I posted a few days ago my excitement of “nearly” going to MacWorld. It transpires that the European live link of the Apple announcement was in BBC Television Centre (the artist known as “A Bloody Big Room” in my last blog), and that I’d been invited. Excellent. I filed in there on Tuesday afternoon, and we ended up in a small TV studio. No chairs, but big white sheets hung from the wall. Apple juice for everyone. Oh, I thought, well, that’s this then. And we waited for a bit.

And then we were ushered into the proper studio. Studio audience banked chairing all around the studio; a bank for press at the front, and for ‘Guests’ at the back. I was a guest, so took my rightful position in the slightly more rubbish seats.

The lights went down. A man with a comedy French accent started speaking, and I quickly realised that he must have been Pascal Cagni, who is essentially the European Steve Jobs, and therefore doesn’t have a comedy French accent, just a French accent. He spoke eloquently about a few of the European things that Apple have been doing: amazingly, the iPod has a 60% share of the MP3 player market in the UK, which is quite cool. He notably didn’t say how well the iPhone had been doing, but did show some pictures of people queueing up to buy them on the first day. He wasn’t wearing a black turtleneck. We listened politely. Then we clapped when he went offstage. And then we watched as the doors were open in the Moscone Centre in San Francisco and lots of people came in, really excited to be there.

The Jobster took to the stage and did a good turn. The 60-second version is in the embedded video above (more excellent Mahalo stuff); then he stupidly announced Randy Newman, who appeared on-stage I gathered my coat. “I’ve just been to Europe,” he said. “They don’t like us very much,” he added. I’ve heard enough, I thought, and made for the exit.

The press got to play with stuff. We didn’t - we ended up in the little studio; but a small transformation had taken place during the Steve Jobs speech - the apple juice had gone, and there was some wine and some Freedom Lager (well, it’ll have to do). I drank some.

Some lovely food came out. I ate really quite a lot of that.

When the drink had nearly disappeared, and the food had turned into pudding (orange chocolate truffles, mmm), I decided to stop being an Apple guest, sling my BBC badge back on, and went in search of the BBC Club to enjoy some proper beer. And a bit more beer once we found some friends in there.

Which is why yesterday there was precious little blogging activity as I held my gently throbbing head.

My verdict, for what it’s worth:
The MacBook Air is too big (13.3″ screen) and way too expensive. I’d have been happier with a 10-inch screen and a tiddly keyboard. And a smaller price. Bah.
The iPhone firmware (I upgraded within a few hours of the announcement) is nice, though I have a feeling it’s added some oddity with the email.
The Time Capsule thing: well, I use Amazon S3 and Jungledisk, so no interest there.
And the Apple TV actually looks almost good; though I’ll continue to use the much forgotten-about Mac Mini, please.

It’s Steve Jobs’s big keynote of the year. Last year, he introduced - boom! - the iPhone. This year, he’s introducing - here’s my guess - a new thinner MacBook, called the MacBook Air, which’ll have something clever apart from being thinner; a raft of updates to the iPhone… a bigger model, new firmware for everyone with new features, an SDK to enable people to produce apps for the iPhone (but which will fall far short of what developers want)… and movie rentals.

Given I’ve pieced all the things together anyway, you might wonder why I’m still looking forward to it. But I am: the black turtlenecked one is a master in presentations, and I enjoy watching and learning.

If you’re a posh journalist in the UK, you get to be invited to a special relay of the event in a Bloody Big Room somewhere. Excitingly, I’ve managed to snaffle myself a ticket.

I’ll not be live-blogging it; I doubt the Bloody Big Room has internet access, and even if it does, there’ll be others doing that. But I’m hoping it’ll be an interesting and exciting end to the day tomorrow, and that I’ll learn something about presentation skills and watch one of the best PR companies strutting their stuff.

And I’ll then rush out and buy myself a MacBook Air. Damn you, Jobs.

Photo: David Liu. Used under licence

Photo taken this week by mike138. Used under licence. Photos for my Delicious postings like this will be taken from Flickr’s ‘interesting feed’ for the day concerned. Seemed like a good idea.

Postalicious
One of the reasons I stopped posting my Del.icio.us links to this blog was the unpleasant way that it rendered, and the lack of any control I had with regard to timing. This hopefully fixes this.

Meet Mr. TechCrunch UK - ScobleShow
In the latest of my “let’s mention Robert Scoble because he normally adds your mention to his linkblog”, a serious one - Robert interviews the excellent Mike Butcher, who’s looking very well in this video. I last saw Mike a good eight months ago.

Ubuntu
Recently added it to my normal workhorse laptop (an HP Compaq tc4200). I wouldn’t say it worked totally instantly out of the box, but after a little tinkering, it’s doing everything I want except print, which is a good start, and I’ve still Windows on the machine if I need it.

The UCC Journalism Society Conference 2008 (my speaking events)
Delighted to be speaking on “the place of traditional media in the Web 2.0 world” at this conference for University College Cork: under the auspices of my Media UK work.

