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 drives, far better cooling than my older one, much more memory, much better processing power, and a snazzy paint job applied by the former owner.

It was barely out of the box when I was off on my Mac burning a CD for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS. The Ubuntu install went flawlessly—I set it up with a standard LAMP stack. By the evening I had installed the latest version of Squeezebox Server (now called Logitech Media Server) and was serving up tunes to the local Squeezeboxes.

A Fresh Start

Now I am looking into what kinds of neat stuff to do with this device. If any of these turns out to be particularly compelling, I will eventually write them up here.

• I am playing around with photo gallery servers for photos within the house, so all of our family members can see our photos in the house without the need to put them on an Internet gallery.
• The Squeezebox playlist sync tool is limping along, but it needs work.
• I already put CVS on the box, to hold any ongoing project work.
• The wiki (MoinMoin) that I use to keep track of technical meanderings is already installed.

But the box is going to get lonely pretty soon if I don’t figure out some exciting things to do with it. Setting it up as a media server sounds fun, but I would probably have to trade my Apple TV for a Roku if I went the Plex route for serving media on Linux.

I’m also looking to see if I can automate some of my photography workflow tasks, getting photos moved to the right place for backups to happen and the right place for the gallery software to pick them up. That kind of work isn’t as exciting, but is still needed.

By the way, the capacitors are Shuttle’s new solid cans that don’t burst. Nice!

The problem is that sometimes you might want to manage your library in a way that Apple never intended, and then things become challenging. iPods, iPads, and iPhones pretty much force us to use iTunes, so why not figure out some way to lessen the pain?

I like the playlist tools that iTunes provides, and I find it very convenient to create Smart Playlists or to create Genius lists. However, I want to keep my Master Library of music elsewhere, far from iTunes. Wouldn’t it be great if I could share these playlists on my home network in a completely nondenominational format? Wouldn’t it be nice if my Squeezebox server would have those same playlists available? And wouldn’t it be spectacular if those playlists would magically appear on a network drive whenever the lists change in iTunes?

Read on for details on how I accomplished this and to download the free utility I wrote to handle this task.

The Problem To Be Solved

In order to understand what this application does, you need to know what I was trying to accomplish.

I have a NAS drive on my network that contains my Master Library of mp3 files. The files on this drive are located under /media/music.

I have a Squeezebox server, running on an Ubuntu machine. This server is used by Squeezebox devices to play music anywhere in my house. It holds a copy of the Master Library, located under /srv/squeezebox/music

What I want: I want my Mac to magically push proper m3u playlists to the Squeezebox server—the Squeezebox server understands m3u playlists.

What I don’t want: Squeezebox supports direct access to iTunes. But I don’t want to do this because I don’t want to have to run Squeezebox on my Mac. Why did I bother setting up a dedicated server if I have to keep my Mac running?

Why is this challenging: Even if I could point Squeezebox to the bare iTunes database file, all of the file paths are wrong. My master library might have a song at …/artist/album_name/disc 1/, while iTunes might put it at …/Artist/Album Name/, omitting the disc 1 folder and reformatting names.

My Solution

I wrote a small command line application in Perl that supports the following:

• Paths to songs in Apple’s mysterious black box are converted to nice paths to the same songs in my golden Master Library.
• Even if a song name changes or a folder path changes, the original master copy is found.
• All playlists are generated in m3u format.
• Smart playlists and Genius playlists are supported.
• The generated playlists are automatically moved to either a local directory or a remote server, using scp.
• Network shares are automatically mounted at beginning of process and unmounted at end of process.
• You can provide a file path to be prepended to all playlist entries.
• Exits early if the iTunes library has not changed since the last run.
• Supports exclusion patterns in order to skip some playlists.
• A local Squeezebox server can be automatically pinged to cause it to refresh playlists.

Here is the full documentation for the Playlist Mapper application.

Basic Installation

Please note that this is a command line program. Some day I might figure out how to make a pretty GUI installer for it, but for now you have to get your hands a little dirty in order to install and configure.

Download the application here: plmapper

This is a Perl script that uses many standard utilities already present in a Snow Leopard OS X installation. You should not need anything other than the plmapper file itself.

