Google abandons IM openness

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There’s been a lot of speculation and misinformation about exactly how far Google is going in abandoning XMPP. I decided to spend a few minutes checking out for sure.

I set up Kopete on Linux with a jabber.org account, and tested interoperability with Google Talk (in Gmail) and Google Hangouts (both web and Android).

Here’s what I found:

  1. You can still receive XMPP messages and accept contact requests in Google Talk.
  2. XMPP messages do not show up in Hangouts, either the app or the web client.
  3. If you are online only via Hangouts, you show up as away in XMPP. Messages are accepted by Google, but they aren’t delivered until you log in to your Google account via XMPP or use the Gmail Google Talk sidebar.
  4. You can still add XMPP contacts to your Google Talk contact list, as long as they accept your request. However, they don’t show up in the Hangouts contact list.
  5. If you connect to Google’s XMPP server, you can carry on sending and receiving XMPP messages as if nothing had happened.
  6. If you connect to Google via XMPP and log in via a Google account, you can still message anyone, whether they use Hangouts or Gmail/Talk.

So basically, XMPP isn’t dead yet, but once you switch to Hangouts, XMPP users in general cannot send you messages; only Google account users. However, you can still connect via XMPP using your Google account and send messages that way.

In technical terms: XMPP federation is dead, but only for Hangouts users. XMPP still lives on in limited form for text-only chat using Google accounts, even for Hangouts users. It remains to be seen for how long Google will keep their non-federated XMPP service alive.

This basically makes Google exactly as proprietary as Facebook: They support XMPP for accessing their own chat system, but don’t interoperate with anyone else, and don’t offer full functionality even if XMPP as a protocol supports that functionality.

Given that this is the case, I no longer see any point in using Google’s IM offerings. More of my friends are on Facebook, and it’s no more proprietary than Google, so I may as well just give in and use Facebook, right?

So Google, unless you fix XMPP interoperability, you can say goodbye to me as an IM user.

Swype vs SwiftKey

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Swype keyboard is now available from the Android store. After a few minutes of testing, I bought it for the introductory price, even though I already have SwiftKey. I thought I’d explain why.

1. I want capitalization fixed automatically. However, with that feature on, SwiftKey insists on capitalizing ‘Web’ everywhere, no matter how many times I delete the capitalized word from the dictionary. Swype doesn’t. Similarly for my name, which I don’t capitalize unless it’s at the start of a sentence.

2. Swiftkey is terrible at mangling abbreviations. If I type “i.e.” it becomes “I. e.”. Worse, attempting to fix the mangling is an exercise in frustration. Swype got it right first time.

3. Swype seems to be more accurate. Admittedly, my testing so far has been brief, but I can type entire sentences in Swype and have them come out correct. That has never been the case with SwiftKey in my experience.

4. Swiftkey has some missing symbols that I use; in particular, one of the double angle quote marks is missing. Swype has both.

5. Swype lets me go in and edit my personal dictionary.

One more feature Swype has which I suspect will be useful is that the dictionary gets updated constantly based on what other people are typing. So when some new topic hits the news, such as LIBOR or ISDAfix, Swype will know the word without my having to teach it — or so I have reason to hope.

There are still some areas where both keyboards need to improve. In particular, neither of them has a good way to enter emoji and other Unicode characters, and neither of them offers an easy way to switch to the Google-supplied emoji keyboard. Neither will do smart quotes, em dashes, ellipsis, and other typographical niceties.

Perverse incentives

It’s commonly believed by right-wingers that US public radio has a left-wing bias. If you want to hear an example of a program that disproves the assertion, I suggest This American Life episode 490: Trends With Benefits. It has turned out to be somewhat controversial, though TAL are standing by the facts they reported, unlike with the Mike Daisey piece.

As most people know, the US economy has a deficit problem. Part of the reason for the problem is crazy defense spending, yes; but there are two other chunks of the federal government’s budget that are about the same size as the military budget: Social Security and Medicare.

