TuneIn Radio

iPad

A superb app.

This piece has nothing to do with photography but when something as well engineered and executed as the TuneIn Radio app for iPad/iPod/iPhone comes along, it’s hard to resist writing about it.

To those despairing of the culturally arid desert that is American Radio, this app is a must. And it says something about globalization when I tell you that a British Americanophile photographer friend recommended it to this Francophile California UK expatriate!

TuneIn Radio allows you to dial in seemingly any Internet Radio station on the planet (I have yet to check for Pyongyang Hits, and don’t hold your breath on that one) using point and touch maps, and your choices are easily saved as bookmarks. If you get stuttering then it’s a second’s work to switch to a lower bit rate stream using the app’s controls. The app is iOS 4 capable, meaning you can continue to listen while doing other things on your iDevice.

Typical streaming options for a radio station.

I decided to go one step further in distributing the iPad’s (and TuneIn’s) sound output around the home. With yesterday being the annual orgy of shopping which kicks off America’s season of gluttony, I did my bit for the side, got on the old push bike (a British Raleigh, of course) and toddled off to the local Apple Store, sadly far too close for fiscal comfort. They had the Airport Express for sale for $88 and moments later I was home installing it, my second. The first acts as a wifi extender in my office, sourcing its signal from the Airport Extreme router in another room. It also allows me to connect my Brother 2170W printer as a Bonjour printer for use as a wireless printer for any number of computers and iDevices, the latter using FingerPrint which does for iDevices what iOS4 has yet to provide – printing. The 2170W does have built-in native wifi but it stoutly refuses to work with OS Snow Leopard, so the AEX does the trick.

The AEX. The teal light is not that easy to get to ….

For reasons probably only known to Steve Jobs, every Airport Express (AEX) I have owned has been an absolute pig to set up. It must be made by Microsoft. Whereas the Airport Extreme is pretty much plug and play, the AEX is a horror story. You fire up the Airport Utility and hope and pray the new device shows up. Then you hope its configuration will be recognized. Then you learn there are no fewer than three reset modes on the gadget (that should tell you something) and next thing you know you are unbending a paperclip to activate the recessed reset microswitch. After four or five goes the thing comes around and eventually changes its amber trouble light to a teal ‘all is good’ one. At that point I plugged the AEX into the dining room wall socket and using a short mini-coax cable, connected the AEX to my old Logitech MM50 iPod powered speakers. If you buy this cable from the Apple Store then you have more money than sense.

The Logitech MM50 powered iPod speakers.

While the MM50 is long discontinued, and the rechargeable battery in mine died years ago, there are dozens of choices on the market. Just make sure there’s a loudspeaker input socket on the one you buy. That accepts the other end of the cable from the AEX. The MM50 is well made with an Apple-like attention to aesthetics. Unlike most Apple products it actually lasts longer than the warranty period.

The rest is child’s play. Fire up your source app on the iPod/iPhone/iPad of your choice and touch the AirPlay symbol to see a list of output devices.

AirPlay output options in the TuneIn Radio app.

‘Tigger’s Logitech’ routes the sound to my MM50 and each output device remembers its volume setting, so you don’t blow the roof off owing to output level mismatching. I complained to TuneIn’s maker that I couldn’t see the other AEX in the home and they blamed Apple. Wrong. The fault was mine. The list of AirPlay devices scrolls with the swipe of a finger and the other AEX, hidden in the above screenshot, is there when needed. The absence of a scroll bar had me fooled!

Best as I can tell you can only route AirPlay output to one device at a time, but this remains a very cost effective way of outputting sound to any one of multiple locations in the home, controlled with a portable iDevice. Cost per location is as much as you want to spend on powered speakers, but $100 buys you a decent pair and another $100 or so gets you an AEX, so call it $200 per location. Expensive? Have you priced running wires through walls recently? And if you want really good sound with a dedicated DAC, the English gentlemen at Bowers and Wilkins will be glad to relieve you of $600 for their oddly named (if appropriately shaped) Zeppelin which is as good as it gets. You would think the English would be tired of reminders of German aerial bombardment after two wars. Anyway, I’m going to resurrect those old B&W DM5 bookshelf monitors from the basement and maybe spring for a nice tube amp for my next AEX installation …. the output level from the AEX is like that from a preamp, so all you need is a power amplifier and regular unpowered speakers with this approach.