Unzip the file and place plmapper in your home directory.

Open a Terminal window and make the script executable:

chmod u+x plmapper

Read the man page for the application by doing this:

./plmapper --man

There are many command line arguments, but you don’t need to worry about most of them. Create a file called plmapper.config in your home directory and put any arguments you need in that file, as name-value pairs.

Example:

itunes=/Users/Bozo/Music/iTunes Music Library.xml
dest=/Users/Bozo/Desktop
library=/Volumes/media/music

Once you have added all of the configuration settings, go ahead and run it:

./plmapper

You should see plenty of status information go by as each playlist is processed.

Making it Run Automatically

There are better ways of doing this, but I’m a command-line commando, so I simply added the following cron entry (see crontab):

0 22 * * * /Users/Me/bin/plmapper >/Users/Me/plmapper.log 2>&1

This causes the plmapper program to run once daily at 10pm, logging output to a file called plmapper.log in my home directory.

Of course, this can be tweaked to taste; it doesn’t matter if you run it hourly since the app skips any heavy lifting once it sees that the iTunes library file hasn’t been touched.

How It Works

The application performs the following basic steps:

• Mounts network shares using mount_smbfs.
• All music files in the external non-iTunes Master Library are listed in an internal data structure, sorted by file size.

  This allows us to quickly find a “short list” of possible candidate files that match a given source file. This works because mp3 files have fairly random sizes.

• The iTunes database XML file is processed using an XSLT transformation to generate a set of basic m3u playlist files. The xsltproc command line utility is used to run the transformation.
• All paths in the playlists are converted from escaped URI syntax (e.g. %20 for space) to regular UTF-8 characters.
• Each path is resolved to a single music file (i.e. an mp3 file) in the Master Library.

  This is done by obtaining the size of the iTunes version of the file and then looking this up in the internal list created in the first step.

• Once a short list of candidates is found, the first few thousand bytes of each file are compared until a match is found.The risks of choosing the wrong file are low: all that will happen is that a song might be switched in the playlist accidentally. As such, it isn’t worth scanning the full file to ensure they are exact matches.This algorithm works quite well, and can detect music files that have been renamed and moved around.

• The playlist files are now converted from utf8mac to utf8 using the iconv command line utility.This process collapses wide UTF-8 characters, consisting of a letter plus an accent add-on, into their single-letter equivalents. This process is known as Unicode Normalization, and this tool uses Normalization form C: Compatibility decompisitiion followed by canonical composition.
• Playlist files are now copied to a local or remote directory, either as direct file copy or via the scp utility.
• Optionally, a special call is made to a specified Squeezebox server to tell the server to refresh all playlists.
• Any mounted shares that were mounted by this process are unmounted via diskutil unmount.

Limitations

• Nested folders of playlists currently act funny. The lists will come over, but you may get two lists. You can use the exclude option to prevent this.
• Songs with non-ASCII characters in the file name might not be recognized by all players. Squeezebox has a problem with many special characters—I tested this by adding songs like Águas de Março.mp3 using Squeezebox’s own playlist editor, and when I reloaded the list the songs were not there. This is a bug in Squeezebox server.
• Occasionally the file matching algorithm might pick the wrong song. In an effort to speed up processing, the program only looks at the first few thousand bytes of files when comparing. It isn’t a big deal if the wrong file is added to a playlist, is it?
• You might see a message that says that the network share is already mounted followed by an error that says that the music library path cannot be found. This may be the result of an empty mount-point directory (e.g. /Volumes/mymusic) left when the device was last mounted or if mounting failed. It is not uncommon in Unix environments to leave mount points hanging around unmounted, but OS X usually doesn’t leave them this way—when you unmount a network drive in OS X, the mount point directory disappears. This orphaned mount point directory will cause plmapper to think the share is mounted when it isn’t. Just remove the empty mount point directory.

Closing Thoughts

As often happens, this program was written because I had an itch that needed to be scratched. Now that I went through all of the hassles, I hope others can benefit.

