Ancient History

Posted on by Ian C.

I was checking my (many!) registered domain names earlier today (including grabbing another one for $6/year to prevent it being poached), and I noticed that 1and1 still maintains the customer data I had when gbmini was hosted by them!

Of course, most of the links will go to (this) current website, but if you manually go to the old weblog you see the last post about the first MCSa at MINI of Peabody – this was back when I was driving Indi Blue GBMINI#2, before GBMINI#3 was ordered and of course way before my current MINIs were built!

It’s funny to see this data still sitting in 1and1’s servers, when I now only use them for domain registration … I wonder if I could use the storage there?!

Opening Pandora

Posted on by Ian C.

Another in the occasional iPhone series!
Today I learned on Macrumors a way to get 2.0 software on my iPhone – successfully; then I downloaded a few apps to try …
There’s a lot of “imperfect” so far, with Mac iTunes failing to sync multiple times, needing to authorize the PC and Mac so that apps could be backed up (stupid!), and overall the many months of 2.0 hype result in an iPhone that’s hardly different to the one I had this morning.

Still, one app – Pandora – is mind-blowing incredible! You create a (free – for now?) account, and tell Pandora one or more music artists you like (I started with Electric Light Orchestra, Genesis, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton), then you let it play.
It’s cool enough on a PC/Mac, playing music from artists you specify and others that it thinks you’ll like (and so far in an hour, I’ve thumb-down’ed just one track) … but installed on the iPhone, it’s just EXCELLENT:

I shut down WiFi on my iPhone, and it happily streamed music using AT&T EDGE … great sound through the iPhone speakers!
I plan to hook it up via AUX input in the car tomorrow, and see how it handles playing during my journey to work (very unfair, since AT&T is basically awful in Essex) … if it works, it makes me wonder why I’d still pay $13/month for Sirius, when I could pay $36/year for Pandora …

The only disappointment (imposed by Apple) is that it doesn’t keep playing when you switch to a different app 😦

UPDATE: I’m not the only one that thinks this