unterwegs/tech

When the iPhone stops syncing with the Mac

2008-05-13T20:14:00.004-04:00

Just want to document this for Google to pick it up, just in case somebody else has a similar issue. The issue was that my iPhone stopped syncing. There was a variety of errors: timeouts, cannot read disk, hanging forever while syncing or just not recognizing the iPhone after connecting. I tried everything - restoring, reinstalling iTunes, swapping cables, but nothing helped. More mysterious, my iPod synced without problems.

The key to the solution was in the Mac OS X logs: the message

May 13 19:28:54 Jamaica usbmuxd[6182]: MuxInterfacev1Receive Dropping packet. Received 17408, expected 32764 bytes

May 13 19:28:54 Jamaica com.apple.usbmuxd[6182]: usbmuxd[6182]: MuxInterfacev1Receive Dropping packet. Received 17408, expected 32764 bytes

This somehow hinted an USB problem and after I disconnected a SanDisk ImageMate 12 in 1 Card reader the problem was solved.

This is by the way one of those situation where Apple's user friendliness gets into the way of solving an actual problem. None of the error messages displayed in iTunes hinted that there's an issue with USB. Good that's Mac OS X is UNIX and there's always a log to look at.

Back Home in NYC

2008-05-06T19:09:00.006-04:00

Back from one of our short trips to Germany, we learned or confirmed three things:

First, business class is the way to fly, if you don't have to pay the full price yourself, that is (thanks again, Christian!). It's not only the amenities, such as a much more comfortable seat, where you can actually sleep, but also that you're not being treated like cattle. Here you can still find something of the old glory of travel.

Second, business class or not, airlines loose, or better mislay your baggage and don't care too much. We waited three days for our suitcase to be delivered, right in time for having fresh clothes on the flight back. Next time we'll be better prepared, with bigger hand luggage and multiple pieces, which hopefully don't get all lost at once.

Third, as nice as it is to visit family and friends, we're always looking forward to get back home to New York. People have different preferences, but we like this city very much, for it's dynamic and its diversity and even for its insane weather.

This is not triple easy!

2008-03-08T15:17:00.004-05:00

I've been looking for this a long time: a mobile device that I can carry with me all the time and that I can use to write. E-mails, blogs, stories, screenplays, notes, which means significant amounts of text. A laptop would be ideal, but is too heavy to carry around, just in case. A smart phone is too small to write more than a few lines in an e-mail. So I want something in between.

On New Years Day I stumbled over the Asus Eee PC, the "Surf" version, that is. This is a $299 ultra-portable that runs some version of Linux. It has almost no storage (some 300 MBytes are free), so it's more or less meant as a dumb Internet terminal. It's close to useless in that capacity, however: the WiFi client is ridiculous, forcing you to enter the WPA key every time it connects. It comes with Firefox, Skype and some other Internet apps, but the 7" screen doesn't make them fun to use. Firefox, for example, wastes almost half of the screen real estate with it's various tool and status bars. For a new class of device you need a new class of software - Asus is doing it on the cheap - literally - and the result sucks.

It can be a quite useful device nonetheless. It has the classic laptop form factor, with a real keyboard, a little smaller of course, but with a right look & feel. And I'm strongly convinced that ultra portable should have either a real keyboard or none at all. Nobody so far has figured how to do the latter right (guess we need to wait for Apple on this), so the Eee's conventional keyboard is the way to go. It also comes with OpenOffice installed, which contains a pro-grade word processor. Again, OpenOffice has its issues to fit in that small frame, but all in all it's usable for serious writing.

But how do I keep it in sync with my laptop? In theory, the Eee should connect to shared network drives, but while trying that I quickly ended up tweaking the Samba configuration files. Now I do know a thing about Linux configuration or two, but this isn't worth the effort. Fortunately there's an easier way: I use a SD card as primary storage on the Eee. With the help of ChronoSync on my MacBook it automatically syncs whenever I put it into the card reader. Sweet.

Remains the battery life, which is, as always, a bitter disappointment. The Eee gives you some 3 hours uptime, which is close to ridiculous, but apparently this is all you can get these days. My commute is around an hour each way, so I can live with that for now.

All in all I prefer the Eee much over other ultra portables, which I find far too expensive and lacking a real keyboard. But there's still an opportunity out there for the perfect mobile device that fits functionally a smartphone and a laptop.

