Finally, the second episode of ‘Ungeheurlich eschoofierend’ is here. Timo and I talk about coffee, Iron Sky and other stuff.
Get it while it’s hot!

Apple’s Home Sharing enables you to share all the content aggregated within the iTunes on one PC. It’s like… well, exactly like iTunes Match for your wifi. You really don’t need it once you use iTunes Match. Or do you?!

Yes. Unfortunately, Apple couldn’t get all the German TV Show people on board with adding Movies and Shows to iTunes Match. Or whatever reason there is. Hence, a German and an US-Apple TV differ from one another.

US

German

As I mentioned above, there’s ‘Home Sharing’ to help German Apple TV customers out. They can watch TV Shows they bought via iTunes just like they did pre-iOS 5.1. But as of now just in theory, because Home Sharing doesn’t work since iOS 5.1 and iTunes 10.6. Clearly, it’s a bug that will be fixed, but it is a pretty unsatisfying situation to go all-Apple but being kept from watching TV Shows via the Apple TV because the feature the Apple TV is depending on to a large extent is broken. I just wanted to sketch out the current situation.

I just read ‘The End of the Internet as we know it’ by Johnny Haeusler and ‘Wir, die Netz-Kinder’ by Piotr Czerski (both in German). These two articles made me think. We have come a long way, the Internet is part of our life (Piotr does a good job of explaining who ‘we’ are).
But what’s next? ‘Where are we heading?’, Johnny wonders. Are we one step away from a divided Internet? One that’s like Facebook and offers bite-sized, easy-to-digest content? And one for the outlaws, hackers, Linux users? The thing is: Will the first one have free speech? Or are we striving towards an even brighter future with consumers living in happy symbiotic relationships with each other and towards companies? Or some dark future with google finally blackmailing everybody with all the information about them?

At first, we relly should recognize that we have come a long way. Today, technology is so highly developed that it enables anybody and everybody to do anything.

One person equipped with some gadgets (yes, I imagine this with Apple devices, come and get me) and a laptop can write texts, take photos, make videos, record audio and produce all of that into a highly polished end product. On the go.

With Spotify finally coming to Germany (I’m so excited!), music is just… available. One week into using Spotify, it feels like a hundred years ago that I actually put a CD in a CD-ROM drive and transferred the data onto a harddisk. Man, we really put in some effort back then. Spotify claims their product is simply better than piracy, and they’re right.

Apple democratizes technology by making it accessable for people who were afraid of PCs. Looking at grandparents using FaceTime with their grandchildren, no one can argue that. They ‘dumb’ iOS down to do so one could argue, but that’s what widespread adoption requires. And considering all the pro users who use their iPads for thousands and thousands of specific tasks, it doesn’t seem to hurt that much. Stephen Hackett knows what I’m saying.
(Wanna complain about the conditions at Foxconn? Read this and see why you’re wrong.)

On a larger scale, the Internet helps people to do really huge and important things. The Arab Spring shows that. Have you heard of what Telecomix does?
There’s gotta be something about this whole Internet thingy. The Internet and the technology we have today takes away everything that once stood between us and information, and therefore exchange, development and learning. Everything is affected.

Information is just all around us. Just like the force, but everyone is able to use it. When I’m looking for information, I automatically press ctrl+T and start typing. My browser opens a new tab and searches for whatever my text input is. It’s like in gaming, when you don’t have to think about which keys to press to make move xyz. If you’re not a gamer: That’s like not having to think about how to gear up or down while driving a car. Its like that, just with information. Its accessible, it s just there. Ideally, it appears in its purest state: linked, so one can reconstruct it.

I recap: The Internet combined with the devices and technology we have today means: Producing and consuming information times infinity. The sky is the limit!

Of course, and maybe that’s the most important thing to realize right now: The Internet can be controlled. Just look at China, or the conditions Telecomix fought and fights against mentioned above. By default it isn’t, but it can be ‘bad’. It can become an instrument of suppression. But just if someone makes it so. And people do, obviously. So, adding a little Internet to everything doesn’t make everything better necessarily.

To ensure that it does, we have to keep working for a free and independent Internet. There will be a new ACTA/SOPA/PIPA.

I found this on Facebook. Chapeau, Facebook. Normally, you'd expect something of this quality linked on Twitter.

I’ve always wanted to, and now am, doing a podcast! Timo and me talk about… tech in general, and some other stuff - yeah, about Apple, too. It’s in German, but I have no idea what percentage of visitors on my blog is from abroad, so I announce it here anyway.

I’ll dedicate a blogpost to every new episode and its contents, but on the sidebar there’s a new link, ‘Podcast’. You’ll find all the episodes there, in one place.
If you’re already sold and wanna feed a feed to your podcasting app: Audio RSS feed.
If you prefer listening to podcasts via iTunes: This way. You can also leave us a rating or a review there, we’d love that.

In the first episode, we talk about iMessage, some iPhone history, accents and our nonexistent knowledge about newsgroups, usenet and the early days of the Internet in general. Enjoy!