Through good fortune, I am working in a Macintosh environment. This means that all of the important tools were already present on my machine: perl, xsltproc; mount; iconv; scp; nc; and others. If I were writing this for a PC, I probably would have written the whole thing in Java—a more familiar language to me, but one that comes with its own configuration issues.

I plan on updating plmapper over time, and if anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

And if a Perl guru wants to tell me my Perl skillz are subpar, go right ahead—but be gentle, and let me know how to improve the app.

[Update]

Fixed a couple of bugs related to path and “qx” calls, thanks to Chris. Updated version here.

[Update 26-Feb-2012]

It has been quite a long time since I last looked at this. As things turned out, my Squeezebox Server died an untimely death and that sort of put the brakes on my central music library project.

A couple of weeks ago I located a spare PC and set up a new Squeezebox Server, so I’m back in business.

Some things I have noticed:

• Squeezebox Server is now called Logitech Media Server. Keep that in mind when you are looking for an installer. I was following instructions on how to install Squeezebox Server on Ubuntu and I had to change the apt-get command from sudo apt-get install squeezeboxserver to sudo apt-get install logitechmediaserver
• Apparently they have changed from using MySQL to using SQLite. This made the install even easier—there was no need for me to mess around with creation or configuration of the MySQL user or database.
• The default server port has changed from 9090 to 9000.
• They still haven’t fixed the bug with international characters in song titles in playlists.

That said, the plmapper script worked just fine with my new Squeezebox even on Lion. Hope it works for everyone else.

I have a nice iMac that I use daily; my wife has a MacBook Pro which she has taken quite a liking to. And I carry around my iPhone (she really couldn’t care less about smart phones). It looks like these devices all converge on and overlap the territory of the iPad. Again, what’s the point?

I walked into the Apple store last Monday expecting to enjoy a few minutes of playing around with an over-sized iPod Touch, and then walk out. Then it hit me: they did it again—they created a device, akin to the iPhone, that is so slick and easy to use that you must handle one and play with its features before you can truly understand.

Alex Payne put it quite nicely in his blog:

“Human-computer interaction has found a sweet spot on the iPad. It’s all the power of desktop computing, plus the valuable constraints of mobile devices, minus the limitations of both. It just makes sense. Use one for a couple hours and your desktop or laptop will seem clumsy, arbitrary, and bewildering. It is, simply, how (most) computing should be.

You can be as cooly aloof as you like about the device, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a fundamental step forward in computing. … [I]f you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.”

— The Moderate’s Position on iPad Openness

He’s right, you know.

As soon as I held the device in my hands it was clear why this device has earned its own new niche that it was wedged into, between smart phones and laptops. The touch interaction that was so revolutionary with the iPhone has become more palpable, and more natural. I find myself gently sweeping my hand across the screen as I read the newspaper, watching the words gently glide by.

It really sank in when I looked at how my wife uses her MacBook Pro. She lays in bed with the machine in her lap, listening with headphones, as she goes through her email, listens to iTunes, searches out videos of old friends in Brazil posted on YouTube, and does some Google searches for whatever is on her mind. Meanwhile, the machine’s legendary thigh-roasting fans are running and she fidgets and fumbles with its bulk.

Everything she does with her MacBook is better with the iPad. It is more like a TV than a computer in the sense that you simply turn it on and choose what you want to do, with no knowledge of its internals. There are no fans blasting searing heat. The device is not cumbersome; she can curl up with it like a good book.

And it does Netflix.

What more could you want?

Well, there are few things I see right away that I would like, but for the most part I want more proper iPad apps. Old iPhone apps offer two equally unpleasant views: either you use the app in a horribly cropped iPhone-sized letterbox view, or the app is displayed in grotty pixelated full screen mode. Fortunately, folks are coming out with new iPad apps every day, some are even free upgrades if you own an app on the iPhone.

The first problem my wife will encounter (when I finally give her my iPad, as promised) is that she will want to print something from it. Printing doesn’t seem to be in the iPad’s repertoire. I have to admit that printing is a bit of a heavyweight for such a handy dandy device. She will still look at me and say “But it should be able to print.” And she’ll be right.

