Month: July 2008

MobileMe

I’ve updated my iPod Touch with the 2.0 software, and done the necessary updates on my Mac to support the new MobileMe syncing stuff. Apple is *almost* where they need to be to allow me to replace my old Palm with the iPod Touch. I now have my calendar and contacts synced automatically to the Touch, accessible on the web, and on my Mac. And I can update either the calendar or contacts on the Touch, Mac, or web, and it should all sync automatically. Pretty cool!

There are couple of little problems. First, while the birthdays from my contacts can show through to my calendar on the Mac and on the web, they don’t show on the iPod Touch. This problem is described here, and there’s a tech note about it here. That’s not a killer problem, but it’s definitely an annoyance.

The other problem is that there’s still no good way to sync text notes in the same way as the contacts and calendar. There are a couple of third-party solutions that may work out for this. Here’s an interesting one that should be available soon. Evernote is available now, and might be what I’m looking for. It would be nice if 37 Signals came up with something to allow you to sync BackPack to the iPhone/Touch for offline access, but I don’t see any indication that they’re working on that.

Friday & Saturday

So the Friday and Saturday schedules for Comic-Con have been posted. Some highlights:

Friday: Stargate Continuum, Cup o’ Joe, Stargate Atlantis, Jim Lee, Joss Whedon, Geoff Johns, Jim Butcher, Venture Brothers, and the MST3K 20th anniversary reunion!

Saturday: Forrest J. Ackerman, Futurama, Ralph Bakshi, The Simpsons, Heroes, Hellboy, the Quick Draw panel, a Will Eisner tribute panel, Bryan Hitch, BSG, Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics, Pixar, Ray Bradbury, JMS, and quite a bit more.

I guess the big question is how many of the panels that I’m interested in will I actually be able to get into.

NY Times con article

Here’s an article about the San Diego con that ran in the NY Times a few weeks ago. It’s nice to see the con getting mainstream attention, but it’s a bit annoying to see them calling out stuff like this advice from the con magazine: “Please don’t smell bad.” Well, yeah, it does seem like some people at the con need to be told that. But it’s really not a defining characteristic of the average con-goer.

And the Times calls the con “decidedly low-rent.” I think that anyone who can afford a hotel room in San Diego during the con is *not* low-rent. Sure, there are a lot of people who would rather spend their money on comics and related merchandise at the con than spend it in an overpriced hotel restaurant, but regardless, the con has to be pumping a lot of money into San Diego each year. Heck, I’m pretty sure I drop about $200 each con, just at Starbucks!

(Here’s a blog post on this article that I mostly agree with.)

San Diego schedule

The Thursday and Sunday schedules are up at the comic-con site. As usual, plenty of interesting stuff.

Some Thursday highlights: a Paul Gulacy spotlight, Doctor Who and Torchwood panels (both with Russell T Davies), an Eddie Campbell spotlight, the Mark and Sergio panel, DC Nation, and, at night, the annual Ric Meyers’ Kung-Fu Extravaganza.

And Sunday: The Jack Kirby tribute panel, a Kyle Baker spotlight, a second DC Nation panel, the Art of the Cover panel, Cartoon Voices, Dave Gibbons, and Buffy the Musical!

PS3 update

For no good reason, I thought I’d write a post on what I’ve been doing with my PS3 so far. I haven’t played MGS4 yet. I’m waiting until I have a good block of time to get started on it. (Maybe after I finish Final Fantasy 8.) I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with Pain, which is a downloadable game that came free with the PS3/MGS4 bundle. It’s a lot of fun. Basically, you shoot a guy out of a slingshot and try to cause as much damage as possible, both to the guy and his surroundings. Very cathartic.

I felt like I needed to go out and actually buy at least one game for the PS3, so I went to Best Buy and bought Orange Box today. The main reason for buying it was to get Portal, which is a nifty little puzzle game with a twisted sense of humor. And an end-credit song by Jonathan Coulton. I’ve already started playing it. Supposedly, it can be finished in just a few hours, so I may be about half-way done. (Or maybe not. I’m usually slower than average with these kind of games.) I’m not sure if I’ll bother with any of the other games in Orange Box. I’m not that interested in online multi-player stuff like Team Fortress 2, and I’m not sure Half-Life will be my cup of tea. I guess I’ll try it out at some point and see if I like it.

Rhapsody MP3 store

Rhapsody has just opened an MP3 store, in beta. If you sign up for it now, you can get a $10 credit to your account, which is enough to buy Perception, a 90-track box set of pretty much everything The Doors ever released. And if you want to spend another dollar, you can get The Herbie Hancock Box, which is a 34-track collection. I’m honestly not sure if either of these box sets is at these prices purposely or due to a pricing mix-up, but either way it’s a good deal.

Unfortunately, the store itself is a bit of a mess. I had a lot of trouble downloading the Doors set. The download manager they provide just didn’t work, so I switched to an option that allowed you to download the tracks in zip files. That got me 81 out of the 90 tracks, but the remaining 9 tracks came down in a corrupt zip file. I had to go through a customer service chat session to get them to credit me for the missing tracks and allow me to re-download them. On the Herbie Hancock set, I found that I could use the download manager if I manually downloaded one track at a time. Queuing up multiple tracks didn’t work. So, basically I had to sit in front of my computer and, click on a track, wait for it to download, then go back and click on the next, and so on.

I don’t think I’ll be ordering much more from them until they get the download manager working well. Still, it’s nice to see another outlet for legitimate MP3 downloads!