Batteries and Apple

In 2006 my girlfriend bought herself a MacBook, one of those white ones, pretty, easy to use, and all was well. About two years later the laptop started acting weird. I shut down even though there was still a lot of charge left in the battery and other strange symptoms. A call to Apple and a quick battery check in the store and she got a new battery thanks to the battery exchange program they had running back then, almost no questions asked, and all was well again.

A while ago the battery started acting up again. We came home from a short vacation and the battery icon had a cross over it and the battery didn’t charge. I got on the phone with Apple and they of course answered that I was SOL, but after refusing to accept that they told me to go to an Apple Support store to test if the battery was depleted, or defect. Needless to say it was defect, it had gone from acceptable performance to no performance in the blink of an eye.

Ok, so with the blessing of an Apple technician I called Apple again and now things started to get strange. The support now told me batteries were something you used up and that this battery too was used up even though the technician said otherwise. After a while I had the support guy accept that Apple didn’t manufacture their batteries to suddenly die after a years usage, but rather become less and less able to hold the charge. Based on this acceptance I tried pointing out that Konsumentköplagen (law to protect consumers here in Sweden) protected me from manufactoring errors, and as we both agreed that the battery was incorrectly manufactured, as determined by their party, this would give me the right, and according to me, right to a new battery.

This convincing had taken a while and the support guy was definatly not interested in Konsumentköplagen nor talking with me, so he redirected me up one level after he had explained the case to the next guy.

The next guy had been told by his managers that batteries were something you used up, and thus the Konsumentköplagen didn’t apply, but when asking for a legal reference to his statement that batteries was specifically not covered by the Konsumentköplagen he got a bit defensive, specially after me pointing out that the first hit on Google has the title “Apple doesn’t care about Konsumentköpslagen”. After a short battle he sent me one step up to something he explained to be their office for more law-related questions.

This time a Danish girl answered and the conversation continued in english and she didn’t seem to have ever heared of the Konsumentköplagen, but was kind enough to give me a 30% discount code on a new battery from Apple Store. I accepted this as the alternative according to her was to talk to their lawyers, and that seemed like a too big effort considering the price of a new battery.

I’m still not completly sure who was right in this case, they never explicitly said that I was wrong. The Konsumentköplagen says that’s it up to the consumer to prove the manufactoring error, but as their technician had determined this already I belive that I was right, and I have still not found any explaination to the relation between Konsumentköplagen and batteries.

android + last.fm = best thing since sliced bread!

Installed the Last.FM player on my Android yesterday and I suddenly knew that I had just taken a leap into the future.

The days of myPod’s and other digital music players are reaching their end. I realise that while writing this, millions of people sit in front of their computers pushing music into their little gadgets before heading out in the street or whatever, and you know what…

<blink>THEY’RE DOING IT WRONG!</blink>

What they should do is to get themselves an Android or iPhone, install the Last.FM app, just head outside and click the “xxxx’s Library” station and enjoy song after song they probably just want to hear right now, for free! The whole world of music instantly available from that Internet enabled device in their pocket.

<blink>THIS IS THE FUTURE! IT’S HERE!</blink>

It’s has also revolutionized my use of Last.FM. As I’m using it on the go I’m not really doing anything other than listening to music so it brings me closer to the music in a whole new way.

If I hear a song it’s really easy to just pick up the phone from my pocket and press the <3 button, maybe skip to the next song if the current one doesn’t fit my mood, or if the song reminds me of someone, the share button is just a click away, both share to email from the android contacts list, or to my friends at Last.FM.

I haven’t been this excited about a piece of software since I first started using Xbox Media Center, this IS the best thing since sliced bread (or XBMC in this case).

First Year of Vinyl

It was some time between Christmas and New Years last year I carried my Technics SL-1200MK2 home in my arms. Now a year later I can say that it’s hands down one of my best investments ever, I mean.. just look at it..

The first 6 months it wasn’t used more than perhaps once a week, but when moving to my new apartment it was the easiest source of music for a long time due to the caos of getting things to their proper place. When finally getting the apartment into order the habit was already there. I’ve listened to almost no digital source of music for the past 6 months when being at home, and my collection is close to filling my first box. When spending most of my awake time in front of a computer it feels very relaxing to kick back in the sofa to a really great analog music experience.

