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This iPhoneless Life #11 – iTunes’ Secret Agent

August 27, 2010

iPod To describe my life as iPhoneless is a slight exaggeration. There is definitely an iPhone in my life, my wife’s iPhone 4, and it robs me of sleep.

My wife is addicted to Angry Birds.  It has not quite taken over completely from reading in bed at night (I can thank the late Stieg Larsson for that) but there seems to be an unwritten rule that we have to get through at least 2 or 3 levels of the aforementioned smash hit game before calling it a night.  I am often called in to help out clearing a level if my wife is stuck on it and wants a break to read another chapter of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I am expected to keep going until every last grunting green pig has been blown to bits.


So I know all about the iPhone 4, it’s beautiful “retina” screen and gorgeous build quality. But for my own use I still have my old, battered Windows Mobile phone – an HTC Tytn II (in O2 “Stellar” livery).  It has done a job for me but now enough is enough and I want a modern phone.

Largely out of sheer bedevilment, I am determined not to become an iPhone user like everyone else in my family. And I’m wary of being a Windows Phone early adopter, much as I believe that platform holds out great promise. How could I forget what it was like to be an early adopter of Vista, when the pain of it is still faithfully documented in this blog? So I will go Android, at least for the foreseeable future, and currently favour the Samsung Galaxy S.

It was while I was checking out what the podcast client options look like in the Android world that I came across a free open source application called iTunes Agent. The idea is very simple. It makes your random non-Apple music device look, to iTunes, like an iPod. That means you can use iTunes directly and seamlessly to synchronise music and podcasts with any mp3 player or phone.  iTunes Agent has been around for quite a while and I can’t think how I missed it, particularly when I was casting around for a podcast solution for my HTC WM6 phone. As explained in an earlier post, I have a more than workable solution using iTunes for podcast capture and WMP for synchronisation, but iTunes Agent looked like a neater fix and I thought I should try it out.

I had no trouble installing and running iTunes Agent on my Windows 7 PC, and it hooked up immediately with iTunes. The difficulty I had was getting iTunes Agent to link up to my phone when the latter was connected to the PC via USB.

The way it is supposed to work is that you specify the folder on your music device where you want your synchronised music to live, in my case a folder on the HTC phone’s micro SD storage card. When you connect your phone, iTunes Agent is supposed to detect that this folder  is available on the Windows file system and therefore knows your phone is ready for synchronisation.  The limitation is that iTunes Agent requires your phone or music player to have been allocated a drive letter by Windows, but Windows was just listing my phone under “Portable Devices”. I could easily navigate through the phone’s folders and files using Windows Explorer but no way could I persuade Windows to allocate a drive letter.  And without a drive letter, iTunes Agent refused to accept any folder on the storage card as synchronisation target.

This stumped me for a while until, by dint of frantic Googling, I discovered the difference between the MTP and UMS protocols for connecting storage devices over USB. My phone naturally connects to my PC using MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) – a technology which is reckoned to offer the widest device compatibility with media players – as opposed to UMS (USB Mass Storage) which is targeted more at USB keys and SD card readers. Unfortunately Windows only allocates a drive letter with UMS devices, not with MTP.

More Googling and I found out about two applications that can be installed on a WM phone to make it emulate a UMS device and thus qualify for a drive letter, W5torage and Softick Card Export.  The former was written by a lone developer and is free whereas Card Export is a commercial product. Both were created so that you can in effect use your WM phone as a card reader.

I tried W5torage first.  It installed fine on my phone and appeared to be running, but in UMS mode my PC was not able to detect my phone at all. A quick uninstall and I tried Card Export, which is free to trial for 21 days. I took an instant dislike to the latter because it automatically added an annoying status display to my Today screen and an icon in the notification tray. It did however work. My phone now appeared as the G: drive and at last I was able to configure my phone in iTunes Agent. My HTC now showed up as a device in iTunes.

This did not though constitute a happy ending. Before going much further I was determined to rid my phone’s Today screen of the unwanted Card Export status display.  I went into the phone settings and unticked the Card Export option from the list of Today items. This resulted in my phone locking up. A reboot later and the Today Screen was free of Card Export status, but now my program icons were missing. There was clearly some clash between Card Export and the application manager software from O2 which came with my phone. Now the O2 software is lot more important to me than use of iTunes Agent – my researches in that direction were more curiosity than need – so it was Card Export that was going to have to go.

