I didn't use eBay again for another year or two.  We did trade negative feedbacks for each other, but in any case, I think it's a little odd that if a buyer rips you off, you can't mark them as being just as dishonest as a bad seller.  Both sellers and buyers have responsibilities and you can usually tell if a seller gave a negative mark just in retaliation to a buyers if that buyer has an otherwise prestine record...

Quoting from techDirt:

eBay has been making some changes lately that aren't sitting well with eBay sellers. First, it announced fee changes that initially were promoted as "lower fees," but the details showed were only lower for goods that didn't sell. The fees on sold goods were actually higher. Now, the company has banned sellers from giving "negative" feedback on buyers.

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For a long time with a mapping program I've wanted the ability to figure out exactly how far something was from me.  I try to walk for exercise when I can, and we also sometimes walk to nearby stores instead of driving when the weather is nice, we have the time, and we're not exhausted from the myriad of chores and duties that keep us busy most days.  Using a standard mapping interface like Google Maps itself doesn't quite cut it.  For one thing it means knowing the address of where you are coming from and going to, which is not always known, so you have to spend extra time looking this information up, and it might not even be completely accurate (for example, according to most mapping programs which use the same data source, my house is actually almost a block from where it says it is!).  Secondly, there's no guarantee that the mapping program will design a route that is the same as the way you walk.  It often chooses some other route that it deems faster by car.  Of course, this doesn't even account for some routes which cars simply can't traverse because of a road that's one way in the wrong direction or even no road at all!  I've always wanted something akin to a graphics program where you draw a polymer by clicking multiple times to form the shape.  In my mind, the lines would automatically stick to the roads that were closest to them.

More recently, I've been trying to get more exercise in during the day, and since it's been so nice and unseasonably warm here this week, I decided to skip lunch and just walk around the neighborhood.  I was wondering how much I walked, but other than the amount of time and a vague sense of how fast I was going, I really couldn't gauge much.  So I thought I'd start looking for something akin to what I've described above and maybe, just maybe I'd find something.  Well, I was shocked that I found something perfect almost immediately! 

Gmaps Pedometer is the site/hack, and it is great for anyone just wanting to know how far it is from one point to another on a map, to someone who wants to get detailed information for a walking program, a cycling route, etc.  You can very easily create a walking path and Gmaps Pedometer will show you dynamically not only what the distance is, but even how many calories you will burn on this path.  I'm not sure about how accurate the calorie count is, though, since my 3-mile path I created around my office was rated at 368 calories, which seems a bit high.  Gmaps Pedometer even gives you a graphic of the elevation levels your path is traversing, but as much as I'd like to believe it, I don't believe elevation is taken into account for calories.  The only forum message from the author about this on the site mentions not wanting to use the elevation markers for anything else because elevation data is not available everywhere - it seems to be available mostly for the U.S. 

If you can time your walk, and Gmaps Pedometer gives you an accurate measurement of the distance, you can figure out your speed and then you can plug that, the time, and your weight into some other tool to get a more or less accurate representation of you calories burned.  I tried to find such a calculator on the web, but all the ones out will only let you plug in pre-specified numbers for your pace, like 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, etc. mph.  I did find one shareware application you can download that does seem to have the degree of flexibility I was hoping for.

In addition to what I've mentioned so far, Gmaps Pedometer also lets you save a given route, so for example, this is one route I created .  Also, it lets you export to GPX format with a third party bookmarklet .  GPX is a format for sharing GPS data, so potentially you could load this into your GPS and use it as a way to navigate.  This might be very valuable for hikers, or just walkers or cyclists who are unfamiliar with an area and want to make sure they are taking the right path.  Theoretically, one could use Gmaps Pedometer to design city walking tours and make those available for people to download, along with a set of MP3's for each of the points of interest on the path.  Really, the possibilities are endless with this thing!

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I just got in the mail an offer from Sprint that might be of interest to anyone thinking of switching over to them for their mobile phone.  Basically, when you get your account with Sprint, within the first 15 days after you activate your phone, you give Sprint the name and number of a current Sprint customer who referred you, and you get credited $25.  So, if you have a friend who has a Sprint account, tell them to go to sprint.com/referralprogram, from which they can email you the offer, and not only will you get $25, but your friend will too.  If you can't find anyone with a Sprint account, I'd be happy to refer anyone, but they limit you to 12 referrals before the end of 2006, and I'm not sure what kind of offers will be available after that.

