iPod

I was wondering yesterday, with the Wifi and Safari built into the iPod Touch, whether you could blog from it. It appears you can, and there’s a WordPress plugin to format posts for the iPod Touch/iPhone screen size. See Wordpress for Ipod Touch (iWPhone)

The best of both worlds - vinyl and MP3 files. Article here about a UK music label that releases music in vinyl format (for the DJ market) coupled with access to non-DRM high-quality MP3s of the music purchased. See U.K. Music Label Creates a Vinyl-MP3 Hybrid.

Recent BBC World “Click” programme had a slot on strange USB devices for your PC. See BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | USB talk. Just right for Darren over at planet telex » One of my new toys….

Interesting article on how the new Zune’s media sharing facilities add DRM to creative commons media. See Wired News: Zune, Creative Commons Don’t Mix.

These wee beasties look interesting if you’re looking for easy ways to get video/audio into a video iPod. Being able to shoot video or have a video source, convert it and upload it to the iPod or PSP with little or no need for a computer looks helpful.

See iRecord in one touch and Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2 PLUS.

I’m now not sure what’s left to make iPod-compatible. Can’t see the appeal personally, but I guess there must be a market somewhere. See iCarta iPod Toilet Roll.

Related link: http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2006/03/inshower_mp3pla.html

Looks interesting.

International Portable Film Festival 2006

The festival works very simply - our films are delivered to you as a video podcast that you can subscribe to through this website. When films are ready they are sent automatically to you, ready for you to watch on your iPod, PlayStation Portable, 3G or media player.

Some Radio NZ programmes at now available as podcasts. Check out Radio New Zealand - Podcasts.

Apple - Nike+iPod combines shoes, exercise and the iPod.

I look forward to the integration of my iPod with my toothbrush. The iBrush (has a WhiteTooth interface) that sends music via your jawbone while you brush etc.

Why stop there? - For those who need them why not the iDentures - suck to advance a track, spit to go back, volume control by the opening and closing your mouth.

Firefly and Buffy are now in the iTunes store (well, at least for the US).

A year ago I posted a link to the New Zealand Short Films web site where, strangely enough, you could watch NZ short films online. Now you can download some of them as MPEG-4 files for your iPod. The MPEG-4 files should play in Quicktime on PC and Mac too.

I’ve taught at various times on the different genres present within the biblical texts and there are some students who find the whole concept of genre really hard to grasp. So several times I’ve set up a game show in class with student participants called “Name that Genre!” I’ve taken a variety of different pieces of music representing different genres, loaded them into iTunes, given each participant a squeaky toy as a buzzer and run a game show - with the appropriate prizes of chocolate, of course. It works as a fun, general introduction to the concept of genre. Which like the concept of metaphor is alien to some people’s reading of the text. (See Douglas Coupland’s neologism “Metaphasia - the inability to recognise metaphor”)

In the process of the game though it becomes clear that the concept of genre is often a pretty fluid one. One person’s jazz is another person’s blues or another person’s gospel. And this gets hotly debated at some points. It’s the same too with the biblical texts. A gospel passage might be “gospel” genre to one person and “historical narrative” to another, or there’s debate of what kind of “lament” a psalm is, or why a “prophetic” text suddenly switches into “wisdom” genre.

I was thinking about this the other day when trying to sort out some music in iTunes. It only allows one genre to be assigned to each song. But what if I want to assign more than one genre to a song. In the end I’ve set up smart playlists that filters the comments field attached to a song. In the comments field I list the genres I want: for example, **jazz**, **blues** and then select using those “tags”. It’s clumsy but it works.

Another example of human beings being colonized by technology - an MP3 player/swimming goggles combination. See SwiMP3.

Fitting right into today’s writing efforts is this older (Jan 2005!) article about Markus Giesler who works in the area of high-tech consumer research. The article picks up on some of the themes from my own research, albeit from a business perspective.

“IPod and user form a cybernetic unit,” said Giesler. “We’re always talking about cyborgs in the context of cultural theory and sci-fi literature, but this is an excellent example that they’re out there in the marketplace…. I have seen the future, and it is called the cyborg consumer.”

From Wired News: My IPod, My Self by Leander Kahney (Wired News, 2005-01-28).

Was skimming through Playlist.com: The best iPod-related products of 2005 and saw a link to Senuti. This is a really excellent little (free) Mac OS X application that allows you to look at and retrieve the content from your iPod through an iTunes-like interface. So if you iTunes hard disk goes belly-up you should be able to recreate it from your iPod.

See Senuti (where there are some other nice little apps too). In the Playlist article there’s a link to a Windows app that does the same thing and is also free.

I read this interview with DJ and music producer Peter Tong because I was following an iPod/Apple thread (see Wired News: Pete Tong: Apple’s Gone Wrong?) and the following quote about DJ-ing stood out

The thing about technology — the same as I learned with the advent of CD — if you stop using old technology and move immediately to the new, your DJing dips. Maybe that’s a good thing, but my thing is to try and blend the two. Everyone I’ve seen who has just begun doing it ends up doing things they would never normally do, just because they can.

Seems to me to be true of many things - business, church and faith, even cooking. Being able to create something new within of the transition area. So rather than abrupt paradigm shifts where you throw away everything you previously did and embrace only the new ideas, you take all the experience, knowledge and technique from the old ways and remix them with the new to make something novel and unforeseen. And if you’re doing that you can connect people from different paradigms and together create a new community.

iPodNN | Podcasting raises church attendance. I guess that it depends on the quality of the content delivered. If some of the services and sermons I’ve heard were podcast I’m sure it’d have the opposite effect.

Wired News: Beyond Porno: Free IPod Content has a list of various podcasts (audio and video) as well as other material for your video iPod/iTunes.