saving ink

*Or, in which I geek out for the first time on this blog. Your regularly scheduled rants about the news media will resume shortly.

Yes, it’s been forever since I’ve written here. No, I’m not dead, though part of me is - and not in some exaggerated metaphorical way or anything, but literally - my computer died at the end of October. My beautiful, two-and-a-half-year-old brain extension in the form of a MacBook Pro decided to depart for the great scrapheap in the sky - or its logic board did - at the absolutely least opportune time for me, the end of October, when I had a heap of commissioned Unsound photos to shop, gigs and gigs of Iceland photos to sort, shop, and post, and, of course, work to do, as my personal laptop is also my work computer.

So here I sit, nearly a month without my baby, and what have I learned? First of all, backing things up is awesome. Even though there’s nothing wrong with my hard drive and when I get my computer back, all of my files should still be there, thanks to the cheap 320 GB portable drive I use as my Time Machine disk, I’ve been able to access all of my files for work from my latest backup while my computer’s been at the shop.

Second, it shouldn’t happen, but sometimes, 2.5-year-old motherboards die, even if you take damn good care of your machine. Yes, even if it’s a Mac. And when it does, and if your laptop is not under warranty (of course), don’t take the shop’s suggested price for fixing/replacing it, but instead, do your research. Thanks to this, I’ll have a brand new 2.6GHz board to replace my fried 2.5GHz for roughly $500 including shipping and labor, rather than the $930 for a new board alone the Apple guys wanted to charge me. Still a hell of a lot of money to spend just to get a dated machine running again, but a lot less than a new one, which I definitely can’t afford.

A side-note to point two is that it’s much better to have an emergency savings account to pull this kind of money out of, than an emergency credit card - both for your wallet and for your peace of mind. Had I no savings and had to put this repair on my card, I’d just be tempted to get a new machine if I was going to spend the money anyway, especially if I were offered a shiny no-interest deal on it. But I love my current machine (when it works); it’s still running like new, I can run every program I need on it (including resource-high games like StarCraft II), and frankly, I prefer the all-aluminum body over the newer black-framed ones, so I have no need to spend $2000 for a new computer just because I could.

And finally, there’s the topic of this whole spiel: using one app at a time. Since my computer broke, I’ve had two alternatives: my iPhone, and the ancient G4 that my boss dug up so I could have a computer at the office (which I’m writing on now). One is designed to run one program at a time (yes, even with multitasking), and the other is so old and slow that it only functions properly when running one program at a time (even after I pimped its RAM and upgraded its OS from Panther to Leopard and did a massive hard drive cleaning spree).

While at first this seemed like a huge disadvantage, and it was taking me twice as long to do most tasks as it would have taken on my own laptop, I’ve now gotten used to both this machine and its limitations, and turned them into advantages. I no longer have my mail client on all the time, which before would cause an automatic reflex to open the program the second that new mail sound chimed. I no longer have 30 tabs open in my browser, because the G4 really, really doesn’t like that - which forces me to read the contents of each tab as I open it, take what I need from it, and close it right away. I can no longer have four or five Word docs plus a Pages file open at the same time; in fact, it’s quite difficult to have any Office program open at the same time as a browser, forcing me to actually edit without interruption. Forget about running iTunes or Spotify with more than two other programs open. Oh, and when I’m Photoshopping or Lightrooming, that’s all I’m doing.

(Side-note two: I have to say, it’s impressive that a seven-year-old, 1.25GHz PPC machine with under a gig of RAM can even run Photoshop and Lightroom, much less run at all. Of course, this is significantly undercut by the fact that my machine died at only two and a half years of age.)

After the initial frustration subsided and I came to terms with the fact that I will be MacBook-less for over a month (and bought this sweet adapter to watch my iPhone videos on my TV), I’ve found that this forced single-tasking is both extremely difficult to get used to, and ultimately far more effective. It’s been a constant struggle with my own, easily-distracted brain, that I’d tried to wage with less success using tools like Isolator or Think on my very multitasking-capable laptop. Now it will be a struggle to maintain this focus once my own computer is back, but I think this experience has given me the motivation to truly give it a go, now that I’ve seen just how effective single-tasking can make me.

