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IT: "We won’t support you weirdos and your Macs."

Me: "Oh, so it’ll be like that time my Windows laptop lunched everything in the Registry to do with network interfaces, and your offered solution was for me to airmail you the hard disk drive for you to format it and reinstall the OS. Got it. Quaking in my boots, I am." Proceeds to order MacBook

Time passes

IT: "We will be upgrading the webmail servers [which Mac Outlook relies on] over the weekend."

Me, on Monday morning: "How come I seem to have a 25% success rate in sending e-mails all of a sudden?"

*headdesk*

I get that IT can’t support every crazy thing that users get up to. Really, I do. I used to be a sysadmin - ok, a PFY, but still.

But would it be too much to ask that at least things that are IT’s responsibility get done properly? Or is this going to be like the time I wrote in to point out an expired SSL cert, and was told that to make the error go away, I should stop using Firefox?

We live in a cosmopolitan world, in which crazes and fads can spread around the globe as fast as the bits can get through the pipes. You can make friends (or enemies) of people on the other side of the world, and speak to them more often and more meaningfully than people on the other side of the street. Every day we move closer to a world without borders.

Unless, that is, you are trying to buy or sell content.

I have never watched the Godfather films (I know, I know), and with some intercontinental travel coming up, I thought this would be a good time to load them up on my iPad and finally catch up - forty years late, but who’s counting?

Since I no longer have any truck with physical media, my first stop was iTunes. At first I thought they did not have the films, but this turned out to be because I live in Italy, and so they are listed as Il Padrino. Fair enough, except that it’s not just the title card that’s Italian; the only soundtrack available is an Italian dub. It’s not even the original, it’s a re-dub, and the reviews are all one-stars complaining about the new dub.

Of course iTunes has all three Godfather films in the US store, but Apple in their wisdom tie your iTunes account to the country your credit card is registered in.¹ This means I can’t simply download the English-language version from the US store.

We don’t get Netflix in Italy, because we have crazy regulations here in Europe, but there are any number of video-streaming services. Unfortunately, I want to watch the film offline, in an aeroplane, so they are no use to me.

Back when I still did physical media, what I would do is buy the DVD from Amazon - which, infuriatingly, was often cheaper than the download versions. DVDs all come with original-language soundtracks as well as whatever dub applies, so I’d just rip the DVD (thank you, DeCSS) and watch it that way. However, I no longer own a computer with a DVD drive, so that’s out.

I tried shopping around for other options, but ended up torrenting the blasted thing², promising myself I will buy it once Apple actually deign to accept my money.³ This is a bit like my recent efforts to buy albums I used to own on (copied) cassettes. I’d rather you didn’t think of it as theft, more as deferred revenue.

Seriously, would it not be easier just to let me give you money? When piracy is not only free, but actually the quickest and easiest way to get the content, what is the point of walls? For every dollar you make by forcing someone to jump through your Ultraviolet hoops, you lose thousands to people who refuse to have anything to do with you - this time, or in future.

Well done.

UPDATE: In a nice coincidence, Facebook reminds me that region locks aren't just for movies by releasing their new app, Paper, for the US only. Because of course nobody outside the US wants it.

Let's break this down. It's not a volume issue, since most FB users are in the US. It's not a language issue, because plenty of people speak English outside the US.⁴ It's not a content issue, because the content is people's FB streams.

So: why?

Especially when it’s easy to jump the fence.

Image by Martin Wessely via Unsplash

Looks like the Apple event on the 22nd is effectively the "one more thing" of the iPhone event, not just the Mavericks launch.

Also MG Siegler is pouring some cold water on the rumours of a radically new Apple TV unit. I'm looking to buy a second Apple TV in mid-November, so a spec bump would be enough for me as a reassurance that I will be compatible with the New Hotness when it comes out. The current device will be relegated to AirPlay and occasional YouTube duty.

Of course this would be the week I'm without broadband due to moving house, which is why I'm blogging and having lunch at the pub; strictly for the free wifi, of course. The pint of microbrew bitter? Oh, that's just to pay for the wifi… Ahem.

This is great! It's like I'm back in my teens…

Twenty years ago I was having religious arguments with my friends about MacOS versus Windows. Some of these arguments even degenerated into snarking at each other in HTML comments inside school websites we were building… Fun times.

The thing is, for some reason we felt, in line with more professional and supposedly mature pundits, that the debate was about far more than which was the correct number of buttons on a mouse, or whether menus should be attached to the top of the screen as opposed to the tops of windows. No, we also had to pull in numbers, and not just megahertz or megabytes, but user numbers. Of course, as a Mac user, I felt this was unfair, because usually the Mac came out well behind in all these metrics. Subjectively, the 200 MHz PowerPC 604e machines I was playing around with at the time, running MacOS 7 and 8, certainly felt faster than the 200 MHz Pentium boxes with Windows 95, but that's hardly a benchmark. Still, it was funny that we were all so invested in our choices that instead of saying "huh, you like that flavour? good for you!" and getting on with it, we had to argue the point endlessly. Admittedly, cooperation was made harder by trying to develop websites together, because stuff that worked at home would break on my friend's machine and vice-versa, and not just when he used that blasted marquee tag either.

