Many many people have this desire: a single place for all their media: music, videos etc.

A NAS device is the place, backed up suitable. The problem is iTunes / Front Row just does not fit with this strategy if you have more than one computer / Apple device.

The core issue is that iTunes does not automatically rescan the media folder for new files. So you can point as many iTunes as you like to a shared location but they will only see the files they add to their libraries via purchasing or importing media.

So you end up with many devices in your house, all with a different view onto your shared media.

To access that new album you imported, you have to manually Add To Library on that iTunes instance, hoping it isn’t set to duplicate the files on the server. When this happens, as it certainly used to for me, you then end up with many copies of albums as you re-create your library from scratch on the various computers over the years.

Add to this the fact that if for some reason your connection to the NAS goes down when you run iTunes, it will revert the media path to the local folder, and you end up with a total mess – a bunch of machines with files only on some of them, their media split between local and NAS, and only the ones that added those files having them listed in their library.

The experience is so un-Apple it is shocking, and it causes daily pain.

It is important to remember that the iTunes Media folder is where it PUTS files that you buy/import – and that is ALL. (There is a new “Automatically add to iTunes” folder there, which seems half-assed to me). The iTunes Library is specific to each computer and is the list of media and the file path to each. This, unlike the media folder that actually stores the media files, is something you do not want to share between computers in many cases.

Now, iTunes 9 added Home Sharing. But guess what, this sucks and blows! Why? It (a) only shares iTunes-purchased content and (b) it duplicates the files to your local HD. Home sharing, I believe has a lot more to do with the iSlate/tablet and their new datacenter – music in the cloud crap – so you can sync your iSlate content without a cable.

Please Apple, it needs to work like this:

How it should work

This is relatively simple:

1. First, never change the media path in iTunes if the previous path is not reachable. Tell the user what is happening so they can fix it
2. When new files are added, make a bonjour announcement to any other iTunes running (perhaps even wide-area bonjour to make iPhones/Slates pick it up) so that they can instantly add the file to their iTunes library
3. When a file is not located on the local disks, have a local cache for stuff that the user ACTUALLY PLAYS. My wife doesn’t like all that heavy metal I listen to, so let’s not fill her hard disk with a clone of it eh? iSlate and Apple TV / mac mini media hubs etc can pick up just the files that are needed.
4. For the occasion when not all the machines / iTunes are running, have iTunes do daily rescan in the BACKGROUND for any new files in the media folder and AUTOMATICALLY add these to the Library. This is not rocket science.
5. Maintain an “excludes” list on each iTunes library so the user can remove items from their local itunes Library (without deleting it from the NAS) and they will not be offered the file again in a future background sync.

Don’t give me stuff about non-purchased media not having ISRC codes to identify them and de-dupe. You can dedupe on SHA hashes of the media (calculate once and embed in the metadata of the file) and failing that trackdata, and then failing that – USER INTERVENTION eg “There are some new media files added and we don’t know if they are duplicates or not – help me”.

You can even put all these newly discovered files into a special “Newly discovered” place in iTunes where the user can yay or nay them – or have it set to auto-accept (default).

The more and more macs and related devices are sold to households the more shitty this problem becomes and you REALLY REALLY need to fix it Apple. Without the cloud. The cloud is not a solution for terabytes of media being instantly accessible in your living room.

Please. Just do it. iTunes Home Sharing was nearly it, but sadly failed completely to address this.

Related posts:

1. The future of computing UIs – TV and touch tablets and OS X
2. My Apple tablet predictions – for what its worth
3. Data sync on iPhone, iPod, iPad – the missing link?

I won’t bore you with the details of that campaign here. However the process has revealed a lot to me about politics, government, legislation and the implementation of such “on the ground”.