It took about 10 reboots before the phone was working normally again, with no trace of Card Export, the Today screen displaying all the right items and no lock-ups when I tried to access the Today settings.  There was a moment when I thought I was going to have to ditch the phone as a write-off, or at least restore factory settings.

That is, unfortunately, one of the most problematical issues with Windows Mobile. Lots of apps but easy access by developers to the deep innards of the operating system, which can readily become unstable as a result. I don’t know why iTunes Agent had remained a secret to me for so long but I could have done with it remaining a secret.

Posted in Computers, Microsoft, This iPhoneless Life, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Vista, wm6 | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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Innocent until proven guilty unless your name is Jenkins

August 10, 2010

I have no idea whether or not Sion Jenkins killed his foster daughter, and neither really does anyone else except of course Jenkins himself.

But his earlier conviction has been overturned, on the basis that his guilt cannot be proven, and he is out of jail. But his attempt to secure compensation for wrongful imprisonment has been quashed.

I don’t know about most people, but I have a problem with that. If we have a principle of “innocent until proven guilty” then we should apply it fairly and consistently. With Jenkins’s conviction overturned he should be in the same position as anyone else who has not been found guilty of that crime. Suspicions or speculation about his involvement, or even a collection of  facts which are suggestive of guilt make no difference so long as they do not add up to proof.

He was not proven guilty so should be treated as being as innocent as the next man. And that means he should not have been imprisoned and, accordingly, should get compensation for wrongful imprisonment.

The Ministry of Justice’s position that compensation should only be paid when the victim of wrongful imprisonment is shown to be “clearly innocent” strikes me as insupportable. Under the “innocent until proven guilty” principle Jenkins is as clearly innocent as he needs to be for damages to be payable.

In legal terms either Jenkins is guilty or he is innocent. Unlike in Scotland, there is no half-way house. So whatever anyone might think or suspect, the judicial system should either find the evidence to convict him or it should pay him his compensation.

Not doing so sets a dangerous precedent which could be readily abused to deny compensation in future cases of  miscarriage of justice. The burden of proof to find someone guilty in the courts is a tough one, but the question of whether anyone is “clearly innocent” seems to be determined at the whim of the Ministry of Justice.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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This iPhone 4 wife

August 8, 2010

iPod It seems very strange that I have now purchased 4 iPhones but am still using a Windows Mobile phone. For a while at least I will continue to lead this iPhoneless life. The first 3 iPhones (all 3GSs) were for my children, for the festive season, and just recently an iPhone 4 for my wife, Naomi.

My children are absolutely besotted with their iPhones. In heaven with them. Naomi hates hers and keeps begging me to get rid of it. Until very recently she was a Windows Mobile user too, and had been since the first O2 XDA came out 7 or 8 years ago. But her O2 XDA Orbit2 was suffering death throes (symbolic of the Windows Mobile platform as a whole) and the iPhone seemed the obvious, safe alternative. Naomi had had a play with the kids’ iPhones (admittedly mostly Doodle Jump) and I expected her to take to it straight away. But she is finding the transition very hard going.

Steve Jobs has shown us that the one true smartphone experience has no room for a pesky stylus. Such things are fiddly and keep getting lost or broken. There is no need for any such contrivance if the user interface is properly thought through. Except that Naomi had had plenty of time to get very efficient writing texts etc with a stylus and finds the iPhone keyboard to be a beast, as many do on first acquaintance. Coupled with exceptionally unhelpful predictive text and her unfortunate tendency to hit send on SMS messages by accident and the results are utterly infuriating for her, when they’re not hilarious.

Last week she replied to a text from my son Jonathan which asked for advice on making sure a text he planned to send to a friend was not misinterpreted. She wanted to suggest he tack a smiley on the end of his text. But thanks to her keyboard issues, the unwanted incompetent interference from the predictive text facility and an untimely use of send she ended up advising him to add a “skills” to his text.

The reply came back: “what is a skills and where do I put it?”

Naomi dissolved into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. She could hardly breathe, let alone say a word. Which was highly inconvenient because at that moment I was driving the two of us around the horrible Coventry ring-road system (which I do not know at all), was struggling to make sense of the Satnav and was hoping for some help from my co-pilot. I had to manage without help.

