March 5th, 2008, 3 Comments »
We’re driving in the last foothills before the Sahara Desert starts in earnest. We were on this twisty stretch of asphalt only wide enough for one car. You had to pull onto the gravel shoulder to let the very occasional oncoming vehicle–mostly trucks and the old beige Mercedes that are the region’s taxis–pass you by.
We’d been listening to music on our stand-in car stereo, this little iPod-in-a-saucer-speaker thingie. “Night Windows” by the Weakerthans was playing.
As I sometimes do, I wondered if this was the first time that song had ever been played over this particular piece of terrain. Had anybody ever driven these 5.25 kilometres while John K. Samson sang:
Depluralize our casualties, drown the generals out in static
We turn and watch our city sprawl and send us signals in the glow
Of night windows
And then I thought about how most phones are also music players, and about the increasing appearance of GPS in mobile devices. And then I imagined a web service like Flickr’s maps.
Instead of recording where photos were taken, this service would capture where songs were played. And because songs happen in time, instead of captured moments, the site would display the paths that that music took over the Earth. Here’s how that might look:
You could build musical maps of trips, events or your entire life. This is a kind of a 21st variation on the songlines of Australian aboriginals (see also Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book).
This seems like a natural add-on for Last.fm or a similar music social network. Maybe somebody has already done this?
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July 27th, 2007, No Comments »
A while back, I mentioned that we’d bought this tiny speaker system for our time in Malta. It’s basically one doughnut-shaped speaker that you plug your iPod into. I’m really happy with it, and here’s why:
- The sound, obviously, isn’t great, but it’s a considerable improvement on our only other audio source–our laptops.
- It’s incredibly small and light.
- You can plug it in, but it also can run off four AAA batteries. This is very handy if we want to take it out by the pool, or in a rental car that only has a CD player (we now own exactly one CD).
- It’s got an audio-in jack, and came with a compatible cord. It acts as a handy external speaker for our laptops when we’re watching TV or movies on them.
- It recharges the iPod.
- It’s got a tiny little remote control.
It’s got a USB port, and looks like it should function as a docking station for the iPod, but I haven’t been able to make that work. That’s my only complaint thus far. It’s a really handy solution for cheap and cheerful holiday audio.
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July 14th, 2007, 10 Comments »
I think the photo speaks for itself, but here’s the back story. I just bought this nifty micro-stereo unit that I can plug my iPod into. It’s a JBL Onstage Micro iPod Speaker System, and is pretty much ideal for our requirements–it’s portable (it takes four AAA batteries), tiny and offers reasonable sound quality for its size.
As you can see, it came with no less than eight adapters. Each one is for a different type of iPod. Remarkably, the adapters only cover the so-called fourth and fifth-generation iPod. How many more would they have to ship to accommodate every version, going back six whole years?
Sadly, this problem is all too familiar. Whether it’s browser compatibility or HD DVD format wars, we waste a shameful amount of time bickering over standards. In the long run, will anybody really care who wins the Atom vs. RSS battle? Will it really matter?
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