Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Well, it’s official — virgin installs of Tiger don’t include any trace of Internet Explorer. Good thing too – it took me this long to convince the powerful ones at work that we should stop even including it in the Dock. Moving on…
Recently missed the season finale of a favorite TV show due to a Tivo screw-up. None of my friends had a copy of the show, so decided it was time to figure out what most 17-year-olds already know: Everything is on BitTorrent. Unsurprisingly, found that the BitTorrent world is somewhat biased towards Windows users, and that usage instructions don’t come with downloads. With a bit of research and experimentation, I was able to pull all the pieces together to download, decode, and burn the show to disc from the Mac. Decided to post notes here to save other 40-somethings the pain of figuring all of this stuff out.
Continue reading “BitTorrent, XviD, UnRarX, iDVD”
Being one of those fools with more MP3s than will fit on any iPod ever made, I’ve never used iPod/iTunes in sync mode – I’ve been more than content to drag tracks and playlists in manually, remove them when ready to move on. Listening to podcasts changed that dynamic. Unlike music, podcasts aren’t something you want to keep around — listen once or twice and discard.
But suddenly there was a need to manually update my “Podcast” playlist on a near-daily basis, which meant a several-step process: Delete tracks from the iTunes playlist (and from the Library, via the Delete Selected Tracks AppleScript), ditto on the iPod. Populate the iTunes list manually, drag its contents over… the process was seriously harshing my mellow. The patient’s passages needed to be unobstructed by food particles and other debris; there had to be a free flow from RSS reader to iTunes to iPod, effortless. Discovering that NetNewsWire 2.0 could be made to automatically add enclosures to a specific playlist in iTunes partially mitigated the hassle, but still required deleting old content before downloading so that old and new didn’t get all mixed up.
Then I discovered what most iPod users have probably known all along – when an iPod is plugged in and you access iTunes’ preferences, you can tell it to just synchronize certain lists. Keen. But when I did that for the Podcast list and sync’d, was amazed to see that the rest of the content on the iPod had been wiped. Not only that, but the contents of the iPod were grayed out in iTunes. Allowing sync to take over meant that everything from now on was going to have to be sync’d – no more manual updates. Which meant that if I also wanted music, I’d have to create new playlists for the purpose and tell them to sync as well.
Funny – this is how the iPod was “meant” to be used, but in almost three years I had never seen iPod sync in action. Not sure I like it, but it’s workable. Can’t help but think there’s got to be a better way. I’d prefer to stay in manual mode, but be allowed to designate specific lists as sync-able.
And now the plot is thickening. Some sites are taking such a huge bandwidth hit from podcast downloads that they’re turning to the distributed model of BitTorrent. That makes good sense, but to keep the flow intact, RSS readers that handle attachments will need to gain the ability to handle BitTorrent files, or pass the job over to the BitTorrent client, then move the decompressed archive back over to iTunes. Small pieces loosely joined, sure, but someone’s got to do the joining. Meanwhile, I’ve stopped listening to Slashdot news and a few others.
While we’re talking smooth integration, someone’s got to solve the problem of sites like philosophytalk, which only cast in Real or other proprietary formats.
Bonus horror: Downloading some fresh casts tonight, when the iPod totally locked up (as Dorothy Parker famously uttered, “What fresh hell is this?”). Then I realized that iTunes, NetNewsWire, and the Finder had all locked up as well, a tangle that ultimately turned into a forced reboot. FireWire bus problems are pretty much an uptime kill on any platform, but damn, that was egregious.
Update: I don’t think the problem was the FireWire bus after all. Something deeper happened, probably on the motherboard. This morning there’s a thin blue line running vertically down the left side of the screen, about 2″ from the left bezel. A reboot didn’t make it go away. Looks like it may be time for this one to go to the shop.
We’ve received the first replacement server in our coming move to an all-Mac campus: The QuickTime Streaming Server we use to webcast events and event archives is no longer running on Windows, but on Panther Server from a dual 2.5 GHz XServe with 2GB of memory. Any future bottlenecks will be at the NIC or switch, not due to I/O. The machine is dreamy, and the XServes really do look great in a stack. :)
Was looking forward to using the QTSS Publisher utility you get with OS X Server for batch/automated hinting of files, generation of .qtl files, etc., but was sorely disappointed — Publisher is really geared for environments that don’t already have a workflow system in place. Assumes too much, and isn’t very configurable. But soon discovered I now have access to the qtmedia and qtref command-line tools (not available for Linux or Windows), so spent most of the day writing a shell script to batch re-write metadata, generate .qtl reference files, add hint tracks (our broadcast software doesn’t hint the files at run-time), and relocate movies to a final resting place on the streamer. In with Flynn.
