13T18:17:22Z

Oh wise people of Livejournal, hear my query...

My sister is moving to London and, as a child of the information age, needs an internet connection. She's been looking around to see what kind of offers are available from the big providers, but I was hoping to get a few recommendations from residents of London Town. Any providers or deals you can recommend?

She's staying for about nine months, and will be splitting the connection with her flatmate. She wants broadband, but ADSL 2 (the 8Mbps connections) is not a must. A deal with VoIP and/or free calls to the UK would be great.

Many of the deals mention line rental - is this local loop unbundling? If so, how does it work in the UK, do you invariably need a BT telephone line, or can everything be done via a non-BT provider?

Any recommendation or tips would be greatly appreciated!

I can't believe...

2007-05-08T12:27:21Z

... that they cancelled Firefly!! Having just finished watching the series, I can only agree with the moniker Jennifer Ouellette gave it, "The Series So Cool We Must Not Speak Its Name".

Firefly did what I thought couldn't be done, it took science fiction beyond the shiny and squeaky-clean vision of the future, where things happen on large scales and in the realm of our imagination, and reduced it to basic drama about human beings - humans whose problems remain the same, despite the fact they are on an interplanetary spaceship. But I do not want "reduce" to be a negative word here, on the contrary - even though the story may fundamentally be about people, the science fiction setting means the story is set in a larger world, a world which, in part, the viewer discovers alongside the characters, as they work to uncover its secrets. In the show's short run, so many questions are left unanswered, which is a pity.

In short, I'm hooked, and now left high and dry for there is no more! :( Time to find a life.

Or the Serenity DVD.

A question of foreign language

2007-03-19T15:09:42Z

There was an interesting article in the Financial Times on Saturday, which I think expressed very well what I have often felt but rarely been able to properly express about living in France. The article is about an Israeli living in Italy, and amongst other commentaries on the difficulties of adjusting, he talks about language:

The most disturbing thing about living elsewhere is language. Even if you manipulate it adequately, you miss the associations and efficiency of your mother tongue. It's frustrating when you can't express the same sophistication, depth, joy or humour as in the language of your roots. You lack tones and nuances. You suffer the gap between your outward personality and your self image. You sublimate the frustration by simplifying your thinking.

The author is onto something here, I think, and it's something I can relate to. For the last eighteen months I have been having similar issues, and it's very frustrating (leading to the occasional outburst, after a long day, of "I need to get out of this <expletive> country and go somewhere where I actually speak the language!"). According to my colleagues and friends (and me, when I'm feeling upbeat) my French is pretty adequate. Most of my work is done in French, virtually everyone I know and interact with is French, and I manage all right. Yes, the occasional word or phrase escapes me, my accent is clearly that of a foreigner, and as soon as friends my age start using heavy argot* I'm lost, but I get by.

However, to the puzzlement of everyone around me ("If I spoke language X as well as you speak French, I would be thrilled!" is something I hear on a regular basis), I often feel like something of an idiot. Why? Because as soon as I try to express something more complicated, something with nuances, something with a very specific meaning, I can't manage it, and so have to fall back to something much simpler. Does the simpler phase works? Yes, it does, but it leaves me stranded at the eloquency level of your average twelve-year old. And no-one seems to be able to understand why this severely bothers me. "People understand you, don't they?" - yes, of course they do, and, yes, they will probably attribute (at least part of) my simplistic speaking style to me being a Foreigner, from Foreignia, where they speak Foreign. However, from my perspective I could bring a lot more conversation, I have thoughts that are far more expressive and precise than what comes out of my mouth, but I am restrained by my lack of French proficiency. Hence, I can manage "I read a good book", but "I read an enthralling book which captured my imagination and kept me up until 4am" is probably beyond me. Nuance, nuance.

In addition, it's even worse as far as humour is concerned, since it relies as much on timing and word choices as it does on conveying information. The end result is that during informal gatherings I am consigned to being passive most of the time, and probably come across as thoroughly humourless. Yes, it's a valid point that humour and banter do not by themselves make up a personality (so my often-repeated quip that in French I am about as interesting as a blob of paint drying on a wall is an exaggeration), but they often function as icebreakers or introductions in conversation.

