Who can turn the world on with her smile?

Things are working out better with the Apple TV now that I've taken a hint and buy episodes on my computer through iTunes first. Also, the catalogue is bigger than I first thought - possibly because its grown over the last week or so, but more likely because the interface on the Apple TV is ridiculously crude and makes for laborious browsing.

Doing nothing but scrolling up and down lists or flicking through cover art might be cute on an iPhone, but it gets old pretty fast with a TV remote. iTunes is easier to browse through - a shame it's absolute resource hog on a PC.

So far my choice of viewing has been a fairly predictable run of satirical animated cartoons full of pop-culture references. But iTunes has embraced the classics as well and so I'm off for a little Mary time...

Authorise This

The experiment has gotten off to a rocky start. I upgraded the Apple TV's firmware to the recently released version (3.0) and prepared to browse through their growing catalogue of TV and movie content - only to be emailed and told to upgrade to the next version (3.0.1) right away otherwise my content could disappear.

Needless to say, the upgrade to 3.0.1 thoughtfully wiped all of my network settings including the WiFi password, which is a complete nuisance to enter with a five-button remote (imagine trying to send an SMS with half the buttons on your phone missing).

But finally I was browsing! The catalogue is currently small but respectable (by way of disclaimer, my office supplies TV content to iTunes). To ensure impartiality, I settled on an episode of American Dad that I hadn't seen before. I was immediately prompted for my iTunes Store password (which the upgrade had also wiped - more painful picking out of letters) but the download kicked off and within seconds I was told the episode was ready to play.

Clicking play only got me an error message: this Apple TV is not authorised to play this content. How rude.

It turns out that despite the "ready to play" message, you need to sync the Apple TV with iTunes (on your computer) before the download will play back on the Apple TV, which is a terrible tease. I used to be able to purchase and play back on the Apple TV without this problem (I still have episodes of our own content on the device that I'd purchased weeks earlier) so I suspect this issue is the result of the recent upgrade - either a bug, or a "security enhancement".

In Apple's defence, they got back to my message of complaint within a day but didn't tell me anything I hadn't already figured out. However, they certainly get the Oscar for most obsequious complaint response:

"I'm sorry to hear that the video "The One That Got Away" did not play successfully on the Apple TV it was purchased on. I sincerely apologize that this video has not met the standards you have come to expect from the iTunes Store. I can certianly [sic] appreciate how eager you must be to have the issue resolved. My name is Stephanie, and I will do everything I can to help solve the issue for you."

If nothing else, I found Stephanie's sincerity and her obvious sharing of my pain comforting.

Crazy like Foxtel

I've just moved house and finally sorted out most of the nuisance stuff that comes with a move: address changes, relocating utilities, that sort of thing.

I've moved a couple of suburbs closer to the CBD (in fact I'm now just a stroll away - wave if you see Trixie and I walk past) so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that despite living in the centre of Australia's largest city, I can't get subscription TV. Some nonsense about strata titles, multi-dwelling complexes, Jupiter being in Mercury's quarter - that sort of thing.

What exactly made Foxtel think I'd be happy to jump through hoops for the privilege of giving them princely sums of money every month is quite beyond me.

So I saved myself the jumping of hoops by cancelling my subscription. Instead, I'm going to see if I can get my televisual requirements purely from FTA TV and from the Internet using such devices as come to hand (such as PVRs, extenders, gaming consoles, etc).

And I'm going to blog about it.

The experiment (I call it that to give it a more scientific air than it possibly deserves) will be strictly confined to full-episode content watched on my TV from a device that sits comfortably and quietly in the TV cabinet and can be used with my universal remote.

Here goes nothing...

What Apple Giveth So Shall Apple Taketh Away Again

This just in: Apple has pulled the C64 emulator from the App store just hours after it went up. Apparently their original objection was to the emulator's inclusion of a BASIC prompt. This was disabled to get approval for the App store, but some ingenious geek found a way to re-enable BASIC access... prompting Apple to pull the app (and thereby ruining it for everyone else).

I'm not quite sure what possible damage the BASIC prompt could possibly do, but there's no arguing with Apple. Previously only the Pope claimed to be infallible... it seems Steve Jobs has joined him.

Flashback

A Commodore 64 emulator has just been released for iPhone (apparently after a number of rejections from Apple). Which takes me back to my very first computer... a C64 with tape drive that appeared under the Christmas tree more years ago than I care to admit.

