Posts Tagged ‘iPod’

What’s the best way to listen to Danny Baker while riding a bicycle?

October 24, 2012

I’ve mentioned before that one of the central pleasures in my life is listening to Danny Baker on BBC London while I ride my bicycle into town. To do this, I used to use the TuneIn app for the iPhone, but it has a rude habit of cutting Danny off mid-anecdote, restarting a moment later at the same point it lost the signal, then skipping a few seconds to catch up. By which point Danny has gone to a Fountains of Wayne record, and I’ve missed the funniest bit of the story. Curse you, capricious app!

For this reason, I now listen to the world’s greatest radio show on an FM radio accessory which plugs into the old version of the iPod. But I’m no analogue snob, and it’s irksome having to carry a phone as well as an iPod, so this week I gave the new BBC iPlayer Radio app a whirl.

Is it any better than TuneIn? Well, after dialing up BBC London 94.9 using the whizzy little semicircular station selector, it soon became clear that it isn’t. On my seven-mile journey, the signal conked out three times – and unlike TuneIn, which attempts to reconnect automatically, I had to stop riding and restart it. Another advantage of TuneIn is that you can listen to practically any station in the world, not just the BBC’s output. So if you can put up with your favourite show going silent mid-broadcast, then choose TuneIn over iPlayer radio.

Yesterday was a decisive moment for a number of familiar technologies: Ceefax displayed its final pixels, and Apple sounded the death knell for CDs and DVDs by announcing that the new super-slim iMac won’t have an optical drive (although you can buy an external device if, in the slightly condescending words of Apple’s marketing chief, you are “stuck in the past”). FM, meanwhile, the old iron horse of audio broadcast media, has kept on going – even if it is, like an OAP, a little fuzzy at times. Perhaps 4G will be so fast and reliable that I’ll be able to chuck out my little iPod radio attachment, but at the moment it seems clear that radio apps don’t work as well as they should on 3G. So I’m puzzled why the BBC released theirs now. In the meantime, it’s FM for the Candyman.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,

Apple’s greatest thingamyjigs

March 9, 2012

Over the years, I have owned and used many items emblazoned with the familiar silhouette of a bitten apple. But my two favourites are probably the least technologically advanced, which is probably why their praises aren’t sung too often. So I would like to offer my own faint warble to them here.

The first device which holds a special place in my heart is this little marvel:

It looks like a Nano that’s grown a tail, but it’s actually an FM radio. Plug it into the old version of the iPod and the screen becomes a transistor receiver dial.

Now, doesn’t that look nice?

I’ve written before about my unbounded love for Danny Baker’s show on BBC London 94.9, but without this beauty, I wouldn’t be able to indulge in the simple pleasure of listening to the great man every day while I cycle into town. Having used the TuneIn app, I’ve learnt that radio via 3G is simply a means of disturbing your listening pleasure with random silences, and I’ve heard that DAB radios have the same problem. So for the foreseeable future, I’ll stick with this fantastic analogue oddity.

My second thing of wonder is the remote control for the iMac.

It enables you to adjust the volume, pause or skip tracks, and switch playlists or albums. All of which you can do with a mouse or a keyboard, but not when you’re slogging away on the turbo and you suddenly realise that you need to go one louder or change to a completely different playlist if you’re going to last until the end of the session. Essentially, by combining this simple infrared device with a pair of good speakers, you’ve turned your Mac into a less fiddly, turbo-friendly iPod.

Yes, these wotsits are merely accessories, humble sequins on technology’s shimmering raiment. But rather than launch the third incarnation of the same tablet in less than two years, I really wish Apple would instead come up with more of these unusual objects. The sort of objects that say, “I can fit neatly into your life,” not “Fit all of your life onto me.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,