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Resolve the “login not recognized” iPhone Comcast app error

chris — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:56:12 +0000

I downloaded the Comcast iPhone application excited to see what, if anything, it had to offer. I’ve become a bit jaded with Comcast over the years due to the lack of a real technology push.

I’ve always wanted set top box built-in picture-in-picture and the ability to set my DVR from the internet or my phone. My parents, who live 3500 miles away, have Comcast and built-in PIP but it’s borderline useless. The small picture is stuck in middle third of the screen in the same position if you had it in the corner of a standard definition TV. At least they have it.

I opened the Comcast app and it wouldn’t recognize my comcast.com login, which is my yahoo email address. I verified that I was using the correct login and pass yet the iPhone app still wouldn’t accept it.

I called Comcast and was initially told, “we only support login problems online and internet connection problems”. I explained to the rep that this was a Comcast provided service and she didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t asking for support with my cell phone itself. After speaking with a manager, they found a buried ‘support request’ page for “comcast mobile”. I filled out this form and went to bed.

Today I tackled the problem again realizing that the support request I filled out last night might’ve been a complete waste of time. I figured that the iPhone app is requiring a comcast.net email which I had never configured or used. I called Comcast again and we reset my comcast.net email password and I verified that I could access it online.

A few minutes later I tried to login to the iPhone app using my comcast.net email and it finally worked.

Comcast, please fix this problem and train your support staff.

Steve Wozniak likes Nine Inch Nails… but he likes Tetris more… way more.

chris — Mon, 25 May 2009 05:12:00 +0000

This weekend we went down to Mountain View to see Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction. We went into the venue through the VIP gate and went up to the bar to get our drinks. We noticed that sitting down near the bar with a few friends was Steve Wozniak, Apple cofounder. We got our drinks and went on our way.

We walked across the venue to the other VIP bar and went down the ramp backstage. It was nothing special. Just a bunch of unknown people standing around chatting. The lone exception was Kevin Rose, digg.com founder.

The tour manager told us that Trent Reznor was getting ready to go on stage so we’d have to come back after the show. We walked back up the ramp to find our seats.

Our seats were in one of the box seat sections in the middle of the two reserved sections. We noticed that Steve Wozniak was seated right in front of us. We also noticed that he and his buddies were playing Tetris on a Gameboy. Somehow I noticed that Kevin Rose was seated behind us. I feel like nerd for knowing this but whatever… I work in tech… and know someone who works at Digg.

Nine Inch Nails came on within five to ten minutes. I kid you not, Wozniak and his friends played Tetris for the ENTIRE SET! It was hysterical. He didn’t look up once.

Kevin Rose is in the black sweatshirt. Click on the photo to enlarge.

After the NIN set we left our seats for backstage. We waited around casually for quite a while. Jane’s Addiction had taken the stage and we could see their set from the backstage televisions.

Eventually we were told that Trent Reznor was available so we were led back to his trailer. I have to admit Shoreline doesn’t keep the nicest of rooms for their guest. Very ugly 1970s wood paneling everywhere. We talked with Trent for a few minutes, took some pictures, and made our way back to our seats to pay our tab so we could leave before Jane’s Addiction finished their set.

Back at our box, I noticed “WOZ” in large letters indicating Wozniak’s box in front of us. We also noticed that Wozniak was STILL playing Tetris. Probably through the entire concert except to eat.

“Steve Jobs Just Died”, MacRumorsLive hacked during keynote

chris — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:42:30 +0000

MacRumorsLive has been hacked during the live keynote. Various ads and bogus announcements, such as “Steve Jobs Just Died”.

iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition

chris — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:46:03 +0000

The following is from, Slashdot: Apple

iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition mallumax writes “The truth is, iTunes is an average music player. Though the UI is simple and good like most Apple products, it has lagged in features compared to music players available on Linux and Windows. A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes. There are no plugins or themes. Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available. But today the wait is finally over. Not one, but two music players have become credible contenders. Songbird: An open source music player which has been in the works for more than 2 years has finally released its 1.0 Release Candidate builds. The team behind Songbird has members who previously developed for both Winamp and the Yahoo Music Engine. It has support for extensions and themes (‘feathers’ in Songbird parlance). Amarok: The undisputed champion among Linux music players is finally coming to OS X, thanks to KDE 4 being ported there. Amarok developer Leo Franchi has been able to run a Amarok on OS X natively. So we can expect a reasonably stable Amarok to hit OS X in a few months’ time. Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions.”

iTunes 8, using the Genius playlist option to do what you want

chris — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:47:15 +0000

iTunes 8 features a new playlist creation tool called Genius. To create a playlist with it, you find a song you like and select it in your iTunes library, then you click on the ‘Genius’ button at the bottom right of your iTunes window. iTunes then gives you a few, albeit overly simplified, options. One, select how many songs you want in the playlist. Two, ‘Refresh’ the playlist with different songs. Three, “Save Playlist”. In theory I like the idea but in practice, it’s half useless.

What if I don’t want songs rated 1 or 2 stars in this playlist? What if I only want unrated songs in this playlist? You may be thinking, “who rates songs? what’s the point?”. The answer to that is rather long and I will go into that in a later post when I explain how to create customized and dynamic playlist to vastly improve the “shuffle” ability of iTunes and your iPod.

To achieve a Genius based playlist that consist of only unrated songs, this is what I did.