I sense Naomi is settling down, very slowly, to the iPhone. And what are the alternatives? Another moribund Wimdows Mobile phone? Just putting off the inevitable. A Blackberry with a real keyboard? She likes the tiny buttons even less than Apple’s virtual ones. And there really is no going back to the horrible texting systems we had before smartphones.

So I imagine the iPhone will stay. But in trying to help my wife get on speaking terms with her new phone I have spent a fair bit of time with it and I do see where she is coming from. The more time I spend with it, the more I think Windows Mobile has come in for an unfairly bad rap.

I don’t think I will be buying a fifth iPhone. Not for myself. I know Windows Mobile is on its deathbed and Windows Phone 7 is still some way off being ready to invest in. Most likely I will go with the trend towards Android.

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Posted in This iPhoneless Life, Windows Mobile | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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England players seeing red over Green

June 22, 2010

I go along with much of James Hamilton’s analysis of the current malaise in the England camp, leading to the abysmal showing against Algeria.

The key to it is clearly the awful and unsettling treatment of Robert Green. Like Hamilton, I saw Capello’s handling of the incident as nothing short of torture for the unfortunate keeper. Sure the mistake was criminal at this level and utterly inexplicable. But Capello should either have announced there and then that Green was being dropped or immediately given him his unequivocal backing.

Despite the seriousness of the error, the best option would have been to back him. How likely was Green to repeat the howler against Algeria or in any other match? How much better for morale to show the squad that he has faith in his players and will stand up for them, at least after a one-off mistake. Particularly bearing in mind how hard Green worked to atone for his error in his second half performance and the open, honest and brave way he spoke to the media after the game.


Instead, Capello heaped the pressure on poor Green by telling him he was on probation during training. This just dragged the whole episode out and put Green under intolerable scrutiny. No wonder he cracked, underperformed in training and had to be dropped. Worse than that, it sent a very unfortunate signal to the whole squad. It left them worrying that their coach was likely to disown them and hang them out to dry if they messed up even once during a match. Hardly a recipe for encouraging them to express themselves confidently on the pitch.

I also take on board Hamilton’s first point about Capello’s disciplinarian regime being tolerated during qualification but resented when it carried on into the World Cup finals themselves. But I think the players know Capello is that sort of a manager and was unlikely to suddenly turn blokey and become “one of the lads” on arrival in South Africa. They would have put up with the discipline if at least they could believe Capello was right behind them. But the treatment of Green after the USA match put paid to that.

What is happening in the England camp has its analogue with the French debacle which in fairness is far worse. The French squad have also reacted badly to what they perceive as unfair treatment of one of their number, in their case Nicolas Anelka, leading to a complete breakdown of relations between players and coach. There are differences. Domenech was already due to leave after the tournament so staying on the right side of him was less of a concern. And the French players have gone much further than their English counterparts, effectively going on strike. And with less cause. Anelka deserved to be sent packing and the players have a duty to their country which should have overriden their loyalty to any one team-mate. In contrast with the French players, the England team have too strong a sense of duty to their nation to engage in open revolt, but the effect on their morale is harder to shake off.

The French are a lost cause. Tant pis. As for England, well, in Capello’s shoes I would be apologising to both Green and the whole squad. He should be letting them know that he is there for them, aloof or not, and then getting on with the job.

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Posted in Sport | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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Perfect Zip Tap Coffee

June 15, 2010

Vista busy cursor For years I’ve had to contend with dreadful coffee at work from the typical workplace coffee machine.  It claims to be a high quality “bean to cup” device. Well I don’t know what sort of beans they use or what the machine does to them, but the result is tasteless or worse.

Then some weeks ago we had a zip tap installed in our kitchen area.  In case you don’t know, a zip tap is a self-contained instant boiling water dispenser tap, installed into a work surface with just a tap and water drain area visible. The gubbings are hidden under the worktop.  For safety reasons, you have to hold a small button in at the same time as pushing on the lever that works the tap.


An obvious use of the zip tap is for making tea and coffee.  I bought a small jar of Douwe Egberts instant coffee and some semi-skimmed milk and decided to try it out.  Well, the result was a big improvement over the office coffee machine but not as good as I am used to at home, using the same brand of coffee.