The This American Life show gives some insight into why the Social Security budget is so huge, starting from one simple statistic: That in Hale County Alabama, a quarter of the working-age adults are receiving disability payments, because they have been declared permanently unable to work.

What counts as a permanent disability? Well, the list includes:

  • High blood pressure
  • Diabetes
  • Chronic back pain
  • Sleep apnea

Now, I’ve known people with diabetes who inject themselves with insulin and go to work every day. I have chronic back pain, but I’ve only missed a couple of days of work in the last few years. My father-in-law had high blood pressure for the last couple of decades of his working life. None of these things should be permanent disabilities that render you unable to work.

At this point, the traditional right-wing media narrative is “Look at all these scrounging parasites”. But as is generally the case, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

If you live in Hale County Alabama, and you aren’t highly qualified — which is the case for the disability recipients — then there really aren’t any jobs you can do. Even if you had the time and money to get the necessary education, there aren’t any white collar jobs in rural Alabama. The only jobs on offer involve lifting heavy objects, standing up all day, or other physical tasks. So if you have high blood pressure, well, you probably really aren’t fit to work any of those jobs. Or at least, no company will employ you, in case you drop dead.

So the problem is bad. But then things get farcical. It turns out that when someone applies for disability and is turned down, they can file for a hearing. At that hearing, they can get a lawyer to present the case for why they can’t work. On the other side, the government has … Nobody. There’s nobody whose job it is to explain why the petitioner is actually able to work, or point out jobs they could be doing. So most of the time, the lawyer will get them approved for disability. At that point, the petitioner is liable for back-payment of disability from the time they first applied. The lawyer gets a portion of that back-payment. In fact, the federal government pays the lawyer directly. So if you do a Google search for (say) ‘disability’, you’ll find lots of lawyers ready and eager to take even a pretty marginal case, on a contingency benefit.

But that’s not the worst part. See, once you get disability payments, you no longer qualify for unemployment benefit. And whereas unemployment benefits are paid by the individual states, the Social Security disability system is a Federal program. So get this: States actively hire companies to go through their lists of the unemployed, spot any who might be persuaded to qualify for disability, and encourage and assist them with the process.

But even that’s not the craziest part. It turns out that children can qualify for disability payments too, for things like learning disabilities. Dyslexic? You might be able to get your parents a nice Social Security check each month. Of course, in time your parents will come to rely on that check, and they’ll only get the check as long as you continue to do badly in school. Once you reach adulthood, well, you can either stay on disability — or you can try and get a job which might not work out, and in the mean time lose your steady disability benefits.

Because the disabled don’t get unemployment benefits, government excludes them from the unemployment figures. Which might seem reasonable enough, but unfortunately right now there are more people being added to the disability benefits list each month than there are new jobs being created. So the actual percentage of people who could be doing some sort of job, but are not doing so, could be way bigger than the official unemployment figure of 7.7%. And we’re still sliding backwards.

So, what’s the solution? Well, there’s one radical theory that has been proposed for decades, under titles like “Universal Living Wage”, “Subsistence Allowance” or “Basic Income Guarantee”. It’s pretty simple to understand: You put together a minimal subsistence payment, enough to cover basic food, shelter and other bare essentials — and you give it to absolutely everyone. You filed a tax return? Here’s your subsistence payment.

This immediately eliminates a ton of bureaucracy. No application process, no means testing, no medical tests, no appeals process, no judges needed, very little chance of fraud. It also eliminates the problem of potentially losing the steady income you need to live by risking taking a job. Hence, hopefully nobody will ever feel like it isn’t worth taking on a job. Even a part-time, temporary or seasonal job will boost your income without the risk of reducing your subsistence payment.

Obviously, there are naysayers. The most common objection is that if nobody is absolutely forced to work in order to afford a roof over their heads and food to eat, why, surely nobody will work at all? Personally, I find that argument incredibly patronizing and offensive. Nobody who has earned more than a couple of million dollars needs to work, but there are plenty of millionaires who do carry on working. And we’re not talking about a luxury subsistence here; if you want a mobile phone, TV, PlayStation or car then you’re going to have to go out and get a job to pay for it, like the rest of us. If you want your own space, rather than a run-down government-run shared apartment space, you’re going to have to work hard.

