Apple released version 1.0.1 of the iPhone software today. It addresses the security hole in Safari that has been widely (mis)reported on in the media.
When I tried up update my phone tonight, the update crashed (twice) and the iPhone entered recovery mode. After I reconnected it to the computer, iTunes saw it and started a restore process. It synced up again just fine, but that was a bit of a scare.
The iPhone was modded with some custom ringtones and system sounds, and I suspect that this is what caused the firmware update to bomb out. I think I will wait a little while and see what is happening with this update before uploading the custom ringtones again.
A few days ago, Raoul Pop had a contest on his blog to give away one of the books he reviewed. Well, I won! It was a 50/50 chance, but still, pretty cool. The book came today, and it’s quite good. The section on cryptographic streams is interesting to me at the moment, as my current personal programming project involves using cryptography to enable secure file exchange over untrusted networks.
Thanks Raoul!
A shot from the Joan Miro Museum, Barcelona, Spain.
How’s that for a verbose title?
Lately I have been encoding my DVD’s for viewing on Apple TV and the iPhone. A video encoded for the iPhone (or iPod video) will play on the Apple TV, but it does not look ideal when it is scaled up to fill a large TV. A video encoded for the Apple TV looks great on the TV, but will not play on the iPhone/iPod. So I have been encoding each DVD twice: once with Apple TV parameters, and once with iPhone/iPod parameters. The iPhone/iPod version contains “(iPod)” in the title to help me tell them apart.
This is great, except that by default iTunes syncs all new movies to the Apple TV, which means I have a large, high quality version, and a lower resolution version on the Apple TV. What’s the point? I am never going to watch the smaller version on the Apple TV anyway. There must be a better way.
Here’s the solution I came up with. Maybe there’s a better way to do it, there are definitely other ways to do it, but this works well for me.
First, I created a new Smart Playlist named Apple TV Movies which matched Video Kind is Movie and Name does not contain (iPod), limited to the 10 most recent additions, with live updates:
Then, I selected the Apple TV in the Devices list in iTunes, and told it to sync only my Apple TV Movies playlist:
Voilá! My Apple TV now only syncs the 10 most recent movies added, and only the movies encoded with the correct format for playback on my TV. I probably could have used the bitrate of the videos to determine which movies to sync as well, but I am going to have different versions with different names anyway, so I just used the name.
One of the staircases at Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain.
One of my favorite shots from Barcelona. This was taken inside Casa Batllo, a residence designed by Gaudi.
This was taken in London, after light rain.