Apple TV Take 2

2008-02-23T14:36:00.004-05:00

I've always thought Apple TV is a great idea, simply because I like listening to music and watching movies in the living room, rather than on my PC. But Apple TV had its flaws and everybody was waiting for the next update (or for its discontinuation). Well, finally it happened and Apple released a free update, which includes tons of new and improved functionality.

The big one is access to the iTunes store, including movie rentals, sometimes even in HD. That's certainly a smart move - however you need a really fast Internet connection for making HD downloads work: we tried it two times and eventually gave up waiting for the data trickling down the net.

But it's the smaller improvements I like the most:

Apple TV acts now as a wireless speaker from iTunes. This very elegantly allows to "remote control" an Apple TV (one item on my first wish list). Also on our last party we could play the same music in both rooms, which is kind of cool.
The distinction between synced and streamed content has finally been dropped. This was pretty annoying, because for accessing the full media library one needed to go through several menu items to switch between the local and the remote library. This happens now automatically and you can even turn the iTunes sync settings to "automatic", which copies supposedly the latest media to the Apple TV hard disk.
Originally we bought Apple TV mostly for watching photos on the big screen. However this was only slightly less cumbersome than pulling a projector out of the cabinet and erecting a screen: if the photos were on a different machine than the one Apple TV synced with, you needed to copy them explicitly over, ideally reducing their size for saving disk space. The new Apple TV finally streams photos from Flickr, ,mac , iPhoto or Aperture from any computer which is connected to Apple TV.

So all in all I'm pretty happy with the software update and my wish list is more or less reduced to one item: streaming music from Internet radio stations. Can we please get this?

Quicken Online: Back to Beta

2008-01-26T15:08:00.000-05:00

I was really looking forward to Quicken online, but the disappointment grows: first it's buggy like hell (Intuit acknowledged this and extended the trial period) and second it's so limited in features that I don't really know what it's for.

Officially it's labeled as an entry level product for people who have basic needs in financial management. Well, I can't imagine how anybody gets something useful out of this product. In my opinion the most basic need is to monitor transactions, categorize your spending and generate reports about where your money went.

However Quicken Online is actually unable to help you with that:

You cannot monitor your transactions, because QO will categorize them automatically, which may be, naturally, incorrect. After it's categorized nothing tells it apart from any transactions which have been reviewed. So, for example, if QO feels that it recognizes a fraudulent charge on a credit card, it will literally hide it among the other transactions.
You cannot categorize spending, because there's no split feature. I don't know anybody at Intuit thought they can get around this. Do they expect that we sort our products at the check out an pay each category separately.
There are reports that show how much you spend in each category, but you cannot download them or print them.

QO is a nicely done web application, but the current feature set is by far not sufficient for any kind of financial planning.

Still Missing the Sync

2008-01-17T21:17:00.001-05:00

Apple's new product announcements are always fun to watch, because you never know what is going to happen. Steve Job's keynote on Tuesday was especially fun, because two new products were actually free software updates and the MacBook Air seems to be such a niche product that it doesn't send me to re-calculate my budget.

Still I think, something is curiously missing in Apple's shiny digital world and the MacBook Air highlights it, given that for most people it will be an addition to their main desktop computer: how do you get the data from your main Mac to your laptop. Of course you can copy files, but this does only work for document files, for example Word files. It does not work for the “library” style repositories that the iLife applications use. For example iTunes, which just got a revamp to support rental movies. Yes, you can sync the movies to watch them on your Mac, your Apple TV and your tiny iPod or iPhone screens. But you can't take it on the road on your laptop and it's 13” or more screen. Same goes for photos, where you have to maintain a separate repository on each computer.

So, Apple, you solved the syncing of persona data between computers pretty elegantly (however pricey) with .Mac. Can we now please have an universal sync that keeps certain files, including the data of iTunes, iLife applications and pro apps like Aperture available on our laptops, while we are on the road?

Quicken Online - First Impressions

2008-01-13T12:30:00.001-05:00

As a long time power user of personal finance software, I've been waiting a long time for a web-bases solution. With the availability of the new "Web 2.0" technologies, there's just no need anymore for installing a clunky local application on a single machine. Especially since there's no really satisfying personal finance program available for the Mac. Now, since Jan 8th, the wait has an end: Intuit released its Quicken Online site and I registered on the very first day (after going through "site unavailable" messages for a couple of days).

Now I was prepared to live with reduced functionality, but Quicken Online covers only a tiny little part of what I'm used to. It seems that most of the work for the initial release went into the connectivity to the banks, which is truly impressive: the list of supported banks (in the U.S.) is endless and I could register all my (non-investment) accounts within minutes. QO would then download 90 days of transactions and try to categorize them automatically, which works pretty well. After that QO would refresh the accounts automatically in the background on a daily basis, so you would look always at a current balance.

