Michael Henley

Over the past few months, I have gotten quite used to being able to scrobble the plays I record on my iPod. Being out and about quite a bit, I find myself listening to a fair chunk of my music on my iPod, and so not being able to record these to last.fm was very annoying. When I searched the forums at last.fm, all I could find were some quite convoluted ways of doing it, and nothing particularly simplistic. This is where Google comes in…

This morning, did a quick search, and found this. Perfect guide for a Mac user to get his/her iPod touch or iPhone scrobbling its plays when synced. This blog has since ceased to be, so I am reposting the info this article contained. Full credit to the original author though:

I found some very useful information last night on how to scrobble your tracks from your iPhone or iPod Touch. As you know I’m a big last.fm’er (?) and I’ve really been missing my iPod tracks on Last.fm. Here’s where I cobbled all this info from if you have any problems.

So here’s what you need to do:

• Don’t use the official Last.fm client and download iScrobbler currently at 1.5.1 here.

• Download this ‘Fake iPod’ .dmg file here.

• Make this AppleScript:

tell application “Finder”

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

delay 15

eject disk “Fake Ipod”

end tell

• Put this script in your Library/iTunes/scripts folder (if it doesn’t exist just create the folder, it’ll work fine).

• Be sure to have iScrobbler setup to scrobble iPod tracks and set the playlist to ‘Recently Played’

• When you sync your iPod/Phone just click the script in the new ‘scripts’ menu in iTunes and the .dmg will mount make iTunes think an iPod is attached and cause iScrobbler to scrobble your recent tracks from the iPod.

• The .dmg will then unmount. To be honest it probably doesn’t need to be 15 secs. Just 1 would probably do

The only thing I found didn’t work from that guide was the POSIX addressing of the Fake iPod.dmg. Whenever I ran the script, I got an error about not being able to find the file. To circumvent this I replaced the line:

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

With:

open document file “Fake iPod.dmg” of folder “Scrobble” of folder “username” of folder “Users” of startup disk

To Windows users, I am sure this will be rectified eventually, either through the last.fm official application, or through a similar method to the above. To Mac users, good luck!

WOW. This week I was in Wales for a Field Trip for the first part, and then have been ‘blobbing’ since then – doing and achieving very little, but enjoying it. Just thought back on the events in Tech of the past week. We have seen TV Links being shut down, with the 26 year old owner arrested for the technological equivalent of ‘aiding and abetting’ piracy and copyright infringement. A sad day I think all will agree, and the implications of this decision may be more far reaching than we would like to think. It was said that would, for example, I also be guilty of this if I linked to TV Links, just as they linked to the sites which hosted the content? We will see but I hope this is overturned.

On a lighter note, we saw The Pirate Bay getting hold of IFPI.com, the domain similar to that of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI.org), and establishing the International Federation of Pirates Interests. According to El Reg, they claim that they were given the domain and so are using it as they see fit. Never ones to miss an opportunity to ‘stick it’ to the lobbyists for the record industry et al. TPB are enjoying themselves.

We also saw Steve Jobs announce the SDK of iPhone and iPod touch (did somebody say U-turn?). Suddenly Apple realises that 3rd party apps won’t destabilise the platform after all, provided they sign off on every little bit of code that is (and take a cut from it?). Russell Beattie has put together a fantastic dissection of this official note from Steve on his blog, and it really cuts out the rubbish and spells out what we cynics see when we read the typical marketing bullshitese!

Ubuntu ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 was released for download, and looks good. I am yet to download this release, but used Tribe 5 in VMWare Fusion on the MBP, and it seems good. I traditionally have used Ubuntu to breathe life into old hardware, such as my old Toshiba Satellite 2450-101 Laptop, which (provided you prop the screen open) works well enough. The Windows installer even seems to tax it now, but Ubuntu usually flies along. I look forward to playing with ‘Gutsy’, and eagerly await the name of the next Ubuntu incarnation (Crappy Cow?…)

Yesterday (Wednesday 11th) was the school’s founder’s day, meaning that from about 12:30pm the process of shipping all 1000+ pupils and staff over to St Paul’s Cathedral in central London took place. This meant that myself and the others on twitter were split up in during the transit and service, and so we found that twitter was to be the desired medium for communication. Worked surprisingly well, and was an amazing use of it.