Here’s the list of my current albums, with albums I’ve listened to the most marked as bold:

• Metallica
  • Ride the Lightning
  • …and Justice for All
  • Kill ‘em All
  • Master of Puppets
• The Beatles
  • Abbey Read
  • White Album
  • Sgt Pepper
  • Magical Mystery Tour
• Peps Persson
  • Rotrock
  • Persson sjonger Persson
• Bob Marley
  • Kaya
  • Uprising
• Jimi Hendrix
  • Band of Gypsys
  • Electric Ladyland
• Jim Morrison
  • An American Prayer
• The Doors
  • The Soft Parade
  • Absolutely Live
  • Waiting for the Sun
  • LA Woman
• Glen Miller
  • Story
  • A Memorial 1944-1969
• U2
  • Under the Joshua Tree
• Nirvana
  • Nevermind
• Mikael Wiehe
  • Kråksånger
• The Human League
  • Reproduction
• Plasticman
  • Sheet One
  • Closer
  • Musik
• Black Sabbath
  • Black Sabbath
  • Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
  • Paranoid
• Pink Floyd
  • The Wall
  • Dark Side of the Moon
  • Atom Heart Mother
  • Wish You Were Here
  • A Saucerful of Secrets
  • Animals
• Front 242
  • Tyrrany For You
• Kraftwerk
  • Autobahn
  • The Man Machine
  • Radio-Activity
• Bo Hansson
  • Ur Trollkarlens Hatt
  • Sagan om Ringen
  • El-ahrairah
  • Mellanväsen
• The Stooges
  • No Fun

If you’re thinking about getting a vinyl player but haven’t made the final decision yet, then doit! You will not regret it.

electricXmas 2008

Two weeks ago it happened again. The annual synth music festival in Malmö, electricXmas. The evening started with some boozing up at the office with a crowd of 10 persons or so, lots of nice music and chattering before we hit the club. This years lineup was pretty nice: Biomekkanik, Autodafeh, Agonize, Interlace and Welle:Erdball. I wasn’t really interested in anything other than Interlace and Welle:Erdball, but these two artists had each really great sets.

Also.. Welle:Erdball also threw out their instrument of choice into my drunk arms:

Unfortunatly it doesn’t seem to work properly after that crazy night, or I’ve failed to tune in the TV correctly (although I can easily find my other C64 on this TV). Next up is probably to switch over my other C64 into this new and signed chassi and get it to actually play some Welle:Erdball sids. Pretty nice to have a dedicated Welle:Erdball-computer

Right, and I at least requested vinyl versions of all of Interlace’s albums, the answer was that it was interesting, and that it might happen. Enough for me to keep on hoping.

Update:
I just ordered a 1541 Ultimate so in a not too far future there will be Welle:Erdball playing on the real shit!

Skidbladnir, a product of GSoC Mentors Summit

GSoC Mentors Summit in all glory, but all sessions and no hack made drax and me dull boys… enter Skidbladnir to bring joy to life!

After a day of slow sessions, me hacking on Abraca, while drax hacking on a new web 2.0 client we decided that enough was enough, time to get some collaboration going.

I actually came up with the idea a really long time ago, while Service Clients was just an vague idea in the minds of drax, theefer, and the wanderers.

As I live in Sweden, home of the fast Internets, I know that a whole lot of people would be very happy if their favorite music player had easy access to, everyones favorite, The Pirate Bay for getting more content.

A typical scenario would be that I was playing some song by Timbuktu, and my music player would automagically notice that I’m missing that new single that Timbuktu, one of Swedens most popular artists, officially released first to the world on The Pirate Bay *hint hint hint all other artists* and then present a link to that torrent for me to click on, and download using my favorite torrent client.

This feature is so hot that ALL XMMS2 clients should have it, thus we wanted to do this as a Service Client.

