Two relatively new gadgets, both of which I've been struggling recently are my Tivo and my 4GB iPod. As technically savvy as I sometimes think I am, all too often these things make me feel like an idiot.
Firstly, the iPod that I got for Christmas. I'd never have bought it for myself - I'm firmly of the belief that you pay more just because they've stamped the name "iPod" on the product, and I'm perfectly happy with my Samsung YP-U2JQB for podcasts, and when I want to listen to music via an mp3 player, my eight-year-old 20GB Nomad Jukebox does me just fine. But I've loaded up the 4GB with music, and as critical of iPods as I generally am, I'm actually enjoying quite a few things about the iPod.
I like the control the click wheel gives you to fine tune volume and scan through tracks. And I really like having a good screen - I'm finally able to watch the video podcast for The Totally Rad Show rather than just listening to the mp3. The screen also just looks really good when you're listening to music. One thing Apple does really well is design. I like having album art. And that brings me to the first of my many iPod gripes.
My gripes center primarily about the abomination that is iTunes. If Sharepod would let you add album art, I'd never use iTunes at all. Did you know that the only way you can have iTunes automatically fetch album art for you is by giving it a credit card number? Pardon me, but that's just effing ridiculous. You can't get album art without setting up an iTunes account, which requires a credit card. Well, I don't want to give them my credit card because I'm a stubborn ass. So I'll be setting up the twenty or so album art covers I want manually. I've already got album art for the Beyond Good and Evil soundtrack manually set up, and I'm willing to bet that iTunes wouldn't have grabbed that one automatically.
Aside from that, iTunes tends to mess with stuff. After I'd tweaked all my album titles, track and artist names, and set things up exactly the way I wanted with Sharepod, I went back into iTunes and it "synched" things, thus undoing all the tweaks I'd made. It changed entire albums I'd manually named to "Track 1", "Track 2", et cetera and reset the track numbers I'd manually set for certain albums. Damn it. And let's say I want to load a video podcast into my iPod. It appears under "videos" rather than "podcasts" because I subscribed to that podcast with Juice rather than with iTunes. Just a minor annoyance, but it annoys me! You also can't set bookmarks in a track like you can with my Nomad. That makes it tough when listening to a 20-hour audiobook.
The other device with which I've recently been struggling (albeit more successfully) is our new Tivo. We had a DirecTV Tivo for quite a while beforehand, but it didn't do half as much as what a real Tivo does. Plus, you may remember my complaints about DirecTV. I'm glad we got rid of them.
The basic Tivo functionality works without a hitch, and I'm loving it. But the real Tivo does a few other neat things, and here I'm talking about Tivo to Go™. I've got part of it working - that is, I can listen to my entire mp3 collection that lives on my server from the stereo in the living room. That's fantastic, and I love it. Also, Frank recently gave me the second episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on a CD in avi format. We hadn't watched it because we're lazy and didn't want to watch it on a PC. So last night, I started trying to figure out how to send the avi to our Tivo. It didn't work, but I found a little app online called gui4ffmpeg21 which converted the avi into a mpeg, and from there I was able to transfer the file to our Tivo. So now we've watched the first two episodes, and have the second two recorded normally on our Tivo. Got to catch up.
I'd also like to be able to Tivo things and then burn them to DVD. Not sure of the legality of this, and it's seldom that I'd actually use it. But for example, I'd love to save off episodes of Journeyman or Dresden Files this way.
I've tried Galleon, but didn't have much luck getting it to work. I had to install it on the server, since my main PC gets really unstable any time I install JRE. Sigh. I need a new PC.