Month: June 2005

hardware muddling

Following up on my pondering, I went with an enclosure for the 120 Gb drive, so the total for a portable backup store comes out to about US$80 (the enclosure was $19 but s&h was $15: feh).

Now the next gap to fill is some memory for the aging iMac SE. It needs 8ns PC100 SDRAM, as much as will fit. It has two slots, currently occupied by a 64 Mb stick to augment the 128 Mb it shipped with. So it looks like a 512 Mb stick is the way to go if I want to breathe a little more life into it. Perhaps two if it can be done. 640 Mb (512 + 128) will be a lot better than the current 192 Mb.
Continue reading “hardware muddling”

idiot blogger (he said it, not me)

No, not a confession. I was just catching up on my feeds and learned that a tempest had boiled out of its teapot and been stuffed back in by the time I woke up. Seems someone accused Apple of inserting DRM into user-contributed podcasts, when in fact they didn’t understand that AAC (Advanced Audio Content) is not necessarily DRM.

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Podcasting is the New Napster

No need to leave comments there: I think he got the message. But it doesn’t help copyfighting to go off half-cocked. Not does it help people embrace this as a new channel to distribute or discover new works.
Continue reading “idiot blogger (he said it, not me)”

decisions

The 120 Gb drive I picked up on eBay the other week arrived today. But it doesn’t look like I’ll be using it anytime soon. I was planning on replacing the internal 12 Gb drive in my aging G3/G4 Blue & White with an 80 Gb drive and then adding the 120 as an external in a FireWire enclosure. But the 80 Gb drive won’t work reliably in the B&W: at 133 MHz, it’s a bit too fast for it, since the chassis was built when 33 MHz was reasonable. So I put the 80 Gb drive back in the enclosure, put the 120 on the shelf, and am preparing to wipe clean the internal drive to make what use I can of it.

Do I throw $35 at this box to add an ATA card that can handle these better drives? Or do I get another enclosure for the 120 Gb drive?

I’m leaning toward B, since that allows me to move the drives around as needed. And when the mini or possible a new iMac should arrive, I’ll be able to use them all with that.
Continue reading “decisions”

HEADS UP if you mount your iTunes music as a share

It looks like iTunes doesn’t grok the way I handle my music library. I have the library stored on a system with more disk space and then automount the share. The mount point is then symlinked to my ~/Music directory.

It doesn’t see any of it. My iPod is now empty was well as a result of syncing it up just a little bit ago. There was a prompt to re-associate my iPod with this library but I’m not sure that was where I went wrong.

Interestingly, I just copied two files into the Library (the two most recent Beethoven symphonies from the BBC) and they show up in iTunes.

Curiouser and curiouser, there is a ‘Previous iTunes Libraries’ directory in iTunes . . . . and moving Previous iTunes Libraries/iTunes 4 Music Library to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library seems to fix everything.

Fingers crossed for now. Now to see if my iPod gets refilled . . . .

<updated> Hmm, it looks like the automount is the problem: iTunes is complaining about not being able to find some tracks, but “Get Info” reveals them (and I note that the share is being mounted in the process, thanks to Growl’s alerts).

This could be pretty irritating: a workaround would be keep different libraries (as iPhoto does with albums) but that’s not possible.

Ben recruits

Ben Hammersley reminds us that the internets don’t care about the Supreme Court.

The curse of the missing clause:

Declaring filesharing illegal across the net because it’s illegal in the US is like declaring the web broken because it’s censored in China. All it means is that people in the US wanting to write filesharing apps and make money from them will just have to move somewhere warm and cheap and do it from there.

While developers in the US are being hamstrung by their courts, and their counterparts in Europe are about to have software patents kick the chair out from under them, the developers in the warm and cheap places are getting busy. If you really care that your software was written in the US, then the Grokster case is quite a big deal. If not, you just shrug and move on. The rest of the world’s a big place. They make software there too.

Not the first he has suggested that rest of the world beckons clueful people. Does the New Colossus’s offer still stand but as guide to the exit?

“Give me
your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your
teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden
door!”

Continue reading “Ben recruits”