First thoughts on iPod Classic

Yes I did it, I went and bought a new iPod. I figure that I now have a fresh battery which will hopefully keep me running for a few years. The other issue was that I ran out of space on my old iPod (a 30gb 5G Video iPod).
My former iPod was still running perfectly fine after using it heavily for just over 2 years (I got it in June 2006). But like most lithium ion batteries, they loose their charge as they are used, and the 14 hour playback time that was advertised when I bought was probably around 6 hours 2 years later (I don't know exactly as I never tested it, but that would be a generous estimate).
So I got the 80gb iPod Classic. Something that can give me everything I own in my pocket. What's really interesting is that I don't have a lot of music on my iPod, less then 2,000 songs. The bulk of what I keep in there are shiurim. Shiurim from yeshiva and shiurim I've downloaded from the web. I have so many shiurim on my iPod I don't think I have enough time left in my left to listen to them all (all right I'm exaggerating, I probably only have about 600 hours worth, but still that's a lot).
Anyways, a quick look at those who are looking to buy one, or replace an existing iPod.
The new iPod has a new user interface that the old one did not have. Apple revolutionized easy user interfaces in portable music players, with it's click wheel, and extremely simple menu system. Since it was first announced in late 2001, the iPod interface was very straight forward, choose music, selevt by Artist, Album etc. When video was added in late 2005 the same thing Videos>movies/music videos etc.
One thing about this simple interface was that the text for it were always located in the left side of the screen, which usually left a gapping white hole on the right half of the screen.
Deciding to take a card of the Micorsoft's Zune, with it's very colorful user interface, Apple decided to utilize this space on the right side of the screen. Now when you click over say Music, the right side of the screen will display you're album art. same with movies, screen shot's of your videos will appear on the right side of the screen.
That's mainly the major change, there are some other graphical changes, like when you're music is playing it will display the album art in 3-D, as well as the iPod now having support for 3-D ganes.
Now the thing that I noticed that was different from the previous iPod I had, was that I felt the click wheel was much less responsive. You now need to get an entire flat section of your finger on the click wheen in order for it to respond. My old iPod (and my 2G iPod Nano) have very delicate touches, you can actually scroll with your finger slightly above the wheel (it picks up your body heat).
I have a feelin that one of the reasons that Apple did this was to keep users from scrolling and overshooting their target. Then play a little back and forth before they can actually select the file that they want. It takes some getting used to, but once you get the full finger thing down, you do have more control using the click wheel.

Anyways, I know that this product came out almost a year ago butI thought I'd put my 2 cents in. If you have any questions let me know.

My Apple Adventure

Well for all the Apple fanboys out there (that would include me) just want to tell a little story about my adventure with my Macbook Pro.
I got the machine at the end of January, and I must say that this machine is absolutely incredible. All of the headaches I used to have Windows...just gone. No more waiting for the computer to "decide" to start working, I actually have a computer that works on my time.
But that's not what I want to talk about.
Because for the past 2 weeks I havn't had the Mac.
It was the Motzei Shabbos before Shavous, and I went to boot up the computer and was greeted with the nomal Apple signon screen, and grey background with a 2 second introduction clip.
The Apple logo appeared and the little swirly thing that show that is' working (the same thing is on the Ipod in the upper left corner when it's being synced).
Then the thing stopped moving, and the computer appeared to freeze. Not something that happens often with Macs.
So I rebooted the machine and was greeted with stark, straight darkenss. Nothing on the screen, just...black.
So I called Apple Care (ALWAYS buy a servace plan when buying a computer!! That's the only piece of technology I recommend to do this for.) and we deduced that I had a faulty Logic Board, nothing that I did, it was just a faulty model of it so I had to take it to the Apple store to drop off so they could ship it off to, I later found out, Houston.
I had Shavous to work around and wasn't able to drop if off until last Thursday at the store.
I then waited patiently for 3 business days, following the statues of the repair on the Apple Repair website.
And finally got it back yesterday morning.
Now after I got it back I noticed that they had replaced my Logic Board and hard drive. And luckily for an Apple feature that has saved I know more that one person besides me. They have a backup program called Time Machine, and the way it works is that you set it up with an external hard drive, and not only will it completly back up the contents of your entire computer and continually backup aything new that happens in your system automatically, it will save things you've deleted, inculding say text of a document.
Let's say you're working on a project for school, and you realize that you had written something the previous week, that had been edited out. Deleted. Gone.
Activate Time Machine and "go back in time" and open up the document the way it was the week before.
So I plugged in my Time Machine hard drive and waited for it to load. And hour and a half later, the hard drive which had been completly empty when I recieved it, had exactly the same contents that I had had on my comouter before. I had to download a few updates and I was good to go.
The only snag that I ran into was Garageband and Windows on Parallels. I'm a musician and use GB to record all the time. I had to re-insall the program (took about 15 minutes) and I was good to go.
Windows wouldn't load in Parallels when I booted, but I just had to do some tweaking of the settings and I was back on there as well.

All I must say I was happy with the experience. Not that I was happy I had to send my computer in, but if I had been running a Windows Machine, I would have lost so much data and spent a long time re-installing programs, and customizing it to my specification again. Way to go Apple!
As someone told me "Hardware is cheap, data is priceless." And I was able to have the computer backed up to withing 24 hours of when it stopped working and didn't loose anything at all.

Apple and Israel

I've been doing a lot of research of Apple in Israel (in case I happened to discover an issue with the computer that had to be fixed) and decided that I would share what I've found out in case anyone else is in my situation.