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In the last few months, however, there have been numerous controversies possibly due to the increasing popularity of Digg.com.  First there was talk about how the top 100 users of Digg submitted more than half of the stories, and so had more influence than the rest of the community who could not spend 10 hours a day submitting stories.

More recently there has been a slew of commentary on how Digg's system for dealing with duplicate entries has been breaking down.  This most recent one got to Digg's front page and generated a huge amount of comments.

Personally, I've found the duplication problem getting worse.  I used to go to Digg and it would take me a while to get through just the first page of stories, so much so that I often didn't even get to the second page.  But more and more, I've been going to the second, third, and fourth pages.  Part of this is due to articles on things I'm just not interested in, but a lot is due to repetition.

I've also been trying to submit articles here and there and when I do searches before submitting I sometimes find not one or two, but half a dozen or more articles on the exact same news item.  And these weren't even items in the top (and up until recently only) category on Digg, technology.

The problem, I think, lies what gave Digg its initial power - that "social" in "social bookmarking.  People are submitting articles so that they are dugg and recognized by others, be they friends or strangers.  It's been called "ego" but whatever you call it, it worked well when there were fewer people because the chance that you were creating a dupe was not as high.  Now that Digg is so popular, chances are that if a story has only been out for an hour, it's already been submitted.  I think this makes some people desperate (since they can't find good articles that haven't been dug) and so they don't search for duplicates and ignore Digg's own warning that their story might be one.

Digg's other tools to prevent duplication don't seem to be working either.  One can mark an article as a duplicate, but what isn't clear is how many of such actions it takes for the duplicate to be removed, or if they are removed at all?  It must be a lot because we still see many of these.  One can comment in the article itself that it's a duplicate, but chances are this won't do anything, other than possibly getting your own comment "dugg down" meaning that your overall rank on Digg goes down.

The problem seems to stem from the idea that people want to be recognized as being special, and that this impulse has superceded the idea of making Digg a better place for the community at large.  I think part of this has to do with what's probably a fairly young demographic at Digg, and we all know that when we were young, we tended to think about ourselves a little more than when we got older and realized the world didn't revolve around us.  Then again, there are plenty of people for whom age has not meant added wisdom in this area!  Anyway, you can be recognized on Digg in at least a couple of different ways.  You can do this in a couple of ways on Digg.  One is to have a high ranking of diggs; the second is to get a story you submitted onto the front page. 

If we agree that the motivation is simply to get recognition, then I think the only way to solve the issue is to remove this recognition.  Otherwise, people will always figure out ways to "game" the system, and given a finite number of new things happening every day, and new articles published on the web, people will simply post duplicates hoping that they can some how pump up their ranking and get their submission on the home page by getting their friends to digg it, or creating duplicate accounts, etc.  But how do you remove recognition from a social site like Digg.com? 

Well, one way to do it is to make the ranking system specific to the person ranking you.  So, for example, if I rank X as being digger whose articles I think are reliable and like to read, then I give them a digg, and if I think they are obnoxious, then I "bury" them (give them a negative digg).  But my ratings are only for me.  They don't get posted anywhere else, save at most on my profile page, but maybe not even there.  The point is, that removing the ranking removes one of the purely selfish reasons for people to submit stories.  You could also opt to make invisible those stories that have been submitted by users who you've previously buried, and highlight stories of those you've dugg.  Or simply have a color-coding scheme to easily pick out the buried users' stories from the dugg users' stories and all the rest.  As for users overall ranking, I think Digg could still tally this, but it would only be for their internal use.  Possibly, people could see their own rankings, but not those of others. 

The second idea is to remove credit to the person who posted a story as soon as it goes on the front page.  That way, no one could say - "hey look, my story was posted to the front page, aren't I great?  Love me!"  However, you could still be dugg or buried by a given user, so your articles might be seen by more or less people depending on how reliable you are.

Whether these suggestions or something else entirely are adopted, I think the problem needs to be addressed by Digg.  We are now seeing "duplicates" submissions of articles about duplicates!  And this blog entry itself is contributing, of course!  Kevin Rose or Jay Adelson, the founders of Digg, need to come out and talk about the issue, be it on Digg, or wherever, or if not talk, then simply do something.  The latest news is about how they are in negotiations now to sell Digg, so this issue, even though it seems to be escalating daily, may not be the first thing on their minds!  If Digg is sold to a large company like News Corp, or another, the problem may get worse before it gets better.  Then again, if we see a massive influx of cash, these guys may have the resources to get their programmers some reinforcements to make some necessary changes.

