this is sippey.typepad.com

make a beat, eat the beat

How great would it be to play with the Skittle-based beat sequencer with the kids? How better to teach them about the near infinite glories of what you can do with sixteenth notes and 4/4 time than with a bunch of colorful candies. Make a beat, eat the beat. Yum. (Via Waxy, of course.)

(But you know, come to think of it, a simple sequencer like this would be a great iPhone app, even if you can't eat the Skittles after making your beat. Instead, you could share them online. iPhone as drum machine. See, I knew I had to have an iPhone 2.0 reference today somewhere...)

ipods that make you thin...and save your soul

I love this little tidbit from the Apple patent filing today...

The lifestyle companion system also can interview the user about non-health related topics, e.g., spirituality/religion, identity (e.g., sense of belonging), relationships, career, financial condition, environment, hobbies, interests, other personal information, and goals regarding the same. 

Can't wait to see the privacy policy on that one.

more reviews like this, please

Wil Shipley of Delicious Library fame posts a fantastic review of the Air, hitting all the right notes, including this pitch-perfect one:

Jonathan Ive should design a laptop bag as beautiful as the Air, that just can contain the machine, a power cord, and a Wireless Mighty Mouse. I'd be in heaven. Nobody seems to have addressed the "I want a small, slim bag that can still hold a power cord without having a giant wart in the side" market. Like, duh, bag designers, STOW THE POWER CORD ABOVE OR BELOW THE LAPTOP, not STICKING OUT THE SIDE WHERE IT CREATES A TENT AND LOOKS UGLY AND BANGS MY KNEE.

+1

a quick note to the kindle team

Dear Kindle team,

I just finished a week of travel with a new Kindle, and I'm well into reading my third book on it. So far so good -- the screen is very readable, even for long stretches of time; I don't have a problem with the next page / prev page button placement; the little e-ink flash when you turn pages isn't that annoying; and the battery life is great.

The UI for finding and buying books is pretty good, and it will be interesting to watch how you use the limited screen real estate and UI controls as a merchandising advantage as more and more titles come online. I can't imagine using the device for browsing the web or reading email -- the screen refresh is fast enough for reading books, but not for skimming web content.  And while I wish the keyboard were virtual (I only use it when searching the store), I get why it's there and appreciate the tradeoff decision re. price & touchscreen.

A key feature of the device is a simple and elegant way to highlight and clip sections of text -- and once you get the hang of it you find yourself doing it all the time. When reading real books I'm always marking pages or making notes in the margin; the Kindle makes this a quick click and scroll action. But I was surprised to learn that these highlights stay on the device, and don't sync up to your Amazon account. (You can download them with the included USB cable, but who wants to do that?)

So here's the feature request that must be on your roadmap: send my clippings back up into the cloud, where I can copy and paste them for future use. Bonus points for giving me the opportunity to connect my Kindle account to my blog, and have the service automatically post new clips via Atom or MetaWeblog. Extra bonus points for illustrating those with a cover thumbnail, and embedding my Associates code in the URL back to the store.

Best,
Michael

so long, series 1

  Purple tivo 
  Originally uploaded by mathowie

Our beloved Tivo Series 1 kicked the bucket this week, dying a wheezing, whining, hard-drive clicking death after more than seven years of reliable service.*

Normally I'm not the type to mourn the passing of a device -- after all, how many have I willingly tossed recycled in the same period?  But there's something to be said for that simple, well-designed box that changed the way we watch television.  It paused while we went for popcorn, treated us to the entire back catalog of Sports Night, reliably delivered hundreds if not thousands of hours of season passes week after week, and kept us sane and entertained during countless 3am feedings.

Rest in peace, old friend. The house may be quieter without the constant whine of your tired, old, underpowered and undersized hard drive, but trust us -- we'll miss you.

* Don't panic, though, we have a Series 2 in the living room; the Series 1 was the luxurious second Tivo that lately was responsible for recording endless episodes of Arthur and Mickey's Clubhouse. Sorry, kids.

first world problem

From Katherine Boehret's review of the Wildpad:

The pad, from WildCharge Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. (www.wildcharge.com), eliminates the messy tangle of wires that many people struggle with each time they want to charge their portable devices. But more to the point, it turns charging a gadget into something that happens in the background rather than an active task. And it spares you from that nagging question: Did I remember to plug my phone or iPod or BlackBerry in before going to sleep?

Thank GOD charging my phone is now something that happens in the background. I can't tell you how much mental energy I've wasted over the years on that incredibly active task.

multiple vibrate options

I think Charlie Schick has Twittered about this, but as I get more and more SMS traffic, it would be great if my phone supported multiple vibrate patterns, a la ringtones.  (I always have my phone on vibrate, because in I have an impossible time actually hearing my phone ring.  Either I'm getting older (speak up, sonny) or I'm deliberately ignoring incoming calls.)

Here's what I want.

• Bzzt == twitter or other automated SMS.
• Bzzt bzzt == SMS from an actual human.
• Bzzt bzzt bzzt == phone call.
• Special pattern of bzzt's == phone call from someone special

Couldn't be that hard, could it?

appletorrent

So Cringely's vision of a million networked Apple TVs acting as a torrent-like P2P distribution network for digital content is very interesting...especially the part about taking the bandwidth cost out of the bottom line and the potential lift in AAPLs market cap. But it's Yet Another Chicken And Egg, since they would still have to get a million of those things out into the market before lighting up the network.

The Apple TV product offering as I understand it today is still too complex for mass market adoption (Requires a host PC or Mac? Bleh), so the near term interesting question is not "What's v2 of Apple TV," but instead, "What's v1.1?" What capabilities will they ship to propel them to a million installed, connected and configured boxes?  (For reference, according to their latest numbers, TiVo's currently at 1.2 million TiVo-Owned subscribers.)

they call it garbage collection

I have a need to clear these Apple-related things out of my head:

• Even if I don't use it as my phone, I'll probably still want an iPhone.  If only as a Wifi enabled, media-playing, web-browsing toy.

• Relatedly, what I want come June is a way to track the price movement of the secondary market for iPhones, esp. if an unlocking method is discovered.  I'm sure there's a way to do it on eBay (or through their API), but it will be interesting to watch the price differential between a subsidized model (with forced subscription) and a resale model (without).

• Surely they'll iTMS enable the phone, right? And leverage the Cingular billing relationship?  (I want that track, I want it now, and sure, go ahead and charge it to my cell bill.)

• I keep reading about how DRM will eventually go away, that it's days are numbered.  The strategic rationale for this is that Apple's dominance of the digital music market will force the labels into action that attempts to leverage distribution of other players (Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Real, etc.) to break the iTMS stranglehold.  (E.g., sell it in non-DRM'd MP3 format so that people can buy it wherever they want and still play it where they want. Like on their iPod.)  This very well may happen, but it might not have that much of an impact on Apple's position in the market, since there would be nothing to prevent them from offering those songs in a non-DRM'd format as well, and they'd still be able to leverage the iTunes hardware-software connection.

OK, that's it for now.

brilliantly obvious

Put a datacenter on your roof.  Or in a parking garage.  Or in your backyard.  Or on a battlefield.  Jonathan Schwartz on Project Blackbox:  "The biggest thing we could build would ultimately be the biggest thing we could transport around the world - which turned out to be a standardized shipping container. Why? Because the world's transportation infrastructure has been optimized for doing exactly this - moving packets containers on rails, roads and at sea."