Add some simple graphs and reports, a way to add future transactions and text message or e-mail bill reminders based on automatically recognized recurring transactions and you have pretty much the entire app. That's a decent starting point, but obviously still a long way to go.

Here's what I miss the most:

Splitting transactions. I can't think of a reason how they could miss this. Officially this decision was made, because they wanted to assign transaction automatically, but that doesn't really make sense. Reality is, that there are transaction that fall into multiple categories and for the purpose of budgeting and controlling your expenses you have to split them accordingly.
Security. I appreciate all measures to keep my personal data private, but logging in could be a little more convenient. At least the login page should allow the browser to fill in user name and password automatically.
Accounts that are not backed by a bank. Common wisdom would say that they are much easier to implement than bank-backed accounts. So why are they missing, preventing me e.g. from tracking international accounts.
Transfers. You cannot transfer money from one account to another, for example to pay a credit card bill. You have to enter the transaction two times, which is silly.

There's missing more of course: a budget function (I haven't seen a good one in any software, so I don't care too much), more reports, more graphs, import/export function and support for investment accounts.

So let's see where this one is going. Supposedly there's a lot of interest, so hopefully Intuit throws some resources at Quicken Online and implements more features quickly.

Amazon Kindle

2007-12-31T14:24:00.000-05:00

It is kind of ironic that books, which can be digitalized much easier than sound or video, are the last medium that resists against being swept away by the digital revolution. The reason may be that the traditional book is a pretty good mobile device already and as opposed to music or video, where one wants to spontaneously select a song or movie, it's easy to choose a book that lasts for the day, when you are on the road.

This may change with Amazon's Kindle. As opposed to previous attempts to establish eBook reading on the mass market, I think this one has the chance to really transform how we read. For two reasons: first, it's from Amazon, which is already the primary site for many readers to buy books. Second, because of the excellent idea to deliver content wirelessly, without a monthly contract, but also without installing software, syncing and without adding more cables to the clutter at the desk.

Here is how it works: You go to Amazon.com and select a title that is available in Kindle format. Most likely, faster than you can go to the content page on the Kindle, the title will be downloaded and is ready for reading. Also nice: you can first download some pages for free, before you purchase the full book. A slightly stripped down version of the Amazon bookstore is also available on the Kindle directly, so in theory you could use it even completely without owning a PC.

The design and usability is functional, but the device doesn't feel nearly as good as, for example, anything built by Apple. There's a next page button on each side, so you can comfortably use it with either hand. For some reason, however, the Kindle is asymmetric, with a bias to hold it with your right hand. The readability of the display is great - the eInk technology allows reading even in bright sunshine. On the other hand, in the dark, the Kindle is as useless as a paper book and there's no built-in light. Also eInk is much slower than a LCD display, so while you can write a full review directly on the Kindle, it's probably not really fun. In order to get around this, the Kindle has a select bar outside of the main display, which is used to select menus and lines in the text for marking up or adding notes. A great feature is the built-in dictionary, which is somewhat slow, but still much faster than looking up a word in a real dictionary.

So what's not to like? First, of course, the copy-protected content. I wouldn't mind so much, because I don't really read books multiple times, but it also prevents sharing books with friends and family, which is part of the fun you can have with books. I can't imagine that publishers and Amazon believe that they can make friends and family pay the full price for a book that they just could have borrowed. So they have to come up with some way of sharing content and the fact that the content files are not easily available open up interesting possibilities.

The display is great, but there's room for improvement. The background is not really paper white, rather grayish, and of course we really want to have color. But all this is probably only a matter of time as the eInk technology evolves.

Lastly, 90,000 Kindle books sounds like a lot to choose from, but if you're looking for a specific book, chances are pretty high that it's not available for the Kindle. The device is currently sold out, so there's a real possibility that it reaches a critical mass that forces all publishers to provide a Kindle edition. If not, the Kindle will remain not much more than an interesting gadget.

What's up with Apple TV?