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However, I have been up to some other things besides parenting, specifically as it relates to what I am listening to these days vis-à-vis digital audio.  First a quick bit of history:

I got involved with audio books and what might be called a forerunner of podcasting (at least in terms of subscribing to feeds of magazine, newspaper and radio shows) about 6.5 years ago when I subscribed to Audible.com. I've listened to a lot of books and other programming, but after I got involved with my now wife back in late 2001, the listening slowed somewhat.

Then in late 2004, I started listening to what was then the very new phenomenon of podcasts. Because there were so many, they completely pushed out my audio book listening.  Sure, I could have alternated. But as kind of a news junky, it's hard to start reading history books when there's lots of current event non-fiction or news articles, etc. I also have this tendency to want to complete lists of listening, and the method that seems easiest is to do the shortest things first, thus getting through a large number of list items right away. Unfortunately with podcasts, they just keep piling up! You can subscribe to just a couple, but I was subscribed to 20-30, and even though these were on average a small fraction of the length of an unabridged audio book (and also that I was speeding these up by 50% or so), I was still barely keeping my head above water. All this time my audio books sat dormant, and continued to pile up. I was also spending a considerable amount of time just doing the processing that would speed these podcasts up, organize them in the proper folders, downloading them and transferring them to my iPod, etc.

Back last December I finally axed my Audible account because I simply wasn't listening to books at that point, and didn't want yet another growing pile of content that I was ignoring. Several months later, though, I took advantage of an offer to become a member again for $10/year with a free audio book offer.  There was a book that had just come out, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillema, that had just come out and was available unabridged at Audible.  I thought I'd spend $10 on it, or half the price I would have had to normally, and gain back some of the priveleges of membership - such as the ability to take advantage of sales, to gift audio books, etc.

In August, I burned out on my podcast habit, and felt like the only thing to bring back a bit of calm was to quit cold turkey and go back to my kindler and gentler days of mainly just listening to audio books.  It's odd, since I now have over 100 audio books that I haven't read, most of them unabridged, that I wouldn't feel the same compulsion to finish them as soon as possible.  But I guess the difference is that these are not podcasts of news events that I feel compelled to be familiar with or else be "out of touch."  Many are novels, but there are plenty of non-fiction titles as well.

I think the seed for this move was generated when I bought my Treo 700P back in May.  I was surprised to see that it had come with a $100 off coupon for some types of Audible memberships.  I was resisting the temptation because at the time I was still totally committed, nay addicted, to podcasts, and so feared digging myself an even deeper hole! I wanted to have some chance of actually finishing what was on my plate! But by the time I had burned out on podcasts, I think I had given up on the thought I'd ever be able to keep up.

The $100 off an Audible.com makes each book "credit" cost about $5.42 (most books are 1 credit), at least if purchasing Audible's Annual Platinum plan. This price is great when you compare it with what you would normally pay at a bookstore or online, save for maybe a used version of some book on eBay.  Then when I was actually trying to sign up when I looked a little more closely at the offer. There's some fine print at the bottom which says "Offer valid for new Audible customers only." Doh! The only way around this is to actually create a new account with Audible and apply the coupon to that new account.  Yes you can do this.  Theoretically you can have as many accounts with Audible that you want.  I don't think Audible cares, as I know many who have multiple accounts.  The one problem with this scenario is that if you want to have all your audio books on your iPod (or other compatible player), you can't.  Well, unless you have only one, or at most two accounts.  You can't activate more than two accounts on a given player.  I suppose you could buy two or more iPods and then rack up accounts in order to take advantage of these discounts, but the added price of the player would kind of defeat the purpose.  In any case, my problem was that my wife had an account as well, which had a number of books I hadn't read and really wanted to.  So I managed to dedicate most of my free time towards reading some of those books, and a few others I ended up skipping after I determined that I wasn't enjoying them enough after the first hour or two to devote another 10+ hours.