The second real issue I have with it is file management. There just is no simple way to move files onto an iPad: all file management is kludgy at best, usually involving iTunes. This was not so bad with the iPhone because our expectations are lower; after all, it is a cellphone first and foremost.

But the iPad is different. Its name screams “Documents” and begs us to flip pages with our bare hands. Why do all document transfers have to involve web browsers, email, and iTunes?

There are many different ways file management could be handled, but the way iPhones and iPads deal with documents and files is so un-Apple. This little bit of tarnish distracts from the beautiful polish of the device.

But I love it anyway

I can’t really criticize much more about my iPad. It does exactly what someone like my wife needs with little hassle, like a handheld flat-screen TV with cool features.

In other words, the iPad excels at being a computer for entertainment.

Check out some of the (currently) free newspaper apps. If you like Popular Science, drop a five-spot on their interactive magazine. You’ll like it.

And did I mention that it does Netflix?

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 is getting flaky, and which cable connects the library to the classroom at the end of the hall.

I have tried Excel spreadsheets, an Access database, even a spiral-bound notebook—none of them made the job any easier. A few weeks ago I thought about trying a Wiki and this has turned out to be a perfect fit!

If you are looking to keep a loose scrapbook of notes with lots of arbitrary categories and relationships between them, a wiki might do the trick. In this article I’ll cover two simple freeware wikis you can carry around on a thumb drive.

What’s in a Wiki?

All of us have used Wikipedia at one time or another, and though it may be regarded with disdain by high school teachers, when you consider how it works, Wikipedia is an amazing achievement. But what is the nature of a wiki?

One of the key features is that any page can be easily edited at any time (of course this can be limited by permissions). Another attribute is the ability to breathe life into a new page just by calling its name.

Between these two features, you get the essence of wiki-ness.

For example, if I have a page that discusses North American bears, I can type in a list of bears in a special format, often in jammed-together Wiki Words, like this:

• GrizzleyBear
• BlackBear
• BrownBear

As soon as I save the page, those bear names become hyperlinks. Even though I haven’t written any pages about the individual bears, whenever it finally suits me, I can click on BlackBear and accept the invitation to “Create a new page called BlackBear”

Better still, a friend who knows about black bears might click on BlackBear and write a beautiful page about the animals.

That’s what wikis are all about.

Back to the School Computers

In a matter of minutes I was able to make a page that described the building and listed the various rooms in the building. I was able to then click on each room and “auto-vivify” a page for the room.

From that point, it was easy to create custom pages for each computer in the building, with each page listing the machine’s stats. I also created pages for each network switch or router.

In a matter of two or three evenings I had the skeleton of a solid knowledge base populated—it’s a pretty fancy looking web site with dozens of pages that took little effort to put together.

Last night I noticed that one of the machines wasn’t connecting to the Internet, though it connects fine to internal servers. I popped open its page on the wiki and added a simple note at the bottom of the page:

2009-10-11 - This machine isn't able to connect to the Internet. Not sure why. It connects fine to internal servers.

A few weeks ago I replaced a fan in a network switch. An easy annotation on the wiki page for that device.

Personal Wikis

There are many uses for personal wikis, mostly centered around personal knowledge management and personal information management. People use wikis as a replacement for time and task management tools, as a place for gathering thoughts, as a sort of amorphous database, and many other things.

There are many different personal wikis available—here’s a short list of free ones. One nice simple wiki to try is TiddlyWiki. If you are looking for something with a bit more substance, you can try a portable version of MediaWiki—the engine behind Wikipedia—that runs off your thumb drive.

TiddlyWiki

This afternoon I downloaded the flyweight portable wiki called TiddlyWiki. This is an amazingly tight little application—it comes in the form of a single fat web page that you copy to your thumb drive. As you make edits to your TiddlyWiki, the single html page is saved with your changes. Since it’s a single fancy file, backups are dead easy.

Here’s what it looks like when you first launch the “empty.html” file:

After a half hour of twiddling around, I had thrown together this basic set of “Tiddlers”

In this screen shot you can see that there are now links that bring up custom “Tiddlers” for each computer and for each room. I have opened one of the little pages for Computer21.

