In my last post I was lamenting the premature demise of my old Squeezebox server, caused by a nasty plague that afflicts tech gear: burst capacitors. After a long search, sifting through eBay listings, reading the fine details of each offering, comparing options, I was able to find a nice newish Shuttle server, sporting good [...]

Do you want to automatically publish iTunes playlists to a non-iTunes music library? This free application will convert iTunes playlists to m3u files, transform paths to match your external master library, and then copy the playlists over the network. It will even ping a Squeezebox server to force a playlist refresh.

I have to admit that I mocked the device from the outset. I sort of chuckled as I said “Boy, they really hit the ball out of the park with the iPhone, but this thing doesn’t know whether it is a laptop or a iPod Touch. Why would I want one?” I have a nice [...]

In my evenings, I sometimes find myself performing the role of “Resident Geek” at my nephew’s school, tending to network issues, computer problems, and my favorite, “The Internet is down!” Over the past couple of years I have considered several different approaches for keeping a grip on which computers had which service patch, which router [...]

After a short vacation on the road with my family, I have come to the conclusion that Kindle is my new favorite gadget. Sadly, I have also found that the Kindle Store is far too easy to use, even when you are on the Interstate in some far corner of Georgia. When the original Kindle [...]

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part. A few months back I received my copy of iLife [...]

Whether you are a cube dweller sharing an electronic document with your next door neighbor or a homeowner attempting to catalogue your digital life, you will soon encounter resistance in the form of document incompatibility. What good is a byte-for-byte perfect duplicate of the original if you cannot open it in an application? My own [...]

This afternoon was kind of lazy and rainy, and I found myself sifting through stacks of CD cases again, full of enthusiasm as I discovered some lost Rolling Stones and David Bowie albums, imagining how few discs remained before I could declare victory. But then I stumbled across a huge cache of classical music discs [...]

Anyone who is serious about committing their piles of paper and other media to digital format asks this question from time to time. And it doesn’t seem to matter how large hard drives have grown over the years—the media files seem to grow to keep pace quite nicely. I would like to share with you [...]

Organize Your Digital Life: How to Store Your Photographs, Music, Videos, and Personal Documents in a Digital World by Aimee Baldridge If you are looking for step-by-step checklists and good solid advice about putting your digital life in order, then this book is for you. The author covers a very broad swath of digital media, discussing [...]