It’s almost as barebones over there, but it’s time for that to change. Hope to see you soon.

That error in thinking was corrected within months, but now I’ve stepped it up to another level of obsession. Thanks to a quest for musical rediscovery spurred on by iTunes’ Genius feature, I recently succumbed to the acquisition of a 120GB iPod classic. Beneath its charcoal exterior (Apple calls it black, but its surface isn’t as deep and shiny as Agent Cooper’s damn fine coffee) is enough capacity that finally carries my entire iTunes library, at least after converting it from Apple Lossless to MP3. That’s, umm, over 12,000 tracks, though some are duplicates due to my obsessive tendencies towards more than a handful of artists. You can never have enough bags, shoes and mixes of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I use Apple Lossless as a backup measure rather than being swollen with aspirations of ever belonging to the group of people called audiophiles. Last year I discovered a double album that had succumbed to some kind of icky effect that made the data side of the discs look like magnified snowflake patterns. Ignoring that they were material goods, this was a rather alarming event.

Anyway, back to the iPod. Lovely shiny iPod. If only Apple has been able to introduce a 320GB or higher capacity iPod, or at least allow models other than the shuffle to transcode songs upon transfer, then I wouldn’t need to maintain two libraries. Even better, though the vast majority need only to keep their library at one quality, why not package high and low quality versions up into one file. That would also benefit HD and SD video (buy a TV show in HD and you get both by default – one for your big screen, the other for your iPod). iTunes treats their separate files as different episodes, so you have to manually indicate the SD version is not new even after watching the show in HD.

What’s up with the classic’s wheel and, on a related note, why the unpredictable alphabetical shortcuts that seems to crop up when you’re not expecting it, and not when you really want to nip to the end of the alphabet? It’s like someone invented the physical wheel, decided it was good for a few years, then thought that society could cope with a downgrade to straight planks of wood, rather than carve a well-formed arc to get travellers from A to Z within their lifetime. If the shortcut fails to kick in, try scrolling through a list of hundreds of artists. Takes a while, doesn’t it?

Bitching aside, it’s nice to have all of my music in one tiny box as my musical moods change faster than Samantha Jones’ boyfriends. I was tired of picking and choosing favourite tracks from albums to squish onto an old 30GB model only to find that I’d rather listen to the tracks that were discarded. Of course they’re long forgotten by the time I arrive home, and I’m buggered if I’ll rely on a Smart Playlist to fill her up. Otherwise I was heading for a disk full of hideous PWL-era Kylie remixes with a side order of Paula Abdul to really get me dancing in the street.

Hey, Straight Up is pure, enjoyable late ’80s tat. Don’t try to publicly shame me as I’m quite capable myself. Besides, I bet there’s far worse in your library. What’s that CD with the blue and pink spine? Betty Boo’s Boomania? Well, okay, I have that one too. Shush, and pay attention.

You’re probably questioning the need to carry around so much music. It’s over a month’s worth of listening… even accounting for delays on the Tube, the battery expire after just over a day.

All of these tracks are tied into Genius, and after some recent forays into Genius and Party Shuffle in iTunes, I felt it was time to rediscover rarely heard tracks. Genius came up with some excellent suggestions on the way into work earlier this week; David Byrne’s Lazy was followed by Björk’s Play Dead and Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain. Even Opus III’s It’s A Fine Day was a welcome departure considering the seed, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor was a step too far.

If your Genius feature remains switched off, I beg of you to turn it on. That way we can all look forward to better playlist generation and, unless you’re even more musically unstable than I am, maybe we can avoids these little hiccups. Quickly, now. Before my iPod uncovers that What Is Love? lurking in all 10.5mm of its depths.

Tetris is available in the UK. It's just a little awkward to reach.

(Originally posted 10 September, updated 14 September)
Spore Origins isn’t the only EA game that appeared on the UK’s App Store this week. Tetris is there, but you won’t find it through the search box.

Search for Electronic Arts and the only application returned is Spore Origins. Try Tetris and you’ll get Spore and a few other puzzle games, but not the one that you want.

I found it by fluke. Visit the Spore page and click the link to see all apps from Electronic Arts — I know, you’ll be expecting to only see Spore, but Tetris will mysteriously appear as well. Alternatively, here’s a shortcut.

Bizarre. What the hell causes this? I wonder what else has slipped under the radar.

Anyway, one less reason to carry my DS around. Bring on SimCity. Hopefully someone will release a game in the style of Advance Wars, too.

Update
This affects other content too. Search for Star Trigon. using the search box or a Power Search and there are no results. Search for Namco in the search box and you get Pac-man and Ms. Pac-man.

Do a Power Search for the same and the right group shows the same two games even if you click to see all results. In the left pane that lists matching publishers, click Namco and you’ll see Star Trigon in addition to them.

A direct search for Tetris reveals it in the US store, but the issue with finding Namco’s game is present there. Good luck finding Laminar’s X-Plane, too.

All is not well.

Direct link: Star Trigon
Direct link: X-Plane 9

Almost without fail I pick up The Word, partly because it’s cover CDs are an excellent way to discover new music, much like the Playlist discs that HMV used to give away with select purchases.

Just like thousands of other people I’ve just updated to iTunes 8 and swiftly sent data about my music to Apple to make use of the new Genius features. I can’t remember the track I used to seed an early playlist that lifted Midlake’s Roscoe from my library, where it languished on a Word album from a couple of years ago, but I’m already glad of Genius playlists. The end result probably isn’t what Apple hoped for, though.