Sadly, William Shatner never did a TV ad for the C64 like he did for the Vic 20 (although the C64 ad is pretty bitchy) but many fond hours were spent on it learning the skills I would one day need to take over the world. Actually, most of those hours were spent waiting for the tape drive to load a program. But it was still better than going outside and playing football.

When I was in university I finally bought a second-hand floppy disk drive (something I had coveted for years as a kid) but mostly the poor old C64 sat in a trunk, until we moved to Australia and my partner decided it wasn't worth the cost of freight and dumped it(!). Mark my words, that's going to be a sorely-missed exhibit when they set up my museum.

So I'm going to have to settle for the emulator (available now on the iTunes App store). It comes with 5 games, but I'll be keeping an eye out for my favourites in future releases.

I guess its a sign of getting old, all this retro hankering. Kids these days don't know how good they got it - why, in my day....

Unwired for Sound

OS 3.0 for the iPhone is out and is attracting more attention and blog-time than is seemly, so I thought I'd join the frenzy. I've been looking forward to it mainly because it promised to introduce stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), so that my long disused wireless headphones might finally get some use.

But predictably, Apple has not quite implemented A2DP fully. For some reason, they've skipped the AVRCP protocol which is normaly used with A2DP, because it allows Bluetooth devices to remotely control the iPhone. This means that the track-skip function on my headphones won't work. Not the end of the world, I'll grant you, but annoying.

Why does Apple delight in witholding functionality like this?

Maybe we'll see it in a future update. Or maybe we'll see some kind of proprietary protocol for this kind of thing, possibly in a pair of Apple-licensed wireless headphones.

Now I'm just interested to see how long the battery in my iPhone lasts when I'm listening to music using Bluetooth. I'm open to bets on this - will I make it through a whole session at the gym? Although if you turn off 3G, you get much better battery life. Because I'm with Telstra, I get to use their Edge network when 3G is off, which isn't that much slower than 3G for browsing, email or Facebook.

But however long it lasts, you can rest assured that there is NO Cliff Richard on my iPhone. Yet.

Do You Want WiFi With That?

It seems that WiFi hotspots have finally begun to apear in Australia - at least I only began to notice after I succumbed to the Cult and bought an iPhone. As you can imagine, my status in the Cult has been jeopardised by signing up with Telstra, which I did less out of a love for Australia's favourite corporate bully and more for the love of things like network coverage and reliability - all of which I failed to get from Vodafone in the preceding months.

One of the other advantages Telstra offers is free access to their network of WiFi hotspots throughout the city. Which sounds good on paper... until you try to use one on an iPhone.

Firstly, you can't help but notice when you've moved into range of a hotspot because your iPhone will constantly pop up invitations to join it. Hotspots like this are usually unsecured in the conventional sense so your iPhone goes ahead and joins the hotspot by default. The trouble is, joining the hotspot isn't enough - you're expected to log in first - something you'd only realise if you were in a browser, which is where the login page shows up. If you're in email or an app, all you get is a whole lot of little circly processing icon and nothing else. As a result, if you don't go to your browser and log in, you have to turn off your phone's WiFi to carry on with 3G - something a friend and fellow Cultist has to do all the time, as he works in the CBD .

A couple of times I've gone ahead and logged in (while my friend spluttered in frustration) because it's free for me. Let's overlook the fact that the login page is clearly not optimised for mobile - the process itself is simple lunacy. First, I have to enter my mobile number into the webpage after which I get an SMS back with a token, which I have to enter into the login page. Only then, do I get to browse.

Clearly the whole thing is intended for laptops and no doubt Telstra is working on a system optimised for mobile, although if they're after a little free consultancy, why can't they tell I'm a Telstra customer from my phone and just authenticate me?

Telstra normally charge for their hotspots, which helps explain the need for authentication (if not its poor execution). But why do places that offer "free" hotspots require you to login and cause the same problems if you don't? I'm talking about cafe chains or multi-national fastfood joints whose normal MO is to make you enter a token from your receipt or (worse) ask at the counter for one. The idea is obviously to make sure you bought something first, but wouldn't it be easier to shoo out people who are taking up a table (and wifi) without eating anything than to make your paying customers jump through hoops to use a supposedly free service?

I suppose that the hotspot might spill out onto the street, but it's just plain petty for the likes of Gloria McStarJacks to obsess over a few kilobytes of internet traffic snatched by passers-by or homeless people.