The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Bob Sullivan’s MSNBC article is trying to pin some privacy issues on Apple’s iPod, and they’re not sticking. It talks about the Gracenote CDDB, the database that lives behind the scenes and gets queried every time you put a CD into your computer to fetch the metadata associated with the disc: artist, album names, track names, genre, et al. The issue is being framed as one of privacy, because Gracenote stores the queries sent to it and uses them to compile aggregate music listening preference data. However, even if this data were to be tied to individual IP addresses (which get discarded after use in determining geolocation-based “top 10” data), it would be impossible to pinpoint individual persons to target them based on it. Furthermore, framing this as an issue somehow created by the advent of the iPod is disingenuous, because Gracenote really has nothing to do with Apple’s famed portable audio device, nor any devices made by other makers — it comes into play any time you put a music CD into your desktop or laptop. Gracenote doesn’t know whether you’ve ripped the CD or not, as erroneously stated in the article.

MSNBC also wrongly invokes the leering specter of the RIAA, who could not extract any information about illegal music downloading from Gracenote if they tried — Gracenote doesn’t have any way of ascertaining the legality of an inserted disc. They even trot out the opinion of Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow to up the ante on the fear-mongering, despite the fact that he admits to not having studied the Gracenote CDDB. He says he “fears the chilling effect that could be produced if people know someone else knows their musical tastes.” I bet he only listens to Britney Spears with the car windows rolled wayyyyy up.

Dude, Podcasting is so two weeks ago. Shufflecasting is the latest and greatest in background soundtrack for your day: instead of downloading fully-produced podcasts, Rael Dornfest is taking a more eclectic approach by using AutoFill to dump a random assortment of shorter clips onto her his iPod shuffle. Audiobooks, soundtrack snippets, sound effects, IT Conversations all combine willy-nilly to produce a never-the-same-sequence-twice cocktail of “geek NPR meets Prairie Home Companion meets The Screensavers.”

As a departure from the more linear and “produced” sound of quasi-radio podcasts or pre-sequenced playlists chosen by others, I think this is a cool trend. Seems like everybody is hot to be a DJ in some form, whether for others or just for themselves. I vote yes on this DIY soundtrack trend. Is anyone else tapping into the random with Shufflecasting?

Leo Bodnar, the same intrepid soul who overclocked his Mac mini, continued his sleuthwork and has uncovered an unused FireWire bus in the Ultra ATA-100 riser card that connects the mini’s optical drive to the motherboard. What’s up with this vestigial FireWire connector? Leo thinks the riser was designed to feed an iPod Dock connector built in to the top cover of the mini. Whether the feature was originally built in and then dropped, or whether this foretells the advent of an iPod Dock-enabled Mac mini (or whether this is all pure shinola, for that matter), is unknown. But considering that not a single iPod now ships with a Dock as a standard accessory, it sure would be mighty convenient if the next revision of the Mac mini arrives sporting an iPod Dock.

Next, imagine hooking your video iPod (since Steve keeps adamantly poo-pooing it, it’s bound to happen) in to your Mac mini dock and sucking down the video content you’ve just downloaded from the iMovies store. How cool would that be?

So I see C.K. has had a chance to introduce himself before I got a chance to whip up a welcome post, so — he’s fired already!! ;) Nahhh, let’s be serious for a moment (must we?) and extend a hearty welcome to the newest member of TUAW. We’ll be sharing the Apple goodness and Borging our way through the blogosphere one member stronger, so look for even more obsessive Macintosh goodness than you ever thought humanly possible coming your way.

Welcome, C.K.!

So we already knew this phenomenon has been going on overseas for some time now, but it’s apparently becoming more of a phenomenon on this side of the Atlantic as well. Clubs such as the Cafe Saint-Ex in Northwest Washington D.C. are now regularly inviting patrons to bring in their iPods for 12 minutes’ worth of song-spinning fame.

Definitely a positive trend, but I’m far more interested in a little nugget buried within this Washington Post article: ”[iPod DJ] Wildt bought her iPod ‘a year and five months ago,’ she says, and calls it ‘Gayle.’ (’I just thought it looked like a Gayle. My computer doesn’t have a name, but for some reason this one has a name.’ Holly Tegeler, 24, calls her iPod Karl, with a K. ‘I knew he was a boy,’ says Tegeler, a Web developer. ‘I don’t know why, I just know he is.’)”

Clearly the real question here, folks, is what is your iPod’s name?

It’s John Gruber appreciation week here at TUAW. I’m very sad to witness the end of this Freeware February series, but I’m happy to ring it out with one uber-useful tool for web authors. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool that enables you to write in a format that’s actually legible, then convert your text into structurally valid XHTML markup. Written in Perl (there’s also a PHP version), it works as a Unix filter or script plug-in to BBEdit or TextWrangler, the latter of which is my new editor of choice thanks to recommendations from all of you.

I only started putting Markdown into practical usage this past month (this entry composed in it!), and I can safely say it’s drastically improved my workflow. As a programmer, I truly appreciate the underlying philosophy of using one simpler, more legible method of markup to specify another, machine-presentable version. The software is freely available under a BSD-style open source license, but if you use it and enjoy its numerous benefits, please consider chipping in to support further development of an already life-saving utility.

There’s a nice write-up on the French site Pomme Grenette covering how to add an internal Bluetooth module to your PowerMac G5. The article is in English and includes photos for each step; a nice resource for anyone planning this upgrade.

[Via Power Page]

File this in the “is anyone surprised” category: music labels are chatting with online retailers about raising wholesale prices for digital music downloads, looking to capitalise on growing demand. The RIAA wants a bigger piece of the pie, which we’re sure they’re going to, uh, give right back to the artists. Yeah.

Steve Jobs apparently expressed anger at the news, and with good reason: Apple reportedly has multiyear agreements with the record labels to preserve digital downloads at 99 cents per track. So what’s the game, here — are the labels planning to strong-arm the iTMS? What’s your take on this?

There’s more than one way to extract a bootloader, and Nils Schneider has come up with a rather inspired one. He wanted to study the iPod firmware in order to write new software for the device, but couldn’t examine the code without first somehow extracting it. He ended up using a piezo element to output the firmware as a series of sounds, which he recorded and analyzed on his PC to convert the squeaks and squawks into a digital representation of the code. He essentially turned iPod and microphone into an acoustic modem, and wrote his own application to decode the signal. Then, he wrote it all up for posterity and posted it online in contribution to hacker lore. Hats off to you, Nils!

[Thanks Brian for the tip!]

Big thanks to AK for sending along this item that clearly begs filing under “news of the weird” — conservative German newspaper Die Welt came up with the following analysis following George Bush’s recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin: “Bush wants to be a great reformer, both in terms of domestic and foreign politics. Domestically, he wants to revamp America to the same degree FDR did with his New Deal… The new plan involves marketing, surprises, big design overhauls.” Marketing, surprises and big design overhauls apparently, according to the paper, equates Bush with the “endlessly creative (and fabulously wealthy) founder of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs.”

Huh. I’ve seen some creative political analysis in my time, but this… this is really, er, something. Clearly the result of some German Mac-using journalists in the throes of a slow news day. Or maybe W.’s iPod is exerting some influence. All I will say is that I am a huge fan of one of the two men, and have very little to approve of regarding the other — I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to do the matching up. ;)

[Thanks, AK!]