palmOne released their SDIO Wi-Fi card for the Tungsten T3 early this month. Like all of the products Palm make, it can be found on their website. They also sell their products and accessories on-line, so no need to go to a reseller. However, the Wi-Fi card is not for sale on their site. According to customer service from Palm, I have to go to a reseller who should have them. Isn’t that daft?

Looking at the resellers’ on-line stores: Carphone Warehouse, Comet, Currys, Dixons, Harrods, Inkino, The Link, Mobile Phones Direct, Orange, PC World, Ryman, Staples, Tempo, Watford Electronics and WH Smiths don’t have the card on their websites. In fact some of them don’t sell any Palm equipment at all.

What does this leave? None. That’s right. None of the official resellers have this product on their stores. So how can I buy it? And indeed, what resellers has the card been shipped to?

BBC2’s Newsnight last Thursday devoted most of the programme to problems with salt in food. According to a survey carried out by the BBC, 80% of people who responded to the poll want the government to take action and make it more difficult to eat unhealthily by restricting salt, fat and sugar in processed food. Many of these are the same bunch of people who (according to another recent survey) believe the government shouldn’t dictate what we eat.

Newsnight’s somewhat skewed view on salt included an analysis of certain items bought in supermarkets to fulfill one day’s food intake. This included the following, which it claims is [an] apparently healthy choice:

• Breakfast of flaked cereal and fruit, two slices of toast, two sausages
• Lunch consisting of a pork pie
• Dinner consisting of soup, two smoked salmon fish cakes and vegetables.

Not surprisingly, this adds up to around 19 grams of salt; more than 3 times the recommended intake. Neither does this strike me as particularly healthy. Flaked cereals, sausages, pork pie and smoked salmon are of course full of salt. You don’t need labels to realise this. Shockingly, Newsnight also needed to emphasis the fact that crisps include lots of salt, by comparing it to the salt content of seawater. Why?

The government is in talks with the food industry to cut down salt content in processed foods. Others want clearer labelling. For example, labelling salt content is not mandatory. Most foods that are labelled include the sodium content since sodium based compounds are used as flavour enhancers, and are therefore not just salt. It’s also claimed that having sodium content is confusing because you need to multiply it by about 2.5 to get the equivalent salt content. So what’s the problem? If salt is a part of the sodium content, then by multiplying the sodium content by 2.5 you surely must get a worst case figure for the amount of salt. Additionally, why not promote low sodium content in food rather than low salt content? Or is the government telling me that people can’t multiply by 2.5. It’s easy: multiply by 5, divide by 2. Or failing that, multiply by 10, then divide by 2 twice.

What about Red, Green and Yellow labelling of salt content? Well, that sounds okay except for the fact it bears no relation to the quantity of food consumed. It’s best to stick with quantitative guidelines. You can’t mess with these.

Now we have to ask why there is so much salt in food. I’ll ignore the sample food intake from Newsnight as it is just plain ridiculous. Salt is used as a cheap flavouring and because it binds with water is often used to bulk food up. It stands to reason therefore that lower quality food is more likely to have lots of salt content. Indeed, lower quality food, whilst being cheaper, is also higher in fat and sugar content. Wouldn’t it be novel if the government promoted the consumption of better quality processed (or pre-prepared) food and the use of fresh vegetables over processed, canned and frozen vegetables. I reckon it would balance out cost-wise, plus have a beneficial impact to the public and the health service. This is without even beginning to ask people to reduce the actual amount of food they eat. Don’t tell me that people don’t have time to go shopping for fresh food. In any case, fresh food can last quite some time in a fridge.

Thus it’s time to introduce two other food industry conspiracies, one of which is with the collusion of the government and health institutes: the use of best before dates, and ‘do not freeze’ symbols. Best before dates are there to advise people on whether something may not be at its best. It’s not a ‘throw this away’ date. It may be my imagination, but I’m sure best before dates are nearer to the dates of purchase than they used to be. Having an earlier date encourages people to buy more food to replace that which is unnecessarily thrown away. If you keep hold of food a little bit longer it actually reduces the amount of money spent on food and reduces the number of trips to the shops.

The ‘do not freeze’ symbol is a classic marketing gimmick. If you cannot freeze something you have to consume it on the day of purchase or stick it in the fridge. Whereupon you’re then confronted by the best before date syndrome. In my experience there are only two types of food that cannot be frozen: some vegetables and most cheeses. Cheese is a particularly tricky beast as it loses its flavour quite significantly and loses its structure. Other foods may lose some of their flavour but this is only marginal.

So finally here are my recommendations. Firstly those that would be possible:

• Make sodium labelling on food compulsary.
• Advise people on the quantity of sodium (and indeed fat, sugar, fibre, protein etc.) that should be consumed in a day. That should only take five minutes.

And now those that wouldn’t be possible since at least one of them is too emotive for this current government:

• Ban value foods
• Ban white bread
• Revise the use of ‘best before’ dates
• Revise the use of ‘do not freeze’ symbols
• Provide assistance to allow people to buy good quality fridges and freezers

According to The Guardian today “The Guardian is offering 10 free tickets on a first come, first served basis to “The MusicAlly debate: PR and P2P – the perfect anti-piracy pitch” on Monday September 13, 2004 from 6.00pm at the Guardian Newsroom, London, EC1. Sponsored by the Guardian, Guardian Unlimited and the Observer, the panel discussion will hear three top advertising, PR and marketing executives – Tim Duffy, the head of M&C Saatchi, Interbrand boss Jez Frampton and PR man and MediaGuardian.co.uk columnist Mark Borkowski – present their views on how the UK music business can avoid a public relations disaster as it seeks to confront the challenge of unlicensed file sharing.