Still, many doubt that such a scheme could ever work. Except it turns out that one country tried it. From 1974 to 1979, Dauphin Manitoba ran an experimental basic income program known as “Mincome”.

Mysteriously, the Canadian government locked away all the data that was collected, and prevented it from being analyzed. The astute reader can probably guess why. When academics finally managed to get access to the documents in 2009 and analyze the results, it turned out that the whole scheme worked pretty well. Rather than everyone sitting around idle on welfare, the only people who worked less were mothers and teenagers. Graduation rates for teenagers, not surprisingly, went up. Hospital visits dropped. There were fewer work-related injuries.

So, how about it, America? The current system is clearly a disaster, and an inefficient one at that.

Python drama circus

So, the ongoing Python dongle joke kerfuffle. My main thought is that nobody cares what I think, but that hasn’t stopped anyone else, so here goes:

Everybody involved in this story has behaved like an idiot.

Let’s have a quick run-down:

Dick jokes during a keynote presentation is bad behavior. In fact, unnecessary conversation during a keynote is bad behavior. You’re there to listen, keep it quiet. Plus, the language is called Python, we can come up with our own dick jokes.

Also bad form is objecting to the content of someone else’s private conversation that you’re eavesdropping on — particularly when you yourself indulge in off-color jokes in a public space.

It also seems as though Ms Richard does like to leap to conclusions and get offended by things. Not a good personality trait for someone whose job is Developer Relations.

Posting the guys’ photos to Twitter to publicly humiliate them in front of thousands was stupid, and it should have been obvious that it would escalate the situation, especially after pretending to be friendly in order to trick them into posing for the photo.

Firing someone for a single complaint about something they said at a conference is dumb. (To be fair, we don’t know for sure that Playhaven didn’t have other reasons for firing the guy, but if they did they didn’t mention it.)

The assholes who started firing off death threats and misogynist comments, well, obviously they’re scum. They’re the people who should really be losing their jobs. And the people who started a DDoS attack are simply criminals.

But, SendGrid are in the wrong for giving in and firing Adria Richards in response to the DDoS.

The conference organizers handled things responsibly, but that’s what you should expect of any conference.

Reading about this whole sorry escapade, the only piece of good behavior that stands out is the fired developer apologizing afterwards on Hacker News.

So in summary:
cut shutupsicle

(With thanks to Keith Bowman.)

Zombie direct debits

Back in 1919, not many people could afford to buy a car. Loans to do so were often hard to obtain. So General Motors set up the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) as a financial services subsidiary. GMAC would provide you with a loan you could use to buy a GM car.

By the 1990s, GMAC pretty much had the car financing thing down pat, and decided that the real estate market was easy money. So they set up GMAC Mortgage, which would handle the servicing of mortgage loans, as well as GMAC Real Estate. My mortgage was serviced by GMAC.

Unfortunately for GMAC, it turned out that a lot of mortgages were ‘subprime’, a technical term meaning that they were unlikely ever to be paid back because the people who had taken out the loan couldn’t possibly afford it. The banks who had sold the mortgages had mostly been smart enough to offload them on someone else pretty sharpish, but the companies who had to chase homeowners for their mortgage payments—like GMAC—got stuck in the crossfire.

So last year, GMAC Mortgage went bust. Early this year I got a letter telling me that the right to service my mortgage account had been acquired by a company called green tree. Sure enough, on March 1st I got my first mortgage bill from green tree.

There was just one problem: GMAC were still direct-debiting mortgage payments from my checking account. Or at least, someone was still direct-debiting. GMAC Mortgage no longer exists, but oddly that doesn’t seem to have stopped the line item deductions showing up on my bank statements.