The script is available for download here.
Amazing screensaver for the Mac called Freefall — tracks data, motion, and areas of coverage of 850 sattellites in real-time over spinning, zooming, panning 3-D renderings of the earth and continents. The quick video preview on the web site doesn’t come anywhere close to doing it justice — the experience is immersive and somewhat psychedelic. Wild to be able to visualize just how many satellites are orbiting at all times, and how scarily close their path vectors come. Satellite data updated over the internet as needed.
The satellites are spinning,
a better day is breaking.
The galaxies are waiting
For planet Earth’s awakening.
(Sun Ra)
Hell froze over, and my boss decided to switch from Windows to Mac, got himself a shiny new PowerBook. After one week: “It’s like I’ve been stuck in a lousy marriage for 20 years and finally met a decent woman.”
He wishes to make clear that he is not, in fact, stuck in a lousy marriage (in case his wife should ever read this).
And now, after the umpteenth drive into the ditch with Windows-based hacks and system failures, and interminable battles with spyware and virii followed by lengthy and tedious reconstructions, our sysadmin has announced plans to ditch all Windows servers and workstations on the J-School campus and going all OS X — a massive purchase and conversion planned for this summer. Should be an interesting challenge, but enough is enough. We all have limits.
David writes: “Handy with a soldering iron?” Apparently you can overclock the Mac Mini. But you’ll also want to have small thumbs — just look at the size of these jumpers.
A good read at Salon about less-obvious aspects of the Mac Mini strategy, or more accurately, why the whole Switch campaign didn’t work. About the differences between Mac people and PC people:
Mac people love their computers on a personal, emotional level. Windows people, on the other hand, prefer to think of their machines as office tools, gadgets no more special than the stapler. Windows users don’t expect much in the way of quality, beauty or elegance from their machines; if they did, they’d be Mac people.
and:
You do your taxes on your PC. You pay homage to John Coltrane on your iPod.
Target disk mode is the greatest thing since sliced bread — connect two Macs with a FireWire cable, reboot one while holding the T key, and its hard drive appears on the desktop of the other, ready for data transfer. When I got the iMac a couple of weeks ago, decided to do my usual Carbon Copy Cloner stuff and blast a fully loaded OS and set of apps onto it (not sourced from my old Mac), then use target disk mode to load all of my user data on top of that. The process worked, but took a while and involved some pain (not worth going into).
Turns out, I’m lame.
Because I cloned it without ever booting it to “factory defaults” first, I never saw the new Setup Assistant Apple has apparently started shipping with all new Macs. Could have saved myself a few hours. When Amy’s Mini arrived yesterday, the Assistant appeared before the Desktop loaded — “Have an old Mac? Want to copy all your apps, user data and settings over? Plug in a FW cable, restart the old Mac with the T key down, and go have a smoke.” Well, it didn’t say that exactly, but something like it. Setup Assistant is basically a user-friendly intelligent wrapper around target disk mode. A Girl Friday for Mac migrations.
An hour later, the Mini was a nearly exact clone of her old machine – new OS and system apps, old user data, previously installed apps, and settings. Everything works flawlessly.
The Mini is even better IRL than pictured. Silent, small, fast, cheap, and beautifully designed. Apple hit one out of the park. It’s hard to get Amy excited about technology (she was talking about the plants in our yard while I was opening the carton), but after a morning using it, she’s totally in love with this box. And we have finally achieved a minor goal we set several months ago – a silent home office (it’s incredible how much noise two older PowerMacs can generate, and how that drone can get on your nerves in a subtle, background-y sort of way over time). The difference is night and day.
When I bought the new iMac last week, also got a copy of VirtualPC with Windows XP — a complete Windows machine running in emulation in an OS X window. Don’t need Windows access often, except to verify that a site I’m working on isn’t too broken in Windows. But when I do, I have to haul an old laptop out of the garage, clutter up the desk, wait a year for it to boot… VirtualPC is a bit of a dog, as expected — a lot of math to turn all the bits inside out, but this machine has 2GB of memory, and VirtualPC really isn’t that bad. It actually boots faster than that laptop does, so there.
Odd – you can copy/paste between operating systems, but you have to toggle between Ctrl-C in Windows and Cmd-C on the Mac side. Kind of like standing with one leg in one country and the other in a…
Funny – literally five minutes after launching it for the first time, got a call from a client needing to know how to configure Outlook Express to work with the birdhouse mail server. “Funny you should ask,” I said, firing up OE in a VM while choking back tears (of laughter, joy, disgust).
