Monday, April 25, 2005

iPod Blues -- 10:17 pm CST, Update by The Master

My wife was awesome enough to get me an Apple iPod, and so far I have loved it. I use a passthrough stereo cable to hook it up to my line in at work, and I can listen to tunes and still hear voicemails and stuff through my PC.

I have one massive complaint, however. The shuffle function sucks. I get settled in at work around 8:00am, and I pretty much hit shuffle on the iPod at roughly the same time every day. And with some variation, I pretty much hear the same set of tracks every day. I think Apple needs to think through the shuffle function a bit. It might be time to introduce a better source of randomness than whatever they're using on the iPod (I'd guess the built-in clock). I'd propose setting up a 64 byte array of random values synched through iTUnes to some random number server, so we can get some true randomness in our shuffle playlist.

A.T. Hun comments: What, no /dev/urandom? PLZFIXOKBYE!!1!

The Master comments: Nope, no /dev/urandom, and I believe that would only be a marginal help, since there is no good source of true randomness on PCs either. We need a free source of random data bits, perferablly something that picks up radio interference off the sun or something. Winamp has exactly the same problem, and it's annoying after a while.

News for 04/25/2005

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