2007-11-29T22:07:00.000-05:00

This year is heavy with Apple news, so the silence about Apple TV is somewhat suspicious and triggers comments like http://www.switched.com/2007/11/27/is-there-hope-for-the-apple-tv/. Not surprisingly Apple TV is painted here as a device only for "die-hard Apple fanatics" without future on the mass-market.
That would be sad, because Apple TV is a good and easy solution, if you don't want to listen to music and watch movies sitting at your desk in front of your computer, but on the sofa in your living room. Yes, Apple TV is restricted to the iTunes world, but that's a pretty big world. I buy video on iTunes and can rip DVDs - what else is missing? Apple TV is by far not flawless and I'm a little disappointed that we haven't seen a software update, for example bringing Internet radio and improved handling of slideshows, but still we have lots of fun with it.
And as far as using a Mac mini instead: did anybody actually do this? I tried and sank a couple of hundred dollars (on top of the mini itself) into it, but I just couldn't come to a satisfying solution. First even with a DVI-to-HDMI cable the picture on the TV was either too small or too big. Then - as opposed to Apple TV - the Mac mini cannot be used just with the remote. It needs a keyboard and a mouse, preferably with Bluetooth, which just don't seem right in a living room. And Frontrow would happily burn the iTunes logo in our plasma screen.
No, I think that Apple TV is still a great idea and I hope that Apple neglected it just because so many other things were going on this year.

The cellphone/carrier mess

2007-11-25T12:21:00.000-05:00

It's holiday season and a the wireless carriers let loose a wave of commercials about fancy new phones, practically for free -if you are willing to sign a new two years contract. In other words, the carriers exclusively focus on customers of their competition, whose contract has expired. Of course, since all four major US carriers are playing the same game, it's obvious that the they win some customers on one side and they loose them on the other side.
This is a silly game with a negative impact for two groups of customers: first those who are still proudly carrying their old monochrome, brick-sized cellphone ("All I need it for is making phone calls"). They may save some money for hardware, but with their fixed monthly charge they cross-subsidize those who get the latest phones every year by switching the carrier. Second, those who like to buy a new gadget as often as they want, but cannot do that without the feeling to throw away money if they don't wait for the end of the contract.
This cries for regulation, as it's already done in other countries: carriers should be obliged to offer a bare-bones monthly rate without any hardware-subsidies priced in and hardware vendors should offer unlocked phones for the full price. That way customers can select a phone and the plan that they want, instead of having a drastically limited choice.

A pleasant iPhone surprise

2007-11-12T20:05:00.000-05:00

There seemed nothing particularly interesting with the 1.1.2 update for the iPhone. As usual there was no information from Apple and the reviews are listing only multi-language support for the international roll-out and some security fixes. Whatever.
But there's more to it: One big flaw of the iPhone was always that it would only allow typing in English - the built in dictionary just went crazy if you tried to type in a different language. Well, that's solved now. And in a surprisingly good way: while I was expecting that I have to go to Settings, General, International, Keyboard to switch keyboards, it's actually much easier. You can activate multiple keyboards, which can be switched with a button next to the space bar. Perfect - as wished √

One Month with the iPhone

2007-08-05T13:53:00.000-04:00

It's been a month since couldn't resist all the hype and bought an iPhone. And, like most others who couldn't wait, I'm enoying it very much. It's shape, weight and vivid display makes you want to use it again and again and I catch myself several times a day just checking the weather or the stock quotes. No doubt, Apple did an amazing job in engineering the iPhone and one can only imagine how the design departments of the Motorolas, Nokias and Samsungs of this world feel after they were so easily overhyped by Apple.
Of course the iPhone is not perfect, but who could expect that. There's the AT&T network for example. Yes, I'd love to have 3G as anybody else, but I agree with Apple that battery life and form factor are more important. It's a phone after all and not your primary device to surf the web. But somehow it seems that AT&T has found a way to make phones to live up to their "raising the bar" slogan without actually improving the effective quality of the net. Sometimes the phone shows 5 bars, 2 bars and "No service" within minutes without you changing locations. And 5 bars doesn't mean that the data connection is good anyway: it can be still slow or non existent. If everything comes together well, though, EDGE provides enough bandwidth for most websites and even YouTube movies.
Then there are the 4 classical PDA apps: calendar, contacts, notes and todo lists. Only contacts is on par with other PDAs. Calendar misses some vital functions (a weekly overview, more than just the simplest repeat options), Notes doesn't sync with anything and due to the missing cut and past functionality cannot be used for actually taking notes from websites, e-mails etc and todo lists are non-existent. I understand that Apple had to get the iPhone out of the door at some time, but I really hope that we'll see some improvement here in one of the next software releases.
What I really like, though, is rarely mentioned: the home button, which takes you to the home screen in all situations. Whatever the iPhone is doing, pressing that button works without delay. Try that with a Treo - if it's busy then you may have to wait. Even a cancel button often just takes you to a screen saying "Cancelling" and then you have to wait even longer. It seems equipping the iPhone with a modern OS really pays off.

