the possibly accurate nowThu, 09 Jun 2005
[13:46] Podcasts, Crappy JVC MP3 Players & LUGRadio
Date: 6/9/05 at 9:46PM
Since I have become a commuter I've found that one requires Things To Do whilst on the Tube. Books are a nice idea but space is often at a premium and asking 4 people to move so you can turn the page is a little annoying - especially if you're a fast reader. Therefore I turned my attention to the auditory world. A brief tangential but highly relevant detour:
Before leaving the sunny shores of Australia I invested $A200 in a
JNC SSF-5100 MP3 player. I selected this because it:
- is ultra-portable as it is tiny
- has 1Gb capacity
- has a built in radio
- doesn't run off some crazy proprietry battery
- is firmware upgradeable
- supports USB2
Let me now provide you, dear reader, with another list or things I would never have found out about the SSF-5100 had I not been so rash as too buy it. I would have never known that:
- the "built-in radio" is actually one of those amazingly crap untunable magic-scanning dohickeys that was NOT built into the unit. It is external to the MP3 player itself, being lodged halfway up the headphone cord. Also it can't pick up ANYTHING. Not one station has it managed to focus it's teensy receptive powers on!
- the AMAZING battery life. I can run this thing continuously for anything up to 20 minutes before I have to change the batteries. I am stunned by how fast it eats them up. I though that maybe if I bought the Extra-Heavy-Mega-Super-Alkaline-MP3 Player Specific batteries from a certain vendor that I might do better. I was wrong. Although 20 minutes is an exaggeration, so is their claim of 9 hours. I went through 3 batteries on the plane trip over here (26 hours TOTAL travel time) and I've gone through another 2 this week alone. I think on average you get about 4-6 hours.
- the little joystick one uses to navigate the menu is COMPLETELY USELESS! It was difficult to drive when it was new and still reasonably firm but now that it's lost its spring/auto-center functionaliy it is a magical mystery tour of prodding and poking. It's a four-direction thingy with Left being previous track/rewind, Right being next track/ffwd and up/down is the volume control - no problems there. However, to mess around in the menu you have to push in (z-axis). This is IMPOSSIBLE. It's like trying to poke a rock at the bottom of a mud pool with a stick, complicated by the fact that you can't SEE the rock and the stick is considerably larger the the rock so you can't tell if you hit it anyway. It gets better! The menu has a timeout so while you're trying to push in and make contact with something it decides you've left and goes backk to what it was doing before you entered the menu - usually something like blowing raspberries at you or drawing lewd and uncomplimentary caricatures of your bad profile.
- playback controls are pathetic. The ffwd/rewind aren't adaptive. If you start to ffwd/rewind they speed through the track at about 10 seconds to the second. I would expect that if I were to continue to ffwd/rewind for more than, say, 10 seconds real-time then the rate would speed up. It doesn't. This makes zipping to the end of long tracks (I have many hour long or more MP3s) excrutiating - 30 minutes of MP3 takes about 5 minutes to get through. You can only ffwd through a track, you can't rewind past the start of the track you're on and into the previous track. Combine this with the thumb numbing ffwd process and you have an excellent recipe for 4 minutes and 30 seconds of ffwding, 2 seconds of pressure relaxation and an automatic reflex to put the pressure back on...bingo, you're on the next track and YOU CAN'T GO BACK. It's fiendish I tell you.
In summary, don't buy one. It blows goats (
Note to self, research where that term came from).
Anyway, the bastard makes sounds if you leave it the hell alone so I converted my oggs into mp3s and stuck them on there. I have an extensive CD collection that I oggified but I find that listening to the same things over and over isn't a great way to keep the mind ticking over so I started to look around for something else to occupy myself...and I discovered
PODCASTING!!! OK, so I was aware of the term but as I was restricted to 3GB of download bandwidth per month back home I never really bothered with streaming anything and podcasting has passed me by along with Net Radio (with the notable exception of
Egg Radio). So, for those of you who have also been living under a rock for the last couple of years a breif precis:
Podcasting is basically someone recording their internet radio show and making it available to listen to on your magical portable audio device. I love it. I've been downloading all sorts of techy rubbish and listening on the Tube. My favourite at the moment is
LUGRadio. Basically an hour of humorous banter about linux, open-source and "stuff". It's deadset hilarious and I commend it to one and all. For more exciting and interesting podcasting doolally go check out
Idiot vox or
PodCast Alley. Also, for the Aussie ex-pats, don't forget that
JJJ also wrap up a lot of shows as
PodCasts as well!
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