All this is despite of the cited best way (besides getting a significant other of that language) of learning a language, diving right in and living in the country. I am doubtlessly making progress, but even after eighteen months I still feel like I'm inside a verbal straitjacket - hence, after a particularly trying day, I occasionally express the wish of living in a place where I spoke the language properly.

In the end, it irritates me far more than it seems to irritate others, yet one thing I cannot figure out is that it doesn't seem to bother my other foreign friends (all of whom have vaguely similar levels of French) far less if at all - am I being too much of a perfectionist? A question to the dear readers - do you ever find you have this problem when you live in foreign places (which is not the same as visiting - if you're visiting somewhere, an incomplete knowledge of the language is no problem at all)? How do you deal with it?

* French slang, which puts every other form of mainstream slang I've heard to shame. It's like a whole different language! And don't get me started to trying to decipher it when people start writing it in SMS-style e-mails... :)

Major geekery

2007-02-10T08:51:05Z

With my left hand temporarily out of action (blasted ice on ski slopes!), I suddenly have enough free time to procrastinate on teh interwebs. Which turns up all sorts of stuff.

It's only a flesh wound!
Monty Python, performed by Captain Kirk, assorted crew and Apollo

I think I like the Doctor better this way...
Jamaican Doctor, and Ghostbusting Doctor

Silly videos III

2006-12-15T19:34:34Z

Blending marbles
From the "do not try this at home, kids" department comes: what happens when you put marbles in a blender?

Craig Ferguson: Letter to Santa Claus
No explanation needed, really...

Lightsaber fight: Ryan vs Dorkman
Oh. my. god. And they did this at home?! (another one, with possibly even better choreography: Art of the Saber)

Belgium is no more!

2006-12-14T10:00:54Z

Last night, the Belgian state TV broadcaster RTBF interrupted its regular programming to announce that Flanders (the northern half of Belgium) had declared independence, the state had dissolved, and the King had gone into exile. Reporters were standing in throngs before the Royal Palace, politicians were giving their reactions and speculating about the future, ambassadors were sending urgent dispatches back to their home countries......

None of it was true. In the best tradition of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast, RTBF had created a fictional event (apparently, they had been preparing it for over a year). Like its famous predecessor, it was so realistically done that not only the public but the politicians as well were fooled, until RTBF declared that it had all been a hoax, several hours later.

RTBF had orchestrated the whole thing to try and re-open the debate over the endless mistrust and dislike between the Flemish (north, Flemish-speaking) and Walloon (south, French-speaking) halves of Belgium, an issue which seems to overshadow anything that occurs in Belgium. The two halves of the country have disliked each other for decades, and the 'language issue' seems to enter into even the pettiest of debates. A friend was recently at a city hall meeting in a Flemish-speaking suburb of Brussels, and a French-speaking lady asked a question to the Mayor. Out of politeness, he answered her first in French (all public officials in Belgium have to be bilingual) and then translated into Flemish, only to be boo-ed by members of the audience, who shouted that he should always answer in Flemish first, as it was a Flemish-speaking suburb..... how petty can you get? You'll find that all the street signs, telephone books and posters in Brussels (which sits neatly between the two halves of Belgium) are in both languages, even the names of the metro stations are in two languages (hence, the destination marked on the front of the trains flickers back and forth between the two versions of the same name). The highway heading east from Brussels towards Germany crosses the 'language border' several times, and each time the street signs will switch between French and Flemish - "Liège" will suddenly start being referred to as "Luik", then switch back to "Liège" ten kilometers later. Madness.

With a general elections a few months away, maybe this stunt by RTBF will provoke a more thorough debate on the subject (up to this point, I feel the 'debate' has descended into name-calling and stonewalling on both sides), but to be honest I'm not holding out much hope. This feud has gone on for several decades, and as much as I'd like it to happen I don't see enormous changes occurring overnight.

Reuters covered this story, as did the French newspaper Le Monde.

r_e_mercia, what was the reaction in Brussels like?

Silly videos II

2006-12-04T17:55:21Z

How to prank a telemarketer
Far too good an idea to waste on scum...!

Video to Amish Paradise
Yes, this has been around for ages. Yes it's still good.

Ask a Ninja: What is Podcasting?
I nearly died laughing the first time I saw this. And the best news? There's like twenty more just like it... :)