When there are seven or eight twitterers out and about, doing similar things in the same area it works very well. Whether it be for covet mass communication during the service (not actually used of course…) or for coordinating the after-service jovialities, twitter was very useful. I use my twitter as much as possible in the every day environment of school, but the use of mobile phones in classrooms is understandably frowned upon, and this means that this is limited at best, except for the odd uncontrollable outbust of anger or hilarity…

An added bonus is that it in fact turns out to be a much cheaper way of mass texting. We all have our phones connected to our twitter accounts, and have notifications set up for each other, meaning that when we post from our phones, this is automatically forwarded to all of the others, and so I am getting a text to 8 people for the price of one. The way that twitter is established means that we can also reply to the sender directly (albeit less privately) and achieve much the same results as we would if we used bog-standard texting.

Being able to access the status updates from many different platforms, be it the web via a browser, the desktop via one of the many twitter apps (I am currently testing the mutli-platform multi-service AIR app Appily for this), or via the phone through texting, there isn’t really much else I could ask for from twitter. It has moved on from its original purpose of posting status updates though I think. While it is still used for status updates, it is also used to a large extent for general communication on the same level as a service like MSN Messenger or SMS. This can only be a good thing, provided those involved are using protected updates…

Well I was going through my feeds today and came across this on Mac Rumors. According to them, one of their users, DavidJearly, personally contacted Steve Jobs via email, and recieved a reply, which among other things, stipulated that the removal of the ability to Add/Edit calendar appointments was a ‘bug’, and would be fixed in a future software update. At last they have seen that this was such a stupid and pointless thing to do. It certainly stopped users such as myself going out and picking one up sooner – as I said in ‘At the Apple Store!‘, this was one of the main reasons I would even consider an iPhone over an iPod touch. And I reckon this was the reaction Apple was after, in that this would boost sales of the iPhone over a very minor software feature. Instead I think many who didn’t already have the iPhone came to the same conclusion I did: Where the iPhone available, (and even this doesn’t count in the US) I still wouldn’t buy one until the storage and 3G issues are addressed in the 2nd Gen iPhone. Instead of boosting iPhone sales, they may well have just harmed iPod touch sales.

Well now that this has been solved (or the solution is around the corner), I can again look seriously at the iPod touch to be the perfect companion to my mobile, allowing me to manage the finer details of contacts, after basic numbers, and to get full portable control of my calendar. Since getting the Mac I have become very dependant on iCal and while this syncs to the iPod I am using at the moment – a 30GB Black 5th Gen – the calendar is more limited than it is on the SLVR, and so really not worth using. Contacts is useful, but being able to edit the entries on the move is even more so.

Overall very welcome news, or at least relieving news that maybe Apple do go back on their decisions if they are clearly incorrect ones. Now then, where was the list of stupid decisions I want to quiz Steve on?…

Well as I said before, we went off to ExCel in London’s Docklands to the Future of Web Apps conference on Wednesday. It was simply amazing! We arrived at around 8:45am, and were greeted by the booths with passes. Of course this was too simple, as they didn’t have my pass there… That said, the organisers there were amazing about it, and simply gave me a blank pass which got me in. Whether they would have done more stringent identity checks had I asked for a pass above the £5 expo-only pass, because they didn’t even check my name, I am not sure.

Once the initial ‘drama’ was over, we explored the expo-floor. It was a ghost-town at this time in the morning, which it turned out was because a lot of people were already there, but in the ‘Showcase Stage’ where some of the paid talks were taking place. First things first, onto the free WiFi provided for attendees of FoWA. For this the ‘Microsoft Lounge’ provided the perfect seating arrangements – Microsoft Visual Studio, and Expression-branded beanbags. Much Xbox 360, and Halo 3 playing ensued, as obviously it would have been rude to not play when Microsoft had provided six networked Xboxs for our amusement…

Once the conference got going, we had a wander around the floor, and some of the exhibits were really good. Meecard looks very interesting, and may finally lead to an end of the many different new services cropping up which are effectively a clone of an existing service, but with one new special feature which means everybody must switch. Instead, I can set up a meecard (such as my own here) which can have as little or as much data on it as I like, and links to most of my social services. While something like Google Reader is a News Feed Aggregator, I see meecard as a Social Aggregator, bringing all of the social services I use to one easy to find and comprehend place.