They describe these pages as being comparable to note cards. All in all, it is tight and easy to use.

Want to give it a try? Download it from the TiddlyWiki site. You really need to play with it to get a feel for what it can do!

MediaWiki

If you are looking for something with a little more meat on it, you can run the Wikipedia engine on your USB drive.

The easiest way to set this up is to let MoWeS do everything for you. MoWeS stands for Modular Webserver System. It’s a free product that you can configure as a self-contained Apache web server with a variety of cool apps like MediaWiki, running off a thumb drive.

Here’s how to set up MediaWiki in five minutes:

• Go to the MoWeS Mixer
• The first time around choose “I do not have a MoWeS Portable II Package and want to obtain a new package” when prompted and click Go.
• On the software lists, check Apache2, MySQL5, PHP5, and MediaWiki
• Click Download Now
• At this point they ask you some kind of question in German, to filter spambots, but it seems to be a simple math problem. Fill in the answer and click Submit Query
  (“Zum Schutz vor Downloadrobotern geben Sie bitte das Ergebnis dieser Aufgabe ein: 5 + 8 = ?“)
• Unzip the downloaded zip file, mowes_portable.zip, and copy the files to your USB drive
• Open your thumb drive and double-click mowes.exe
• Select your language and accept the license
• Click install, and confirm when prompted

The installation process may take several minutes, but rest assured that it isn’t installing anything on your computer.

Note: I received two or three firewall warnings for the Apache web server and the MySQL database. I had to click the “Unblock” button for all of them before my new MediaWiki-on-a-stick would work correctly.

After all of the dust settled, I have this little window on my screen:

In order to shut down and close out, just click the End button.

Once your MediaWiki USB key is running, you can go to this web page:

http://127.0.0.1/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

It looks just like Wikipedia, doesn’t it?

What a truly amazing thing: you can carry around your own Wikipedia server on a USB key and plug it in any random machine and start it up.

Different Wiki Features

As you try out different wiki software, you will notice that there are plenty of differences in the features they support:

• Each wiki has a different kind of editor. Some are visual; others are simple text editors.
• The markup syntax you use for pages is different from wiki to wiki.
• Most wikis support features such as “category pages” that find all pages tagged with a category.
• Some support adding images and other content; others don’t. I imagine that TiddlyWiki probably has some means of embedding images, but I couldn’t find it.
• A quick glance at the MediaWiki screenshot above shows extended features such as the Discussion tab and the History tab.
• Some use the filesystem for their pages; others use a database.

Since I wanted a central wiki for the whole school, I chose a different product from the portable wikis I discussed here—I decided to run MoinMoin on a Ubuntu installation on an aging Gateway desktop machine. Nevertheless, the basic idea is still the same.

Once that arrangement becomes a little more stable I’ll write up a howto document, like the Linux NAS one from a few months back.

Other Sources

There are loads of different personal wiki options out there and many people have written how-to documents and tutorials. Here’s a few:

• Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick (Lifehacker.com)
• Geek to Live: Set up your personal Wikipedia (Lifehacker.com)
• Wiki On A Stick (PmWiki.org)
• Getting Started with Wiki on a Stick (About.com)
• TiddlyWiki for the rest of us (giffmex)

When the original Kindle was announced, I was skeptical of its utility and I just couldn’t see myself using one. In the year or two since it was released, I have occasionally dreamed of buying one, but balked at its steep price. The combination of a new version (Kindle 2), a price cut, and a vacation was all it took.

In short, I love it, and it is the perfect companion for a long lazy vacation. In this article, I’ll cover several of the high points as well as a few of its shortcomings.

A Display (almost) like Real Paper

As far as I’m concerned, this is the only feature that really matters. Most will agree that reading from a screen is unpleasant. I have read books on a wide variety of sub-par screens such as laptops, Palm devices, and my iPhone—they are all pretty bad. Why is this screen so special?

To be honest, you really must see one of these e-ink devices in person to fully appreciate the difference between Kindle and a netbook display. I saw my first e-ink device in a Borders book store—they had the Sony Reader on display. If you are in a Borders, you might want to see if they have any on hand. If you have any gadget-geek friends, ask around to see if one has a Kindle you can hold in your hands.