State of the art – the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin.

State of stupidity – the $26,000 Challenger01 – you will need two.

When you ripped all those old DVDs to your iPod you did use lossless not MP3, right?

Christmas gifts

iPad

Well, duh!

If you are a parent with young children, do yourself a huge favor and read my earlier piece The Unfair Advantage.

Then look at this chart from America’s taste-takers:

Sure, those kids want bragging rights and video games, but, properly policed, technology confers an unfair advantage and you owe it to your kids.

Disclosure: I have significant AAPL exposure today (but maybe not tomorrow) but if each of the several thousand daily readers of this journal rushes out and buys 5 iPads, the impact on AAPL’s bottom line and stock price will be precisely zero. Further, if you are coming here for stock advice you need to get a life, and a brain. Long AAPL stock and call options.

The AppleTV with the iPad and iOS 4

iPad, Photography

A dream combination.

Having just installed iOS 4.2.1 on my iPad I can scarce contain my excitement as to how it collaborates with a big screen TV and an iPad for a photographer.

It’s still a work in progress but this combination begins to finally show a meaningful, realistic step in the direction of coordinating disparate devices and making them work together painlessly.

Let me jump to the bottom line. I’m reviewing a photo album in my iPad on the AppleTV to the accompaniment of classical music, relayed by Pandora Radio. The source pictures and music are coming from my iPad. I flick the pictures on the iPad and the 42″ TV faithfully reproduces them. The colors are true also as I have profiled the TV with my EyeOne colorimeter.

For the amateur this is magic; for the pro, showing his pictures to the magazine editor, it’s essential. All that’s needed in addition to the iPad is a TV and the $99 AppleTV device, which I have reviewed at length here a few days ago.

So while much of what we are hearing about the latest iOS for the iPad is about multitasking, the real magic sauce for photographers is in AirPlay, the technology which makes what I describe above possible.

Setup is child’s play; after installing the new OS on the iPad, all you do is go to the Photos app on the iPad, select an album, turn on the TV, touch the AirPlay button on the iPad and you are off. Music? Add it in background mode from your iPad and route it likewise to your TV. The TV, of course, has two things the iPad does not – a huge screen and decent speakers.

Snags?

The iPad still needs a decent touchscreen photo processing app so that you can make changes and see them on the big screen, rather than round-tripping to your desktop. You still cannot turn pictures on the iPad through ninety or one hundred and eighty degrees.

And, worst fo all, you cannot print from the iPad. Mr. Jobs, please. All that hype about the new iOS 4 and we learn that the only way the iPad can print natively is through one of the latest AirPrint-enabled printers? What a crock! You expect me to buy a new printer? Well, BS says I.

Click the picture below and you can download an $8 app to your desktop Mac, check off your Bonjour enabled printer, and the iPad will print to it (or to DropBox, etc.) just fine. It works fine with my Brother 2170W monochrome laser, and I have yet to try it with the HP DJ90 wide carriage color printer. What have you got to lose? The app comes with a 7 day free trial period.

Click to see more.

Here’s FingerPrint being installed on my HackPro – note that I have checked off my Brother printer:

That’s a screen shot of the HackPro taken remotely using LogMeIn on the iPad to remotely access the HackPro – another piece of magic which I wrote about here. Note the FingerPrint icon in the menu bar (circled), and be sure to add FingerPrint to the login items on your desktop to make sure it’s automatically loaded after a reboot.

So now you can display your pictures on the big screen from a 24 oz portable device and print them to your device of choice. I’ll let your imagination do the rest.

Installing iOS 4 on the iPad:

If you have tons of data on your iPad the process of upgrading from iOS 3 to iOS4 could scarcely be worse. Mine took 9 hours. There’s a fault in the code and iOS4 will not load until the 9 hour backup (a mere 40gB of data in my case) is done through iTunes. Ridiculous. And please don’t tell me Apple is ignorant of this error. Look at the hits regarding this issue on their discussion board:

Only after I did the long backup to allow the installation of iOS4 did I learn of a free utility named BackOff which aborts the backing up of data and permits the iOS upgrade to proceed apace. Guess what I’ll be doing next time ….