Israel does have an Apple distribution center called iDigital and it's located in Tel Aviv. You can buy, from what I can tell, all Apple products from Mac to iPod. Can't buy the iPhone yet because it's not supported in Israel but you can get pretty much everything else.
Now this is only a distribution center, and not an official Apple technician shop. After speaking with the Apple technician on the phone I learned that I can not get my Mac (or iPod) fixed at this place under the current Apple warranty that I have. I'll check it out when I get there and see if they offer their own type of service for stuff they sell, because it doesn't make sense that they would sell Apple products and then sell the Apple warranty that doesn't offer support in Israel.
UPDATE 8/15/09: I had to get some work done on the computer at iDigital in Tel Aviv so here' the deal: They will honor an Apple warranty on an Apple product purchased outside of Israel, but there is a minimum of 21 business days before they are able to do any work on the product because they need some kind approval from Apple.

One of the resons that there isn't an Apple store in Israel probably has to do with OS X and iPod softwares's lack of Hebrew support. It's interesting that Apple doesn't support Hebrew, especially considering that Apple has started using Intel chips in all of their Macs and all Intel chips these days are made in the Intel R&D headquarters in Haifa.

The closest Apple stores to Israel (that I'm aware of) is in Turkey and Italy. So it might be worth it to just take a vacation for a few days and fly there to get the computer fixed (the flights are relatively cheap).

There is someone who is connected to the Yeshiva that I'm going to who has a Mac, so I'm going to ask him if he's ever had a problem with it and needed to get it serviced. He has a Mac Pro, the "tower," so it's not like he can just put it in a bag and fly to the states to get it fixed. If something happens to my Macbook Pro (laptop), it will relatively easy to get it fixed, albeit there will be issues that I'll have to coordinate, like finding someone who's going to the States who would be willing to take it and either take it an Apple store themselves.

There are some independent computer workers that will fix a Mac for you, but they won't do it on the Apple warranty, something that ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY when buying a Mac or any computer. I spent about $250 for the protection plan and I'm covered for any issues I have for 3 years after I bought it. I learned that if I had the issue that I had without the protection plan it would have cost me $1200, enough to buy a new machine.

So if anyone has any question of Apple in Israel I'll be happy to answer the questions if I am able. I still feel that you can't go wrong with getting an Apple product, especially if you live in a country where you can get full service/coverage on your product (hmmm, I wonder what it would take to open an official Apple store in Israel...would there be any money in it?)

Milestone

Well it took me 1 year, 1 month and 28 days to reach the milestone of 1,000 visits to my blog. Go ahead and pass it along if you like it (or don't like) I welcome all viewpoints and opinion.

Hehe, I've got Windows Running on my Mac

Thanks to a friend of mine I am now able to run Windows, using Parallels, inside of the Mac OS.

How to Get music off of you Ipod Part 2 for Mac

This is a follow up article to something I posted back in October about getting music off of your Ipod without having to buy any external programs. That was how to get if using Windows, now I'm going to tell you how to do it on a Mac.

Yes, I have finally converted over to the wonderful world of Macintosh computers (soooo much happier), anyways here's how to get the music off of your Mac Ipod.

The truth it's much easier to do it on a Mac because instead of having to do it manually there's actually a free, open source program that you can download.


The program's called Senuti and you can download it here.


I have not actually tried this program myself because I now run my Itunes library directly from my Mac. If anyone tries this program let me know.

For other free open source programs for mac you can go here and try out some of these programs

WHAT??!!!

All right, I don't get this. Why in the world would anyone pay over a THOUSAND DOLLARS for an 80gb iPod?

Weird.

From a guy who wants to get a Mac. . .

How to Backup your Ipod without using any external Programs

I keep hearing all of these horror stories of people who have not backed up their Itunes libraries and all of their music is on their Ipods.

Then their Ipod stops working/breaks/gets stolen/gets lost. I am going to present to you an extremely easy way to back up your Ipod. The only thing you will need are DVD''s to burn the files to, or an external hard drive.
Note: this is only for Windows. The Mac instructions are posted elsewhere on this blog.

1. The first thing that has to be done is to locate the music on your Ipod in My Computer. This can be done by clicking in the Ipod icon in My Computer (just as a side note the Ipod should be plugged into the computer for the entire process). There should be an icon that says "Ipod control." If there isn't, located at the top of the window click Tools>Folder Options. Click the "View" tab, and go down to where it says "Hidden Files and Folders." Make sure that line that says "Show Hidden files and folders" is clicked on.
Now go back to the Ipod folder and the icon "Ipod Control" should be located there in a lighter yellow from the folders around it.

2. Now click "Ipod Control>music." This will bring you to a lot of folders that start with the letter "F." I'm assuming that this refers to the Drive letter. My Ipod is drive 'f' so I''m assuming that most others are, but the letter isn't important, it's the numbers that are.

3. Now is when you can start backing up your music. If you are burning DVD's, open the program that you use to burn CD/DVD's (I like to use DeepBurner mainly because it's free and it works) and simply drag the folders from the Ipod into the burn list. You can burn about 10 folders for each DVD.
If you are backing up to a hard drive simply drag and drop the folders onto the drive.

Now you're done! You're current library is backed up, but I would highly suggest you have some sort of schedule to back it up in the future.

The only downside to this procedure is that you can't go and take individual songs off of your backups. Apple makes very obscure titles for the file names even though the Track information is the same as it would be on your Ipod. Now we'll talk about getting the music back onto you're new/refurbished/memory-wiped-clean Ipod.

5. To get music back onto the Ipod simply plug the empty Ipod into Itunes, adn drag-and-drop all of the music from the folders into The 'music' part of the Ipod.

NOTE: This will work for all movies that were backed up as well.

So hopefully now you'll fell a little bit more comfortable with the knowledge that all of the music on your Ipod has been backed up.

Microsoft redesigns the iPod

Only certain people will enjoy this, I think it's hilarious.

How to Rip Vocals off an MP3