In less than 15 minutes (10 a.m., San Francisco time), Apple Inc. will begin hosting a special media event that has “Let’s Rock” as its tagline. The “Let’s Rock” event has been heavily hyped since its announcement exactly one week ago. The tagline and the familiar silhouette that accompanies the invitation suggest an iPod related event. A refresh of the current lines of Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch had been expected and is inevitable since they have already shown their age. Except for Shuffle, I have had owned either previous or current models of all the other iPod lines. I currently own the following iPods:

I never saw the need of a Shuffle because even cell phones made couple of years ago could do a much better job than any Shuffles had been able to do. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple drops the Shuffle line completely.

I have owned 2 previous generations of the iPod Classic when they were still known as just the iPods.

I still own a 5th generation iPod Classic that I take advantage of its 60GB capacity to store most of my iTunes music library. Its capacity is not big enough to backup my iTunes library of both videos and music though. It is attached to my car stereo most of the time. Until price of flash memory comes down significantly coupled with significant increase in capacity, I think there will still be demand for the iPod Classic. So I hope a new Classic with at least 250GB capacity will be released today.

Pictures purported to be that of a real Nano 4G started popping up all over the Internet last week. Those pictures conveniently confirm the drawings of the unconfirmed Nano 4G that had surfaced since July. The Nano line is the only iPod line that I have owned all the generations.

If those rumours of a vertical Nano with 16GB hold true, the Nano 4G will be the first of the Nano family that I won’t be interested to own. I want a Nano iPhone!

It has also been rumoured that the iPod Touch family will undergo some minor cosmetic changes that come without increased capacity beyond its present 32GB limit. With iPhone 3G availably widely at contract prices that are way below that of the iPod Touch, I doubt if a minor facelift and price cut would be enough to attract buyers.

More on my Flickr album

Except for doing a nice job of copying the look of Nano, the build quality of the knockoff is mediocre at best and the software is badly designed. It not only rip off Nano but is itself a real ripoff. The people who made this should really be ashamed of themselves.

Meantime, my Nano is looking very handsome with its new accessories:

Music
Music is at the heart of every iPod. But with only 8GB of storage, I have decided even before I ordered my Nano that this Nano won’t be my main music playing device. In my latest sync, I have selected only 48 songs from 25 albums to sync with my Nano.

Even with so few songs, I still get to appreciate the usefulness and beauty of Cover Flow. Cover Flow actually makes more sense to me on an iPod than on a Mac computer because it really makes navigation easier and more intuitive on a device that has limited input capabilities. If your albums come with album art, you will really love the new Nano because it makes full use of album art. Besides Cover Flow, a thumbnail picture is placed next to each album title under the “Albums” menu to make navigation, again, more intuitive. Because, chances are one can recognize an album more quickly by its picture rather than by its title. An album art is also displayed in each lyrics page as well. Speaking of the lyrics page, text is much more legible than on the 2nd Gen Nano.

Videos
Video quality of the Nano is much better than I had expected. I don’t have my 5th Gen iPod with me to compare now because it is on loan to a friend. But even at just 50% of the brightness, the videos appear very bright and viewable. For the purpose of demonstration, I have synced an episode each from my iTunes library’s TV Shows to my Nano. iTunes isn’t flexible in allowing its users to choose which episodes of a TV Show to sync with an iPod. It only allows synchronization in accordance with its predefined rules, like the “last 3 most recent unwatched” episodes of a TV show. And once you have selected the synchronization scheme, it will be applied to all the TV Shows that you choose to sync to your Nano. I hope in future upgrades, I can select the particular episodes that I want to sync.

Photos
Because the 3rd Gen Nano has almost twice the screen resolution over the last generation, photos on Nano finally look good. I’ve synchronized over 1,000 photos to my Nano in my latest sync. Besides resolution, there is another noted improvement in the Photos application over previous generations. If an album title is longer than the width of the iPod, it now scrolls automatically so the title doesn’t get truncated. The title appears on top of the thumbnails page also scrolls to make room for long titles.