So I signed up for the new account that gave me 24 credits.  What do I do with those credits?  So far, the only ones I've used were for a podcast!  Well, that's what Audible calls them anyway.  They are basically the same type of subscriptions that Audible gives you the choice of downloading in the old more manual way or via a feed address.  Unfortunately, as I've found, when you set it up in iTunes as a podcast via the feed they give you, it downloads a file that cannot be sped up as all other Audible content can be on the iPod.  Yes, I still speed things up!  Although I do this via the iPod's built in ability that will only speed a file up by 20% or so, not the 50% I was doing in a much more belabored process with my podcasts earlier.  I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker magazine.  Then I discovered a couple of free audible shows, one of which only comes out every month or two called Ear to the Ground, the other which comes out twice a week, called This is Audible.  Both of these contain excerpts of audio books, interviews with authors, publishers, and others who talk about the books.  Then just a week or two ago I discovered that my new account came with a complimentary subscription to the New York Times!  So now I have around 27 hours of subscription/podcast content via my Audible account!  I can't escape the podcasts!

In an effort to try to organize things better, I went through my very long wish list on my old account to look for stuff that I could get rid of. I hadn't done this in a while and I had lots of old stuff, and as it turned out a good amount of abridged stuff which Audible
never did offer an unabridged version of. I made the rule that I wasn't going to have anything abridged on the list, nor books that were more than 100 or so years old, since that would put them in the public domain and I could possibly get versions for free via Libravox or the Guttenberg Project. I used to add books to my wish list because they seemed interesting, and that's fine, but after 2 or 3 or more years if they had no reviews and a rating of 3.5 or less, I didn't have the confidence that these were books worth  listening to. I was able to get my list down from a whopping 308 to a much more manageable 60 or so. Of course, I've also been adding new ones to this list due to hearing some of the books on This is Audible or Ear to the Gound which really interested me.  But I've also paired things a bit by actually buying a few titles via special sales that Audible has had in the last month or so - they seem to be having sales pretty regularly now, maybe gearing up for even bigger ones towards the holidays in an effort to make some big sales numbers by the end of the year?

The point of this is that I've been listening to a lot of stuff, and have even managed to post a bunch of short reviews on an Audible Yahoo Group, but I thought I'd start posting them here as well, since I'm not posting much else these days!  So watch for a bunch of these reviews as I have time to find them, spruce them up slightly and post them here.

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We're sorry, but there's been an error delivering this podcast. Please contact podcasts@npr.org for updates and more information.

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Think Secret can confirm recent rumblings that Apple is nearing completion of a completely revamped video iPod that will shed the ubiquitous mechanical click wheel for a touch screen and will sport a 3.5-inch diagonal display.advertisementThis video iPod, which has been in development and on the table since before Apple released the 5G iPod last year with video playback, will feature a display that will occupy the entire front face of the device. Sources who have seen the device report that it features a digital click wheel, one that overlays the touch-sensitive display and appears when a finger touches it and disappears when the finger is removed.

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• You can access your desktop via various methods, including ActiveX and Java. 
• You can access it via any system that can run a java-enabled web-browser
• You can change screen resolutions and desktop panning options on the fly without having to reconnect, etc.
• You can change the number of colors that it uses on the fly.  This way, if you don't need lots of colors (for displaying photos for example), you can decrease them, which will result in speedier displays.

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Several weeks ago, Apple announced their newest version of the iPod, the much anticipated one that allows owners to watch videos.

I generally have very good rationalizations when it comes to upgrading my gadgets and this time was no different. After all, I had resisted getting the photo iPod when it came out earlier this year. No, I figured, there needs to be a very significant value added over and above what I have in order to upgrade. Having a better screen, even allowing you to view pictures (something I could do on my Phone for years now) was not enough.

While I said I'm not the biggest video buff, especially these days with a new baby in the house, the various new features and enhancements that were better than my old 4th Generation monochrome iPod (all of a year old now) just added up to a critical mass and convinced me that it was time to upgrade:

For one, there's the video, of course. While I'm probably still probably going to be using the iPod 99% or more for audio, it would be nice to load many of my unwatched DVD's that I've been wanting to watch for years, not to mention TV shows that I miss on a regular basis these days, or whole series that I missed out on. As you may have heard, Apple and Disney teamed up to offer some of Disney's content, which includes some ABC shows like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives". I'd always heard raves about Lost, but never got around to watching it last year and I'm one of those people who refuse to pick up watching a show when I haven't come in at the beginning – at least dramatic shows. While buying the shows individually can add up at $2 a pop, one thing that I haven't heard mention in the other articles I've read about these downloadable shows is that you can actually buy a season's worth of a show for nice discounted - about $1.40 per show instead of the normal $1.99. Unfortunately, you can't do this with a season that isn't complete - I can't pay for all of season 2 of Lost because it hasn't all been made available yet and Apple just doesn't seem to have the mechanisms in their iTunes Store to handle this kind of "subscription" of ongoing content. Maybe their venture into podcasting will help them implement something like this in the future, though.

