Author Archive
Itunes match – almost very good
February 3, 2012 | 
Author I signed up for Itunes match as it seemed a quick and easy way to get all old ripped songs that were in the Itunes library in higher 256kbps versions and essentially ‘backed up’ within Apple’s infrastructure. When you switch it on it checks your library and finds out which songs are already in the Itunes store and matches them to yours. You can then update yours to the higher rate versions. Tracks which aren’t in the catalogue are uploaded. It is a bit of a faff to update them as you have to delete the songs out of your library that are matched and redownload them. If you switch on icloud status in the view options then you can order by whether the album is matched or not quite easily. Using a smart playlist isn’t very helpful as when I tried it the delete option wasn’t present so I couldn’t just delete them all and re-download them in bulk. Out of about 5000 tracks 3500 were matched which wasn’t too bad. The matching is a bit inconsistent as often whole albums were matched apart from one track or partial albums were matched. This was annoying as it means either not bothering to update them to the higher bit rate or faffing around with re-ripping or hoping a re-running the match would find them.
Updating and re-downloading took a while. I chose to put songs into the trash so I could retrieve them later if there was an issue. Luckily only one track wouldn’t download for some reason. I was using Itunes and playing other songs at the time so I wonder if that was the issue.
When re-ripping unmatched tracks I discovered an annoyance. Re-ripped tunes are not automatically uploaded to the cloud even if they are a higher bit rate. I chose ‘replace’ when re-doing them so I’d expect itunes match to do just that as sometimes re-ripped tracks were then marked ‘matched’. In the view options there isn’t a way of seeing what version is in the cloud without deleting the local copy. If it is the higher rate version then you’ll see the bit rate stay the same when the download icon appears. If it is lower then you ‘ll see it change to the lower rate. To get the higher rate saved it means having to delete the old album then re-rip so that itunes thinks it is new and will upload the higher rate version. Total nuisance and to me unnecessary.
Itunes match really needs the following enhancements: option to update cloud version to higher bit rate when songs re-ripped, easy one click ‘update and download matched songs with higher bit rate versions’, easy way of seeing at a glance whether there is a difference between the tracks stored locally and the cloud, manual match when matched albums are missing the odd track.
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Automation is cool with ifttt
I have been noodling around with ifttt for a few weeks. It is a great little doodad for setting up simple automated events. If this happens then do that. It seems an ideal way of bringing together multiple channels of activity in one easy interface. So far I have done a simple one to tweet when the temperature is below freezing. That has been working well so I thought I’d try something else.
I have now added another to tweet when I update my blog to compare its performance to twitterfeed which has been flaky of late. It does have a wordpress channel in it but it uses xml-rpc which I’ve never been that fond of. I used the feed channel instead which should be safer as it just uses the standard rss feed.
Let’s see what happens…
Reverting to the old tweetdeck
The new version of tweetdeck is hideous to use. Simple things have become virtually impossible to do. Luckily there is a solution! I followed these instructions and downloaded adobe air, the old tweetdeck air file and bingo! You just have to remember to uninstall any old versions of tweetdeck you have lying around otherwise you will have a problem. Worked first time for me and I’m happily on the older tweetdeck.
I tried seesmic but the silverlight plugin tries to install it in the downloads folder for some unknown reason. I did copy it into applications which worked for a while but then went wonky. It has all the features of tweetdeck but the user interface looks awful in comparison and it is very slow. Shame really as if it looked like tweetdeck and had its features it would be great. It also had a smaller footprint than tweetdeck – it can be a bit of a bloater. I also tried echofon which if it had 2 tabs side by side it would have been fine.
Hopefully tweetdeck will have the sense to release an update which has all the functionality restored that they have removed.
Getting isync back on lion
For some reason apple has removed isync from lion. For those of us without an iphone this is rather annoying. I have used isync for years. It sort of generally works ok. I tried syncmate but that was useless as it only works with s40 nokia phones and my N8 is an S60. I tried it but it just hung when trying to sync. I uninstalled it and then later it popped up to remind me I hadn’t sync’ed! Not impressed with an application that leaves bits of itself lurking.
I had a quick google and I found this article on nokia support forums which had a solution.
I downloaded the sync from there. It is the last version that was made. I then went onto nokia’s site and got their add in for the N8.
