Thanks to all who emailed and pointed out the problem.

Infact there was no sign of season two either, just season one. Very odd. (next-day googling reveals that Warner Bros are withholding it from online distribution to try and increase the value of the show for syndication).

This of course led to a small dilemma. Missed show, no scheduled repeats, no way to buy it online or watch it in Hulu/CBS.com. Hmm. In this day and age do content providers REALLY think people will wait for the repeats/syndication/dvd? I mean really?

No of course not. Instead they* head over to somewhere like The Pirate Bay or the other zillion torrent sites and grab the episode for free. The content owners lose out on the money people were willing to pay (or advertisements to watch), and viewers have to go through a bit of hassle to obtain a copy of variable quality (although one that's almost always better than SDTV).

Nobody wins, aside from the torrent sites with all the advertising. It's quite sad really.

*(by they I mean everyone else, and this is not at all what I did…)

Posted via email from Andrew Live!

After rebooting both my laptop and Time Capsule, and even trying to create a fresh time machine image I finally discovered a way to fix this issue – downgrading to 7.4.1 of the Airport Extreme / Time Capsule firmware.

To do this open Airport Utility, hold down the “option” key on the keyboard and choose “BaseStation->Upload Firmware…” from the menu bar. You should now be able to downgrade your Time Capsule / Airport Extreme to previous firmware versions, and 7.4.1 works flawlessly with Time Machine / Snow Leopard 10.6.1 for me.

Hopefully this will save others from lots of head scratching

Instead of sending me spam email advertising your new GPS service, how about pulling your finger out and providing the MMS service that Apple have been dubiously promoting for around six months now? (“Late Summer” my arse).

The moment I can get an iPhone on Verizon, you guys are toast.

Bests,

Andrew

Posted via web from Andrew Live!

Posted via email from Andrew Live!

-> Add To Cart!

No, none of these were the number I eventually chose, but I do wonder why companies such as AT&T don’t offer anything like this. (Ok, I already know – these types of company rarely innovate until forced to by threats to their market share from younger companies or changing technology).

If you haven’t checked out Google Voice yet then you definitely should, it’s very very neat.

Part of that is because I’ve left behind the sun-drenched beaches of Los Angeles for the slightly chillier climate of the Bay Area – San Francisco to be precise. Despite dropping about 10 degrees in temperature (5.5 degrees, Celsius readers) I’m very much enjoying the change. It’s nice being back in a city where walking and public transport are a part of everyday life, definitely an improvement over the car-centric nature of Los Angeles. Also I’m living in the North Beach district which means I have a huuge number of bars, restaurants and shops just a few blocks away, which is fantastic for those summer weekends and evenings

And with a change of city comes a change of job! About a month ago I started at LucasArts and so far it’s been brilliant. I’m part of a team working on something that’s fantastically exciting, but also highly highly confidential and several years away. I’ve always avoided talking about work here other than in the abstract and that’ll continue, but I do look forward to the day when I can say more

This of course means that I’m no longer at Seven, something that has mixed emotions for me. On one hand there’s some great people I’ll really miss working with, but on the other the last twelve months were pretty grim with layoffs, salary cuts, and the public lawsuit around our game, Scratch: The Ultimate DJ.

I think all of us at Seven felt that Scratch had the potential to be pretty special so having it taken away was hard, and not helped by then seeing our former publisher hawk the game at E3 or various parties. Or butcher our original concept art into a pretty horrific website. But hey, it’s their game now. I’m not sure if they’ll ever manage to release it, but if they do hopefully they’ll stay true to the game and it won’t be just another button-pressing music game.

Being bought by Activision, even with the loss of Scratch, is definitely the best thing that could have happened to Seven. I wish all those guys the best of luck and look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

On a totally different note, now that life should be a little less hectic I’m going to hopefully have a lot more time to devote to personal projects. On the Whiist side there’s a few things in progress that I really need to finalize so I can release a new version. I also have a new plugin for Windows Home Server that was part of Whiist but made more sense as a standalone item.

And then there’s the iPhone… Some of the changes in 3.0 while not outright breaking Photo Speed Dial have definitely made it less useful (such as the OS now prompting before initiating calls from 3rd party apps, urghh!). This weekend will be dedicated to deciding if and how I’ll try to work around these issues. I have a number of changes for Better Christmas List that I’m grouping together into a bigger release for later this year. It might just be me, but I tend not to think about Christmas shopping until at least September I also have a couple of ideas/prototypes for new apps that I’ve been working on,  hopefully things that will stand out in some way from the gazillion apps that are now to be found on the app store!

Anyway, I’m off to play the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition that we just released

I think my car (2006 Mustang) was probably one of the last models ever not to feature some form of auxiliary input on the radio/cd player. (Four years after the iPod explosion and Ford still weren’t offering an easy in-car solution – hard to imagine why they’re having financial problems..).

For listening to iPods the only option I have are the “FM” tuner devices that broadcast a local FM signal for your radio, and for an iPhone only the types of these devices that are shielded to avoid interference.

With the closure of LA’s Indie 103, and my rapidly growing podcast backlog, I decided to pick up the Griffin RoadTrip FM for iPhone so I’d be able to listen to something other than the junky commercial stations that decorate the LA airwaves. My only requirements were for something that supported the iPhone and had a cradle/charge stand, which were both covered by the Roadtrip.

The retail price of this device in stores like BestBuy is $99, but Amazon have it for $60 – which is a good thing because for $100 I’d have returned it. At $60 I like it enough to keep it though.

The build quality of the device is good. The rubber arm is flexible and the perfect length for my car with it’s mid-level power socket. It comes with a selection of cradle attachments for different iPods, none of which seem designed for the curved body of the 3G iPhone but several of which work anyway. When attached my iPhone fits just right – snuggly enough that it’s not going to fall out but easy to disconnect with one hand.

The radio signal is ok – it’s strong enough to overcome weak FM signals but stronger ones will require you to switch channel. There’s a secret “Euro” mode that opens up some frequencies supposedly unused in the US, but I still received interference and the sounds of Mexican music in the background.

The RoadTrip allows you to “save” three FM channels so if you begin to receive interference on one you can easily switch to another. You program these presets yourself by finding and “saving” unused channels, you can then add the same presets to your FM radio, or (as I do) switch between three such as 102.5,102.7,102.9 by using up/down.

And that brings me to the biggest issue with this device – ironically one that’s marketed as a big selling point: The “SmartScan” functionality is badly designed and works extremely poorly.

The SmartScan feature is designed for when you find interference on one of your presets. It purports to scan and find channels that are unused in your current area. There are three big problems with its implementation;

• Much of the time one or more of these channels are infact used.
• These channels are spread throughout the radio spectrum, so if the first is unused it’s difficult and dangerous to switch to the next while driving.
• The “SmartScan” completely wipes out your presets and replaces them with it’s faulty picks.

I’m not really sure what the intent of SmartScan is. If I have presets that generally work for me, but one day find interference, what I want is a “find me a channel I can use now” option. Something that I can press as many times as it takes to find one that works. I don’t want all of my carefully selected presets, that I may have programmed into my FM radio, wiped.

With the SmartScan problems (which IMO render the feature useless) $99 is excessive for this product and as mentioned I’d have returned it. At $60 I’m happy with it and it definitely makes my daily commute a little more enjoyable.