I found a great site the other day and it took me on a real stroll down memory lane. It’s a bit nerdy, and probably appeals to the OCD aspect of my personality¹, but Walkman Central has a list of all the Walkmans that Sony have produced. The two that really struck a synapse in the old long term memory were the WM-102 and the earlier WM-10.

A mate of mine in school had the WM-10 and I loved how small it was. It was the same size as a cassette case but it expanded a little wider when you wanted to actually put a tape into it. The WM-102, which came out a couple of years later, went a bit further. It took the battery out of the body altogether and stuck it in a little box on the bottom. You could either use the slim rechargeable one or a standard AA battery. With the rechargable one the whole package was super small and genuinely the same size as a cassette case.

This picture here² is what you got in the pack. I bought mine in 1987, the year they came out, with the winnings from a lottery scratch card. I can’t remember how much it cost but I seem to remember having to put some money towards the £100³ that I won. Finding this site really brought back some memories of old-school⁴ technology envy.

It also made me remember just how dominant Sony were in the portable music player space at the time. Sure there were other manufacturers like Aiwa and Akai but Sony were top dog. It always amazes me how they completely blew the portable music space when MP3 came along. They seemed to be so busy fighting the change in the way people were listening to music that they didn’t produce a digital music player until very late in the game. Even then they refused to support MP3, presumably because they were afraid of piracy issues, and instead came up with their own “standard” ATRAC.

Friends of mine came back from New York recently where they each bought themselves one of these beauties which I think are fantastic. Just as soon as I can find some spare cash to spend on one of them I will⁵. Still, I have fond memories of my trendy little Walkman from the 1980s for a lot of different reasons and I’m sure Sony do too.

– Fintan

Picture by colmmacc Some rights reserved.

Apparently An Taoiseach thinks that we’re the laughing stock of Europe for not rolling out eVoting (see this RTE News article). Hmm… I’m sure they’re having a good laugh at us in France right now where their Nedap voting machines, the same ones we currently have in warehouses, are causing problems.

As someone who has worked as a software developer for years eVoting is something that really bothers me. To be honest, I’m not that concerned about electoral fraud. It’s not like manual voting hasn’t been the subject of electoral fraud in past, but at least with a manual ballot count you can be pretty sure that it’s being done under the scrutiny of representatives of all parties¹. What I am concerned about is some script kiddie changing my vote to a vote for Senator Palpatine or some buggy, poorly written code that wasn’t tested properly due to budget or time constraints resulting in my vote being lost.

At least a piece of paper with a box on it won’t crash or forget what I voted for.

Incidentally, the picture of the Nedap machine above comes from Colm MacCárthaigh who has a small piece from last year here on how it was hacked.

– Fintan

A couple of weeks ago I finally did what I’ve been promising to do for months now and finally bought myself a Mac. Originally I was going to pick up a MacMini but I already have one desktop machine in the house and it was going to be hard to justify buying another one.

I did need a new laptop though and so two days ago I took delivery of a shiny new MacBook. First impressions so far are good but I have yet to do anything to really test it. Most of what I’ve been doing is transferring files to it from the PC and trying to retrain my fingers to use the right keys. In the short term I’ll probably still use the PC for a few things, hence the “sort of” in this post’s title, but I expect that as I get used to it I’ll use the Mac for more and more stuff.

– Fintan

Early last year¹ I talked about how I felt the iPod was such a strong seller in the MP3 market because of the Apple brand and that Sony blew it in a space they should have owned. Since then Sony have come out with the hard-drive based Walkman and a rake of other MP3 players. Nice but too late. If these had come out around the same time as the iPod they might have had a chance. Now Apple have gone one step beyond with the iPhone (watch the MacWorld 2007 keynote, this thing is amazing). Due out later this year (Q4 in Europe I believe) this one is sweet and comes close to the device that I talked about in this post.

But Apple didn’t just stop there and now I think they have a really strong chance of owning the HTPC space with the AppleTV. This ticks the boxes that I talked about in this post back in March of last year and then some. I’d pre-order one right now but I have a problem and that is my TV². My TV is a dinosaur in that it’s going to be 8 years old this year and I don’t think it would support the AppleTV (or do it justice if it did support it). When I think about what I paid for it back then and what that would buy me now I shudder…

- Fintan

Speaking of natty new devices, during my brief hiatus Microsoft finally announced just wtf the Origami was about, and it turns out it’s not just a poor viral marketing campaign¹. It’s actually a mediocre handheld PC. At least that’s what it looks like at first glance.

They’re calling it the Ultra-Mobile PC. Quite why I would want something much larger than a PDA but without the battery life and keyboard² of a small notebook is beyond me. For me, anything with a battery life of 3 hours is not going to be much use while out and about. You can forget about trying to use to watch a movie while on a long flight. No doubt performance will improve but I still don’t see a need for this other than finding a new place to stick Windows³.