After pairing my phone via bluetooth I loaded up isync and copied it into the applications folder. I then loaded the nokia package. After that I added the N8 as a device back into isync. It worked perfectly! All the calendar items I had have popped into the new calendar. Contacts have appeared in address book (never use it). I have no idea why apple have dropped it.
Rebuilding a digital life from the pieces
I hate it when a computer dies. Everything is backed up (theoretically) but it is still a trauma to go and get back everything especially when you are updating operating systems at the same time. You also find out any holes in the back up regime such as slow restores. Even on a fast connection some of the restores are taking hours when they should be done much faster. Nothing you can do but set them off and wait!
First up was to get Itunes library back. Need music to suffer the rest of the hassle! That wasn’t too bad as I happened to have copied off the library onto a removable drive (wish I’d done my photo library at the same time…) so it was easy to import into Itunes. Music on and now for the rest….
Lion is horrible when you first start it. No drive icons on the desktop so you have this feeling of being lost in the ether. Took a while to find them in finder preferences. Feels more sensible when you have them back. Loaded the tablet driver with tablet scroll mouse. Things started to feel more normal again. Got most of the software back on that was missing.
Email was more tricky. For some reason your user’s library area isn’t shown in finder so my cunning plan to restore my local folders straight back into the new thunderbird profile was scotched. I had to resort to noodling into terminal and doing a unix copy to achieve the same thing. Works fine but it would have been so much easier had I been able to see the library folder. You can see it with an option click sometimes but within a program save dialog that isn’t going to be available.
Worst problem I had was stored passwords and finding out some bugger has changed Xmarks so you can’t back up passwords without using lastpass or somesuch. It wasn’t working at all and I had this horrible feeling I was going to lose all stored passwords which would have been a disaster. Luckily firefox sync is actually included in later firefoxes. It used to suck. Now it doesn’t. Set up the laptop which has a copy of everything on it as I’d been using xmarks. Synced with FF. Added the new computer and bingo! All saved passwords and bookmarks etc returned.
App store is quite good for finding software but it seems to be more expensive than just getting the same product from a company’s website. Not been able to find exact replacements for some things.
New tweetdeck is awful. No reply all and the block user and other user functions are two clicks instead of one. Also it seems to have stopped loading the last 200 tweets when you start it up so there are large gaps. I thought this had been fixed ages ago. It had but they have put it back! Growl doesn’t seem to be picking up tweetdeck or thunderbird as potential notification sources for some reason. I forget how I got it to work before as it was such a long time ago.
Latest Iphoto has some facial recognition guff in it. You can’t turn it off. It just slows it down. I quit Iphoto while it was still doing its facial scan so it crashed immediately when I tried to start it up again. Crashed several times until I rebooted the whole machine. Then it would start and restored its windows. So frustrating that it has features I do not want, that cause problems and that cannot be switched off. I sent a report to apple with a request for an off button… I may move to aperture instead. It has the same facial recognition features but you can switch them off. Seeing as Iphoto though a car light cluster was a face it really is useless anyway.
New keyboard is much nicer though. I went for the wired as I can’t be bothered with bluetooth keyboards or mice. Flat battery at an awkward moment. No thanks. Not even unpacked the new mouse. Used the old one I had from the G5 which I didn’t use either. Tablet driver isn’t always loaded fast enough so sometimes when you first start using it there is a delay before it picks it up. New screen is nice and whole machine performance is really good which I’d expect from a quad core compared to an ancient G5…got another 4GB of memory to go in. 4 memory slots and no need for matched memory either so it is a lot less awkward. Apple wanted a phenomenal £160 for another 4GB. Macupdate wants about £30 for the same.
I hope this mac lasts 7 years. I don’t think I could face having to do it all again much sooner!
It never rains but it pours….
As many people have noticed, bad luck and misfortune seem to have a nasty habit of clumping into a big fat old black swan. Black swans are rare but disastrous events that seem unlikely but actually happen more often than you realise. I’ve had such a week. 2 boiler failures, wonky mobile, dead imac, wonky laptop, backup system playing up. All in the same week. I am now waiting for a moose to fall out of the sky..
You can make contingency plans that work for single failures or even a couple but where are the plans when literally everything goes wrong? Can you survive the ‘worst case scenario’ if several happen together? If you do backups can you get your data back. I discovered that yes I can but it is much slower for some reason than it should be. Trying to retrieve several GB of data at 70k a second or even 700k a second on a connection that easily manages several Mbit is very frustrating. The irony was I copied off my Itunes library only recently and almost copied the photos too, but didn’t. Such a silly mistake. Another lesson in following your instincts!
Roll on 2012. Things can only get better.
Foscam webcam – easy peasy.
My old dlink webcam gave up the ghost after many years reliable service. I had a quick look around for another dlink but they were kind of pricey. I’d never heard of foscam before. I chose ones of those mainly because they were supported by Security Spy which is the webcam recording software I have used happily for many years. I ordered the foscam and then did absolutely noting about setting it up until today. I wish I’d done it earlier. It was so easy!
I plugged it into the mains and plugged it into the nearby network switch. Checked on my router to see which ip address it had picked up. It had found one without a problem. The dlink was more problematic as it was by default set to a fixed ip so you often had to mess about changing the subnet on a machine to find it and then alter it to be the same subnet as your main network was using. No such fuss with the foscam. I reserved the ip for it in the router control panel so it wouldn’t wander around. That’s the beauty of dhcp. The set up cd has a doodad for finding the ip of the webcam. I didn’t use it as the cd wouldn’t read properly. The software is also available from foscam’s site so wouldn’t have been a problem if I had ended up needing it.
Setting it up with Security Spy was straight forward. A similar model was already supported so I chose that and it found it quite quickly. Motion capture works fine and without much messing around.The ptz function in Security Spy seems to be backwards so you have to remember to move it the opposite way round.
The only annoying thing with the foscam is that when you are in the web interface for it a lot of the changes mean the webcam reboots. It makes it more time consuming than it should be. I haven’t updated the firmware away from what was already on it. I will see how reliable this one is first. If it works, leave it alone! The PTZ functions are quite cool but I have it with a fixed field of view so I set it to stay still and also not to return to centre when rebooted. I also switched off the wireless interface and added a password to the admin control panel as it is initially blank. The interface is very similar to the dlink one so it was easy to work with. Works fine on a mac with firefox too. It has other features such as mail alert, motion capture alarm and dynamic dns amongst others.
This webcam also has night vision so it will be interesting to see what lurks after dark.
Carpe diem
I’ve been reading a lot of David Du Chemin recently and this has made me a bit philosophical. Why do we kill so much time? It’s all we have that is irreplaceable. Money we can replace. Minutes murdered through procrastination, unsatisfying jobs and pointless tv can never be brought back to life. In his articles he mentions one hour a day adding up to 45 days in a year. That is a lot of time to be productive or spend doing an activity you enjoy.
Whatever you have been putting off – do it.
Whatever you have been fearing – do it.
If you have a large project in mind – start. Starting something is the hardest part. Start it badly, but start!
Toppy vs Icecrypt
My dear old Toppy is getting a bit old and worn. It is nearly 5 and has been a pretty good PVR for most of the time that I have had it. It’s psu capacitors are getting to the end of their life as the hard drive is running hotter and hotter. Before it is toasted completely I decided it would be sensible to find a suitable replacement.
This was more difficult than I realised. A player which advertised record two and watch a third channel with a dual tuner system seemed to be more rare than I thought. A few reviews later and some bargain hunting I decided upon the Icecrypt 2400T. This is an HD model with dual tuner and 1TB disk. It has both analogue audio out and digital. Some model specifications I had read seemed to not mention RCA phonos. The Tivo I had for a short while didn’t have any at all (it went straight back).
I was tempted by the Humax 9300 but it was £150 and SD only. The HD version with the same sized disk as the Icecrypt was much more expensive. I had also read about people complaining about the Humax missing recordings which put me right off it. I’m not bothered about media playing or iplayer or any other guff. If it can’t record reliably and consistently it isn’t any good to me!
Record two, watch third, HD, large disk and Freeview+ support were on my requirements list. The biggest annoyance with the toppy is having to pad recordings manually to deal with the useless broadcasters that are unable to keep to time. I regularly have to add several minutes onto lots of recordings as the BBC just runs so late in the evening. With the Topfield you can add freeview+ support but this hasn’t been done well and actually leads to more missed recordings. There are also TAPS you can add which improve functionality and offer nicer interfaces. I didn’t bother with any as apart from being slightly clunky the toppy generally worked.