In a nutshell, approximately half of the Steiner Waldorf kindergartens in the UK accept state-funding for a short period in the 3-4yr age range. A condition of this funding was to submit a “profile” for each child assessing them against certain goals, but this was not a statutory requirement and was not rigidly enforced. It also required information about how children were being guided towards literacy and numeracy at this early age – something that Steiner Waldorf education does not and cannot do in any explicit way at this age, formal and teacher-directed learning being held off until Class 1 (age 6/7).

However Steiner Waldorf kindergartens are generally held in high regard and are well supported by local authorities, being backed up increasingly by new research on learning in the early years. Even within government there are some that appreciate the educational approach and its value, and OFSTED are supportive.

As such this allowed these kindergartens to “play along” with the state systems to enable any parent (not just those with the money for fees) to secure a Steiner education for their child at this sensitive 3-4 year old range where school is not even compulsory yet in the UK. OFSTED would inspect using a different set of criteria for Steiner settings, and the Local Authorities were not heavy handed in collecting the profile data.

Anyway the new EYFS legislation makes all the learning goals and assessment statutory requirements, and makes the inspection against EYFS statutory for OFSTED, and gives the local authority powers (and likely obligations) to ensure that profile data is being collected and submitted.

There are therefore parts of the legislation, including in particular the literacy and numeracy learning goals, that are in direct conflict with the Steiner approach.

Never fear though, after a long battle and changes of heart from Government (“There’s no problem” AKA the immortal DCSF phrase “The EYFS is a flexible framework”, “The exemptions process is not required” to “You all need to apply for exemptions”), there is now an exemptions process that schools can use to exempt them from some learning & development requirements.

BUT. Here’s the catch. To apply for an exemption a school must do a whole load of arduous stuff, which includes asking the local authority if they will agree to continue to provide state funding. They are not obliged to do so. You can see how a local council may remove funding if they will not be receiving meaningful assessment data (the government will be setting targets for the local authorities to meet), and may have constrained budgets that produce thinking such as “Tiddly Winks Nursery up the road from you teaches literacy, we’ll fund them thanks, our budget is tight this year”.

So now if a school applies for an exemption and the local authority says they will not continue to fund, these kindergartens are rather stuck.

If they want to continue taking funding they will have to submit profiles with incomplete data (as no Steiner Waldorf school can compromise on the literacy and numeracy – it breaks the whole educational philosophy), and when OFSTED come to inspect them against the full range of EYFS learning and development requirements, they will inevitably suffer negative consequences. This in the long term could well lead to lower uptake due to poor published results – and eventually cause financial detriment to the setting.

So you end up with a situation whereby educational experts and people within Government know the educational approach is good. The kindergartens are doing good work. But you may only get funding if you follow the conventional learning approaches, and as such settings that embarked on the process of taking state funding to open up the education to a wider audience may find themselves in an unsustainable position.

This is particularly perplexing in the case of the new Hereford Steiner Waldorf Academy, which is fully state-funded, including its kindergarten. No setting that calls itself Steiner Waldorf can compromise on the literacy and numeracy goals, so this implies that the Government’s own academy will receive a poor OFSTED report for its kindergarten. Literacy and numeracy are a major part of the the learning and development requirements set down in the seconday legislation.

Of course the solution for all of this is for the Government to plug their brains in and supply funding to all parents equally whatever educational philosophy they want to pursue. This is anathema to the economics driven approach to education they are taking that requires measurement at every stage, and has turned our children into statistics and outcomes, instead of people who have their own unique place in the world.

The thinking in Government has to change from “We give you this money and you give us this outcome at age 5″ to “We want parents to work and children to be happy – here’s some money to make that happen”.

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This excellent video goes some way to explaining why the EYFS framework is set to trash the education of young children in the UK. This is also particularly endangering Steiner education.

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Please take a look and sign up to the early years petition if you can.

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In the last few weeks there has been a storm brewing. It turns out that in 2006 the UK Labour government introduced the Childcare Act 2006 which no doubt includes some sound aims.

