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This is a nice little YouTube video that caught me odd, on how to charge your Ipod. Hopefully, it hasn’t been posted here before. Anyway, check it out here.

Those of you that know me know that I have a huge music fetish. I LOVE listening to new (previously unheard by me) stuff.

With that in mind, I’ve recently ran across some new stuff which I want to share with you.

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Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on March 15th, 2007.

I am totally sold on hands-free communication when using a cell phone. I can not stand to hold a phone up to my dome and talk on it. It makes me feel all yucky inside. So, ever since I got my first Bluetooth® enabled phone, the Motorola RAZR V3, I have been sporting a Bluetooth® headset along with it. Before I go on about my latest adventure, let me give you a little history of where I’ve been.

Lately, I have been using a Plantronics Voyager 510 and a Motorola H700. Both of these headsets have their pros and cons, in my opinion. I have written a little bit of what I like and dislike about both of these units below.

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Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Sunday, February 11th, 2007.

I cleaned up my desk today, well, actually yesterday since it is now 12:27AM on Sunday morning. I got it looking so good I thought I would take some pictures of it. I needed to get my stuff straightened up so I could do some development without being overwhelmed. The photos are posted below:

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I recently purchased an Xbox 360 and have been fascinated with the whole 360 dashboard experience and the Xbox Live! integration with all of the games. I especially like the fact that you can stream music, photos, and movies from a Windows XP or a Windows XP Media Center PC. That’s extremely cool. I have a Windows XP machine at the house, mainly used for playing Windows only games, but my stash of music resides on my MacBook. What to do?!

While browsing around the web I found a nifty little $20 program called Connect360 by Nullriver Software. This software integrates with your iTunes and iPhoto libraries so that you can stream media content to your Xbox 360 as if it were coming from a Windows PC. The software even updates the Last Played tags for your songs in iTunes, which is pretty cool, so your Recently Played playlist can be as up-to-date as possible.

While this is extremely cool, there is one downside… You can’t play any DRM content on the 360. Any albums/songs/movies purchased through the iTunes Store are not playable on the 360 due to the copy protection in place on those files. But! CDs you have ripped to your Mac using iTunes in AAC format are playable, meaning you could burn your purchased music to a CD and rip it using iTunes as AAC, MP3, or whatever and you’re good to go. Other supported audio formats are WAV, AIFF and Apple Lossless. In the photo category, you can display JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF images on the 360 straight from your iPhoto library. Currently, only WMV+WMA videos are supported for streaming video… Sorry, no Quicktime videos at this time.

All playlists from iTunes and iPhoto are intact so you can stream your slideshows from iPhoto and listen to your favorite audio playlist (minus any DRM’d content) at the same time for a wonderful media center experience. It is extremely cool to be streaming music from your laptop while playing Gears of War. The music on gears of War is good but having Metallica’s …And Justice For All or Sepultura’s Roots playing subtly in the background is a nice feature. In the end, the streaming experience sure beats having to rip CDs to your Xbox’s hard drive like the generation 1 Xbox. And doing it from a Mac, thanks to Nullriver’s Connect360, makes it that much better (for Mac users of course)!

Until next time…

In response to my post last week about Igor Falecki, the 4-year old drummer that wore it out in a YouTube video, Jason pointed out this video to me showing a very young Tony Royster, Jr. wearing out a set of drums . Since I am a drummer and we have a number of musicians that visit the site, I thought I would share it here. Enjoy!

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In light of all the humor related posts today, I figured I would post this for anyone who wants to see a 4 year old wear out a drum kit. Supposedly his name is Igor Falecki. He’s pretty good and very impressive for a 4 year old. Enjoy!

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10 iPod vs. Zune Myths

This is for anyone out there that’s looking to get an iPod or a Zune for Christmas this year. If you don’t know, the Zune is Microsoft’s attempt at killing the iPod.

Long story short … don’t waste your money on the Zune … get the iPod.

I recently purchased the M-Audio FireWire 410 and everywhere I read, i.e. during the installation, in the printed manual that came with the device, and on their web site, it says not to hotplug (to plug in or unplug while the machine is on) the device because it could render the device or the FireWire interface unusable. If you would like to read more on this from M-Audio, try the below article:

Caution: Do Not Hot-Plug FireWire Devices

I have never heard this about FireWire devices. I figured FireWire was like USB in that you can plug a device in and unplug the device while the machine us up and running. I know that you should “Safely Remove Devices” by stopping the USB service or whatever for the device before unplugging it (although I have never personally had any data lost by not doing this with storage devices… knock on wood) but still, USB is hotpluggable.

Does anyone out there have any experience with FireWire devices and can you confirm that this will indeed cause harm to the device or to the FireWire port? Is this just specific to this device? This is my first FireWire device and I don’t want to take any chances with the FireWire 410 or my MacBook.

Jeff

Sounds cool:

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., a provider of satellite radio, and Cingular Wireless LLC, a wireless carrier with more than 58 million customers, announced a partnership Thursday to stream 25 XM music channels to Cingular handsets.

Beginning Nov. 6, Cingular Wireless customers will be able listen to a variety of XMs popular commercial-free music channels through the XM Radio Mobile service.

Audio streams of 25 commercial-free XM music channels will be available to Cingular customers.

XM will deliver data to make it possible to view the song title, artist and album while listening on a variety of compatible handsets.