I consulted green tree. They told me (today by letter) that they had received a forwarded payment backdated to February 7th, but nothing since then. So someone has a month’s worth of mortgage payments taken from my account, and I don’t know who.

I’ve called my bank, and requested an investigation, a refund claim for the two payments deducted since February 7th, and a stop payment order.

Of course, in the mean time I still have to pay the mortgage. So it’s a really good thing I have savings that can easily cover the situation until it’s resolved.

I generally don’t allow anyone to direct debit my account. The mortgage company was literally the only exception; I figured that it was really unlikely that a bank would vanish, and that if I couldn’t trust the financial institutions responsible for my mortgage, I was in so much trouble that mere direct debit issues would be of little consequence.

Hey, it seemed reasonable at the time. Lesson learned.

So I guess my message here is two-fold: First, always make sure you have enough money to cover 6-12 months of necessary expenditure in an instant access savings account. And second, don’t allow anyone direct debit access, not even for your mortgage.

Update 2013-03-26:

Wells Fargo investigated one direct debit, agreed with me that it was bogus, and got the money refunded. They’re now investigating the other one.

But amazingly, I got a letter saying it’s from GMAC’s processing center, warning me that transfers from my account are failing because of a ‘stop payment’ order. Well, no shit. That’ll be because the money you were taking wasn’t reaching my mortgage processor after almost a month, won’t it?

Google Reader alternatives

So, Google decided to kill one of their most useful products: Google Reader.

If you don’t use a feed reader, well, it’s a way you can subscribe to one or more web sites, and collect headlined summaries of what’s published. You can then sort, browse and filter the summaries, and click through to the articles that interest you. In short, it’s the only reasonable way to keep up with more than a handful of web sites.

Like many people, I had migrated to Google Reader because it offered a web UI for the desktop, and apps for my phone and tablet. When I had 20 minutes to kill at the doctor’s office, I could use my phone to catch up on what was new from the web sites that interest me, including all my friends’ personal blogs.

How much did I use it? According to Reader’s own stats: “Since November 23, 2007 you have read a total of 299,990 items.”

There used to be a lot of competition in this space. Everyone built RSS into things, and later Atom (a newer and better way to do the same stuff). There were commercial feed reader applications. But Google Reader was so good that it killed the market for many of them, and most of the rest became alternate front ends to Reader’s back-end storage. And now Google are killing the entire ecosystem.

It could be worse, though. I can get my entire subscription list out of Reader in a standard format (OPML), and load it into a replacement system. All I need to do is find the replacement system. I need something that’ll work on tablet, desktop and phone. I want it to have a compact display option that maximizes headlines per screen; it needs to be able to deal with 400+ subscriptions efficiently.

So, here are the options I’ve looked at, with notes.

Feedly have announced their Project Normandy. Apparently they were expecting Google to shut down Reader, and have been quietly cloning the API. They have web and phone/tablet clients, so they’re a strong contender. I’m guessing that most of the good feed reader apps will switch over to Feedly. They have tips for getting a more Reader-like UI.

Netvibes push their service as a business intelligence dashboard. At the heart of it, though, is web feed reading. While they don’t make a big thing of it, they have a Google Reader style interface. They also have pretty much everything else. It’s overkill, but quite intriguing, as it would let me pull image feeds (like Flickr) in as well. Check out their SXSW demo dashboard, and look for the toggle switch top left to switch to reader view.

Both Feedly and Netvibes have a business model: selling premium features to businesses. Feedly are a lot less in-your-face with it, and call their option Feedly Plus. Is it a sustainable model? I can’t tell, but as long as I can get my subscriptions out again I’m not too bothered. Netvibes have OPML export; I’m not sure about Feedly yet, but I’m guessing it’ll be part of Normandy if it doesn’t already exist.

NewsBlur is a completely open source solution, so it should be future-proof. Unfortunately, its servers are currently getting pounded by bitter Google Reader users trying to switch; the developer has had to cut free accounts down to a dozen feeds each to try and control the load. I could set up my own instance, but unfortunately it’s written in Python and I don’t know how well my web host supports that. (Also, most of my experiences trying to get unpackaged Python stuff to run have been very negative.)