Then there's home video. We got a digital camcorder last Spring in anticipation of our first child and I've been slowly trying to figure out video editing and production. I figured it would be a nice thing to keep a collection of clips of events or just clips of our daughter playing and smiling.

The new iPod will also let you record audio at 44kbps, rather than a measly 8kbps for previous models. Not that I have any big plans to start my own podcast, but this does at least open up the possibility of recording audio on the go, whether that's just notes to myself, a conversation, a class, or our daughter "talking" to us.

The large capacity of the 60GB iPod would seem like more than enough for all your possible needs, but Video can take up a LOT of space. We are talking hundreds of megabytes per hour - and that's highly compressed! Even at 60GB, Apple states its capacity at all of 150 hours of Video. This might seem a lot, but I have about 1,400 hours of Audio Books currently on my iPod, and these take up less than 20GB. This audio book collection keeps growing as I continue to download books from a subscription to Audible.com and little time to actually listen to them and move them off the iPod. Another 12GB or so are taken up by a music collection which I'm sure will grow as our daughter gets older and we put more music for her on it. Finally, there are couple of gigabytes of podcasts that I can't seem to get caught up on either! So already I was getting dangerously close to my old iPod's limit of 40GB! That extra space will really be useful, although of course I would love to have 100GB (or 200GB for that matter) instead of 60GB!

My old iPod supposedly had 12 hours of battery life, and while that might have been true initially, it always seemed the battery meter was getting low way before that time. It could be the battery meter was just faulty, who knows. In any case, the new 60GB model that I bought is rated at 19+ hours of playtime for music, so I think I could safely listen for many days without having to recharge. Of course, Video can kill the battery in around 3 hours, so if I end up using it a lot for that, I may have to look into a battery pack that expands battery life to 9 hours for video.

Finally, the new iPods are considerably thinner than the old ones. For someone who has lots of gadgets and sometimes carries them in pockets, this definitely helps me not look like a total buffoon, in addition to just being more comfortable to carry.

Oh yes, also, I figured, I could sell the old iPod on eBay and not pay full price for the new one.

Equipped with an airtight rationale for upgrading, I went to the Apple store the week after the new iPod was announced and was told that it wouldn't be in until the end of the month (October). However, on the iLounge.com forums, people were sighting them at other Apple stores across the country, so I kept coming back and pestering the poor Apple store staff. Within a couple days they had the 30GB model, but it was not on display. Instead the item was tucked in the pocket of one of the staff that let me look at it. He said there would be no 60GB model until the following week, but I knew that these estimates seemed always to be very conservative. So I continued to return every day and ask if they had a 60GB model and within just a couple of days, they did and I grabbed it!

Impressions

My general impressions of this "5th Generation" iPod model are generally favorable. I'll talk about the video aspects of it below, but other than that, it seems to work as well, for the most part, as my old iPod. The big color screen is of course a whole lot prettier than my old monochrome model, but it also seems a bit more "sluggish" in its display. That is, when navigating between tracks or even between the different "pages" of an individual track (the scrubbing page, the album art page, the rating page, etc.), the screen doesn't transition immediately, but lags a second or two before changing. When navigating to the next track, the audio for that track kicks in immediately, but the screen stays on the old track's info for a second or two before changing. This isn't a huge deal, but it makes it feel a lot less responsive than I would like. A couple of other minor issues that may or may not annoy some people follow:

1. The lack of a true power supply. All previous iPods had a separate power supply to charge the unit, but for these, you have to charge them via the computer via the supplied USB cable. Not particularly convenient if you want to take the iPod with you on a trip and don't want to or can't bring your computer! You can still buy a power supply separately, but for the price, Apple really shouldn't be REMOVING accessories that were previously included.

2. The lack of a firewire interface. IPods can no longer connect to a computer via firewire. Some people believe firewire is faster than USB2 despite that according to the specifications USB2 is slightly faster. I've also heard that for video transfer from digital camcorder, firewire is critical. But I'm not sure how much of that is pure transfer speed and how much are other factors like consistently steady throughput. In any case, there's probably not a tremendous difference between the two and so you wouldn't notice a big different unless you are transferring a significant amount of content.