In it however, it includes a duty to implement the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. What this does is legally require providers of care/teaching to 4-5 year olds to lead them in adult led play and teaching to learn the basics of reading, writing and phonics, from age FOUR.

My four year old daughter is currently very happy doing NONE of this and I am very happy that it is this way currently. Childhood, it seems, where you are free to play and hence free to learn according to your desires and abilities, ends at 4 according to the government.

"We… must… produce…. more…. robots…." I can hear them thinking it. "More parents at work!" "Start teaching the children when they are babies they need a head (Sure) start". "Boost productivity!" "Increase GDP!" "Fight off the threat from China!"

What a load of utter nonsense. There are going to be a lot of seriously outraged parents writing to a lot of MPs and a lot of very well respected, long established, and good-performing schools threatened with closure unless the government realises that it cannot dictate to everybody how their children are educated when there is no evidence of any problem.

With this in mind, I have started the Save Childhood website with a view to organizing campaigning around this theme of the Early Years Foundation Stage, and maybe in future the longer term issues with assessment and testing in later years, and the frankly horrendous proposal to fine children who are not in further education or training if they have left school before 18.

Alastair Darling… I left school at 16 willingly, to work full time. How dare you propose that I would not be able to do the same again if I were a child now – shame on you.

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Tricia was an independent midwife of international renown, and we were lucky enough to have her as our midwife for the birth of Amy our first born. We had a wonderful natural birth in a birthpool in the sitting room of our small Victorian terraced house, opposite the railway station with traffic humming past, although it was a Sunday morning so we didn’t notice. She was so incredibly warm and comforting, we could not help but trust her completely. She was so humble that at the time we had no idea how important she was to the midwifery community in the UK and internationally, let alone an accomplished singer, poet, artist and public speaker and campaigner.

She was someone who made a real difference to the world, and quietly but tirelessly worked to improve the lot of women, babies and families worldwide. When we met her we began to realise the tragedy of the loss of birthing and breastfeeding knowledge from all our families since the increasing medicalization of birth in the last few decades. Some people now are two or even three generations away from a true natural birth in the family, so how can we expect new families to see that there is so much wrong with birth as it is experienced now? There are so many aspects of modern hospitalized birth that defeat the natural physiological processes of birth, resulting in increased interventions. This excellent Tricia quote sums it up:

Let us bring them into harsh rooms with bright lights. Let us make them lie on their backs on hard narrow beds. Let us tether them to machines so they cannot move. Let us make them stay silent and make no noise with their pain. Let us expose their most private parts and threaten them with cold steel. Let us make them push their babies upwards, against the pull of the earth…In these conditions, labour swiftly becomes unbearable and pain relief becomes a woman’s only hope… This is not the natural cry of a woman in labour bringing a child to birth, although if you have only ever witnessed childbirth in a medicalized setting you might be forgiven for thinking so. This is the screaming plea of a tethered animal in pain. [Source: http://rixarixa.blogspot.com/2007/08/pushed.html]

I can only hope that the work of the many midwives in the UK to prevent the idiotic demolition of the independent midwifery services by the UK government succeeds. If it doesn’t, this will be a tragedy that is hard to comprehend.

Tricia was a rare person – charming and witty but never flippant, spiritual and "alternative" but  grounded in the real world. Her working method was rigorous but happily acknowledged that sometimes things work even when it doesn’t seem like there is the science to back it up.

Tricia elsewhere on the web:
http://www.saveindependentmidwifery.org/images/stories/pdfs/practising-midwife-feb-07.pdf
http://birthinangus.org.uk/index/news-app/story.23/title.-10-steps-pioneer (see links from there)

All I can say is, if you’re about to have or are planning to have a baby – get the facts - read some natural birth books. This isn’t hippy stuff, its the actual physical process that is intended by nature, that current methods fight against.  Personally I always thought that going to hospital was for when something was wrong with you. Since when was birth a problem to be solved?