Common Ground

2007-08-04T14:07:00.000-04:00

We felt kind of helpless, when our favorite Friday night hangout Bar on A was closed for renovations. It didn't exactly seem to be scheduled, so we guess a certain New York City agency might be involved in this sudden closure. (Later we discovered that Nice Guy Eddie's was closed as well, so maybe there was a crack down on Avenue A last week).
Anyway, something like this is always a good moment to break habits and so we tried Keybar (which was packed with seemingly non-locals), Mug, that went through a recent renovation and served terrific Schneider Weisse from the bottle (for $8 though) and then finally Common Ground, a new pub on Avenue B.
Although Common Ground is new, it's a very traditional place, with chandeliers and a large, dark wooden bar. They have a nice selection of beers, most notably the two brands that make us happy: Brooklyn Lager and Sierra Nevada. A CD-driven jukebox runs the gamut from oldies and brand new stuff and our two last CD purchases, the Kaiserchiefs and The Killers were power-played by others and us. The specialty of this place is the bar food, though. Since there's no real kitchen, the chef had to be creative for the better. No burgers (which we came for originally, because what is a common ground food if not burgers), but quesadilla, french pizza, various dips and everything usually with a nice twist. We enjoyed it very much.
The downturn were the two barkeepers. Both were really nice girls, but they were intensely engaged with some guests, which made us feel like outsiders. With one of the girls we weren't even sure if she was on shift, because she exclusively served two friends sitting next to us. There was not much business, so we cannot complain about being neglected, but the vibe the two bartenders created doesn't really make us want to come back. The food however does.
And another thing (if any bartender reads this): please do not offer "the next one is on me" after we order our third beer. It's certainly meant as a nice gesture, but it also makes us drinking more than we want to.

No Reservations

2007-07-29T16:26:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we went to the movies for the first time after a long time. Being extremely turned off by the flood of blockbuster franchises this summer, we even skipped "Pirates", even though there's Keira Knightley in it. But we wanted to make a point to watch one of the few romantic comedies this year and went into the "No Reservations" on its opening weekend.
However, before we actually went to the theatre, we had to endure a barrage of bad critics, as usual with a romantic comedy. TONY gave a single star, because Melissa Anderson just didn't like its star Catherine Zeta-Jones. That's okay by itself, but Transformers got 5 stars. This has to be disheartening for any actor these days: a story, whose heroes are (CGI-generated) robots is considered 5 times better than one that evolves around two real, human characters. And EW considers "Ratatouille" the far better movie on the ground that both mostly play in a kitchen. Maybe, but, personally, I still enjoy seeing Catherine Zeta-Jones more than a computer-generated rat, no matter how cute it is.
It seems that many critics just gave up and try to make their peace with what Hollywood considers the movie of the future. Really, "No Reservations" is not the greatest movie and has many flaws, but it is at least a story about real people in a real environment and it deserves at least for that some credit.

iPhone Wishlist

2007-07-02T19:51:00.000-04:00

So far, so good: the iPhone is certainly a lot of fun to use. Yes, the Internet over EDGE is slow, but at least I'm used to it: my Treo 650 wasn't any faster. But most of what I'm missing, can be done with a software update, which are supposed to come often and quickly, according to Steve Jobs. Here's my wish list:

I have not problems with the on-screen keyboard, which I think it's not worth than the one of the Treo. As long as you type in English. In other language, I guess, the built-in intelligence works pretty much against you and even worse, the custom dictionary would fill up with non-English words, which hamper typing in English as well. So please come up with installable dictionaries in other languages. I can imagine that this is high on the priority list, not only to roll out iPhone in other regions, but also to support a large bi-lingual market in the US.

In the sparse pre-launch information about the iPhone that came out of Apple, the calendar was always suspiciously missing. The reason is now obvious: the calendar application has the bare minimum functionality, far sub-par to what Palm and Windows Mobile are offering. No to do lists, no multiple calendars. I would expect at least the functionality of the iCal on the Mac.

There's no way to put files on the iPhone, despite the fact that it can display PDFs and office documents. This means no attachments to e-mails and no reading on the go.
The iPhone would be an excellent e-book reader, if there was some software for it.

For some inexplicable reason, e-mails cannot be read in landscape mode. This would help reading some HTML-formatted e-mails.

We love Google...