I reasoned it must be to do with the water temperature.  At home, I wait until the water in the electric kettle is fully off the boil before pouring into my coffee cup, to avoid the taste of the coffee being seared out of existence by the boiling water.  Clearly, the water coming out of the zip tap was too hot, resulting in the destruction of coffee taste that I am so careful to guard against at home.

So I have changed my methodology.  I now grab an empty white plastic drinks cup from the office coffee machine and half fill it with boiling water from the zip tap.  I wait a few seconds then slowly pour that into my coffee mug, over the Douwe Egberts. I can then safely top up the mug direct from the zip tap.  That gives me the optimum combination of flavour and temperature.

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Owls v Palace: The relegation play-off final

April 27, 2010

Five years on and it’s almost like a re-run of the League 1 play-off final.  In 2005, I and my son Jonny were among 41,000 Sheffield Wednesday fans at the Millennium Stadium Cardiff to watch the Owls take on Hartlepool (with 17,000 fans of their own), with promotion to the Championship as the prize.  I remember holding on the phone for hours to get tickets.  Every Wednesday fan, however peripheral, felt caught up in the occasion and wanted to be there.  On that occasion Wednesday won and the ensuing cup presentation and celebrations were so joyous and glamour-packed you might be forgiven for thinking we had just won the Champions League or the World Cup.

Sunday’s match against Palace is technically just a scheduled Championship fixture like any other, but for practical purposes it is a play-off final.  As in 2005, two teams are playing against each other in a single match for a place in the Championship next season.  The loser will be playing in League 1.  It means as much as 2005, captures the imagination just as much and Owls fans will be clamouring to be in the crowd.  Futile attempts to get through to the ticket office by phone, or to get a response from the club website, took me straight back to 2005.

I should have been on the website even before the final whistle at Selhurst Park last night confirmed that Palace had failed to beat West Brom, missing the chance to secure Championship survival and setting up the dramatic finale on Sunday which, as fate would have it, brings together the two remaining candidates for the last remaining relegation spot.  Thankfully, Jonny managed to get through on the website at around 1:50am and secured 4 tickets together in the South Stand.

While there are practical and emotional similarities with Cardiff in 2005, there are also some differences.  No extra time or penalties.  No cup to be presented.  Palace need only draw; Wednesday need to win.  Against that, Wednesday have home advantage and will have a full house urging their team on.

2005 was about the euphoria of promotion.  2010 is all about avoiding the anguish of relegation.  We win to stay where we are, not to go on to greater and more hopeful things.  In Cardiff, both sets of fans milled in the streets in a friendly spirit.  Everyone was enjoying their day out and there was a genuine party atmosphere.  There was nothing to lose, and the chance of a big gain.  This time, the atmosphere will be far more tense and grim.  The winner gets away with a narrow let-off; can breathe again.  No great hike in status to get euphoric over.  For the loser, there is the despair of the drop.

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Posted in Sport | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

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Hasta la vista, ActiveSync

March 15, 2010

Vista busy cursor Or as I prefer to call it, ActiveStynk.  Childish, maybe, but it is far and away the most putrid lump of software ever to come out of Redmond.  I makes even Vista SP0 looks like something Steve Gibson might have lovingly hand-crafted.

At least Microsoft have finally decided to consign ActiveSync to the annals of history, as announced today at the MIX’10 Conference in Vegas.

Good riddance.  May it rot in hell.

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audible.com feature request – the audiobook you want is now available

March 9, 2010

Books I want to read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I could just go into Waterstones and buy it but I want to read it as an audiobook.  I get much more time for audible books than physical books.  Anathem has been recorded as an audiobook and is available to audible’s customers in the US.  Unfortunately, due to the usual misguided machinations of publishers, the Anathem audiobook is not available in the UK, at least not yet.

Every now and again I check on audible.co.uk to see if it has materialised.  Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon has shown up in recent weeks, but not Anathem.

What I would really like to see is a feature on audible’s website where I can lodge a list of books I would like to be alerted about by email when they become available.  That would be so helpful. I guess there is the issue of making sure that the target book has been identified uniquely. I would have to key in the title and author myself, as opposed to selecting it from a list, so for example  minor spelling errors might cause identification problems.  Maybe we could be allowed to enter the ISBN number of the print version as an alternative.  Or a link to the corresponding page on Amazon.  Should be no issues there since Amazon now own audible.