An ego blog-search
I wanted to see who was blogging about me, but I had problems with Google Blog Search returning my own blog entries. I’ve worked out how to stop that with -blogurl, like so: “James Cridland” -blogurl:james.cridland.net -blogurl:www.flickr.com

v-moda “Vibe Duo” headphones for the iPhone
My Christmas present to myself was an iPhone: and these are just excellent headphones - way better sound than the original crappy ones, and with a headset mike, so I can still use it as a phone. Mind, damn expensive.

ShinyRed - 10 blogs to read in 2008
Nine blogs you might actually want to read; and one ridiculous suggestion. But it’s very nice of them, so thank you, ShinyRed.

Prompted by Martin Belam’s list, and to avoid the utter boredom of reinstalling OSX now that my Mac Mini’s internal hard drive has given up the ghost a day before Christmas, here’s my top ten blog posts of 2007, thanks to Google Analytics.

I don’t get nearly the number of readers that Martin gets, and interestingly my recent appearances on the BBC Internet Blog (and links from it) haven’t altered my blog traffic significantly. In fact, most of the traffic to james.cridland.net has been related to a BBC Backstage gadget I’ve written, bringing feeds of BBC Weather to iGoogle. But, here’s the most-read blogs.

1. Fantastists and lazy journalists
Back in March, I looked at a story that the press failed to adequately check before printing, while I checked on it by, um, typing things into Google. I don’t comment on this story any more, and almost feel wrong even linking to it, but it’s clear that others still find it interesting. I wish Ryan and his family all the best.

2. When a perfectly valid credit card won’t work
Highly confusing, this one. This is just a rant, in January, against a credit card (one I don’t have any more, I think), but has clearly caught some search-engine love.

3. iPlayer on GNU/Linux
Welcome news about the BBC iPlayer, with a screenshot from the Ubuntu box in the kitchen. Oly posted in 12 December, but the third most popular posting of the entire year.

4. Review of the O2 XDA Mini S
A review of one of the most hateful phones I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to own. Curiously, my idea (held within this post) of how wifi should work on mobile phones is entirely how the Apple iPhone works. Interesting, too, how much of what I say is fixed with the iPhone.

5. I move to the BBC
My announcement from May, which many linked to. This posting has the record for the amount of comments on this little blog - 37 comments to one post. I ended up leaving Virgin at the end of June, and starting at the BBC on 9 July.

6. DAB+ in the UK
From March, a posting which appears quite high in a search for “DAB Plus” apparently; berating WorldDMB’s Quentin Howard for saying DAB+ would “never come to the UK”. He was wrong then, and while there are still no plans for any DAB+ broadcasting in the UK, he’s still wrong now.

7. How to auto-fill your iPod and train it for better music
From January. I mean to write a follow-up; but sadly have lost my iTunes library thanks to a failed hard-drive today, including all my information about the songs I like. Sigh. Will have to listen to lots more music, then.

8. Channel 4 and DAB Digital Radio
From March: an enthusiastic post about the (winning) Channel 4 bid for the second DAB multiplex. I wonder how many of the promised services will actually make it on-air? Virgin Radio Viva’s certainly not there… and it had a nice logo, too…

9. The Apple TV versus the Sony PSP
A long blog entry from March, essentially saying that if you allow people to hack your products, they’ll sell more. The Apple TV has, of course, sunk without trace; while the Sony PSP has lived to see another day.

10. iGoogle BBC Weather gadget
The source of most traffic to james.cridland.net these days. Bizarrely, Hereford appears to be the most popular place that people want their weather for.

11. Pandora - available to the US only? Or not
A rant about Pandora (who don’t pay PRS/MCPS and PPL licences) still being available in the UK.

12. talkSPORT nicks my little UK flag
…and I’m happy. This blog posting made me add the flag to all my sites again. Ah.

13. DAB audio quality from Ofcom
94% of people say that DAB audio quality is just as good if not better than FM. Worth a blog post.

14. Sky Anytime
I discover this catchup service on my Sky box. Seems to me that we’ll be much better services by proper IP-delivered catchup services. BBC iPlayer seems to fit the bill rather better these days.

15. The story of last.fm
To coincide with their sale to CBS, I witter on about how they don’t pay any licences to the music collection agencies, and just went ahead and made a business (while PPL, MCPS/PRS just stood around and did nothing). Nothing has changed.

16. DAB Slideshow
A photograph of the UK’s first DAB Slideshow services. The BBC has since added some slideshow services, but I don’t own a radio capable of decoding them.

17. Facebook - goodness, it’s good
I discover Facebook. In May of this year. And it’s quite good.

18. Getting rid of out-of-office replies in Gmail
Quite a few rules to rid yourself, mainly, of out-of-office replies. This post needs updating.

19. Logitech Harmony review
A long-term review of a remote control. No, seriously, it’s in the top 20.

20. Google Charts with PHP
Only posted in December, this is announcing a free mostly-port of some Google JavaScript code (which does the same job in PHP). The power of open-source strikes again.