2007-06-16T17:15:00.000-04:00

... who doesn't? Because it's always fun to browse Google's site for features and get inspired about something new we can do to shape our online life. So here are two additions to our site, that someone may find useful:

Elke's And Olivers NYC: This is a map where we mark places where we love to go. Check it out for some tips about good places to eat out or to party or to have some other kind of New York moment.

Elke's And Oliver's Events: A calendar with events where we're planning to go. Unfortunately it doesn't mean that we can make it, but we'll try hard.

Digital Loss

2007-06-06T20:44:00.000-04:00

Since we meet Swati from time to time at one of our favorite bars and her CD “Small Gods” is one of my current favorites, I thought it would be nice to have her sign the CD. However I downloaded the album from iTunes, so the only way would be printing the cover art, having her sign it and then scan it again and add it to the iTunes library.
Now this seems a quite geeky thing to do and probably not worth the effort, but it makes one think about what we loose during the transition from physical media to free-floating bits and bytes that travel wires and the air in light speed.
We still have a couple of hundred vinyl records on display in our apartment (although we have to turntables at the moment) and each of them tells a story of where I found it and what my life looked like at this time. And then, of course, there's cover art, booklets and other stuff that made a record seem precious. Some records used to be mysterious in the pre-Google age, because I didn't know more about the musicians than a (probably fake) name.
Now this is all gone, all information is plain in the open and music is available 24/7 from everywhere with a mouse-click. That's progress, no doubt, but again, something certainly got lost.

We Write A Script

2007-05-20T12:36:00.000-04:00

As Hollywood heads into the movie summer with a barrage of CGI-heavy kid's movies, we are kind of disheartened. Our demographic seems to be forgotten by the studios and these days we can find joy at the movies only at film festivals or maybe in the Oscar season.
Now, the least we can do is writing the movie we would like to see and go from there. We've been tossing around ideas for over a year now, but we're coming (slowly, much too slowly...) to an end.
Why are we doing this? First of all, it's fun. Sitting, for example, at a bar and talk about stories and characters just so perfectly fits to New York City. And the formalized and concise writing style of a movie script, suits us well with our tech writing experience. On top of it, it's an ideal art form for working together, again because individual writing style has a much lower priority.
Secondly, I think, as a screen writer you're competing on a relatively level field. Of course, having a well-known name gets your work much easier in front of producers and directors. But people watch movies because of actors and directors and maybe the people, who brought you some other stuff you like, but very rarely for the screenwriter. This means, as opposed to musicians and novel writers, there's no marketing power associated with a screenwriter's name. That may be frustrating at times (who remembers the name of the last screenwriting Oscar winners?), but we'll happily deal with that later.

3 Favorite CDs in May 2007

2007-05-17T20:13:00.000-04:00

Blonde Redhead - 23
I've already liked Blonde Redhead's previous release Misery Is A Butterfly, but 23 is a CD where – at least for for my taste – everything falls together. It's the kind of album where every track kicks of a movie in your head and inspires highflying thoughts. The voices are unusual, but if you can get over it, then it's likely some of the best stuff ever.
Official Site | iTunes

Swati - Small Gods
We discovered Swati because, well, she's a regular at the Magician as we are and when we learned (through a full-page article in the TONY magazine) that she's putting out a new CD, we bought it on iTunes, more or less, to show support. But it's good, really good. TONY has already called her a guitar goddess, but she also has a great voice and interesting lyrics.
Official Site | iTunes

Hybrid - Morning Sci-Fi
Hybrid is an Welsh band, whose recent concert fell into the club section rather than into the music category. So I guess, it's not really band, but DJs and and programmers, who crank out atmospheric and probably very danceable music. But it's great stuff to put extra-loud on the iPod, while walking through the streets. It's music that gives you an extra kick of energy and let's your thought fly to more pleasant regions than they probably currently are.
Official Site | iTunes

Watching Apple TV

2007-05-14T20:22:00.000-04:00

After having an Apple TV for a couple of weeks in our living room, I can confirm that it truly changes the way of watching TV or listening to music. Still there are some features I dearly miss and which can be hopefully added soon by a software upgrade.

Something like a “Playing now” playlist. Maybe I'm overlooking something here, but every media player except iTunes supports an ad-hoc playlist. Basically there should be a way to select music and not play it right away, but after the current selection finished. This is a feature a love on our Squeezebox.

Speaking of the Squeezebox: remote controlling Apple TV from a PC would be nice, too. Sequeezebox does it via a the web browser, for Apple TV iTunes would be the natural choice.

