Results tagged “ipod”

You no longer have to buy a Kindle or give Amazon.com any money in order to access the bulk of Kindle content and features, thanks to a new application (download here) released by the Seattle-based book giant today which allows you to read, highlight, and bookmark e-books Kindle-style on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Just last month, Seattlest got to handle our first Kindle; its owner had to gently inform us that the first-generation version did not in fact have a touch screen after a full minute of watching our grimy fingers scooting along the surface in vain. If you have one of the old Kindles and don't want to invest in a new one just for the touch screen feature, now you have options. iPhone-owning readers: will you be downloading this app? [MvB: Just did.]

Microsoft's Zune sales plunged $100 million dollars, or 54 percent, this holiday season compared to last. CNET says iPod unit sales were up 3 percent, though Apple's revenue was down 16 percent.

We don't have a shred of evidence for that headline; it's a gut thing. We're rollin' Jack Fuckin' Welch-style. But Citigroup research analyst Mark Mahaney does predict this will be a Kindle Christmas; he's doubled his sales estimates to nearly 400,000 units. At $359 per, that's over $136 million from a single product. Mahaney says Amazon's e-reader will bring in $1 billion by 2010. This projection is based on the Kindle selling as many units in its first year as the iPod. No one outside of Amazon knows how many that is--Mahaney is guesstimating, using in part the 4,000+ mostly positive Kindle reviews on Amazon's site, more than half of which give it 5 out of 5 stars. Our favorite contrarian response? Peter Kafka says hold on a sec: "iPod users immediately had access to thousands of songs they already owned the minute they synced their machines to their computers. And they could get anything else they wanted for free (if they chose to steal). Kindle users, however, are pretty much forced to pay $9.99 each time they want a new title."

For a brief moment last night, it was summer in Seattle. Inside the sold-out Ting Tings show at Chop Suey, it was hot and humid. The house was packed with young people drinking, dancing, and carousing. The music was pounding, and the gays were in full effect—all the trademark signs of summer. And then, about half an hour later, it was over.

You're headed to Vancouver for the weekend, excited because Canada is like almost a foreign country. Visions of staring at Belugas and spending your wad of rapidly-depreciating USD's on Robson Street bounce loosely around your head when suddenly a border patrol agent is directing you to a special lane at the Peace Arch. There's a problem and you've got to get out of the car. "Sir, this is aboot your iPod and the copyright infringements that reside on it."

"Mac vs. PC" by Etchasketchist, with permission. Cool!

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from their vehicles when they go out on missions, a forlorn music scholar on the eve of his retirement from a mid-western University, and a young laptop battler who agonizes over keeping track of the ever-multiplying sub-genres of electronic music and enthralls with his live performances of entirely computerized music that rely heavily on audio samples from early-80s video games.

A few months ago we switched back to Rhapsody music service from Yahoo!'s whatever-the-hell-it-was.

Inspired by a random iPod event at Seattlest's Thanksgiving, a friend lamented the early death of John Denver and then launched into a diatribe about how he didn't pull a Kennedy; that is, Denver wasn't a dilettante pilot. He went on to explain that Denver was an experienced pilot who owned many planes and flew often. He died, our friend claimed, when one of the fuel tanks in the experimental plane he was flying...

The snow is falling, our dear Seattle friends, it simply isn't falling here. Whistler just announced it is open for business, bagging the ultimate ski resort coup of cutting powder before we cut the turkey. Of course you want to go, but in fondly recalling the days of 1998 when the US-CA exchange rate swung wildly the other way, you fear you can really only afford to stay home and play Ski Resort Extreme Halo 3. We've learned a thing or six going back and forth with our neighbors to the north for many a year now, and so we offer you our quick and dirty guide to saving at least a wee bit of money and time in your BC powder-chasing adventures.

Amazon released an eBook reader today, it's three years in the making. They call it Kindle. Here's a big 'ol Newsweek piece about it.

If you've never had the chance to see Broken Social Scene together, you've at least had, or have, ample opportunity to see current and former members roll through town during October/November. Last month, it was Metric (with BSS alumni Emily Haines and James Shaw), then Mr. BSS himself, Kevin Drew. Next week, Stars (with BSS alumi Millan, Cranley and Campbell ) come to the Showbox.

The husband-and-wife team Over the Rhine [MySpace] play at the Triple Door at 7:30pm this Thursday and Friday, and both shows are already sold out -- SRO tickets will be on sale the nights of the shows.

There was a time when every urban iPod listener had a choice to make regarding personal speakers. Do you use some pair of headphones from the 80s with the orange foam on them that you found in the spare electronics box in the garage to disguise your identity as an iPod owner? Or do you fly the snowy whites your iPod came with and announce your Apple Cool to everyone on the bus, and damn the mugging risks, this being Seattle after all. Or do you sport the giant cans because you absolutely need to squeeze as much sound performance as you can from a 128 kb-encoded MP3? The question has fallen moot as time, incessant television advertising and the near-ubiquity of iPods themselves have wrung the last vestiges of cachet out of the white cables. Just go with what ya got--Seattlest has a pair of these Sony earbuds that sound ok, but have this terrible cord configuration that was dreamed up by either a moron or a marketing guy hoping to horn in on Apple's headphone branding successes.

The only reason Silverchair’s blistering Showbox performance didn’t surprise us: We had no idea what to expect from the band. We’d never seen them live, but we’d observed their gradual musical evolution from Frogstomp to Young Modern (out tomorrow) and didn’t know if they’d rock or pop through Friday’s show. Per our conversation with Ben, we knew not to expect much, if anything, from their first album, but otherwise we were clueless.

