Over the weekend I decided I would give Valve’s Steam a whirl and download Team Fortress 2. I had heard good things about it and after seeing on Digg that the game was on sale for $10 this weekend, I figured hell why not? So far I’ve quite enjoyed the melee chaos that is TF2, and at $10 how could I go wrong? But this blog isn’t about Team Fortress 2, it’s more about why I ended up buying it.

I have long advocated when it comes to media that exorbitant prices should be lowered to stimulate sales in the music and film industries. It just seems like common sense. Obviously the perceived value of digital media has taken a hit since the advent of digital downloading. People simply don’t feel there is value in what the industry charges, so therefore they look for alternatives. To me $10 is the most I would spend on a CD, and even then I would have to really want it. $10 is impulse buy territory. Most people won’t even think twice about spending ten bucks. When the price gets to $15-20 it gives most people pause and makes them second guess themselves.

By lowering their price Valve got me to make an impulse purchase that I probably never would have made otherwise. I installed their software and they now have a new customer out of the deal. If only other digital media distributors figured this out they probably wouldn’t be in the spot they are in now.

Since the new iPod nano came out I have to say I was a bit jealous of one of its features, that being the shake shuffle. That’s probably the biggest pain in the ass about having an iPhone is when you’re listening to music on shuffle and you want to skip to the next track. You have to pull it out, unlock the screen, then use the tiny onscreen controls to skip to the next track. That was until I ran across a jailbreak app called Pocket Touch. This very cool little app available through Cydia and Installer allows you to shake shuffle as well as use screen gestures to adjust the volume, pause and skip tracks back and forward. It’s pretty cool. I tried it while walking and found the shake shuffle a little too sensitive being in my jacket pocket, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. So for those iPhone and iPod Touch owners with nano envy, this is the answer, at least until Apple builds it into the firmware at some point.

I’ve been mucking around with the new Genius feature that was introduced in iTunes 8. When I originally set it up I didn’t really understand the hub bub about Genius, given I rarely buy stuff from the iTunes Store. But I finally found what the killer functionality about Genius is. Playlists. If you’ve setup Genius in iTunes, all you have to do is click a song then press the little Genius icon at the bottom right of the window and it will create a playlist for you.

Not just any playlist though. It uses the collective knowledge extracted from other users iTunes libraries to figure out which songs flow well together. I find that my iTunes library has just become so unwieldy these days that I have trouble figuring out what exactly to put on my iPhone. Now I just pick a song that fits what I’m in the mood for, then it does all thinking for me by matching tracks in a similar vein. I’ve been quite happy with the results so far, and according to Apple it will only get better as the service learns more about the music in peoples libraries.

I got a heads up from a former co-worker about a new app he’d been working on called Poptiq for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The app positions itself as something along the line of the popular music service Pandora, but for videos. Since there is no way to view Flash video on your iPhone, this is a revelation for anyone who loves watching online video.

The app uses an available Wi-Fi connection to download videos to your iPhone based on what you like. All you have to do is rank, using an onscreen slider, a few intro videos and you’re off to the races. The app will then start downloading videos based on your tastes. I spent about an hour last night using this app and the videos just kept coming fast and furious. The video selection was pretty decent though I found I quickly skewed it a bit too much. After enjoying 2 Onion videos I ranked highly all of the sudden I had about 8 videos from The Onion. It samples from all sorts of different sources, so it’s got a pretty wide array of video available. I saw lots of stuff I had seen before, but of course the app has no way of knowing what I have and haven’t seen.

The best part is that the service downloads and keeps the videos there, so you can load the service up have lots of video content to keep you occupied in between times when you don’t have a Wi-Fi connection. You can use this app on 3G and Edge networks, though an unlimited data plan would be highly suggested. From the hour I used this app my iPhone was just cooking by the end, so I would assume battery life would be at a premium if you chose to use it on the go.

All I can say is download this app, it’s probably the best app I’ve used so far from the App Store. You can download it for free in the iTunes App Store until September 24th, so get it while it’s hot.

For quite awhile I’ve been keeping an eye out for a deal on a first generation iPhone and I finally found one. My buddy Cory originally bought an iPhone as soon as they were released in the US and had it imported. When the new iPhone 3G came out he jumped at the opportunity to get a new 16gb version, so I ended up being lucky enough to be able to buy it off him for about $150. Safe to say I was quite happy about that.