Another of note was Wakoopa, who not only had hacked iPhones there to attract people (it worked!) but also were talking about their next big planned development – to log which Web Apps you use (should you choose to allow it to). This means that it will record how long you spend on, for example, the GMail webpage. I queried on the privacy implications this raises, and they assured me that instead of sending your web history to Wakoopa for analysis, the Wakoopa client will instead look for specific sites which they can log, and only send usage info for these, so it does remove some of the privacy issues, although I am not sure how comfortable I would be with something putting my specific web usage onto a public page, and what info they displayed would be of great importance. That said I will be looking at these new features with interest if, and when, they are released.

The Microsoft stand was also interesting. They were talking about ‘Expression’ – their competitor to Adobe’s Creative Suite. A friend of mine, who is an avid user of Photoshop, with some astounding results (see here), mentioned that from the looks of it Expression was more accessible to users who were unfamiliar with Photoshop. For someone like me, who has always been scared or beaten by Photoshop, this is good news. One thing I did find very amusing was that the main computers that Microsoft had for Expression were MacBook Pros. One was running Windows Vista through Boot Camp, and the other was running in OS X, but it was a surreal site, and the last place I thought I would see those!

The other main highlight was meeting Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht – the hosts of Diggnation. It was purely by coincidence, in that we were sat in the foyer of ExCel, and they walked in. After about 20 seconds of umming and ahhhing we decided that there was nothing to lose, and went to introduce ourselves. This was amazing, and they were great guys, although they couldn’t talk for long because they were running late in preparation for Kevin’s keynote speech, and for the later live filming of Diggnation.

The Diggnation filming began at 7:30pm, and lasted for an hour. This was fantastic to see, and a great experience. Kevin & Alex basically got rock-star treatment, arriving on stage to cheering, applause and blaring music. One thing I noticed was that Diggnation had actually filled the ‘Showcase Stage’ at FoWA more than Kevin’s Keynote speech about lessons learnt from setting up Digg and Pownce, which said something about the popularity of this particular podcast! The ‘episode’ was great, and they were very good, managing and entertaining the crowd, as well as doing what they were there to do.

Photos from the day can be found on my Flickr here, and on Alex Muller’s here

Here at FOWA, on the free WiFi. The conference is amazing! I love it. Some classic moments such as seeing Microsoft demoing their Expression system on MacBook Pros (admittedly one was running Vista in Boot Camp but still…)

More to follow,  but in the mean time – Just found this on Flickr. Awesomeness!

Bit of a rant here (makes a change!). Just connected my iPod to the MBP, and iTunes seems to have forgotten who it is…

Bearing in mind that this is the same machine it synced to last night, and the same machine I ejected it from this morning, I wonder what could have happened in the intervening few hours to cause iTunes to forget all about this iPod, or for the iPod to forget that it was ever synced to this machine.

I don’t mind iTunes, but sometimes I wonder how there can be so many issues with what is effectively a closed system – Apple Software, running on an Apple laptop, syncing to an Apple iPod…

Thankfully the music etc is sync directly from this machine, so there isn’t a problem getting it back on there once I re-pair them and it syncs. This isn’t always the case though – see here for a perfect example.

Well we are off to FOWA tomorrow morning for what is looking like a fantastic day. Spending the day on the floor, and then going to the Diggnation Live filming. Plus I get to leave home later than usual which is always a bonus! We will however not be able to see any of the speeches, because we didn’t spend £250 on the passes which get you those.

However today, Thomas Vander Wal is coming to talk at school, thanks to him knowing our Director of ICT. The talk will be about Thomas’s speciality – Social Tagging and Folksonomy. Should be really interesting. Hopefully we will get a preview of what he will be saying when he talks on Thursday at FOWA.