For some strange reasons, my Nano thinks every photos I took were taken on 6th February, 2040. I don’t know whether it is a bug or not. My photos are synchronized with my Aperture library and their dates are reported correctly in Aperture.

Games
The new Nano came with 3 games pre-loaded, one fewer than my 2nd Gen Nano. I played the iPod Quiz and Vortex in the video below. Gaming experience has improved a lot over previous generations because of the higher resolution of the screen. The background soundtracks of the two games I played are also very good which make the whole gaming experience even richer. I think I will be very likely to get more games from iTunes in the next couple of days.

http://www.hkbws.org.hk/bfs/ – about Black-faced Spoonbill

http://www.wwf.org.hk/eng/maipo/ – all you want to know about Mai Po presented by WWF Hong Kong

http://www.charliesbirdblog.com/~charlie/maipo06sept05/maipo06sept05.html – a blogger’s journal on his trip to Mai Po Marshes

http://www.wetlandpark.com/en/index.asp – official website of Hong Kong Wetland Park

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by the non-stop developments and constructions going on in the city, I forget Hong Kong has its quiet nature side too. And it isn’t that far away. Mai Po is far more accessible today than it used to be. I vaguely remember visited it once during high school. It has just faded away in my mind through the years. Coming back from my last trip to Kansai, instead of admiring how the Japanese have conserved their history, I should start being more aware of this city that I live and call home. Without awareness, there won’t be conservation. Without conservation, our next generation will be robbed of non-material things to admire and learn, leaving them more materialistic than our generation. All that I have been thinking of lately is watching 3D Harry Potter at Megabox. I am making Hong Kong Wetland Park this weekend’s destination.

花落誰家:

鐵塔以下青翠山嶺 化作了石油站
鐵塔以上一對鸚鵡 也要各自逃難
鐵塔以下都市璀璨 根本不懂感嘆
花瓣吹散 誰在乎誰著眼

聽說發達只有興建 蓋夠八十層吧
聽說過活只有改變 變到再沒童話
聽說進步黑臉琵鷺 盡管犧牲一下
牠一張臉 已給你記憶風化

當櫻花迫於遷往悄靜月球
天高海闊珍惜不夠
雛菊都給安葬以後
換到繁榮誰來內疚
只許燈飾普照地球
不許花園開墾幾畝
鮮花死了 至感慨愛得不夠

這個四月相對乾燥 吻到有裂痕吧
這個八月天氣很冷 再見快樂炎夏
聖誕晚上感到炎熱 盡管燈飾優雅
當天飄雪 你可會有些牽掛

當櫻花迫於遷往悄靜月球
天高海闊珍惜不夠
繽紛煙花閃照過後
望見層層浮雲漸厚
開採山丘斬去木頭
花開花落不可拯救
儘管擁有 怕一切變得罕有
(即使擁吻 怕空氣已不足夠)

Powered by Qumana

After loading the disc, my Windows desktop crashed and restarted itself without warning. It kept restarting every time I had the disc inserted. After spending some quality time with my system, I found the culprit by elimination. It was a feature called “Audio CD Free” that came with a software that I use to by-pass DVD’s region protection system. It allows ripping of audio CDs that are protected. Obviously, it needs to be updated. With it disabled, I was able to start my PC normally. The CD launched its own program to ask me what I would like to do with it, play it or burn a backup copy of it or rip its tracks into WMA. None of my software players, even Windows’ own Media Player was able to access that CD, let alone ripping from it. WMA files ripped from the CD using its own software have the usual digital rights protection. Therefore, iTunes could not import those WMA tracks for transferring to my iPod. Fortunately, one of the rights “granted” by EMI is the right to burn those WMA tracks onto a blank CD as Audio CD. iTunes is then able to rip from that CD. If this is EMI’s way to deter “fair use” (which in my case, format-shifting and backup) of their CDs, it surely has failed to dissuade me. I don’t know if there are any laws in Hong Kong that govern “fair use” of copyrighted materials nor are there any precedent cases for or against such usage. But “fair use” is recognized in the US and famous precedents include the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision. Personally, I think “fair use” is fair. I own and use 5 portable music players. Each of them fits a particular pattern of my usage. Am I supposed to buy 5 copies each of every CD?

