njr 3.0

Also in the radio department, I've been listening to the MPEG-4 audio stream for radioio a lot this week. At around 130-150kbits/sec (VBR), it's dramatically better-sounding than the 128kbit/sec MP3 streams to which I ordinarily listen. Just heard a song that used to be my favorite for a while in high school: now, while I still know the lyrics by heart, I can't stand the singer's voice or the excessively poppy style. On the other hand, it's the first time I've heard it on the “radio” since it was popular. I always wondered what people meant when they said their tastes in music change; now I know.

radioio is going subscriber-only at the end of the month, and I'm sorely tempted to fork out for it, especially with the loss of FolkScene and KPIG broadcasts.

8:53 PM | Radio
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Spent some more time on DSBRTuner today: the playthrough CPU usage bug is fixed, it now supports clearing presets, and includes a more informative and useful dock menu.

Source is here if anyone is interested.

8:24 PM | Radio
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Today marks not only the first anniversary of Radio 8's release, but the first anniversary of this Weblog. In an ideal world I'd have something profound to write here, or at least a site redesign. Sorry about that. It's been fun, and I hope to make the following year even more productive.

Les Orchard has some DSBRTuner timed recording scripts, saving me the trouble of writing them—or modifying Pester, which was my first thought. I've discovered that DSBRTuner uses CPU when playthrough is enabled yet the tuner is powered off, so I'll fix that bug today and (since I've seen some interest) post the modified sources.

Safari continues to impress, though without reasonable stand-ins for tabbed browsing and automatic form filling it's not going to replace Chimera as my everyday browser. Today's “wow!” features are the feedback you get in the Downloads window as Safari downloads and Disk Copy subsequently extracts a UDIF image (.dmg) file, and the beautifully worded HTTP authentication sheet.

As I've commented before, it's been a few years since I've been amazed by Apple's software design. It's wonderful to see a return to quietly excellent software, or as Claris's ad slogan went, “simply powerful”. Now the Safari team needs to convince the developers of the rest of OS X (*cough*Finder*cough*) to take as much care.

3:28 PM | Radio
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The USB FM tuner I ordered arrived today. There's no Mac software, but Paul Haddad's DSBRTuner works wonderfully. I did a bit of an interface overhaul:

Changes submitted back to the author, and if they don't get incorporated into the next version I'll post them. My primary reason for buying it was to do direct-to-MP3 recording of radio programs, since I'm hardly ever around when what I like to listen to is playing on WILL or WEFT.

8:14 PM | Radio
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Finally released Pester 1.1b1 yesterday, and beta 2 today, to testers. So far the biggest complaints I've received have been about user interface rather than functionality, which is a good thing. If anyone else is interested in testing Pester, please let me know and I'll add you to the list. The final release should be early next week if everything goes well.

The CocoaDev recent changes RSS feed should be back up and running now—it broke in mid-November and I didn't have a chance to fix it.

Today's Apple introductions, which I slept through in uncharacteristic style, were great. Safari is terrific, and has the potential to provide a great user experience and speed since Microsoft gave up after releasing MacIE 5. It's not as innovative as Cyberdog was in its time, but it isn't just another Web browser either. The positive energy radiating from Apple these days is really refreshing.

In challenging Apple's choice of Web framework, most people seem to neglect Mozilla's significant footprint and overhead: the choice of KHTML/KJS was the right thing to do. Now I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and Apple to expose their higher-level interfaces (check inside Safari and you'll find a likely-looking WebKit.framework) so app developers on the Mac can finally get a modern standards-compliant Web rendering component. Even other Apple applications such as Project Builder, Help Viewer and WebObjects Builder should benefit from the change.

The new PowerBook hardware looks terrific, although the only thing I'll likely be buying is a new base station with USB printer sharing support and an external antenna connector. My mother's Christmas present was a Canon i850 printer, which has outstripped my expectations in every way. It prints a 4×6 photo, borderless, looking just like something you got developed, in less than 45 seconds. Micro Center had a sale on the photo paper, $3 for 20 sheets, last week: we bought 4 packs which should last us a while.

If you're the a market for a cheap yet good photo printer which can handle light duty text as well and doesn't cost a fortune in ink and paper costs, go get an i850—you won't be disappointed. If you're using OS X, you'll need to download the drivers and ImageBrowser software from Canon's Web site, but it works well. I wish iPhoto or iView MediaPro supported borderless printing.

I got back to Champaign on Friday, and med school classes started yesterday. Since the classes are harder this semester, I'll probably only take immunology to leave enough time for research. I got my medical genetics results back from last semester—I passed, but not with a margin I'm proud of. My goals for 2003 are to make a huge dent in developing software for my PhD, to excel in med classes, to keep in better shape (I gained 20 pounds last year), and to make slow but steady progress everywhere else.

Last but not least, MacIRC is back, for OS X. More on that soon.

10:32 PM | Radio
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