I know everyone and her dog will be talking about this, but I have to admit that it’s the first announcement Apple has made that actually excites me. The iPhone is an entirely new design, with a wide touchscreen as opposed to buttons. It’s a phone, iPod and tiny computer that runs a version of OS X. It has wifi and bluetooth and is a quad band GSM phone on the Cingular network.

It’s not exactly that I don’t like iTunes - when I first started using it I was blown away by how great it was. And it just kept getting better until it hit that point. The point where it’s trying to do so many things that it doesn’t do anything right for me.

I admit that I’m not a lover of converged devices - I have a pda, a phone and a music player; they are all separate devices to perform separate functions. I like it that way.

I recently discovered that a lot of visitors find this site searching for information about how to watch podcasts. Obviously, that’s because the name of my podcast is Tech Watch.

However, I can provide the answer to that question. Most video podcasts have a website where you can watch the episodes online in your web browser. If you want to subscribe, though, you’ll need both a podcast aggregator and a video player. This is where it can get tricky.

I’ve been having trouble with the Yamipod part of the myPodder to iPod solution I posted about previously. So I wrote an Automator workflow to use iTunes instead. If you’re on a Mac running 10.4, you can use it too. Download the workflow here.

If you’re a power podcast user like me, you’ve probably found that iTunes doesn’t have the feature set you’re looking for in a podcatching client. That’s why I was thrilled to discover that myPodder, the client that goes with the online site Podcast Ready, now supports iPods. I was less than excited, though, when I discovered that “support” means that the application runs, not that you can actually play the stuff you download directly on your iPod.

What’s the big deal about digital rights management? And why can’t I play my DVD movies on my iPod?

The wikipedia entry for digital rights management.

The Golden Hammer: Tech Watch is a proud member of Techpodcasts.com - if it’s tech, it’s here.

Subscribe [?] to the feed using your podcatcher of choice; see the links in the sidebar.

Here’s the list of technologies I want in my grubby paws by this time next year. My kingdom for a fab lab…

This morning I installed ipodlinux on my first generation iPod mini. I’m no hacker - I used the OS X installer available from kainjow.com. This is an unsupported version of ipodlinux, but it works really well.

The funny thing about linux on the iPod is that the thing it does really badly is play music. But that’s not why I installed it. I was hoping for the recording feature available with older iPods running linux, but no cigar. If I had read the documentation first, I would have known that recording doesn’t work on newer iPods yet.

I’m starting to include short audio segments in addition to the written entries on the blog. Download the mp3 file here, or add the RSS feed on the right called “Podcast” to your favourite podcatching client.

For other file formats, visit the archive.org page.