3. The removal of the port on the top of the iPod which many accessories use. This essentially has made these iPods incompatible with dozens, if not hundred of accessories that used this port. I had two of these myself, which I was fortunately able to sell along with my iPod. Many others, I'm sure, would have much rather keep their accessories, especially if they were expensive to begin with and/or can't be resold for much.

Video: is it the Video iPod or iPod with Video?

When these new iPods first came out, Apple touted them not as the "Video iPod" but as an iPod "with Video capabilities." It was as if they still weren't ready to come out and say that video was in any way a central feature. They had to qualify this release by saying that the iPod was still primarily a music player. Whether this was BECAUSE they didn't think the video capabilities were good enough, or whether they actually didn't put everything they could into making video as good as it could be, I'm not sure. What I do know is that video on the iPod works reasonably well considering the small screen size, and some other issues that I'll get to below.

As far as screen size is concerned, Apple enlarged the screen as much as they could within the confines of the standard iPod dimensions. They even sacrificed a bit of size of the click wheel in order to do this. Sure, they could have radically altered the design by stretching the screen across the entire front and changed the click-wheel to some other interface, or even implemented a touch screen that included the clickwheel as an image on that screen instead of an actual hardware click-wheel. Obviously, though, Apple did not want to take such a big risk in radically altering the interface that has helped them win and maintain such a commanding majority of the MP3 player market. As it stands, the screen is certainly watchable, but I don't know if I would want to spend multiple hours staring at it! Even holding it up close, watching an episode of Lost, I felt a little like I was taking the images in through a straw. A big straw - maybe something akin to the cardboard tube that paper towel is wrapped around – but still it was constraining, if you understand what I mean.

The other way that Apple made a very hesitant step in the direction of Video was in its choice to only allow a couple of video formats to be compatible with the new iPod. Neither of these formats is proprietary per se, but they are not particularly popular outside of Apple's own software. I'm sure part of this was also to prevent those who have big libraries of video in more popular formats (read "DVIX"), that they've either converted themselves or gotten illicitly off Grokster or BitTorrent, from easily playing them on the new devices, thus getting Apple slammed by big media companies as being too friendly towards file sharers. The result is that you can still do this, but it just takes more work: if you have a bunch of DVIX-encoded video files, you just have to convert them yet again to H.264 or MPEG4.

As for what kind of content there is available, you can download a select list of ABC TV shows - five to be exact from Apple's iTunes Music Store. You can also download around 3,000 music videos. Whether it's a 3-minute music video or a 30-minute TV show, the price is still $1.99. Apple also announced that, after the first 20 days from the launch of the new iPod and the video content in the iTunes music store, over 1 Million of those videos had been purchased. They did not reveal how many were the TV episodes and how many were music videos. Not bad considering this product was brand new and wasn't even easy to find in stores for the first couple of weeks after the launch. Then again, I wonder how much of these purchasers were people like me who don't plan to make a habit of doing it, but still wanted to see a sample of what they could have on their new iPods without going through all the effort of converting.

Unfortunately, it seems that the other networks are not jumping onto the Apple bandwagon, but at least for now scrambling to sign deals to make their content available in other "downloadable" forms. NBC has signed a deal with DirectTV and CBS has signed a deal with Comcast so that respective users of these services can download shows onto their DVR. But you can't then transfer these shows to a portable player, which is the main feature of the iPod. So, this then forces people who want to have portable content into either recording these shows themselves and converting them, or even worse obtaining illegal copies on the Internet - all because the networks still want to limit how people watch, despite this supposed venture into new forms of content distribution. Just today AOL and Warner Bros. announced a new online venture to bring older tv shows to the internet, but again, there seems to be no plan to offer an option for content portability. Another announcement today from Hasbro does involve portable content, but only through Hasbro's VUGO device. Even at best it looks like the interests involved will still end up carving out small domains where only certain content is available via a given service/device. A fragmented mess that's bound to encourage pirates to record or obtain the content illegally and crack the protective DRM that prevents it from playing on all but one device.