We’re only going to be in our twenties for the next three weeks, so lately we’ve been trying to feel younger--and there is no better place to accomplish this than at a local district Democrat meeting. Once again we were one of the youngest people in the room. We love you sweet, sweet democracy.

Every once in a great while we'll be reading the Seattle Times (we're housesitting and they get it here) and we'll learn something. We can't express to you the shock of it. This morning we were reading their Bumper column (the Times's version of the P-I's Getting There), and ran across this comment from a guy who got a warning for honking...well, here, you read it:

The other day Mark Cruz, of Renton, was waiting to turn left at a green light in downtown Seattle. The car in front of him was sitting under the light, turn signal blinking, but had not budged even though all oncoming traffic had passed. Cruz honked his horn to urge the driver to move. "Then I was pulled over by a Seattle police officer on a motorcycle. He let me off on a warning for honking at the car in front of me.

Continue reading "Honky McBeeperson Asks: Should I Lay Off My Hooter?"

There's been a lot of hype about this disc--Clarkson fired her management and pissed off Clive Davis in the process of making it--and you can bet pretty much every reviewer will mention that somewhere in their assessment. We're sheep, so we thought we'd open with that and get it out of the way. We'll be honest. Nobody's going to be giving Kelly Clarkson an award for being a great lyricist, so just get it out...

You know when someone's acting like an idiot at an intersection? They miss their turn at a four way stop or they're making some crazy-ass right turn from the way far left lane, slowly, though, and with maximum exposure and danger to both their life and yours and everyone else's? And you're like, "This motherfucker's on the phone," and it turns out that they are so you honk and yell at 'em, "Hang up the damn phone!" as if the person on the other end is going to hear you and the offender will somehow be shamed into paying attention to what they're doing? And then the person you're on the phone with is like, "Hold on, some jerkoff is yelling at me"? Or maybe the idiot in the intersection is on the hands-free. You think, "This phone-talking moron is going to kill everyone" and then he pulls alongside you and there's no phone at his head. "This regular, every-day moron is going to kill everyone." And then he starts blabbing away to an empty car and it's obviously not singing because no one listens to anything besides KEXP and you're listening to KEXP and it's an instrumental track currently. "Hands-free moron." What we need are gigantic signs on top of everyone's car, like the ones that are on top of cabs or student drivers, that light up when you make a call: "LOOK OUT--I'M ON THE PHONE." A law is a good start, though. It's not going to stop people from talking hands-free or from reading and responding to text messages or from spinning the little wheelie on their iPod or from keying a street address into their little Garmin doodad or replace common sense in any way shape or form, but it's a good start.

Nate Robinson hit what he believes to be a lifetime-high of eight threes in a game against Portland last week. On his blog, he's unsure what caused this outburst of marksmanship:

Maybe it was the music I was listening to on my iPod before the game. I went old school that day, listening to Rick James, Aretha Franklin (R-E-S-P-E-C-T!). You know, stuff like that.

Continue reading "Nate's Debate: King of Kings or Queen of Soul?"

If he were alive today Kurt Cobain would be blowing out 40 candles on his birthday cake. We were 19 when he died, and were sleepwalking through a higher education that we never asked for at a university in central Illinois where life, frankly, sucked, and it was made worse when we heard that the guy who single-handedly saved us from the ridiculous crap we were filing our ears and minds with until then had gone and got shot in the head. By his own trigger finger. Later that year we woke up and got the hell out of there. We were 19, he was 26. Feels like last week.

There's a potentially interesting article in the Seattle Times about a potentially interesting class at Seattle University that includes in its coursework a potentially interesting experiment. It's an experiment in "media deprivation" for a class called "Restorative Solitude." Ninety six hours, no media. Awesome. It reminds us of Chris Pirillo's Google Fast. In the teeny bopper world in which the article is set "media" are things like cell phone, email, internet, iPod, TV, at least those are the options in their "what could you live without" poll (we voted internet). Hat tip to the Times for realizing the futility of listing "newspaper" in there, at least, but that's a pretty narrow view of what constitutes media to the teenagers or young twentyish types towards to whom this article seems to be directed.

Hello, gorgeous.

AIR SUPPLY: Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Fighting for Air, examines how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, is interviewed by Michael Fancher, Seattle Times editor-at-large.

We're still waiting for the verdict: Zune, the "next gen iPod killer," or Zune::Microsoft as albatross::Ancient Mariner.

Which of the following will you not hear on a Mariners television broadcast this season:

Steve Jobs just unveiled the new iPhone in his keynote speech at Macworld in San Francisco. If you're a Mac freak you already know this because you've been sucking down the Mac Insider streaming coverage like crack through a straw. If not, would you just lookit this thing?

Did you listen to The Works this week? We haven't yet. It's cocked and loaded on the iPod which ran out of batteries before we could listen to John Moe talk about Nerd Core and interview MC Plus+. We're not looking forward to it anymore, though, because now we're going to have to listen to it while knowing that John Moe is leaving KUOW. He's moving to Weekend America, which, yeah, is great and all, but what about us, John?

--Another M's fan idly threatens a boycott here.

About seventy percent of my iPod contains music that could be construed as a guilty pleasure, and most of that is right out there in the open. I'm just not really feeling a whole lot of guilt over it. However, there's also a playlist so innocuously named that it couldn't possibly attract any attention ever and that playlist contains the lowest of the low; the truly embarrassing shit, the shit that is sure to come on the moment I let random play deejay a party.