ESPN360 and the iPhone

Notice I didn't say ESPN360 on the iPhone - for that you'll have to look elsewhere. But for someone like me, whose Comcast internet means no ESPN360 access, I just found out my iPhone was the key to unlocking the online sports streaming service.

Since ESPN has obstinately decided to use the cable TV model on the web - charge the providers, not the customers - those of us who get our Internet through a non-participating ISP (and for all I dislike about Comcast, I can't blame them for not buying into this horrible precedent of an online business model) can't access the Worldwide Leader's online live video.

The iPhone is no help on the go - as far as I know, there's no way to watch the video on the device. But navigate to espn360.com using AT&T's 3G (or Edge, I imagine) service and ESPN sees you as qualified. If you have a free myESPN account (or if you sign up) you can then click "Remote Access" to set your username as someone who can use the service. Then at home using a non-360 ISP, log in to ESPN and start watching.

New personal rule: when I'm cold and want to check the temperature, make sure the weather app on my iPhone isn't set to display the Los Angeles conditions on opening.

nice touch, Apple

On iTunes AppStore today, all links work except one: when I try to see "All Free Apps" I get an error message saying the store is unavailable.

Looks like somebody wants their commission.

damn

Unexpectedly, my external hard drive quit on me the other day (I suppose it never happens expectedly, but I've certainly had more warning of an impending drive failure). One minute, it was cranking along, saving a few episodes of the BBC version of "Blue Planet". Then, after a restart (not a crash, I just decided to shut down and restart the computer) all of a sudden I'm getting messages about the drive not being readable, and for a while the computer wouldn't even see it plugged into the Firewire port.

I ran Diskwarrior, which gave me bad news - it couldn't repair the drive due to serious drive error. It found all the files which had been on the drive, but when I tried to backup what I wanted to save, all I got where copy errors due to a bad disk.

This was a 150 GB Firewire drive, where I'd been keeping all my media files. I'm not too worried about losing some TV episodes I've already watched and all our wedding photos are backed up.

But it was where I was keeping all my music. I can recreated a lot of it from our two iPods, but I'll lose a decent part of the library. Most of our photos are on the laptop's drive, but there were a few photos I had on the now-defunct drive. Also a few other random folders of stuff I wanted to keep but didn't use often, so kept on there to save disk space.

Our personal photos are on the laptop drive, so we've got them, and I've got another, smaller, external hard drive I backup most of our important documents. I didn't have enough storage space to back up the drive which failed; I got it to be a backup. I've suffered through three major hard drive crashes in the past five or six years. None of them are pleasant.

This spring the drive in our laptop failed. Luckily I managed to salvage it enough to back up what I wanted before sending it off to Apple for a replacement. I think last week our extended warranty ended, and the laptop is acting up again (or is it my imagination?) enough to make me worried for my data.

Time for a new drive. I don't want to keep an army of drive to backup my backups (and I don't want to pay for them, either) but every time a drive fails it reminds me what a pain in the ass it is.