Of course, as with music, one might already have a lot of video in the form of DVD movies. These movies can be transferred to the iPod, but it isn't a trivial process. It takes time, some degree of technical knowledge, and experimenting with tools that are still clunky, in beta, or which will cost you additional money. And don't expect Apple to help you very much in this effort. Apple's tool for converting video to a format the iPod plays, Quicktime Pro (Mac users can also use iMovie), will not convert a DVD for you in and of itself - you still need a DVD decoder. Even then, Quicktime Pro is a $30 program and is one of the notoriously slowest video converters out there, although it does seem to work predictably without much hassle. Other applications are a lot speedier, but some have had difficulty in getting them to work at all. Some video formats simply won't convert in some of these applications, whereas other problems could be in the various settings that one can use for a given conversion (bit rates, keyframes, resolution, etc., etc.) that aren't exactly within the iPod's constraints.

I experienced this myself in a free converter for Windows called Videora iPod Converter when I tried to convert some home video clips that were in uncompressed AVI format - what I thought was one of the most basic video formats. These AVI files were created with Adobe Premier Elements and whenever I tried to convert them, they would either not transfer to the iPod or they would only produce an audio track, not a video track. After trying just about every setting I could think of, I finally converted the AVI file to another format, and then converting it with Videora. This worked immediately. Other programs that offer conversion and dvd decryption in one package and have gotten some good reviews are Nero Recode and PQDVD on the PC side, and Handbreak on Mac (and Linux).

In addition to the video that one can download from Apple and the video that one can convert from DVD, there's yet another category of freely available content available on the internet - video podcasts, video blogs, and other such episodic content. A new site that was just created to link to various kinds of content like this that is available in formats that will work right off the bat with the new iPod is FreeIpodVideos.org. A couple of other great sources for free video that you will undoubtedly have to convert to play on the new iPods are the Internet Archive's Moving Images and Google Video.

The one other video issue that I hadn't thought much about before I got the iPod (mainly because I've never had a video-capable device like this) is the issue of outputting the video to a TV. Now, one might ask why you would want to do this if the whole point of having a portable player is to watch things away from home. True, but at the same time, if you could watch something on a much bigger screen, wouldn't you opt for that, especially if you want to share the video with multiple people? Just as people bring their iPods to friends and hook them to a stereo so that everyone can enjoy your music collection, so too can you share videos or pictures. You still have to buy an extra connector to do this either via Apple for $20, or from a Radio Shack or place like it for a bit less.

Once you export the video to TV, you will see that video that has been optimized specifically for the iPod within its native 320x240 resolution, and it will not look very good except on sets that are at most 25". Since most people tend to have larger TV sets these days, this becomes a problem. One way to avoid it is by changing the resolution to something higher than what the iPod itself displays. The iPod will then just scale it down when displaying it on its small screen, but will display all the resolution when connecting to a TV – given the TV can display the given resolution. Unfortunately there are still limits. Apple lists a max resolution for MPEG4 files as 480x480. This is somewhat of an odd resolution, being completely square, as opposed to the more rectangular standard TV screen or the even more elongated widescreen dimensions. But that 480x480 is a bit misleading. What it really means is that 480 pixels times 480 pixels yields a total of 230,400 pixels. So one can create videos of ANY resolution as long as their total pixel count doesn't exceed this. For example 640x360 also comes to 230,400 pixels, but is much more rectangular. In any case, when you pump up the resolution from 240 vertical lines to 360 or even higher, the picture becomes much more watchable on a large TV.

The one issue that remains may not be an issue for everyone, but it is for anyone who has a widescreen TV. It appears that the iPod doesn't support a way to export anamorphic widescreen video to a widescreen TV. By this I mean that anything that is played on a widescreen TV via the iPod, whether that source video is in a widescreen format or not, does not fill the entire widescreen TV. Rather, they show up in the middle, so there are boxes on the sides as well as the top and bottom. I have asked on the forums about this and no one has given a satisfactory definitive issue. I even tried to get in touch with Apple, but I guess a lowly blogger is not worthy of a response. If they somehow surprise me after a week and actually answer my question, I will post an update here. Here's an image of a widescreen movie playing on the iPod itself:

And here's an image of that same movie piped out to my widescreen TV:

Again, this probably is not going to be a huge issue with a lot of people right now, but I was really hoping that this would work since most of my DVD's and all my recent home video is filmed in widescreen. So having to watch it in this small area within my TV set seems a bit pointless. Then again, I could always export the home videos to DVD and get full resolution displays, it just would be nice to be able to view them in the same (or almost the same) way via the iPod on my own and other people's widescreen TV's…

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Now another developer has created a way for site owners or groups to set up their own map and allow people (visitors, readers, members) to populate it.  It's called "Frappr" and I've set up my own map that you can access via the button on the right or via the one right here:

 So if you do read my blog on occasion, or even if you're a one-time reader, I'd love to know who's reading from where.  You can even enter general comments or post an image in your entry.