“As British labels gear up to consider suing their own customers, how can the industry succeed in winning over the hearts and minds of today’s technology-savvy music fans and get across its point in a fresh, innovative and credible way?”

Too late folks. We’ve had the attempts at copy protecting CDs – many of which can be easily worked around, and which most people deplore. Now we have lots of legal music download sites (and quite a few more illegal sites). So what’s file sharing used for now? Sure, people still use it for music to some extent, but the main area that people use it for are software, movie and television releases.

And since when has the music industry been innovative or credible? Surely it’s not going to start now?

One of the things I find about having a cold is that I end up having loads of dreams. I started with this cold Monday evening so I have three nights of dreams to relate. Most are little snippets:

On Monday I dreamt that I lived in a house made of wasps.

On Tuesday I had a cat that lived with me in a flat on something like the 14th floor, but it kept leaving lots of wriggly little worms all over the place. I ended up chucking the cat out the window.

Wednesday was much more varied: Firstly I met a mate (who I used to know at university) in a bar called No. 17. We played pool, and the beer was quite nice. The following day we went back, to find that two women were using the pool table as a foot rest, all the seats were arranged like in a cinema, and the beer was really bad. So we never went back there again.

This dream continued with me and a bunch of strangers conspiring to arrange for a women to find out that his boyfriend was cheating on her. Then I became a detective and successfully got a DNA sample from a reverse signature transferred from a cheque onto a piece of paper. I don’t know why.

The final part of the dream was me making friends with an animal which was a cross between an otter and a red squirrel, except without a tail. It came into my garden and I fed it. It seemed really happy and then left. Six months later seven of them came back, and they all recognised me. We played together for about 15 minutes and then they left. I spoke to a neighbour who remarked that they do remember if someone’s nice to them and that’s why more of them returned. He had 25 of them in his garden a couple of weeks previously.

Those who know me are aware that I’m in a quandary regarding how I listen to my music. At present I have an extensive iTunes library (about 13,000 tracks) which lives, at present, on an external disk connected to an iBook. The music is on an iBook rather than my main G4 because the G4 is just too noisy to keep on all the time and I can here it underneath my office in the lounge. My music used to be on our office server but we needed more space there so that’s one of the reasons why the music came off it.

I also have a Slimp3 device in the lounge. This, combined with SlimServer on the iBook, allows me to wirelessly stream music from the iBook to the lounge, so I’ve no need to keep CDs handy. Running SlimServer on our office server was a bit too clunky for me which is the second reason the music is now on the iBook.

My quandaries are plentiful:

• At present, SlimServer doesn’t stream files bought from the iTunes Music Store (FairPlay protected AAC). I doubt any time soon that it will do. So when I buy music I have to rip to CD and re-import as MP3s. It actually turns me off buying music from the store. All that convenience to buy music – then the hassle to convert it so I can listen to it elsewhere.

• But, Airport Express streams wirelessly from iTunes and iTunes transcodes all music into Apple Lossless Format before sending it encrypted and securely to the Airport Express. So, why not get an Airport Express instead? Well, they don’t come with a remote control and iTunes can only stream to one of these devices at any one time. If I bought one, I’m sure I’d want to get another one for my kitchen. They’re nice and small. I don’t fancy running upstairs to change destinations. SlimServer can stream to multiple Slimp3 devices simultaneously – even different streams. And, synchronised playback of streams is handled, so you don’t hear the music in the lounge 2 seconds before you hear it in the kitchen.

• Then there’s the Sonos system. This is coming in the autumn and supports multiple streaming, just like SlimServer. You can buy a remote control for it too. Just like the Slimp3 devices. But that doesn’t support protected AACs either. And it’s rather expensive because it’s designed to be used standalone with powered speakers. Grrr..

So I have no preferred solution. Just a bunch of imperfect options. I asked in an earlier entry on this site why people accept things that are just okay. The alternative question is why do people accept anything less than perfect? Each of the above solutions and products are more than okay. They’re damn good. Pity is they’re not perfect.

My current iBook set-up is, at present, just okay. I need a bigger disk at some point – and that’s a whole new ball game (assessing capacity, noise, number of ports, fans). But I needed something to let me play music on my G4.

Fortunately, iTunes allows you to share from one instance of iTunes to any number of others. Whilst sharing Smart Playlists is a bit touch and go, sharing an entire library is a breeze. So, I can access all of my music from the iBook and play it through the G4. But I cannot buy music on my G4, unless I then move it back to the iBook. Nor can I fiddle with my iPod which needs to be connected to the iBook so I can update its content from the music library. However, there’s a product called netTunes which lets me drive iTunes remotely. This is essentially a clever, application specific, VNC. It’s all written in Objective-C and Cocoa, so PC users won’t see a version for them. Importantly it does work. This morning I just updated my iPod whilst sitting at my G4. My quandaries still remain, but at least for the moment I’m a happy bunny.