Fuddland

Entries concerning the world of technology.

This category is a subcategory of Science.

In order to both reduce the amount of packing I’ll need to do when I move house, and to raise some extra pocket money [my grant ran out in March and there’s no teaching over the summer], I’ve offered-up quite a number of old videos, CDs and DVDs for sale on Amazon Marketplace, ones I’ve rarely — or in some cases have never — watched. I was quite surprised to find that whilst the CDs and DVDs are shifting pretty rapidly, no one wants any of the videos, despite them being only a quid or so each. I suppose the general decline in VCR and video cassette sales means that only rare [i.e. unavailable on DVD] items would be sought after.

Also, people are really bad at leaving feedback ratings; of the twenty-two people who have purchased one of my items, only three have bothered to give me a Seller Rating. Happily, I received top marks from all three, but it’d be nice if every one of the twenty-two took a few minutes to show I’m a reliable Seller — I bet if they were unhappy with the products they’d be straight online to give me a negative rating.

Apple’s new iPod shuffle and it’s “innovative” notion of random playlists is precisely how I usually use my own MP3 player: very rarely do I copy entire albums into its 256+64Mb memory. I just fire up either Rio’s bespoke synchronisation application or Windows Media Player and copy over a random selection of my music, and enjoy the playlist for a couple of days before uploading a new one.

It’s because I knew this was how I wanted to use my player that I didn’t opt for a proper iPod in the first place: I don’t want all my music with me at all times, but listen to only ten percent of it on a regular basis — I want to be pleasantly surprised by a song I haven’t heard in years. And if I forget the name of the song or which album it’s on, I have a handy LCD providing the basic metadata, something Apple decided wasn’t worth adding — I can imagine that might lead to some frustrated users desperately trying to recall the name of the singer whilst out and about, having no choice but to try and remember to look it up later on. I can understand the thinking behind not including a display [reinforcing the fact that it’s designed for random play, as well as cutting the cost I should imagine], but personally I prefer to have the information readily available.

There’s an interesting [and lengthy!] look at the idea of shuffled playlists over at City of Sound.