The main reason for buying Apple TV was to present pictures on a large TV. But this feature of Apple TV seems to be designed in a hurry. The main feature that is missing is some sort of index page: if you want to start a slide show at a certain picture, you have to click through it one by one.

Support of streaming from iPhoto: iPhoto itself can so it, so should Apple TV, too.
At least allowing to sync iPhoto slides hows with all settings, including a soundtrack. As of now iPhoto just copies the photos of an album.

Re-sizing pictures automatically before the sync, as it's done for iPod. A 7 megapixel photo doesn't do anything to improve the experience on the TV, but it slows down syncing and fills up Apple TVs hard disk in no time.

Syncing iTunes with other computers. I don't understand, why I can sync a TV show to my iPod to watch it on a tiny screen, but not to my laptop. Yes, I know, I can just import it, but an automatic sync is much more convenient.

Last, I think Apple needs to think about how to organize the iTunes media library, as they grow bigger and bigger. And it will get only worse when finally HD content hits the iTunes store. So there need to be a way to distribute content on different disks and computers.

Best 5 Bars in 2006

2006-12-30T14:49:00.000-05:00

5. The Paris/P.J. Carney
Paris Tavern and P.J. Carney have to share this place because they play such similar roles in our lives. The Paris is our base in the downtown Financial District, P.J. Carney serves the same purpose in Midtown. Both are essentially Irish pubs, but not typical ones. And both we have been frequenting for a very long time. The Paris since end of 2001 and P.J. Carney even longer, since our 1998 honeymoon.
The Paris and P.J. Carney serve decent pub fare, although they are not dining destinations. And both have a huge beer selection, including our favorites Sierra Nevada and Brooklyn Lager.
The Paris
P.J Carney: 906 7th Ave (@ 57th St) - 212-664-0056

4. Lolita
We always come back and after a break for a couple of month last year, where we were drawn into Vasmay Lounge, Lolita again has its fixed place in our bar rotation. Lolita has been our favorite for so long and it's so much laden with stories that it will be hard for any other place ever to catch up.
Lolita is an unpretentious neighborhood bar that is just pleasant to hang out in, especially during happy hour, before the large crowds hit. We had our share of fantastic evenings there, when we met people with whom we chatted the night away. Lolita doesn't serve food which naturally limits the time you can spend there before dinner, but they welcome you to order from a delivery service.
Lolita: 266 Broome St (@ Allen St) - 212-966-7223

3. Bar On A
We like bars where we feel like friends rather than guests of the house. Bar On A carries a record: it took only a couple of minutes until we felt like at home, thanks to Yvette, the charming and beautiful bartender with an excellent taste for music. That's enough to pull us in many Tuesdays or Fridays.
Besides Yvette, Bar On A is an interesting place: they serve bar food, a rarity in New York. Also there's a small stage for live concerts and the weird, snake inspired interior. Certainly a place to hang out far too long.
Bar On A

2. Lotus Lounge
Lotus Lounge is best in the afternoon or early evening. You will find most patrons illuminated by laptop screens, most of them adorned with the white apple. And most of them doing exactly what Apple commercial would like to suggest us: blogging, working on the website, video editing or uploading songs to the MySpace site.
So much creativity is contagious and so we always have good discussions and ideas at Lotus. Of course a unusual and excellent beer selection helps as well as the fact that there is only a single, small TV screen that rarely shows sports but rather quirky movies or Spanish game shows.
Lotus Lounge: 35 Clinton Street (@ Stanton St) - 212- 253-1144

1. Magician
The Magician kind of sneaked up there to the number one spot. It's our favorite place for Mondays and sometimes Wednesdays and usually we seek only one or two relief beers after a hard working day. But in a way the Magician is always comforting and relaxing, albeit rarely exciting. But, again, this is not what we're looking for in there. It's rather a chat with bartender and manager Kelly or with one of the other regulars, a nice Brooklyn Lager or IPA and then heading home with the feeling that we're not alone in the big city.
Magician: 118 Rivington St - 212-673-7881

The Paris Bar & Restaurant

2006-11-27T20:24:00.000-05:00

The Paris has its share from the Downtown Manhattan history. Mobsters used to meet there and Buffalo Bill frequented it. Located in the middle of the former fish market the environment is still industrial, with the F.D.R. drive overpass and the old market halls. A couple of month ago you could add some considerable stench as well. But the neighborhood is changing rapidly and The Paris will soon be surrounded by many hip places.
But it will be difficult to top the atmosphere at this Irish pub. The staff of bartenders hasn't really changed since we started to go there after we won a gift certificate at the South Street Seaport Holiday party in 2001 and guests most definitively appreciate this. They have an incredible selection of tap beers and decent food. An host of TVs and screens show live casts of any thinkable sporting event and while we're not into sports watching we've been enjoying to see World Cup soccer or Olympic figure skating being presented in a bar.
All in all The Paris is the best bar you can find downtown and it's certainly worth to walk the extra block in order to evade the chain restaurants of Pier 17 (although the McMenamin's on the 3rd floor has the same owners).
The Paris - http://www.theparistavern.com - 119 South St. (near Pier 17) - (212) 240 - 9797