Fever is commercial software you buy once, and run on your own hosting. It’s PHP and MySQL, unfortunately, but at least that makes it easy to get up and running somewhere. My main reservation about it is that it seems to be focused on drawing your attention to whatever everyone else is talking about the most. That’s not what I want. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The Old Reader is a clone of how Google Reader was before its most recent redesign. It doesn’t have any app support yet, though.

Tiny Tiny RSS is another DIY web-based solution. PHP. Has an Android client (and a tablet-compatible web UI).

Then there are the desktop-only applications. In many ways they’re great, but I’m not keen on losing my mobile reader capability.

RSSOwl is probably the strongest option on the desktop, as it’s free, open source, cross platform, and supports kill files—the one feature I’ve been waiting for someone to implement in feed reader land. It isn’t going to win any beauty contests, but if you don’t need mobile sync it’s a strong contender. Currently it has a sync to Google Reader option, so perhaps it’ll add sync to somewhere else (Feedly?) and then I’ll be able to use it with some other Android app.

Bloglines is an online feed reader that almost died in 2010, something they still mention on their home page. Their focus is now local news. I’m not filled with enthusiasm by either of those things. No apps either.

Newsbeuter is for people like me who are so old-school that they probably helped build the school. If you miss trn, this is your best option.

More to come, no doubt.

Connecting some tech news dots

27 February: Freescale announces a KL02 ARM chip, just 2mm across.

Freescale says that the KL02 was specifically designed in response to a customer’s request. (They aren’t saying who.) There was a need for a chip smaller than 3 by 3 mm and this was the result. Who needs a chip this tiny? We look forward to finding out — we think.

When a component manufacturer dare not speak the name of its customer, you can make a pretty good guess who they’re talking about. Sure enough, just a week later, we discover the answer: Apple’s Lightning connector to HDMI adaptor is taken apart, and discovered to have a tiny ARM chip inside.

So let’s review: when Apple decided to switch connectors on the iPhone, they could have gone with Micro USB and MHL. After all, they already agreed to adopt Micro USB for charging back in 2009. Adding MHL would have allowed them to stream full 1080p/60 HDMI through a Micro USB connector.

But no, instead they went with a new proprietary Apple-only connector. And they made it so crap that it can’t stream 1080p. So now they have to stick an ARM CPU in every high-priced adaptor cable, to decode MPEG-compressed video. Never mind the artifacts that result, Apple gets to charge connector licensing fees, and that’s what’s important.

What a horrible piece of proprietary engineering.

An embarrassment of musical riches

Back in the 1980s, technology triggered a tidal wave of experimentalism in popular music. Punk had established an “anything goes, anyone can do it” attitude, and punk bands like Tubeway Army, Wire and DEVO began to explore the possibilities of the cheap synthesizers being built by companies like Casio, Korg and Roland. This grew into the new wave movement, with groups like The Human League, Depeche Mode and OMD achieving chart success with stripped-down experimental sounds that would never chart today. Then came affordable sampling synthesizers and bands like The Art Of Noise, and even musique concrete became mainstream.

Encouraged by this, several record labels known for their pop repertoire flirted with classical music in the late 80s, trying to bring it to a wider audience. Factory Records started their Factory Classical division, and Virgin (who had been issuing classical music since the mid 70s) set up a sub-label called Venture.

Meanwhile at Zang Tuum Tumb, there was Andrew Poppy. I first heard his work on ZTT IQ6, Zang Tuum Tuum Sampled. I added the name to my “Buy on sight” list, and wasn’t disappointed.

However, the great popular modern classical music experiment died suddenly in the early 90s. Virgin was sold to EMI, and pretty much stopped releasing anything experimental. Factory went bust. ZTT imploded in a mass of lawsuits. Mute was still around, but Daniel Miller had never been interested in anything involving orchestras. I picked up a few more Andrew Poppy releases over the next decade, but only by scouring record conventions.