So late saturday afternoon just before we left Googleplex I started to update the xmmsclient python bindings to match the Service Client branch my student had written during GSoC. Meanwhile drax was working on getting his webclient ready and some helpers to count string distance between Freebase data and some mock Pirate Bay torrent names. Due to jetlag my evening ended early for me, but when waking up somewhere around 3AM I had a great message from The Pirate Bay waiting for me about getting early access to their upcomming webservice API. The rest of the sunday was spent frantically hacking the python bindings so that we could have a running demo before I had to leave for the airport and it worked! Around 2.45PM we made the first working request from the service client and I ran to the bus.

So to summarize what this client does:

1. Register as a service client that accepts an artist (string) as argument.
2. Accept request.
3. Find albums by artist in medialibrary.
4. Find albums by artist in Freebase.
5. Find albums by artist in The Pirate Bay.
6. Subtracts the albums in medialibrary from the albums returned by Freebase.
7. Calculates string distance from what’s left of Freebase result with The Pirate Bay result to get good names pointing to correct but crappy torrent names.
8. Return a list of albums missing in the medialibrary by some artist, with links to download.

Right.. and the name Skidbladnir refers to the ship of Freyr that sails the Scandinavian intern^H waters with fair wind, and folds easily into ones pocket.

MOSiG Hackaton \o/

It’s time again for the annual Hackaton where a heap of creative people meat up and bash their heads against their keyboards until something cool comes out. Be there, write the code, spread the source…

Details can be found at the official page here.

GSoC Mentors Summit reflections…

PTSD, I miss google…
I want to go back…
I want to hack…
take me back…

Thinkpad X200

Got a new laptop at work yesterday, the long awaited ThinkPad X200.

Hands down best laptop ever. Everyone should throw away their old crappy laptops and get this one, or the X200s. I’ve started writing a page over at ThinkWiki on how to install Debian on it.

Buildbot on Windows

Buildbot is nice… I use it for the XMMS2 project, and I use it at work. However, the hellspawn OS known as Windows likes to tell the user if some executable crashes. This might be nice and user-friendly as it’s a pretty common scenario that applications crash on this OS, but when running unittests in a buildbot slave this causes the slave to hang instead as there’s nobody watching the screen and clicking the ok button in the dialog box. Killing the application with the Win32-api doesn’t help as the message box heavily guarded by the OS (…or rather the result of another application intercepting the crash). I bet others have stumbled upon this disturbing issue, and like me don’t know that much about the OS in question, so here’s one solution that works:

• Disable problem reporting in “Properties in My Computer”
• Disable JIT debugging in “Tools->Options->Debug” in Visual Studio versions
• Enable drwatson by running drwtsn32.exe -i

ReCaptcha

After reading an article over at wired.com earlier this week I wondered how fast I typed these days. The girl in the article managed to type 120 words per minute, and I know I was pretty fast in school when we worked on type writers, so up to the test.

First I tried copying a Swedish text from paper while a friend was standing next to me with a stop watch, the result measured around 80 wpm (although I think I could write a bit faster if I’d tried a couple of more times).

Second up was finding a program on the computer that just gave me random words and performed the same measurement. After a quick search with apt I found the package ‘typespeed’ and gave it a spin. A couple of tries later I didn’t even manage to get past 52 words per minute, but this test was in english, and there were some words I hadn’t heared of before, but still, both 80 and 52 are WAY less than 120.

Ok.. so finally time to get to the point. This ReCaptcha thing has been around for a while now. For those of you who haven’t heared about this wonderful project, here comes a short resume: ReCaptcha is like regular Captcha, but with two words, one known word, and one word that a computer has failed to interpret while digitalizing a book. So each time you solve a Captcha, you help opening up the world of cyberspace to a dear old book. Each word will be sent out to a lot of Captchas thus providing a kind of voting mechanism that filters out the typos.

Ok.. so finally time to get to the point (really). It would be pretty damn neat if you had a typespeed program that fed you a specified ratio of unknown words for you to train up your fingers with. This would ofc not distort the actual word before displaying it like done with Captchas. Unfortunatly I guess it’s a bit more common with people having to fill in captchas for blogs etc, than people trying to improve their writing speed using some silly program.

Anyways, way past bedtime (perhaps the reason for the idea in the first place), so good night intarweb, see you tomorrow!