If you want to build something really neat then build my dream device. This is something about the size of a PDA. It’s clamshell so it folds open revealing an eInk-like screen. It has built in 11g wireless (bluetooth-shmoototh), USB 2.0 and incorporates a mobile phone. I don’t particularly care what OS it runs as long as it runs a JVM and has the usual diary/mail/browser stuff. It’s the PDA that Homer^H^H^H^H^HFintan built⁴!

– Fintan [listening to 1 Giant Leap]

A couple of weeks ago myself and Olivier had some discussions over Apple, Microsoft and Media PCs. Simplifying things, and without getting into the guts of the arg…discussion, Olivier felt that Apple were already competing with Microsoft’s MCE because the Mac can play video, while I disagreed because I believe that a true media center PC is more than just a standard PC that can play audio and video.

Apple’s recently announced dual-core Mac Mini seems to be heading in the right direction. It comes bundled with a nice simple remote control that resembles an iPod Shuffle and Apple’s Front Row software which looks like a really lovely, simple front end for a device that should really be nothing more than a glorified vcr to an average punter.

These guys are road-testing a Mac Mini against a Windows MCE PC. It’s only part 1 of 3 so I’ll mostly hold fire until I’ve read all the articles. However, one of the criticisms they make of Windows MCE boxes is that they are typically noisy and hard to get working. Now, my brother has a Windows MCE box in his home AV setup. It’s probably not the nicest case around but it certainly fits in with all of the other kit he has¹. It’s not particularly noisy and the user-interface, in conjunction with the Microsoft MCE remote control, make it really quite nice to use. On top of that he built it himself² and with the latest version of MCE it worked straight out of the box³. I have no doubt that the Mac Mini works straight out of its box⁴ but it’ll be interesting to see what these guys make of it bearing in mind their criticisms of MCE. Admittedly they sound somewhat biased but I’m sure we’ll be able to read between the lines.

I have to say though, I’m seriously tempted…..

– Fintan [listening to 1 Giant Leap]

In a post to my other blog yesterday I talked about how I thought there might be a sneaky iPod Nano recall going on. It got me thinking about the power of the Apple brand and in particular the iPod.

The problems that people have been having with iPods are well documented and anecdotally a large number seem to be going back for repair¹. It might just be down to the sheer volume that they sell² which results in a greater number of duds but there are some obvious general problems with them (e.g. battery reliability). So why do people persist on buying iPods when everyone knows about or has experienced problems with one? I know one guy who got so frustrated with his U2 iPod constantly wiping itself that he smashed it up. He then went out and bought a new one. Admittedly the first one was a freebie from a record company but why didn’t he buy a different player given his extreme frustration?

I think there are two things going on here.

First off is Apple itself and its brand. I’m not talking about the zealotry of extreme Mac fanatics (although I will some other time) but just the general brand image that Apple has. Apple is cool. They make nice, pretty things. Hell, even the box and packaging the Nano comes in is so nice you feel like you shouldn’t throw it out. Having the iTunes store tied to the player has undoubtedly helped but there is a definite cachet associated with all Apple products that’s hard to get away from. Everyone wants an iPod and it’s becoming synonymous with digital music players.

I think there’s something else going on though and that is that Apple’s competitors have yet to come up with a viable and attractive alternative. The iRiver and other competing products just don’t seem to have it on the design side and there’s also the issue of OS support with some only really working on Windows machines.

Clearly with their history in portable audio Sony should have owned this space and it’s not hard to see that they really missed the boat. Their early players used a proprietary format (ATRAC) that no-one wanted and consequently they didn’t sell. Even quite recently a friend of mine, someone who definitely doesn’t buy based on image, returned his newly bought Sony player back to the store because despite liking the form factor³ he found that it was converting MP3s to the Sony format on the fly. The result was that copying music over to the player took an age, even over USB2. He bought an iPod instead.

I think that Sony do have one possible comeback though: the PSP. I don’t own one myself. My days of being an innovator or early adopter disappeared with the m&m⁴ and now I’m more of a late majority or laggard⁵. Anyone I know who owns a PSP loves it. It’s versatile, plays games, movies and has a browser. It also plays MP3s and it’s memory is expandable. It also has that shiny black cool design and in terms of cachet it comes close to the iPod. The one problem I’ve heard mentioned is that you can’t lock the buttons to stop them from doing stuff while it’s in a coat pocket. It’s not perfect but it does at least begin to fit the bill for a complete portable entertainment device.

While I love my iPod Nano (and since having it replaced I’m now on my second one) I really don’t think that Apple are going to have it their own way forever. Someone, someday soon is going to come up with a device that will kill the iPod. Who knows, it’ll probably also be made by Apple and come in a really cool box.

– Fintan [listening to David Kitt]