As some may know, I have an iPod. And while some people (cue GrantRantTM) may find them not much to write home about, I think they're a pretty damn good portable music player.
As a consequence of having an iPod, without having to resort to all kinds of technical tom-foolery, you're forced to use iTunes in order to load music of any kind onto it. And where the iPod does a damn good job of being a music player, iTunes does the complete opposite as a media player (especially in windows). It's dog-slow, frequently stuffs up meta-data and it's video playback often bogs down a pc so badly it sounds more like a stutterer trying to recite the lyrics to Theophilus Thistler.
Oh yes, and it also has a really annoying habit of randomly bringing itself to the front when the program is minimised or, even better, randomly restarting itself after you've closed it down.
Why do these quirks matter you ask?
Last week, when my mouse decided to up and die on me for no apparent reason, I was forced to try and discover how to navigate a point and click interface, without the ability to point or click. It was quite fun.
While Windows is possible (although painful) to navigate by using a keyboard, some programs which don't want to behave with the OS, don't let you use all of the features you could otherwise access with a mouse. iTunes is one of those programs (shocking I know for a piece of software written by Apple. Who would have thought...). I needed to download an individual podcast to take to work (a Chaser broadcast if you must know).
iTunes won't let you tab to navigate to the pane where you can select individual items to download by using the keyboard. The only way to download it that I could discover was by switching on the option hidden in a series of submenu's that tells iTunes to automatically download a new podcast when it was available. So I switch that on, download the required podcast, shut down iTunes and head off to work.
So what you ask? Where is all of this going?
Remember where I mentioned earlier that iTunes has a really annoying habit of restarting itself after you've closed it down? Well, after I went to work, it did. And seeing that it the option switched on to automatically download new podcasts, it proceeded to do so. Now normally this would not be a problem, but last week I had subscribed to a HD video podcast for curiosities sake to see how well it outputted from my iPod onto my television. So the randomly restarted iTunes proceeded to grab the latest episode.
And the one before that.
And the one before that.
And the one before that.
And the one before that.
And the..... well - I'm sure you get the drift by now.
These video's average a file size of between 350MB to 470MB. And seeing as they're stored on an akamai server, they're being downloaded at a really fast rate. How fast? Well, in the time I was at work, iTunes managed to download 10GB's worth of video. That's right - 10GB.
Not surprisingly, that exceeded my remaining quota for the month. Itunes did this in 7 hours. So, since last Thursday, I've been shaped at 64k until December 01. So f@ck you iTune for doing this to me. You and your sh!th@use Apple software can go scr@w yourselves.