The financially unhealthy combination of sample tracks on the band’s website, my previous whinge about needing new music and a steadfast love of shiny 12cm discs stirred me to make an impulse purchase of 2006 album, The Trials of Van Occupanther. It’s a lovely album that ought to keep my ears busy for at least a couple of weeks. They’ll also get some work from other recent purchases: Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue and Emiliana Torrini’s Me and Armini, and a John Cale compilation that, bar two or three songs, has also been neglected until Paris 1919 came up on shuffle a few days ago.

It turns out that Midlake are on Bella Union, the same label as the marvellous Laura Veirs. I fell in love with her music after an even more reckless purchase a couple of years back that was based entirely on the librarian-esque looks of Year of Meteors and vague recollection of a website posting that compared her to Suzanne Vega, but with observations of city life replaced with oceanic imagery. Just a little, I can see where that comment came from.

Since discovering Veirs, I’ve done further investigation of the label’s signed acts before but never got around to buying more of its albums. I have a feeling that’s about to change.

So here’s to aurally fruitful spending. If you haven’t already heard Year of Meteors then it’s worth checking out for the worrisome Spelunking. Veirs’ most recent full album, Saltbreakers, is softer and an easier route into her material with gentle harmonies and vocal contributions from her band. I saw her touring for this album twice last year, first with the band and a second time, building magnificent live samples with a Loop Station to retain the harmonies despite being on her own. She’s already toured the UK once this summer, but I recommend catching a performance if she returns any time soon.

Cheers had a great ensemble cast from the beginning, though Carla (the superb Rhea Perlman, who I saw in Boeing Boeing a while back) was, for me, the one thing that lifted it above other sitcoms. Yet it’s the addition of Alley that really got me hooked on the programme when I was… oh, maybe a whole decade old.

Ah, old school sitcoms. Even before the titles roll, the bit at the beginning of each episode that proudly declares that “Cheers is filmed in front of a live studio audience” is a perfect setup for a 20-odd minute nostalgia trip.

This has been a brief gushing of fandom from yours truly.

By the way, the title of this post isn’t just me being rude for the sake of it. Here are a couple of clips from Alley’s latest TV series. It’s not quite Cheers. Not even Veronica’s Closet, in fact, but how I wish I could look half as sexy trying to squeeze into my jeans on a morning…

• On the first Mac, log in as an administrator and create a standard user account and set its password.
• Turn off fast user switching, not that it seems to make a difference either way.
• Ensure the administrator account has a password set as well.
• In the Sharing preferences pane, go to Screen Sharing and set the option to restrict it to specified accounts. Add only the new standard account.
• Log out of the administrator account and stay at the login window.
• On the second Mac, open a Finder window and find the first Mac in the sidebar’s Shared group.
• Share the first Mac’s screen and you’ll see the login window. Try entering the administrator’s account details and the attempt should be rejected. Break the connection.
• Physically go back to the first Mac and log into the administrator account.
• Go back to the second Mac and try to share the screen. Enter the administrator account’s credentials again. They should once more be rejected.
• Now for the curious part. Enter the standard account’s credentials. When I do this, the remote Mac allows me to log in, but I arrive at the account that’s already running: the administrator account.

This happens regardless of whether Fast User Switching is enabled. With that feature enabled, I expected to arrive at the standard account’s desktop. With it disabled, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Certainly not to arrive at the administrator’s desktop, but I’m unsure if this is expected behaviour for VNC. I can’t imagine why it would be, but I had only used third-party VNC clients (on Windows) prior to this.

More stuff along the lines of Fleet Foxes would be welcome. I’ve already had two recommendations based on that connection this week: Bon Iver and Conor Oberst. I’ve been sampling the former this evening and though not all is to my taste, Creature Fear and Lump Sum stand out as memorable.

Should it help, here are a few other things that have left an impression over recent months and years.

• Finn Brothers’ Everyone Is Here
• Laura Veirs’ Year of Meteors
• Maria McKee’s Life is Sweet
• Hector Zazou’s Songs from the Cold Seas
• David Byrne’s Look Into The Eyeball

Help me, dear reader. I beg of you to leave suggestions and save me from trawling the tawdry disco and 80s soul regions of my iTunes library for respite.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is now available for 900 Wii points on the European Virtual Console. This is the first time this SNES game, a joint project with Square, has been made available in this market, previously only seeing the light of day in Japan and North America. I’ve played a very short part of the US version and was immediately charmed by the graphics, the strange Nintendo humour (which could just be down to translation, for all I know).

The interactive battle sequences are a joy too, making proceedings less tedious than traditional RPGs.

Thank goodness for the current relations between Square Enix and Nintendo. I hoped that this game would be released a few years ago as part of the Super Mario Advance series, but thanks to all involved in finally pushing this out in Europe.

Hmm, what to spend my remaining 1700 Wii points on… I bought many of the good VC titles on cartridge, and Chrono Trigger will finally reach these shores via the DS next year. I wouldn’t mind seeing the delicious Secret of Mana again.

This enticing collection will be released through her website as Suzanne Vega Acoustic Favorites. From what I’ve gleaned from interviews about her writing process, it sounds like the results could be akin to polished demos. I’m very excited at the prospect of stripped down versions of her songs, particularly ones from her 1990s albums.

I recently posted about her iTunes Live performance, which has since been released on the iTunes Store. Sadly it’s the usual iTunes Live six-track EP, not a video of the whole concert, as I presumed from the pre-show announcement. My mistake. Sorry to get anyone’s hopes up, and I still recommend catching a date next time she tours in your area. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a venue as top-notch as the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham, where I saw her in 2004.

It’s years since I last saw the film and I’d forgotten quite how funny it is. Watch the trailer and wait for the second part of the car-side conversation between Molly Ringwald and James Spader. Amazing that they didn’t waste the entire budget on trying to nail that scene.

Anyway, forget Nintendo’s attempts to broaden gaming’s horizons. This is the future of PC gaming.