Daily Archives:September 20th, 2008

Genius is not always recognised

If you’ve upgraded to iTunes 8, but not actually watched Steve Jobs’ keynote or listened to lots of Mac podcasts, it may be easy to miss the best bit of the ‘Genius’ feature. The obvious bit – the Genius sidebar, shows you all the music you can buy at the iTunes store that might coincide with your tastes.

The more subtle bit is the Genius Playlist, which appears with your other playlists on the left hand side. If you select a song in your collection and then click the little ‘genius’ button at the bottom right, this playlist will populated with that song and a selection of your music that should go with it.

On my brief experiments, it seems rather good. The things you can do when you can draw on millions of users’ data…

Connected in Kent

Hap snapped this picture of Rose and me in Tonbridge Castle car park last weekend trying to find somewhere to stay for the night (using a combination of an OS map and a wifi connection to my phone).

I was successful in finding places, but not ones with any spare rooms at such short notice. At least, not before my phone’s battery ran out. It was tired after a long day of being my SatNav.

Incidentally, Quentin’s theory of technological linguistics says that a technology is truly pervasive when you no longer capitalise it. How would you write ‘satnav’?

Inversion

US government now owns all your homes. Russian stock market booms. Let’s hope nobody’s waking up from 30-year coma.

Charles Arthur (on Twitter)

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser