Posted by Patrick on October 8th, 2006
Saturday
Having gone 24 hours without any sort of local chemical fire, we decided to venture out (and luckily for us, 50 miles away from the town with the fire) to the house. And why not? We haven’t closed on it yet, but we’ve signed and initialed a few things, so we figured that earned us a look-around. We had hoped to run into some neighbors but none were out.
We checked out the yard post-rain storm (no muddiness or flooding) and the crawl space under the house (nice and dry) and peeked in some windows. We also tested the driveway for Celica Compatibility and that worked out well… although I think I’ll have to pull in and and back out very slowly as there’s a drop off at the end of the driveway. I fear I may leave some silver paint if I’m not careful. But it beats parking in an apartment complex where random people could ding your door.
Nerdiness
I spent some time backing up stuff to an external hard drive this weekend. I’d been using a second desktop to back up stuff, but I tend to leave it on all the time, and that tends to some dollars to our electric bill. By using a cable to plug in another hard drive, I only leave one machine on now.
For those of you who read my earlier post on iTunes, I switched back to version 6. The new features just weren’t’ worth it. All I want to do is listen to music, I shouldn’t have to fight with it.
Sunday
Today we started filling out the paper-work for our loan. There’s a lot of information that the bank wants. Luckily Kate’s on top of things in the organization department. My pre-Kate system of leaving all financial documents in a tall pile for months on end wouldn’t have worked well here. We also went up to the apartment people and gave them our “we’re moving out” notice.
Kate’s a quilting machine right now with her mad sewing skills.
Posted in iTunes |
3 Comments »
Posted by Patrick on September 23rd, 2006
Taking a momentary break from our streak of North Carolina posts here tonight. More posts on that subject in the future.
Tonight I’d like to talk about a program that I think is great, and at the same time, totally drives me nuts. I’ve spoken about the music playing program in the past. The recent release of version 7 seems like a good time to talk about it.
I downloaded it on the day it came out…. which is usually asking for trouble, but the features advertised made it pretty tempting. I’ve been using the program a lot during the day, now that I’m working from home.
What is Great
A few new features of this program are great. One moderately great thing is the new way the library source list is organized. Everything is separated out in an easy to read way. The number of unlistened podcasts is now displayed, which is kind of cool.
Another great thing is the once separate program Coverflow is now built right into iTunes. Being able to flip through music like this tends to make me listen to albums that I haven’t heard in a while, adding a visual element to the listening process. When Coverflow was a separate program, I blogged about it.
One other thing that I thought was cool was iTunes showing the cover art next to the list of songs for each album. This is pretty slick, and probably should have been in the program earlier on.
The last great thing is a backup feature that’s built in. Click the menu item, and iTunes will back up all your songs to DVD-R discs. For someone like me who has all their music on a hard disk (having long since sold most of the CD’s), this is nice to have.
What Drives Me Nuts
The Coverflow feature is great, but it also drives me nuts. It’s much slower now that it’s built into the iTunes program. The flipping is not as fluid, and it ends up showing blank boxes for albums without cover art associated with it, and that’s kind of lame. I guess it’s a camera in a cell phone. You’ve got two things, but neither work as well as they did when they were separate units. Or something like that.
Speaking of slow, man has this software slowed down. Scrolling through the list of songs takes at least a second to start after clicking*. It’s no so bad on the iBook, but on my Windows desktop it’s almost unusable with other programs running.
Another new feature, while ambitious, seems not-quite-ready to go. iTunes will find album cover-art for your songs, which is very cool. This makes the Coverflow feature better, but iTunes often makes wild guesses on just what cover should go with what album. At one point it was downloading the covers of Beatles albums and displaying them with Black Sabbath tunes. I don’t need that kind of confusion in my life.
Another thing that drives me nuts – instead of attaching the cover art it downloads to the individual song file, it creates a separate folder on your computer and makes a file for each album cover. And, not a .jpg or .bmp file, which I can deal with. It’s an .itc file. I tried to open this album art file in Photoshop, and was promptly mocked by the software. These many extra files add unnecessary clutter to my computer, takes up more space then necessary, and if you move the music files to another computer, the album artwork doesn’t come with it. Weak.
More Great Then Nuts
iTunes is still, to me, the way to go for playing music. I guess the way its organized is the most appealing thing to me. It feels like Excel (a program I use frequently for my work, far above and beyond accounting and goofy pie charts) in the way it arranges music into columns and rows. Also it’s ability to easily stream (think “broadcast”) the music from the hard drives in my desktop to the laptop wirelessly is super sweet and super easy to use.
As for as upgrading, I’d say if you’re still using version 6, stick with it for now and wait for Apple to put out some kind of 7.xx update. Hopefully some bugs would be worked out and the program will have sped up a bit.
*Really, it doesn’t drive me nuts. It’s a slight aggrivation in my otherwise super-easy middle-class life.
Posted in iTunes |
1 Comment »
Posted by Patrick on February 3rd, 2006
For those of you out there who listen to podcasts, I came across a new one this morning. West-coast radio station KCRW has a good one, a daily radio program called Morning Becomes Eclectic. It’s a radio show where musicians and bands come in and play live in-studio kind of music.
The most recent podcast featured a band called The Elected. They were pretty good, and now that I’ve downloaded the podcast file, I have an mp3 file of their live recording.
I’ve got a large stash of birthday iTunes gift cards (thanks Kristen!), and new music from something like this might be a good way to spend it. Regular radio is kind of limiting when it comes to playing new music…. lots of the same old stuff (which is sometimes good) and these days rarely anything revolutionary. Local station WBRU might be an exception – they play new and different things occasionally.
The KCRW podcast page is pretty sweet, and links to a few other shows I listen to semi-regularly like Left, Right and Center, The Business, and The Treatment. All good stuff. You don’t need an iPod to listen to these shows, but the free iTunes software is a pretty easy way to get the songs and listen to them on your computer.
Posted in iTunes |
2 Comments »
Posted by Patrick on January 14th, 2006
This posting won’t apply to most of you, since it’s very Apple-centric, but it’s something so cool, I had write about it.
I like music, and have been feeling good about music lately, probably due to the iPod. Together, Kate and I have amassed quite a collection.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t listen to every song, but the variety and the instantness of digizited music is pretty freaking sweet. In fact, rare is the day when I pull a CD out of a case and put it into some kind of player. That leads to one of the downsides of the whole non-physical-media thing… the non-physicalness of it. Cover art and lyric sheets use to be an enjoyable part of the music listening process. Now, when you buy a song online, or rip a CD and put it away, you don’t get as much of the visual connection with an album.
As it turns out, others feel the same way. This guy made this program called CoverFlow which allows you to browse through your music based on album cover.
It loads the images of the album covers from your own music collection (and grabs them from Amazon.com’s images). You then use the right and left arrow keys to move through the images, as if you were flipping through a collection of records. Double clicking on the album loads the music in the iTunes player.
It’s still a beta program, so sometimes it loads the incorrect music, so hopefully the program creator will update it. It’s also Mac-only, so Windows users are out-of-luck I think. A helpful program when you’re not sure what to listen to.
Posted in iTunes |
3 Comments »
Posted by Patrick on October 17th, 2003
Caution: Nerdy Post Ahead:I know I talked about Macs in the last post, but I didn’t consider it nerdy because there were cats and whales involved.
The new version of Itunes just came out, and now it works on Windows. It now allows me to wirelessly stream music from my Mac to the laptop. So that means I don’t have to fill up the laptop with lots of music, and I can now sit outside in the cold and listen to music over the wireless waves that eminate from our living room.
In other nerd news… a demo for the PC version of Halo just came out. Halo is a mighty fine xbox game that came out a while back, and held me in it’s addictive clutches for a couple of months. Downloading it right now…
So I plan on getting my camera warmed up and posting photos of Kates’s most recent stained glass project. High Quality! Crazy skills!
Happy Weekend, Rockland-Ave viewers.
Posted in iTunes |
Comments Off