The music industry needs to open up its mind to consumer behaviour. Please don’t make it any harder than it is already for people to transfer music from CDs to different formats. Don’t turn a blind eye to the millions of music players that have been and continuing to be sold in Hong Kong. With legal music download still an infant industry, how do you think consumers feed their players? If not from CDs, it has to be from illegal sources.

As for online music stores, WMA is great. Microsoft’s initiative of PlayForSure is also great. It offers seamless integration between music stored on computers and PlayForSure devices. All my devices are capable of playing back WMA protected music, but only one of them is PlayForSure compliant. Until sales of PlayForSure devices match those of iPods, I am not so sure that many iPod customers are as patient as myself in finding ways to work around rights protected WMA files to make them playable on their iPods. The music industry may consider these are necessary measures to combat piracy. But I can appreciate it how some users may see them as excuses for getting music the easier way.

While I admire greatly the recent efforts spent by the music industry to fight piracy by using the judicial process and increasing public awareness, I hope they are also working with the education system to educate children during their formative years the importance of respecting intellectual property. After all, intellectual property plays a vital role in a knowledge-based economy, if Hong Kong is to becoming one. It is not enough to teach them how to use the computers and the Internet. Parents, of course, also have responsibility to set an example for their children to follow.

I don’t have any children, so I have no idea what is being taught in schools nowadays. I consider myself lucky to have spent my pre-university study in a Jesuit-run school in Hong Kong. We had ethics lessons that taught us the value of righteousness. I didn’t own a PC until I went to university but yet I always know it is wrong to consume pirated goods. If I cannot afford it, I will just pass or work for it. Judging from the staggering rate of piracy in Hong Kong as reported in the news, at least a generation or two behind me had already ‘forgotten” the value of righteousness.

To fight piracy, a concerted effort to educate our younger generation is desperately needed.

(An abridged version of this letter appeared today on the Technology section of South China Morning Post)

The song I bought was encoded in WMA using a sampling bit rate of 256 kilobits per second (kbps). I don’t have discerning ears, so sound quality is not a great concern. I bought the song because it was a ‘pre-release’ and it wasn’t available as part of a CD album. A few days later, I bought another version of the same song from Eolasia.com.

When I read about Soundbuzz.com (Technology Post, August 9), I checked it out that morning and found that the two songs I had bought at Eolasia.com were available for $8 each, almost 24 per cent cheaper. While Eolasia.com listed those songs at $10.50 each that morning, it had cut the price to $9.50 each in the afternoon. Soundbuzz.com was still about 16 per cent cheaper.

I therefore signed up with Soundbuzz.com for a free account and purchased three songs right away. After downloading them, I soon found out that I didn’t overpay Eolasia.com after all. While Eolasia.com clearly and prominently lists the digital rights and sampling rate used to encode each song, Soundbuzz.com does not.

I could not find such information during the entire ordering process. It turned out the songs I bought were encoded with a sampling rate of 128kbps. They are available at Eolasia.com at 256kbps. I suspect most of Soundbuzz.com’s catalogue, if not all, is encoded at a 128kbps bit rate. But I can’t say for sure unless I purchase and download more songs.

Mathematically, music at Soundbuzz.com is 50 per cent more compressed than songs at Eolasia.com. So unless they are 50 per cent cheaper, I will stick with Eolasia.com in future. I can also take advantage of the points that I earn from purchases made to redeem even more songs. Digital or analogue, consumers like perks in the absence of a bargain.