The first time you see the display, you will be surprised at its paper-like qualities.

To show this, take a look at this close-up of the screen:

• It works by reflected light, like paper. There is no backlight.
• The letters appear to be printed right on the surface—look at the text around the coins to see what I mean.
• You can read in direct sunlight with no loss in quality. Indeed, I took the photo in sunlight to show this.
• The display consumes no energy unless it is changing pages. In fact, when you put the device in sleep mode, it displays one of several images of literary figures until you wake it up again.
• The display is just as crisp at any angle:

In this image, not only do you see the effects of an amazingly thin depth of field from my lens (a bit more than I expected), but you can see that even at a very flat angle, the screen looks pretty much the same.

The only shortcomings I can think of are that it isn’t color (no big deal), and the contrast still isn’t exactly like a printed book—it’s more like the black-on-grey of a cheap newspaper.

Some may find the page-change flash annoying: when you change pages, the display flashes black for a split second in order to clear the prior page.

The Reading Experience

With a display like that, it’s hard to go wrong.

One of the main complaints of the original Kindle was that it was too easy to accidentally turn pages. They have fixed this problem, and now you can easily turn the page from either side, while avoiding accidental page turns. It feels quite natural, and the paperback-sized screen is just big enough to feel like you are really reading a book.

The device is very small, so you can carry it anywhere (please buy a cover, though). There is no longer any need to fold the newspaper fifteen times to avoid encroaching on the personal space of your fellow commuters.

Over my vacation, I read several books with ease. Amazon says that they want the Kindle to “disappear” in your hands, so as to not distract from your reading enjoyment. They have achieved this goal.

The Kindle Store

All things considered, this was the deal maker for me. The fact that I can go to the Kindle Store wherever I am and buy a new book is unbelievably cool. To sweeten the pot, Amazon allows you to download the first few chapters of any book for free. That way, you can decide before paying if the book is going to be a good read. This ability to download free samples was what sold the device for me.

For example, while we were driving through South Carolina the other day, I suddenly developed a hankering for a good first-person WWII book. After a few minutes of figuring out how to find WWII materials, I started paging through dozens of interesting possibilities and finally settled on Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II by Herbert A Werner. How neat! I was looking for yet another memoir of D-Day battles from an American author and stumbled on a German’s first-person account of his U-boat experience.

Periodicals

Amazon provides a relatively short list of newspapers and magazines that you can subscribe to, including the New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and others. There are also a few magazines to choose from (33, to be exact).

As with books, you can sample the wares before buying. You can have one 14-day subscription to any periodical for free.

I subscribed to Reader’s Digest and USA TODAY. Both of these seem to have been well adapted to the device. Every morning when I turn on my Kindle, the day’s edition of USA TODAY automatically comes down over the air.

Built-in Internet

I’ll be brutally honest here: you really don’t want to surf the net with this device. The Internet connection exists mainly as a means of connecting to the Kindle store. If you are the kind who likes surfing the ‘Net using the text-only Lynx browser, on an actual vintage VT-100 terminal over an acoustic coupler modem, then this might fit your style.

In a pinch, you can zip to Wikipedia, but don’t expect to use it to manage your eBay auctions or watch YouTube.

The image at right is a screenshot generated right from the device. Trust me—even browsing a Wikipedia article is a painful experience.

What’s Wrong with Kindle?

Any complaints I have about Kindle are minimal, bordering on nipickery, but you should know of some of the minor annoyances.