In addition to helping customers discover when the audiobooks they want are ready to buy, the system could be helpful to audible in assessing the demand for different titles.  If large numbers of people entered Anathem as a book they were interested in, that might help speed discussions with the publishers by demonstrating there was a market for that title as an audiobook.

Just a thought, dear Audible, you might like to consider.

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Buzz Off Google

February 12, 2010

Vista busy cursor Why on earth does Google think I want my main day to day email platform (Gmail) infected with social media? I use email to …. er, send and receive emails. Why would I want the normal flow of email messages to be lost among a load of twitteresque status updates and other social media frippery from people that I may have emailed in the past?

Email and social media belong in two different worlds.  They do not go together at all.  Email is purposeful;  you use it when you need to get something done or are dealing with important information you need to keep on record.  Social media is for transient casual entertainment and amusement.  A time-waster or time-filler when you are not in purposeful mode.  So the two should be kept well apart.

That’s not to say that I have a problem with social media.  Far from it.  But social media works best when everyone uses the same platform.  We already have Twitter and Facebook, and Facebook pretending to be Twitter. Google getting in on the act just risks fragmenting the social media space when what we need is integration.

Buzz is not for my benefit or yours.  It is Google’s play for a slice of the social media market, for its benefit. It’s to my disadvantage because it fragments social media and, because they are trying to do it by getting a leg-up from the success of Gmail, it threatens to adulterate what has up till now been a perfectly good email platform.

I’d rather Gmail stuck to email.  It has in the past been in the forefront of cloud-based email with helpful, innovative features such as conversation threading.  I wish Google had just focused on improving Gmail as an email tool by starting to introduce features from Google Wave instead.  Wave was supposed to be email reinvented for the modern age.  Well, right now it is heading for oblivion because no-one will make the jump and there is no way to get to critical mass. Better to give us Wave by transforming Gmail bit by bit until it looks like Wave, and keep the users on board.  And keeping me-too Twitter features out of it.

But if Google wants to start a social media war with Twitter and Facebook it can do it without messing up my email.

Kill the buzz, NOW!

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Keep taking the tablets

January 28, 2010

Vista busy cursor I had a bit of a “Doh!” moment when I finally discovered what the iPad was all about.  It should have been obvious long before Steve Jobs’s announcement yesterday.  My only excuse is the constant reference to the term “tablet” which I associate with devices that look superficially like conventional laptops but have swivelling screens.  I have one of those but they are in general regarded as a failed concept.

The iPad is not in that space at all.  It is not Apple’s answer to the tablet PC but Apple’s answer to the netbook and Amazon’s Kindle combined.

As ever, Apple pick up after a need for something new has already emerged and others have already created inadequate products in response. Usually those early attempts by others fail because they are trying to adapt something that already exists but the paradigm does not translate properly.  The tablet PC is a prime example.  Another would be every smartphone prior to the iPhone which was some unhappy marriage of PDA type device and conventional mobile phone, often involving use of a (ugh!) stylus.

Apple won in the smartphone stakes, improving on the earlier failed attempts by starting from a different direction.  They realised that they needed a device that was all touch screen but with an interface that did not need a stylus.  And not to try to do too much. Most users want to be able to get their media on there, browse the web and access their email, but not necessarily care about getting into the gubbings or hacking the device.  If they wanted to play games or expand the usefulness of the phone they would just download applications.

Similar story with the iPad. Netbooks have arisen because many people just want to browse the web at home or do their email but don’t want to wait ages for a PC to boot up.  They don’t need to do serious gaming or video encoding so something smaller, lighter, cheaper is fine.  To date the answer has been a smaller, lighter, cheaper laptop – ie the netbook.  Another need has been the eBook reader.  The Kindle has been successful but eInk is not everyone’s cup of tea.  Low contrast, slow page turning.  The only real benefit is a long battery life.

The iPad takes the paradigm that worked for the iPhone and reapplies it to the need to date met by the netbook and Kindle.  It brings the benefits of ease of use, touch interface without stylus and quick/convenient access to the lightweight tasks (web, email, reading a book, watching a movie) that most people actually want.  It will stretch to work type things but that is not its main market.

Do I want one?  Hell no, but I do think it will be successful.

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