And then the Internet changed everything. The long tail became more viable. And then, a few weeks ago, I discovered there were five Andrew Poppy albums available that I’d never heard of. I had some gift money left over from Christmas, so I ordered them all, from the man himself.

Here are some brief notes on what the various pieces sound like, for non-completists considering purchase.

Running Naked Through The Garment District

  • Drum Machining: Drum machine samples speed up, cluster, fragment, and collapse into soft clouds. This could almost be Autechre at times, or a robot version of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music”.
  • Double Stitch: Beautiful and mellow, shoegazey, like Harold Budd or quieter tracks by The Durutti Column.
  • Lining For A Desirable Suit: Slightly more up-tempo mellow synth/guitar minimalism which dissolves into warm summer. Shades of Angelo Badalamenti and Twin Peaks.

Blood Sugar

  • Last Light: Sometimes a piece of music sounds exactly like the title suggests it might. This is one of those cases. Strings.
  • Snowdronia: Not at all what I was expecting, i.e. not a 20 minute piece of drone music. Instead, it could be a longer and more delicate and icy take on “Last Light”. There is some drone, but it’s just part of the overall picture. Stylistically, edges towards the quieter moments of “Godspeed You! Black Emperor”.
  • Revolution Number Eight: The mood takes a turn for the sinister. If this is an airport, it’s the one from Stephen King’s “The Langoliers”.
  • T.A.R.D.I.S.: “Time At Rest Devouring Its Secret”. Previously available on a CD of its own of the same name.
  • Untitled track: A sketch of piano, echo and delay.

Infernal Furniture

First, a series of solo piano pieces. Then, the recorded piano pieces are digitally sampled and manipulated.

…And the shuffle of things

  • Something Secret: Electronic drone, ethereal voicelike tones, strings, and a voice discusses the nature of sound. Stylistically, reminds me of Derek Jarman’s “Blue”.
  • Wet Fold: Wet thumping percussion, gentle droning buzzing, echo, and discreet piano. I liked this a lot.
  • My Stress Mistress: A piano tries to relax, but the electric organ isn’t helping.
  • Balcony Scene / Doppelgänger: Harks back to “Alphabed”, but with operatic vocals.
  • Wave Machine Parts II and III: A caffeinated piano cadenza followed by one which switched to decaf.
  • The Head of Orpheus Football: This one’s a bit Momus, a song about taking football back to its roots—by playing it with the severed heads of famous football stars.
  • What Else: What Then Now: Back to Andrew Poppy’s roots with systems music.
  • My Father’s Submarines: Another spoken-word-over-music piece like “Something Secret”.
  • Almost the same shame: Solo piano with an interesting side effect that develops.

Shiny Floor, Shiny Ceiling

If you like pop music and classic music, and are at least neutral about opera, give this album a try. It defies me to come up with a genre for it or think of anything else it resembles. Classical lounge hip-hopera?

Nexus 4 vs Galaxy Nexus

My wife’s 3-year-old phone has been irritating her with its lack of app space, so I gave in and bought a Nexus 4, passing my Galaxy Nexus on to her. I thought I’d write up a quick review comparing the Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus, for the benefit of anyone not sure whether to upgrade.

From the front, it’s hard to tell the two phones apart. The Nexus 4 is 0.76mm wider and 1.6mm shorter, with the same basic rounded rectangle shape. Both phones have volume buttons on the left, power on the right. The Nexus 4 has the headphone socket on the top instead of the bottom.

Turn the phones face down, and they’re clearly different. The Galaxy Nexus has a rubberized gray back, whereas the Nexus 4 has a glass back with sparkly pixels underneath and “nexus” inset in silver. Presumably this is for when you’re playing the phone stack restaurant game.

The new Nexus is a fraction of a millimeter wider than the old one. However, it doesn’t taper the way the old one does, so it feels thicker. Curiously, it also feels noticeably heavier, even though the actual weight increase is only 4g. I think that the difference is psychological, and comes down to the build quality, which is the biggest physical difference between the two phones.

