Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

Watch Glenn cavort with an iPod.

From bump: The Nomad Jukebox eats batteries very quickly, and I got about two hours of playback at the most out of it. The interface on it for navigating music is sometimes maddening, other times barely usable. Finally, transferring music takes forever.

Yeah, I didn't have room to rant about battery life in my column for this Sunday's Seattle Times on the iPod. The Nomad uses four AA batteries, which it can recharge internally, to run its rated four hours of service, which Robert Occhialini says above is really two. Managing AA's is a pain in the butt. None that I've seen are intelligent enough to have current levels or other markings on them to help differentiate them. They're a commodity you're supposed to buy in endless quantities and throw away.

Never mind that they're full of toxic chemicals and should be disposed of as hazardous waste if we lived

I have a friend who works or worked at MTVi in a high-level position. Their offices were south of 14th Street in Manhattan, so after (first) the trauma of the World Trade Center disaster, they were unable to return to work until the next week. Back in the office, things were raw, apparently. The axe finally fell today, about six weeks after the disaster. MTV is folding its interactive division, once primed for a separate IPO, back into the parent firm and laying off a ton of employees. I'll be interested to see Adam Curry's reaction given his long-time "relationship" with MTV and his many friends and colleagues at the network.

I noticed today that Amazon.com has modified and raised its special order surcharge for books that require direct-from-publisher orders. Typically, these books are listed with 4-6 week availability on their site. I have written (and been quoted) extensively on the subject during Amazon.com's confusing pricing tests this summer, since which the company calmed down. My colleagues at the firm expressed their surprise and concern that I was critical of the pricing test, but ultimately I think I convinced them that consumers wouldn't be able to navigate the several changes in price, shipping, and surcharges.

The latest change comes after months of stability, and addresses all of my concerns. In the interim between summer and this change, Amazon.com has charged a 99-cent surcharge for special order titles, but did not note this information anywhere except as a surcharge on their shipping charges page. When you reached the checkout

In my inimitable fashion, my Apple-supplied technology preview of the iPod (see earlier posts) died on me about two days after arrival. I'm sure it was my fault. I unplugged while it was running. I stuck a too-long stereo adapter in it. I put it in my back pocket (and didn't sit on it). Fortunately, my Apple PR contact at Edelman Worldwide is a clever dude. I called him this a.m., and he said, press Menu + play for 10 seconds and it'll force a reboot. I do so. Little happy iPod bootup screen. Tony, you're my savior, I say, and email his Apple contact. I deal with a lot of PR people, and they are always criticized when they don't do what we press types want. It's important to thank them to their clients when they do great deeds such as this one. Does his competence predispose me more

Thanks to a generous loan from Apple Computer, I've been playing with an iPod since yesterday morning. It comes in a fascinating cube-shaped box that not only firmly protects the iPod with inches of foam, but splits in half in the middle to reveal components on on side and the iPod on the other - reminiscent of McDonald's failed McDLT. (There's a tape drive format known as DLT, but I'm not making the MacDLT joke here.)

It's a nifty toy with all the features Apple claimed for it. It's not entirely silent, but it's not far off. You can hear the tiny hard drive whirr from time to time. The interface takes 20 to 60 seconds to learn based on my experience in showing it to four computer-oriented folks in my office.

Some early praise: it really does take just a few seconds to transfer a 160 kbps stereo encoded

The grand old man of newspaper computer columnism, Walt Mossberg, celebrates his 10th anniversary writing his column. I don't always agree with Walt's specific opinions, but his overall approach is consistent: computers and computing machinery intended for consumers shouldn't be difficult, expensive, and poorly supported.

My dad emailed me to point out something I'd noticed a few days ago: Yahoo's Finance site is using a new kind of popup ad that expands the ad above and below the small footprint when you mouse over it. Foldout ads?

The Internet Archive announces the Wayback Machine. Enter any URL and see what they have archived and when, then view it, in real time. This is an invaluable tool for archivists and researchers. It will almost certainly blow out copyright issues to the fore, as it has before. F'r'instance.

It just hit me that this could be a national security problem. Nuclear plants are revising their sites to move previously quite explicit information about the site location, such as maps. But then, you can use the Internet Archive to view Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the past.

I wrote a few days ago about Robert X. Cringely declaring death of consumer broadband. I agreed reluctantly with a lot of his logic. More proof arrives. I mentioned in that post that Sprint had cancelled its Ion service and halted new Sprint Broadband (wireless 2.5 GHz) deployments. Yesterday, AT&T Fixed Wireless was eliminated in budget cutting; they apparently used the 10 GHz range. And I've just read that SBC plans to cut back DSL buildout.

The New York Times reports this morning in a tidbit that the author extracted from Steve Jobs and I haven't seen elsewhere that the company's new iPod only synchronizes one way: that is, you can download new music from one machine to your iPod, but not from the iPod up to another machine. This makes some sense, as it's minimal copy protection. And because you can use the iPod as a plain hard drive, you could use a simple Synchronization program and the drive side to move files from home to work to a latop and back. But it does decrease the utility, especially given the size of the drive. My girlfriend and my CD collection ripped into 128 kbps 16-bit MP3s via iTunes is 25 Gb. Maybe Apple needs to introduce the iCan iFlippin iBackup iMy iFiles with an 'ighCapacity iTapeDrive, guvnor?

As always, the response to that statement is, "done what?" The new Apple iPod is a $400 music player sporting a 5 Gb hard drive, FireWire (IEEE 1394) port, large LCD screen, and 10-hour lithium polymer battery. It recharges itself over FireWire. If you don't have a computer handy, you plug the FireWire cable into an included AC adapter. It combines the best features of most MP3 players into a single box. It doubles as a hard drive. It slices and dices and makes pounds of julienne potatoes. It syncs itself up with iTunes, the new 2.0 release due out simultaneously in early November. Rip in iTunes 2 (twice as fast now, Apple claims), plug the iPod in, zoom zoom zoom at 40 Mbps over FireWire. Run away and play.