I already owned an iPod Touch and found that I loved that device so much that I pretty much took it everywhere. I found that having a music player that was Wi-Fi enabled just became indispensable. The problem I had was now that I took my iPod everywhere, I no longer carried my Virgin phone with me, as there is really only so much real estate available in my pockets so something had to give. I’m a very light cell phone user(less then $10 a month with Pay As You Go), so it really became hard to justify carrying it with me.

Now that I have an iPhone, I had to choose a carrier. Virgin uses Bell’s CDMA network, so if I wanted to use the iPhone I had to switch to either Rogers or Fido’s GSM network. Both offer Pay As You Go options. I found Fido did have better rates on month to month basis, but I discovered Rogers had a deal that worked perfectly for a light user like myself. If you purchase a $100(+tax) top up card from a Rogers store the balance lasts for a whole year. That worked out to be even cheaper then what I was paying with with Virgin ($30 for 3 months x 4=$120 a year+tax).

When I went into the Rogers Plus store in Cambridge they thought I was crazy to setup an iPhone as Pay As You Go. I think so many people are confused about how the data usage on an iPhone works. Given the fact I already own an iPod Touch I’m well aware that there are open Wi-Fi networks pretty much everywhere these days. Having Data access would have been handy, but at this point it’s pretty cost prohibitive for someone like myself who doesn’t spend a lot on a cell phone. Going from $10 a month to $60 is a pretty big leap just for easy data access. So when they setup my phone I was opted out of all data related services, which was fine by me.

All told getting an iPhone setup and running didn’t really cost me any more then buying my last phone through Virgin. I even bought my sim card off of eBay for $7.

For a long while I’ve been trying to amalgamate my email services into one account. I have a couple domains, all of which have email addresses with separate logins. It definitely becomes unwieldy to deal with so many accounts on an individual basis. It was a couple months ago that I discovered that you could actually manage multiple email accounts through your Gmail account. Using a couple different services on my Mac and PC I was able to setup the ultimate notification system to keep on top of my emails, as well as Twitter and Facebook.

Setting up forwarding to Gmail:

1. Under the settings in Gmail, click the Account tab and click “Add another email address”
2. Fill in the desired address you want to forward to your Gmail account
3. Gmail will then send a verification email to your external account. Simply click the enclosed link and Gmail will be ready to send messages from you@yourdomain.com
4. Find in your domain hosting or email settings(it’s different with every host) that deal with Email forwarding. Set your external account to forward to Gmail and you’re all set

Now the next obstacle you’ll find is if you use custom signatures. Gmail won’t quite do the job in that regard, as they currently only have the ability to handle one signature profile at a time. Since if you’re like me and have 4 addresses this can become an issue if you have professional emails and want to keep everything separate. Luckily there is a Firefox extension that handles this very issue. Gmail Signatures allows you to assign up to 4 different signature profiles per email address. For me I really only need 1 different profile per email address, so this handles things perfectly. Here’s a guide on how to get everything setup using Gmail Signatures.

Now all that’s left is to notify you when you get an email to Gmail. There are lots of ways of doing this, but I wanted to highlight what notification solutions I use for both Mac and PC.

For Mac:
I recently started using Growl, which is a pretty all purpose notification system that works with many programs available in OS X. All you need to do is download and install Growl, then install Google Notifier. I also use FMenu, which gives me Facebook updates through Growl, which is pretty handy. Using Twitter on the Mac is a little more complicated then just a simple install, but it can be done.

For PC:
I recently switched to using Digsby as my preferred messaging client on the PC. This application allows me to have similar notifications to that of Growl all in one application. Digsby allows me to use multiple messaging services and get notifications for new email, Facebook and Twitter.

With the new iTunes App Store open I’m definitely looking forward to doing the upgrade. It kinda sucks that I have to pay $10 to enable iPhone 2.0 on my iPod Touch, but whatever, I’ll deal. The main reason I want to get the 2.0 upgrade is simply for the remote control app. I currently have a setup in my apartment that has my iMac streaming music from my library to my Airport Express with Airtunes, which is then hooked up to my stereo, which is then in turn connected to outdoor speakers on the back deck.

