Jar Of Eyeballs

No, not for you, the reader. I’ve got news for car stereo manufacturers. Pioneer, Sony, Kenwood and all the rest, did it perhaps occur to you there might be other MP3 players around besides the fucking iPod? Today I was searching for a new car stereo. The one I currently have is the one that came with the car. Of course, this means it’s the cheapest no-brand FM radio CD player combo. It worked fine until now, but lately the CD player started skipping like mad even if I hit a speedbump. I started searching for a new one, and I noticed almost all car stereos have an iPod connector. But what if you own something else? That’s right, there are other MP3 players besides the iPod, as shocking as that may sound to some people! Most also have a USB port you can plug a USB stick into, but that’s too inconvenient. Try finding a song on a big USB stick full of music on a small display! As far as I know, the only solution is a stereo with a line input on the front panel, so I can connect the headphone output to it. I do that for my stereo in the living room and it works perfectly. The problem is, only a very few have this feature, and no store around seems to have them. And yes, I know there are these small FM transmitters, but that’s junk. The same goes for home entertainment systems. There’s a million accessories for the iPod. Speakers, docking stations with remote controls, everything! Hardly anything for other types, though.

As you can probably guess, I don’t own an iPod and I never will. My current player is a Creative Zen Vision M. It’s a few years old and a bit bulky compared to current players (it was one of the last players to have a harddrive), but it still works perfectly. When I bought it, it cost about 100 euro less than an iPod with the same capacity (30 gigabyte). And it did exactly the same thing as the iPod! This is the same for all Apple products. They are a lot more expensive than similar products, but still sell like hell. Of course, everybody knows why this is: cult-like fanboyism. Apple fans buy everything with an Apple logo on it, no matter how expensive, worship Steve Jobs the way North Koreans worship Kim Jong Il and get pissed off when you even dare to suggest a Creative Zen is as good as an iPod (or, even worse, claim it’s actually better, even though the Creative Zen XFI really is better).

If you’ll excuse me now, I’m gonna continue searching for a decent car stereo.

I signed up with ping.fm a few hours ago. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a service that allows you to send updates and messages to all possible social networking websites, such as Facebook or Twitter. For example, if you want to post a status update to both of these websites, instead of logging into both of them and sending it twice, you can do it directly from ping.fm.

The best thing, though, is that there are lots of ways to post things. Besides logging into the website, you can send them by instant messaging, sms or email. That last one is definitely the best option! Here’s my problem: I don’t have internet access at work, and for some reason I can’t log in to Twitter anymore with my mobile phone (I should really get a new one, I still own a Samsung X640). I do have email, though, and now I can post Twitter updates during the day by sending an email to ping.fm! It’s even possible to upload pictures to Flickr or write complete blog posts for Blogger or Wordpress.

The thing that kept me from using services like this until now is the fact that you have to provide them with your login and password for all services you want to use. Smells a bit fishy, but ping.fm seems to be quite well-known and popular, so I guess they are thrustworthy enough. At least now I don’t have to wait until I’m home again to post updates!