BackOff comes in first world (Mac) and third world (PC) versions

We are at the cusp of a revolution in the ease with which devices can be connected in the home or business.

You need and AppleTV to go with your iPad.

Disclosure: I own tons of AAPL stock and call options. Your buying an AppleTV is hardly going to make me rich.

Market Street

Architecture, Photography

1906 before the ‘quake.

The remarkable movie of a tram ride down Market Street in San Francisco, made in 1906 just before every building shown was destroyed by that year’s earthquake, is something I chanced on using the new ’60 Minutes’ iPad app. You don’t need that – you can see it on your computer by clicking the image below:

Market Street, 1906. Click the picture for the video.

The original was shipped east just one day before the earthquake and is not just history but tremendous fun. It ends at the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building, (seen above), splendidly restored today. More here.

Photography and the CPI

Photography

How we spend money.

This may seem a bit dry but bear with me.

The CPI is the US Consumer Price Index which is a US government scam used to fool most of the people most of the time. The stated uses of the CPI appear on the government’s web site as follows:

  • As an economic indicator. As the most widely used measure of inflation, the CPI is an indicator of the effectiveness of government policy. In addition, business executives, labor leaders and other private citizens use the index as a guide in making economic decisions.
  • As a deflator of other economic series. The CPI and its components are used to adjust other economic series for price change and to translate these series into inflation-free dollars.
  • As a means for adjusting income payments. Over 2 million workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements which tie wages to the CPI. The index affects the income of almost 80 million people as a result of statutory action: 47.8 million Social Security beneficiaries, about 4.1 million military and Federal Civil Service retirees and survivors, and about 22.4 million food stamp recipients. Changes in the CPI also affect the cost of lunches for the 26.7 million children who eat lunch at school. Some private firms and individuals use the CPI to keep rents, royalties, alimony payments and child support payments in line with changing prices. Since 1985, the CPI has been used to adjust the Federal income tax structure to prevent inflation-induced increases in taxes.

The reason I refer to the CPI as a scam is that I’m the one who does the grocery shopping chez Pindelski and I have been seeing the grocery bill rise steadily over the past year, despite the government’s lofty pronouncements that the nation is threatened with imminent deflation which is why they are printing ever more money. I’m also an investor, which is what I do to allow me to afford those groceries, and it is not lost on me that global commodity prices for everything from aluminum and palladium to corn, wheat and soy beans have been going through the roof. But if you read the above uses (especially the third bullet) of the CPI and you run the government, it is very much in your interest to misstate the statistic erring on the low side. It suggests you have inflation under control while simultaneously allowing you to deny pay raises to a host of workers and pensioners.

Anyway, these were the thoughts that prompted me to check the components of the US CPI to better understand what’s going on. Well, it’s pretty obvious when I tell you that housing and rent comprise no less than 40% of the index and unless you are blind, deaf and dumb, it will not have escaped your notice that US house prices have been falling 20% annually for the past two years, thanks to the bubble blown by the criminal cabal that is Wall Street. Now 20% of 40% is 8%, so right there you have an 8% drop in the CPI; with the government telling us that CPI is rising at 2% annually, that means that everything else is rising at 16.7% for the math to work ( (8+2)/0.6 = 16.7 ). Aaah!, now I understand what’s going on and why our grocery bill is rising so steeply.

While nosing around the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site I delved into the CPI some more and, lo and behold, ‘photography’ is in the index! It’s in the Recreation section which accounts for a total weight of 6.437% – here’s how that section breaks down:

Recreation and photography in the CPI.

So Americans spend about eight times as much on cable TV as they do on photography. They spend in a similar ratio on their pets! It’s also depressing to note how little is spent on books – near the bottom of the table.

Well, the point of this column is not to harangue with tales of government lies; you already know that your government lies to you, no matter where you reside. Rather, it’s to place focus on some interesting data on how much we spend, as a nation, on taking pictures relative to other pastimes, most of which are passive, meaning TV and sports. In one simple table you can learn more of the interests of a nation than any amount of subjective chatter will provide and, yes, we are living in a high inflation economy whose housing stock remains greatly overpriced.