The Icecrypt didn’t make a fantastic first impression. It is very similar to the Toppy but some of the interface keys are different so you think you need one button for one thing but it does something else entirely. Also some of the quirks with the Icecrypt are mistakes that were ironed out on the Toppy many years ago eg not remembering where you were in a watched program, not being able to use the program guide while watching a recorded program and a few other EPG quirks. It was deja vu.
I set up some series records and noticed one irritating factor. With series records you will have every different series of a program if it is currently on another channel. You have to go and delete it out of the list later. This bugged me as at the time I was watching something. Chose to record a series that had an instance that was starting right now so the Icecrypt changed channel from what I was watching to something I didn’t actually want to record anyway! I also notice that when you are in the guide and a recording starts you are binned out of the guide. Most irritating when you are spending time setting up recordings.
Watching a recording is more convoluted as all the recorded programs are organised by folders rather than just being in a chronological list. You have to go into library, then into that program folder then you can play a program. I started watching something and pressed the jump button thinking that skipped adverts. Nope. Skipped back to the beginning of the program. FF is also a bit jerky when you stop it. RW isn’t which is quite strange. Again that is something that I remember being an issue with the early Toppy firmware. I opened the program guide because I remembered another program I wanted to record. I was binned out of what I was watching. Very poor. Had to go back into the program and FF yet again to where I was. By this point I was wondering whether I had made a serious mistake with buying it as it was now about the third attempt to watch something.
The EPG display is a bit pants. The long column list is ok and you can use the next day button to roll round another 24 hours. There are some quirks with displaying some times for some reason. Setting a recording is fairly easy. Go into the guide and press the record button while highlighting the program you want and there is an overlay to choose single, series or reminder. Series record sometimes brings up an annoying recommendation function sometime where it prompts you whether you want to record something else as well. For some reason the recommendation was something I had already set to record. There doesn’t seem to be an option to switch it off. Recording is different with freeview+ so you don’t do manual padding or anything else. You just have to trust the broadcasters to signal the start of the programs properly. I have no idea what happens when something over runs and you have another two recordings starting. With a manual timer you’d just miss the end of one but see the beginning of the other. Theoretically you can record all channels on a single MUX even with just one tuner so you could cope with such an overlap by recording 3 at once if programmes were only spread across two MUXES. Whether this is done is another matter.
One area the Icecrypt is very good is the picture quality. Even on SD it looks better than the Toppy. Also when you set an item to record when you’re on an SD channel if there is an HD version of it will prompt you to see if you want the HD version instead. This is neatly done.
It wakes up happily from standby to record things and returns to standby. This is good too. The keyword search is also useful to find things you think might be on but can’t find. With the poor EPG layout then this is a great help. Series record also works ok with radio too so you can record radio programs just as easily as TV ones. It is also clever about duplicate channels. Those from another region are fainter grey and at the end of the list so you don’t end up with multiples in your main list getting in the way. You also only need the one aerial lead rather than two. The toppy had two aerial ins. You could use a loop cable but this generally lead to having a second tuner with a weak signal.
Shame the Icecrypt doesn’t have PIP. But generally I only really used it to make sure I wasn’t going to miss the end of something so I’m hoping I won’t need it any more.
Priorities and going the extra MILE
There are many ways of prioritizing what you need to be doing. Many advocate starting with the biggest job or the hardest task. But neither take into consideration what is important, what is relevant to your goals and what will make a difference. I’m a fan of Limoncelli’s simple system – important due soon, important due later, not important due soon and not important due later method. If you’re over worked then the not important tasks are basically binned. Anything important and due soon is done immediately. The rest are ignored until the due soons are all done. Obviously some of the laters will switch to soon over time. The main mistake people make with prioritization is to do tasks that are less important just because the deadline for them is close. If they’re not important now don’t do them.
An interesting new method which I found on the simpleology site which they call HIME – High Impact Minimal Effort system is to do the tasks that have the most impact on your goals first and choose the ones requiring least effort. I call it MILE – Most Impact Least Effort. Being lazy but still wanting to achieve as much as possible it seems to be the most logical way of choosing what to do. The Pareto principle – 80% of results arrive from 20% of effort seems to be a good reason why such a method would work well. I’d much rather just do the 20% that brings the results than waste time with the other 80% of tasks that have little to show for them.