Needless to say, after reading numerous rumors about Lion’s iOS-like interface and push towards full-screen programs, I’m definitely looking forward to the upgrade. Here’s hoping my MacBook is up and running by then.

Yesterday, I wrote that I’m not falling for Steve Jobs’ Ping trick. Today, after making sure it wouldn’t make me upgrade my 3G to iOS 4, I finally downloaded iTunes 10, to see what the fuss (and mostly boos and hisses) was about for myself.

Being an Apple fangirl, I can’t exactly say I’m happy about this, but I have to admit that I was right: Ping is useless. There are two people I’m following on Ping, both of whom I know in real life and already know what they’re listening to since I also follow them on Twitter, Tumblr, and Last.fm. There is not a single artist I would like to like from Apple’s recommendations, but considering the five (obscure) albums I have actually purchased on iTunes that they’re using to judge my entire musical listening habits, that’s hardly a surprise.

And what, exactly, is so social about it? I can’t share my playlists - something I can do in Spotify (not to mention stream music, but that’s a whole different argument). I can’t recommend non-iTunes artists to my friends. I can only follow mainstream artists who hardly need any more publicity. Yeah, very useful.

In general, if Ping were an independent social media start-up rather than an add-on to an already heavily populated platform, it would go the way of countless other failed experiments on the market. And it still might.

Also, here’s the ultimate irony: I can “like” my own band’s album on iTunes, but it won’t show up in my library as I didn’t buy it on iTunes… even though I’m the one who submitted it to iTunes. Way to go, Apple. And as Zoe Keating has pointed out, if you’re not a major artist, you have no way to make an artist page for your band at the moment, as artist profiles are made “by invitation only”. Which is why you only have major (read: mostly shitty) artists on Ping right now.

One way I could see Ping being useful (and I can’t believe Apple didn’t think of this) would be if it were a general media-sharing social network, rather than one just based on music. Because my guess is that most people buy more films and TV shows than music from the iTunes store, not to mention subscribing to podcasts and iTunes U videos that you would actually want to share with your friends.

Hell, it could even just be an app-sharing social network and it would be far more relevant. After all, unless you have a jailbroken iDevice, ALL of your apps come from the App Store, and I, for one, love showing off the mostly useless but fun little apps I find.

So for now, I’m going to forget about Ping, and let my vision adjust to the new oh-so-dull grey icons, while I wait for something interesting to happen with their service. But it’s hard to hide my disappointment when Apple has begun following a pattern of releasing broken or incomplete products only to fix them in a month or two with an update. I wonder if they’ll include a free virtual bumper case for iTunes 10 until then?

Oh, I see what you did there, Steve Jobs, but I’m not falling for your Ping trap…

…probably.

I say probably, because first of all, I still haven’t downloaded iTunes 10 as I can’t get an answer on how it will affect my jailbroken and unlocked iPhone 3G 3.1.3, which I really do not want to upgrade to iOS 4 due to the horror stories of its performance on 3G phones, and a crippling fear of losing my unlock again.

But back to Ping.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m a fairly average iTunes user: about 99% of my iTunes music library comes from sources other than iTunes purchases, and the few things I have bought on iTunes (Zoe Keating’s album, for example, and the occasional single) do not accurately reflect my overall listening habits.

And this is where Ping is genius - or evil - depending on how you look at it. Because over the years, social music sharing sites, last.fm being the best example, have made it big by correctly betting on the principle that what you listen to does not matter nearly as much as what your friends (and perfect strangers) think you listen to. These social music sharing sites have made us constantly self-conscious of what we’re playing, even if we’re alone in our homes with headphones on.

Of course, I’m guilty of this as well. I’ll turn on my last.fm scrobbling when listening to the latest cutting-edge dubstep artist, just to prove I know what’s going on in that genre (hint: I don’t. Luckily, I have friends who do and share), but then I’ll hit the “pause submissions” button when I turn on the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack for the 20th time this month (what can I say, Bear McCreary helps me work).

And now, Apple will capitalize on this in the simplest way possible: by encouraging you to build up yet another public persona, with the money going straight to them as you buy yet another record that you otherwise wouldn’t, so you can show your friends just how interesting and worldly your listening habits - and by extension, you - are.

But I’m not falling for it, oh no. You can keep your Ping, Mr. Jobs, and I’ll keep my last.fm…

…probably.