…but this is where the really tough part about birth comes in. There’s life at stake. Fear and litigious tendencies make us feel risk-averse and with this mindset natural birth can seem like you are not doing the best for your child. The trouble is that this is assuming you know the risks of an un-natural hospital birth. I bet you don’t. Ask questions, then ask more questions. Then do what feels instinctively right. It’s a journey to be travelled, but it is a wonderful one.

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I was in London the other day and noticed a lot of Cadbury chocolate adverts for Dairy Milk bars, along the lines of  "There’s a glass and a half of milk in every bar". This is a very disturbing ploy for which the ASA should be punishing Cadbury – effectively trying to sell their awful chocolate (which it has been argued can’t be called chocolate due to the high level of fats relative to cocoa) as a "healthy" food on the basis that most people, incorrectly, believe cow’s milk to be a healthy food product.

The conspiratorial side of me wondered if there was a joint promotion going on between the Dairy Council and Cadbury to do what is effectively promotion of both products.

Instead, I happened on a link of sorts. Yahoo appear to be in the beta testing phase of a new service called Yahoo Kids! One presumes this is to protect children from all the potentially offensive and/or insanely boring parts of Yahoo – or you could argue its to collate as much marketing information on children as possible… there is a caveat at the footer of their pages about collection personal information.

Anyway, I found the Food and Eating section. Oh the horror. Take out a couple of entries from oxfam about chocolate and tea, and you have direct links to:

• 4 (yes you read correctly, four) Cadbury chocolate sites, presumably "educational" in nature
• The British Egg Information Service – hey we all need more cholesterol
• Kellogg’s – those bastions of sweet cereals
• A site selling sweets
• The Dairy Council’s website – cow’s milk is for… cows
• Ribena – mmm more sugar
• Walkers – makers of crisps (who notably -do- make unsalted crisps)

There’s a couple of minor information sites there too, but that’s the section so far. No doubt Yahoo! will say it is early days yet, but I have this one question:

How long will it be before advertising regulations on children’s junk foods are extended to places where children will be given false "educational" material on the web?
You can bet this tactic is in use elsewhere on the web, where frankly pathetic people are paid to find sites like this to list links to the "educational" content they are providing to suck kids into their products.

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The UK government is on the verge of destroying independent midwifery. There is an excellent article on the issues and about the unique services provided by independent midwives. It is nothing to do with wanting private care over state provided care, it is all about giving birth back to women and their families rather than medicalizing all births without a second thought.

Both of our daughters were born at home in our living room in the same "home made" birth pools, in a terraced house in a city center. Amazingly most people consider home birth to be something odd rather than something done the way it is "meant to be". Birth is not something to fear, and it certainly shouldn’t involve mandatory hospitalization!

We were lucky enough to have fantastic independent midwives to support us and provide the information and caring environment my wife needed to have completely intervention free healthy births.

Please sign the online petition on the Prime Minister’s website to try to stop this daft regulation killing off independent midwifery completely by requiring insurance that just doesn’t exist for midwives, as the risk is deemed too high and yet independent midwives in general have better outcomes than hospitalized births.

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Thing is… I don’t see how useful it will be, especially in the UK because it looks like just a remote iTunes player for audio and video really. Notably:

1. There’s no DVD drive, so you can’t watch DVDs.
2. There’s no TV input (maybe it will come with USB) so you have no hard disk recording of TV/Satellite
3. There’s no mention of OS X or installing new software, so this makes adding something like EyeTV via USB to record normal TV quite unlikely
4. No SCART output. In fact there’s a list of “compatible TVs” which implies you can’t even use it with your normal TV.

So in the UK, unless you are willing to keep your clunky old DVD player, set top box, get an Apple TV and get a huge new TV, this thing is pretty useless.

Especially so in the UK where you still cannot buy films or TV shows from the iTunes music store.

What’s with buying anyway? iTMS should be offering RENTAL.

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