haniblog

If you have an Airport Express you have to get Airfoil. The app lets you stream music from your Mac to just about anything that receives a wifi signal, including your iPhone, a Windows or Linux box or even the AppleTV. You select the source application and activate the destination speakers and off you go!

For as long as I’ve had an iPod (and I’ve had one of the originals), I’ve always filled them with songs. My still-going-strong third generation 40GB iPod is full of music I felt I ought to have. I’ve always been averse to buying single tracks off albums and prefer to get the whole lot. But I have a confession to make… I’m afraid of most of my music. To be precise, I’ve been afraid of using that conceptually huge function known as Shuffle Songs.

No more. I’m facing my fear. I just stuck the iPod in the dreaded mode all afternoon and the last five tracks played are:

I know this is almost 8 years too late, but it’s like having my own eclectic radio station! Yes, I know. It is sad.

Oooh, Supergrass is on! Haven’t heard this in years!

It’s simple. Aircraft appear in an airspace wanting to be led to two landing strips or a helipad. All you have to do is draw a line to the appropriate strip and the jet/biplane/chopper will follow the approach vector and land.

Simple, right? Nope! Not if you have three 777-class planes, 737′s all over the place, 3 crop dusters and slow-ass choppers all over the screen! And it’s so much fun! Go and get Flight Control and forget any free time you have. Addictive, fun, frustrating and beautifully designed.

Forget iTunes Music, forget Amazon MP3. Spotify is revolutionary.

When I first installed the free app I was underwhelmed. Another iTunes clone, I thought. But as I dug around Spotify I was more and more impressed. It lets you instantly stream any music you want, for free. You can also create collaborative playlists, and by collaborative I mean other people you share the playlist with can add tracks and it all streams, again for free. I also like the fact that Spotify is platform agnostic… Mac, PC or Linux. Just download the app, click on the link your friend sent and listen.

I know Spotify mimics some of Last.fm‘s features but to me it feels more complete. If it keeps going as is, I don’t think I’ll be buying much music from iTunes.

I tried, I really did. Then I gave up and called Apple to take their underpowered, overprotected media box back. This is the first Apple product I absolutely and unreservedly hated. It made iTunes look bad, and that is one of my favorite applications.

Okay, so it’s hackable. But it turns absolutely buggy and crashes a lot. Plus, I don’t want to spend another night trying to coax it to do what it should do in the first place: play whatever media I throw at it, and iTunes syncing isn’t the way to do it.

Enter WD TV. It should arrive tomorrow along with a 320GB pocket drive. It costs £100 less than the 160GB Apple TV and it should play movies with popular codecs without complaining or transcoding. As a bonus, it plays 1080p instead of just 720p.

I really hope this is the answer otherwise it’s back to the Apple Store to buy another Mac Mini and install Plex.

I just noticed that the new series of Lost is on iTunes in 720p! At £2.49 per episode compared to £1.89 for SD it’s not a bad deal. The whole season pass costs a bit more, £41.99 for HD or £31.99 for SD. Bring on 1080 now!