1. Create a Genius playlist for a song. Select a song you like, click on the ‘atom’ looking icon at the lower right of your iTunes window. Select “Limit to 50 songs”. and click on “Save Playlist”. You may repeat this step and create an unlimited number of Genius playlist. I call each playlist “g: song title”.

I try to rate all of my music, so when iTunes creates a Genius playlist, probably about 50% are rated. This only gives me about 25 songs per playlist that aren’t rated. Depending on how many songs you have rated, and how many unrated songs you want to achieve for the final playlist, you can adjust the parameters to match your needs.

2. Create a Smart Playlist that contains “any” and for the options, select “Playlist” > “is” > (the genius playlist you created in step 2). You may continue adding any and all Genius playlist you’ve created in step 1. I called this playlist “g: all”.

3. Create another Smart Playlist that contains “all” and for the first option select “playlist” > “is” > (select the playlist you’ve created in step 2). For the second option in this playlist, select “rating” > “is” > “0 stars”. I called this playlist “g: unrated”.

Here is a screenshot of the playlists I’ve created. I named them all with “g: ” to make it easier to find them and to know what they are for just by the playlist name.

So now if you want to play unrated songs based on the iTunes Genius feature, just select the final playlist you’ve created in step 3. Which for me is “g: unrated” in the screenshot above.

This is also a good way to find songs that you knew you liked but for whatever reason haven’t gotten around to rating yet. As each song plays, you can easily and quickly rate it. Or you can eyeball the list and batch rate songs with a few mouse clicks.

This is how I currently rate my music:

5 stars: My absolute favorite songs that I very rarely skip
4 stars: Songs I like
3 stars: Song I’m indifferent to. They may grow on me.
2 stars: Songs I don’t like
1 star: Special case songs, “live music”, “spoken word”, self-help tracks (instructional, tutorial, etc)

Stream your music collection to your iPhone

chris — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:20:46 +0000

http://www.simplifymedia.com/

Simplify Media software connects you directly to your music with your iPhone.

Enjoy songs that are on your home computer while at work or from any WiFi location. Explore friends’ music while they are online.

Hoping to spur a strong early reaction, Simplify Media is offering the iPhone edition of its utility for free to the first 100,000 to download it but will charge $3.99 per copy afterward. The computer-based software is and remains free, regardless of platform.

How to install and setup Jinzora (streaming media server) in OS X

chris — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:26:15 +0000

simplehelp.net has instructions

Per Jinzora:
“Jinzora is the ultimate web based media streaming and management system. Streaming your media with Jinzora gives you quick and easy access to your online music and video collection from any device with a web browser. Enjoy your media from your PC, notebook, PDA, Smart Phone, Xbox, PS3 or Wii.”

PandoraJam, a must have app for Pandora.com fans

chris — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:38:43 +0000

“PandoraJam enables fans of the fantastic Pandora.com music service to easily listen, record and stream tunes to an Airport Express. With support for scrobbling tracks to Last.fm and Twitter, PandoraJam is essential software for net music lovers everywhere.”

Features include:

Stream music wirelessly to a sound system (requires Airport Express)
Record music for iPod or iPhone playback
Apple Remote support
Tag recordings with album artwork
Submit songs to Last.fm (known as Audioscrobbling)
Native, Cocoa application.
Growl notifications
Keyboard shortcuts
Instant Messaging status updates (Adium, iChat, Skype)
Twitter support

I’ve been using this off and on for about a year now… and I’m a bit late posting about this. I’ve never been a dedicated Pandora user because there are so many options and many of them have their limitations. However, using PandoraJam to listen to Pandora provides the huge majority of features and flexibility that tech savy music lovers desire. A custom designed station (add your artists), smart new artists recommendations, audioscrobbling, Instant Messenger status updates…

listen to my custom Pandora station here

beatunes.com

chris — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:14:18 +0000

BeaTunes’ powerful inspection feature let’s you clean up your iTunes track data in a way unrivaled by any other software on the market today. Easily find typos or different spellings of artists’ names, automatically fill in the album artist names, and much more. No more R.E.M. and REM in your iPod’s artist list!

beaTunes can even help you to find the titles of tracks that have no artist or title associated with them.

And once you have a clean collection, the built-in playlist generator works even better.

Here are some more examples of what you can do with beaTunes:

Automatically determine BPM (beats per minute) and store the result in iTunes
Manually determine BPM and store the result in iTunes
Inspect and fix your music library (typos, wrong genre etc.)
Sort existing playlists so that matching songs succeed each other
Create matchlists, i.e. playlists based on one or more sample songs
Browse songs from your music collection that match the currently selected song
Discover albums that aren’t in your music collection, but would complement it
Keep up to date through Amazon™ album charts
Automatically set start and end times of songs based on their volume
Categorize songs by their sound color
Build playlists per drag and drop
Create blog entries on blogger.com with your favorite playlist or songs
Add del.icio.us like tags to your songs
Look up track metadata using acoustic fingerprints
Detect the language of lyrics already stored in iTunes

beatunes.com

iPhone found in airplane toilet

chris — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:35:41 +0000

On my flight home to San Francisco last night, the flight attendant came on the intercom and announced this to the airplane:

“May I have your attention. Someone found an iPhone in the toilet in the back of the plane. If you’re missing your iPhone, please come and get it.”

There was a fair amount of chuckling that went on for a few minutes afterward.