Frappr is similar in ways to a service that I used to have on my site from Bravenet, but they wanted a chunk of money every month for it, otherwise it was surrounded by ads and pop-ups.  Frappr is free and has all of one set of inconspicuous Google Adsense ad.  If you're a site or online group owner, this is a great way to see where your members or visitors are from, but they do have to actually go and fill in some information – it's not automatic based on visitor logs or such.

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So for starters, I have revamped the links section at left - specifically I've updated it with the podcasts I listen to now.  Many are the same, but there are a lot of new ones, particularly NPR podcasts.  If you've been following this blog, you know that I have been rooting for NPR to get most or all of its shows out there as podcasts.  A couple of months ago they did add a whole lot of content, but not exactly in the way I expected. 

Most of the new content added is actually clips from various shows they produce (Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Day to Day, etc.), but categorized.  So you have lots of movie-related content strung together from different shows into one regular podcast.  Another has lots of health-related clips, and so on.  It's definitely a different approach than simply taking an entire show and plopping it down into podcast form.  In some ways it's better for the listener because if they have no interest in a given subject, they don't have to fast forward every time a segment comes up on, say, the bird flu pandemic.  It's of course a lot more work for NPR itself, so I'm a bit surprised they went to that level.  On the other hand, there are also these "Story of the Day" or "Most Emailed Stories" which aren't a specific category.  Because they overlap other categories, and even each other, I very often have to fast forward through stories that I've heard before.

Then there are all the great shows that are put out by the individual stations rather than NPR headquarters.  Shows like Good Food, Le Show, Leonard Lopate, Morning Stories, etc.  NPR is finding it needs to adapt to the ongoing change in technology and distribution channels.  Unlike the recording industry or the movie industry, it doesn't have to protect its outlandish profits or price scale of $20-30 Million for many of it's top performers, let alone the high costs of advertising, marketing, and executive salaries.  And so it doesn't have to put everything into a DRM package, continue to charge outlandish prices for its content, nor arrest children because they downloaded some copyrighted content off the Internet. 

NPR affiliates still rely on two main sources of funding.  One of these is the involuntary donation of every tax-paying citizen, although Congress has continually whittled away at this.  The other source is through voluntary listener donations.  In past years I have given to my two local affiliates as I used to listen to them daily.  But now most of my listening is in podcast form, and my local affiliates don't put any of their shows into that form.  So I'm seriously considering, at the end of this year, dividing up my allotted amount between the various stations that produce the podcasts I listen to, including KCRW, WNYC, WGBH, and others.  I think this really does make sense because not only does it thank these stations for what they are offering and help defray those costs, but it also, I would hope, motivates other stations to get in their to offer their own content in a free, downloadable form.  Some of my favorite shows, including Marketplace, This American Life, Metro Connection, and others) still aren't in this format.  At this point there is just far too many shows that are freely available to worry about the shows that make it harder for me the listener to listen to them (whether that is due to lack of a downloadable version, or a downloadable version that one has to pay for - such as through Audible.com).  I would even be ok with a subscription fee to all public radio shows, but I'm not going to subscribe to individual shows as I fear the price would add up significantly after only a few.

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• "Optimizes memory handling and frees up more memory with non-volatile files system improvements" - I now have almost 15MB free whereas before the upgrade I had a about 9MB.
• "Updates VersaMail to heighten stability and add improvements" - I really don't care about this one since I use Marc Blank's excellent ChatterEmail.
• "Overall voice quality improvements and enhanced call clarity" - I've never had a big problem with voice clarity, so I'm not sure if this is going to be a big difference for me.
• "Latest carrier settings files" - not sure about this. I use T-Mobile and never had an issue.
• "Bluetooth Headset Volume Increased" - again, this has never been an issue for me with my Pa1mOne Jabra BT250. My biggest problem with it is that it's very sensitive to wind, and makes it impossible for the person on the other end to hear my voice if there's much of any wind. Even the AC in the car does this if it's pointed towards my head! Truly annoying. There's nothing about that here, so my assumption is this will continue to be a problem and is probably something inherent in the headset and has nothing to do with the Treo.
  

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