Might I wish you a happy and safe Christmas.

Photo: Stuart Meldrum. Used under licence.

There’s a well-worn cycle with tech toys.

- You think they’re bloody great for the first few days.
- You convince yourself that despite the drawbacks you’ve found with the product, it’s still a jolly good buy.
- A few weeks later, you discover the full potential of the device with some odd workarounds that take quite some time to do, but make your product do some really cool things.
- A week later, you work out how to automate most of the workaround, which makes you feel even cleverer.
- A few weeks later, you stop doing the ridiculous workarounds because they take far too long to wait for the automation to work.
- A month later, you consign the product to a drawer.
- Six months later, you discover the product again and get all excited.
- Six months and one day later, you realise exactly how much of a crock of shit it is, and throw it back in the drawer.
- A year later, you sell it on eBay for a fraction of the cost you initially spent.

This is generally my cycle.

I’ve spent probably many hundreds of pounds on tech toys that I thought would be great but the dim reality dawns once I play with them. Nevertheless, half the fun is hacking these tech toys to do what you want.

An Intel MP3 player, that required an arcane piece of software to be run every time I wanted to put some music on it, and for me to sit and wait as it slowly transferred over USB1. No podcasts at the time, but plenty of free content broadcast over the air on DAB Digital Radio, for which I had a computer-based tuner which allowed me to take the bitstream, then manually re-encode it into MP3 (since MP2 wasn’t supported), and then allowed me to manually copy it over.

A Compaq iPAQ, USB TV tuner, Sky+ and Windows Media Encoder combo that would, once I’d programmed it carefully using a DOS batch file and co-ordinated hitting buttons on the laptop and the Sky remote, record those programmes I’d flagged in Sky+, encode them into Windows Media format and copy them onto the SD card which I could then the next morning take and place into my iPAQ which would then allow me to watch the programme I’d recorded on the tube.

Similarly, a USB-based DAB tuner which I managed to get networked on a Bluetooth connection to my iPAQ, allowing me to listen to (and control) DAB Digital Radio in any room in the house. Before I realised that it was infinitely easier to get a DAB Digital Radio.

Anyway, this is an awfully long preamble to saying, quite simply, I’m only on the first point with my iPod Touch. I still think it’s bloody great.

Now, true - I’ve “jailbroken” it, so now I have a ton more applications on it. VNC allows me to control the machine over there that’s playing music. I also have the Mobile Mail application (and the maps application) which should be on the iPhone; and it works perfectly when it sees a wifi connection - checking and uploading my email automatically. The ‘terminal’ application, which allows a full Unix session, is pretty cool to show off with (though moderately useless otherwise).

But I’m using it as I did my iPod Nano - automatically filling it and training it to play me great music, as well as getting some great video podcasts, like the aforementioned Mahalo Daily (if I mention it again, maybe Jason Calcanis will pop back and make another nice comment), the slightly surreal Tiki Bar TV, and the always excellent Onion News Network, a delicious pastiche of network news.

It is also, as mentioned earlier, an excellent web tablet - not least because websites have done such a good job of reformatting their content to work with the device. From Facebook, to BBC News (they’ve done some nice tweaks recently, I note), to Google Reader - content owners are taking notice of this little device. (Visit this website on your iPod Touch or your iPhone and you’ll notice that I could hardly resist myself.)

If you’re looking for a good Christmas present - perhaps even for yourself - you can’t go far wrong.

Photo: my colleague Dan Taylor. Used under licence.

The first post on our Radio Labs blog is a blinder - a very neat version of the BBC’s podcast directory for use on an iPod Touch and an iPhone.

Simon does a great job of explaining what we’re all about. Neat.

In other news, I’m off to SBES tomorrow. Hope to see you there if you’re going. I drink beer, by the way.

Deep in O2’s terms and conditions for the iPhone…

Unlimited Data / WiFi Fair Use Policy:
Your O2 tariff for iPhone allows you unlimited use of O2 UK’s Edge / GPRS networks and The Cloud’s UK Wireless LAN network, for personal internet use, email and Visual Voicemail (VVM) on your iPhone only. All usage must be for your private, personal and non-commercial purposes.
You may not use your SIM Card in any other device, or use your SIM Card or iPhone to allow the continuous streaming of any audio / video content, enable P2P or file sharing or use them in such a way that adversely impacts the service to other O2 customers. If O2 reasonably suspect you are not acting in accordance with this policy O2 reserves the right to impose further charges or disconnect your tariff at any time, having attempted to contact you first.

So. I’m forbidden from using an iPhone, since I would be using it for commercial purposes (ie fielding the odd email about Media UK, the website I run).

And if you’re planning on running iRadio, a neat little app which copes with streaming MPEG streams for your iPhone, then - don’t. Not on O2’s tarrif, anyway.

(I’ve not got one. My iPod Touch is beautiful, particularly now it’s jailbroken and contains loads of apps; my Nokia N70 is acceptable, if not great.)

Photo: Otu Ekanem. Used under licence