Bondi Road: Surfing At The Lower East Side

2006-11-11T13:09:00.000-05:00

We've always been convinced that New York is only an unfriendly city, if you compare it to the outworldish friendliness in other regions of the country. But taken for itself, New York very well is a place where you can meet people and make friends, especially after you pass the threshold of a bar. But last Thursday even we were surprised, when we visited Bondi Road, the Australian joint that opened a block away from us a couple of month ago.
The two bartenders, both from Australia, were fiercely determined to demonstrate the greatness of their country and its people to us. We had to try Oyster Shooters, a shot with a fresh oyster and some booze in it, that supposedly is used by surfers to battle hang overs. And yes, if your stomach can keep it, it probably would drive a hangover away. We got a lesson in Australian geography with the help of a napkin and we tried South Australian beer ("nobody drinks Foster's in Australia"). We learned that each state has its beer, not very impressive, though, given the fact that in Germany each little village used to have its own brewery (before everything was bought up by multinational brewing corporations).
Food is ordered by ticking off dishes on a simple menu. There are four fish varieties, a bunch of sides and some meat and sandwiches as well. For the beach bar atmosphere of the place (there are surf videos looping on two big screens and picture wall papers from some Australian beach town) we would have expected the food delivered on paper dishes, but it came on stylish, rectangular china. The portions were not big, but the quality was high. The lamb chops were probably the best I've ever eaten and the fish was fresh and tasty.
The only downside are the barstools that don't leave a place to put your feet, which causes a constant discomfort. But anyway, we're happy to have found a new neighborhood joint with excellent food and a good atmosphere.
153 Rivington St., @Suffolk St., phone: 212-253-5311

Bar On A

2006-11-04T14:20:00.000-05:00

After our favorite bartenders left Vasmay Lounge, we were searching for a new place to spend too much time and money pretty much for the better part of 2006. We loved Angel at Niagara, but she disappeared without a trace (at least from our angle of view).
The search could be over. While we were looking for a place to spend Happy Hour before Elke's birthday dinner, we stumbled over this place on Avenue A that is officially called "Bar On A", but abbreviated BOA, which inspired a snake theme of the interior. (The name, BTW, hides the place in the Internet - you can't find it in Google.)
BOA remarkably serves food, which is a rarity in NYC bars. So far we didn't try it (the times when we went there, we were on our way to a more or less fancy dinner), but it's a fair selection of bar food at very reasonable prices.
The best in BOA, however, is Yvette (pictured in her Halloween kimono) and her excellent music selection. Her playlist looks like one of the tapes I mixed back in the eighties. Not the cheesy American stuff, but the good music. Now, Yvette probably hasn't lived yet when those songs were recorded, but still - we love her music taste.
We will have to go there a couple of times more, but this could be our favorite hang out for the next months. More on this on NYDiscovery.info.
Bar on A, somewhere on Avenue A and around E 10th St (I couldn't Google the place)

Google Maps Mobile

2006-10-22T11:50:00.000-04:00

Our time is not short on technological innovation, but from time to time something just leaves me awestruck. In this case I'm talking about Google Maps Mobile, which gives you the full functionality of Google Maps on a cell phone. You can search for a location and it would give you a high quality map. Then you can tell it to give you directions to any other locations, for example, what's the fastest way from New York to Los Angeles (it's 2,787 miles). Sure, it's not a GPS, so you have to tell it where you are to get the next instruction.
Now one could say that portable GPS devices are around for quite some time, but the nice thing with Google Maps Mobile is, that it literally comes out of thin air. You don't need any special hardware, just a cellphone (and you want to have an unlimited data plan). Imagine being lost in a big city: in that very moment you could download Google Maps Mobile, search for your current location and find the way to your destination. And from this moment on, you'll never be lost again, wherever you are (provided you have Internet connection and Google Maps covers the area).
You even have the satellite view, so you can view your current location from space (of course it's not a live picture) - a couple of years ago this would have been material for a James Bond movie.