Now the same thing is going on again, except now it's iOS versus Android. Plenty of people seem to feel the need to pile on any mis-step by Apple or by iOS developers and point out the superiority of the "open" Android platform. I don't get this reaction at all. For one thing, many of these Issues, which look potentially fatal to Apple at the time, are tempests in tiny teacups. See for instance Mapsgate. I never had any problem with the new Maps, but then again, I'm hardly a power user. I did check out a few points of interest at the height of the brouhaha, just out of curiosity, and I didn't see any issues. Metro stops were in the right place, villages were correctly labelled and had all their streets, and directions were sensible.

If anything, the new Maps app was an improvement in the one area for which I rely on it most: traffic. See, in my commute there are a couple of points where I can go one way or another, depending on traffic. If traffic's moving, I just stay on the ring-road, but if it comes to a halt, it sometimes makes sense to take an alternative route via surface streets. The alternative routes can also get grid-locked, though, so what I do is to bring up Maps and check what traffic looks like in my immediate surroundings. The old Google-powered Maps app would take so long to load data that even the crawling traffic would carry me past the relevant turns, so I had to guess and hope. The new Maps app loads up almost instantly - on the same phone, with the same carrier - and lets me make an informed decision.

So one reason I'm still on the Apple side of the barricades twenty years and two platforms later (Classic MacOS > OSX > iOS) is that my subjective experience is still better than the alternatives. The funny thing is that this feels very familiar in another way too. For all the Sturm und Drang in Gizmodo comment threads, I only know one (1) passionate Android user. I know many who don't even know that their phone is running Android! I think this also explains those statistics that show that despite representing a relatively small percentage of the market, iOS devices still account for the vast majority of web traffic: iPhone and iPad owners bought their devices deliberately and use them a lot. Many Android users simply wanted a phone (often not even a smartphone) and ended up with an Android device by default. They never connect their phone to wifi, or install apps; they might use built-in Facebook clients and what-not, but many don't even do that.

Android and iOS simply serve different markets. As I suspect that I would not be happy with Android devices (especially to replace my iPad), many Android users have no wish to spend several times more to get an iPhone which is (for their use cases) no better. Can we just move on now, instead of hyper-scrutinising every breath an Apple executive takes and every move Apple's stock makes?

I have been trying off and on again to get one of my computers to act as an AirPlay client, that is, so that I could stream content from iPhones and iPads to their screens. The reason is that upstairs I have an AppleTV, but the downstairs TV isn’t able to talk to anything. It’s an older TV – doesn’t even speak HDMI – which is why it was demoted to a backup. However, since it’s just on the other side of a wall from my desk, it’s tethered (via DVI or VGA) to the Windows box.

I used to run Boxee , and all was well. Boxee has a nice iOS remote, which gives my first-gen iPod Touch something to do with itself, and also has an extremely nice feature in a bookmarklet which lets users save videos straight from YouTube or whatever to their Boxee queue. The problem is that Boxee have, in their wisdom, decided to discontinue development of the downloadable version of Boxee in favour of their BoxeeBox hardware. This is a nice enough device, but it’s not worth three AppleTVs in my estimation, especially for a couple of hours’ use a month, which is what I would give it.

Watching local content is as easy sending iTunes over to the secondary monitor and driving it with the Remote app when I want to watch something, but this doesn’t help with YouTube. There is Leanback mode , but that requires more solutions, like the Remote Mouse app, to drive it.

I tried playing with Clik , which is commendably simple: visit the website, it flashes up a QR code; scan the QR code with the iPhone app , and you can browse videos on the iPhone and play them in the browser window. It doesn’t deal with subscriptions, though, and a big goal of the exercise is to be able to watch videos from the /Drive channel, so it’s not ideal.

Next I tried getting one of the computers to act as an AirPlay host. First I tried Windows, simply because the cable already reaches that box, so it requires the least amount of effort. AirMediaPlayer is nice and free, but only lets me view photos, not video – it doesn’t even show up as a host in video or audio mode. That seems to be the only free solution, so that’s Windows out.

Next we try the Mac. This is less than ideal because my Mac is a MacBook Air, so it would require connecting two cables (no HDMI, remember?) each time. However, I assumed that in the Apple world someone must have hacked AirPlay. Sure enough, Erica Sadun had – but it doesn’t work for me.

Finally I got desperate and tried FreeBSD. The Totem player has a plugin for AirPlay, so full of hope I spent quite a lot of time downloading Totem and sorting out its dependencies, then getting Git and its dependencies, and finally found that… it doesn’t work: Totem-WARNING **: Error, impossible to activate plugin ‘AirPlay Support 1.0.2′. Joy.

So it looks like that’s it. Unless something changes, I’m going to wait for the Raspberry Pi and try that. Any suggestions, drop me a line.