This new app should be the missing piece to perfecting this setup. The biggest weakness to this setup is if a undesirable song comes on. My library is full of lots of random stuff, and not all of it is fit to be blared out to the rest of world. So when one of those grinding, industrial noise rock songs comes on, I will now be able to use my iPod to access my iTunes library on the iMac and pick the next song. Easy as that. The iPod Touch uses the WiFi connection to communicate with my iMac, so as far out as I’m able to use my wireless connection I’ll be able to manage my music. Sounds pretty ideal to me. Now I just need to figure out how to rollback the iPod jailbreak I did awhile back so I can do the iPhone 2.0 upgrade.

Update Jul 12 I was able to install the 2.0 upgrade yesterday and try out the remote function this morning. Works flawlessly. I was sitting on the back deck, 30 feet away from the router and 50 feet away from my computer and I was able to easily swap songs in my library and adjust the volume. Apple, you outdid yourself.

My new iMac finally arrived yesterday. It replaces my previous iMac, which lasted me almost 4 years. I blogged last year about how I wanted one of the new iMacs and finally pulled the trigger on it. I bought a 24 inch, 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo from Future Shop, which finally allowed me to jump to the Intel side of the fence. I price matched it against Best Buy and got a pretty reasonable deal on it considering the huge display. It is a generation older, but considering I got a 24″ new for roughly the same price as a current generation 20″ model, I’m not complaining.

I’m starting to get used to the screen, but the monitor absolutely dwarfs my 17″ iMac. I just did the math, the 24″ has 250 square inches of screen versus the 17″ 130 square inches, so just short of doubling the real estate. I’ll need to reconfigure things on my desk a bit so I’m not sitting as close to it.

I can’t wait to try out Boot Camp. Get Windows and Ubuntu installed on this beast and I’ll have my prime website testing machine good to go.

I decided to check out what Future Shop had in the offering for their Boxing Day sales. There were no real big ticket items that I was particularily dying to get this year, so I opted for a couple of the smaller deals. I wanted to get a Belkin Wireless-N router and a 2GB Flash USB drive, which seemed reasonable enough. I was on right after the sale started at 8pm and I put through my order. This year they opted to put in a 2 stage queue system to attempt to handle the load, since in previous years their servers have folded like cheap lawn chairs. This seemed like a move in the right direction. It turns out it’s just another stage of online shopping hell. Instead of just going to your cart and checking out, you now have to wait in line. It seems to emulate real life in this regard, as if you were attempting to buy one item at the grocery store only to be stuck behind an old lady with a cart full of cat food, coupons and a change purse containing exact change…in pennies.

I waited in this queue initially after 8pm and waited, and waited until eventually walking out of the room and forgetting about it without having the progress bar move at all. I came back at 10pm and tried again. This time the progress bar was moving, but it took quite awhile. It eventually froze, so I gave up again given it is Christmas Eve and I wanted to spend some time with family instead of online shopping. I tried again and had the progress bar get to the end, only to have it deliver me a Microsoft runtime error. So I go back to my shopping cart only to find the Flash drive is now apparently sold out. Ain’t that just special. I give it one more go after removing the Flash drive and finally get to step 1 of the checkout process. I try and plug in my new address with which to ship to, only to be thwarted again. This time the site is running so slowly that none of the graphics will load, including the ones that will navigate me to the next page. So I’m left stuck, since when I hit enter it just takes me back to the order verification page. That’s just special.

To me this crap is unacceptable. Future Shop and Best Buy have this happen every year. It’s not like it’s a surprise that they have a spike in demand. I can tell they tried to build an infrastructure that would hold up to the demand, but obviously they are pretty grossly deficient in this regard. As I finished this blog post I just finished placing my order for the router, nearly 5 hours after I originally wanted to do so and with only 1 of the items I originally intended to get, even though I am sure I would have got the Flash drive if they were properly able to handle my order when I actually put it in.

I got this pop-up this morning telling me that Windows Vista had come up with some solutions for problems my computer was having. Oddly I didn’t know I had any problems, but Vista had already solved them for me, hooray! So I click this pop-up and it gives me a window with about 5 different, vaguely defined issues with my computer. I click the one titled Problem caused by Firefox and get this window. It tells me that there is a problem and that to solve the problem I should post on the application support forums about said problem. The only problem I see at this point is that other then vaguely outlining that there is a problem, Vista has not given me anything to go on with which to actually troubleshoot this problem. Excellent work Microsoft!