The Galaxy Nexus felt plastic. I personally don’t mind my phone feeling like plastic, but a lot of iPhone fans criticized the Nexus on that basis. The Nexus 4 has glass front and back, with a rubberized edge. It feels exceptionally solid. The glass has a rounded bevel on the edges, so the device gleams slightly in the light. (It’s the same effect Nintendo used on the DSi XL.)

When the screens are lit, the difference between the two devices is clearer. The Galaxy Nexus used a Super AMOLED screen, whereas the Nexus 4 is an IPS LCD. The LCD has better color accuracy and brightness, and doesn’t suffer from the papery texture of the AMOLED or its tendency to show color fringes at the edges at low brightness. On the other hand, the IPS doesn’t have the totally black blacks of AMOLED, which you’ll notice at night.

The Nexus 4 screen is slightly wider, 48 pixels more, about an extra 4mm. That tiny difference in aspect ratio is strangely noticeable, making the screen seem ‘fatter’.

The Nexus 4 supports GLONASS as well as GPS, for improved location services. Not much more to say about that.

Sound quality during calls is better on the Nexus 4, both sending and receiving. The Nexus 4 supports T-Mobile’s HD voice, and my colleagues tell me my voice is exceptionally clear.

The software, of course, is almost identical; both run Android 4.2.1. However, the Nexus 4 has a quad core CPU instead of dual core, and double the RAM, which means that everything runs just a little bit more smoothly. In particular, the Google Play store doesn’t lag at all, even when you’re installing and updating apps.

The built-in camera is also a big improvement. Resolution is 8MP rather than 5MP, and it’s an f/2.4 lens rather than f/2.8. It also has a back-illuminated sensor, which combined with the faster lens means that it’s far better at taking photos in low light situations. Finally, there’s an HDR mode built in, plus face detection.

There’s no dock connector. Instead, it can charge wirelessly using a Qi-enabled charging pad. On the whole, I found the Galaxy Nexus dock fiddly, and prefer the pad option, even though both are pretty ridiculously overpriced.

Battery life is about the same, though I don’t have any detailed figures yet.

So overall, a pretty solid upgrade in every respect. However, if I hadn’t needed to upgrade for other reasons, I’d probably have waited to see what the X-phone brings.

Where to buy music in lossless formats

The last CD has been ripped. I now face the problem of finding out where to buy lossless audio files.

Criteria for stores:

  • Must sell something I’m interested in listening to, i.e. not just folk and jazz.
  • Must sell to the US.
  • Must have more than a token number of releases available in lossless format.
  • Must sell music by someone I’ve heard of already. I know there are lots of talented unsigned artists out there, but I’m viewing that as a separate problem.

Before checking the stores on this list:

  • Try the artist’s official site.
  • Also, try the record label site.

Stores I’ve found:

  • Bleep, the Warp Records online store. First port of call for anything electronic, they carry music from many labels, including Mute, !K7, R&S, Planet Mu.
  • HDtracks. Very little electronic music, but some pop and rock—Björk, Kate Bush, Velvet Underground, Tubeway Army, the Kinks, U2, Rolling Stones, Beck, and so on. Often they only have one or two albums by any given artist.
  • Linn Records. Offshoot of the hi-fi hardware vendor. Slim pickings in the rock, pop and electronica, but a good selection of classical from Deutsche Grammophon.
  • Boomkat. Things that bleep and make noise. Of note, they have the Touch Records catalog in FLAC, which Bleep does not.
  • Beatport. Aimed at DJs, with a selection to match. They also remove tracks when they’re no longer in demand by DJs, so don’t wait around to buy.
  • Junodownload. DJ focused, but it’s the only place I’ve found that has most of the remastered ZTT back catalog in lossless.
  • Qobuz. French download store. Fancy some Jean-Michel Jarre 24 bit / 96kHz remasters? (If you get them, tell me if they’re worth the upgrade.)