• Any navigation and pointing and clicking is clunky and slow. It really does remind me of typing on an old-school terminal over a 300 baud modem, where it was quite common to accidentally type in several characters before the computer caught up and started displaying them.
  Sometimes you move the “mouse pointer” down to an item you want to click on, but it lags and you click once too many times, and then the final button press clicks the wrong thing. I managed to accidentally buy a book this way—fortunately, Amazon provides a “I made a mistake” link.
• No touch screen. While struggling with the navigation, it is so tempting to just poke at it. At the moment, this is likely a blessing: the Sony Reader has a touch screen, at the cost of a substantially muddled display.
• The book prices are a little steep. I’m certain that the publishers are partly to blame on this, but it is hard to accept that a dead-tree edition only costs a few bucks more than an electronic edition. There are none of the losses associated with publishing, stocking, shipping, and then handling returns on these books, but they still cost almost as much.
• Come on, only 33 magazines? I know that many magazines are glossy and colorful, but I wouldn’t mind a reduced-cost version of Wired, for example.
• They don’t give you any kind of case. You are spending $300 on this fine device and the least they could do is give you a cotton slip cover!
• You can’t replace the battery. This is no big deal for me, since I am already on my second iPhone: the technology advances fast enough for me that I buy the latest gadget before the battery in the last one dies.
• They aren’t even close to reaching the full potential as a book reader, and likely won’t. Since Kindle supports DRM content, why can’t we have an online digital library where we can check out books for a week and return them? Why can’t an outfit like books24x7 allow me to download a full book to my one registered Kindle?
  Certainly, these uses would conflict with Amazon’s business model, but it is a shame to see this unused potential.

The ugly specter of Digital Rights Management

One particularly troubling concern is with the Amazon DRM model in general. On the one hand, it seems that Amazon wants you to treat the Kindle and its content as a service. You are paying a substantial sum for a service. Since there is DRM involved, you really don’t own the content in the true sense of the word. You can’t give a book to someone else. Much of the value of Kindle is derived from the permanent connection to the Kindle Store, and your online bookshelf. Unfortunately, many customers have found that when they fell out of Amazon’s good graces, by returning too many purchases, they were shown the door quite rudely and locked out of their Kindle accounts forever. It seems that Amazon would like to have their cake and eat it too; treat their product as a service, but then tell you it is useful as a standalone product once you are left out in the cold.

And who can ignore the irony of the whole 1984 debacle, where books were yanked out of customer’s Kindles as they slept?

To be sure, most Kindle customers are not recklessly returning big-screen TVs after Super Bowl Weekend and returning GPS units after their summer vacations, so the whole Amazon lockout issue is probably not a concern for most. Likewise, Amazon should have learned their lesson from 1984. Forewarned is forearmed. Make sure that you understand the risks and limitations before you dive in.

What’s Right with Kindle?

• The display is beautiful.
• The battery lasts several days, as long as you turn off wireless.
• It really does disappear in your hands, as promised.
• It will hold every book I ever plan on purchasing.
• The online store is almost perfectly implemented—it’s extremely easy to purchase new books anywhere.
• Those free samples are the best.
• The free iPhone companion app lets me see my Kindle books on my iPhone too, and it keeps my current page in sync between the devices.
• It’s Paperless!

My Conclusion

There are tons of features that I haven’t covered, such as the built-in dictionary, the “read-to-me” text-to-speech feature, and the MP3 player features. I hopefully have covered the key features that really matter for an eBook reader.

For me, the fact that I can carry a ton of books in my hand without involving dead trees is great.

If you are an avid reader, but you are not a starving college student living on ramen, order one. You will not be disappointed.

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 ’09 and was quite pleased with the new Faces feature—I recall losing a couple of evenings sifting through photos and finding people I had forgotten.

Derrick Story from Macworld has written an article providing some tips for getting the most out of Faces. Even if you have been using the product since it was released, you may find these tips useful.

For example, after reading the article I immediately set up a smart folder that shows all unassigned faces—called “Missing Persons.” A simple idea that I would have never thought of.

I still don’t tire of refining the Faces gallery in my iPhoto collection!

Read the full article here: 7 tips for using Faces in iPhoto ’09 (Macworld.com)

My own choice for document format is almost always Portable Document Format (PDF), but rather than just state this, I would like to consider some of the factors involved.

This is the first of a series of articles covering document formats. This article focuses specifically on the distinction between works in progress and finished product.

Two Kinds of Documents

In general, we can consider two broad categories of documents: working documents (works in progress) and archived documents. You can call these by many different names, but the fundamental distinction is still there.

Working Documents

These are documents that you are still writing. They share some characteristics:

• They must be retained in their original format, such as Microsoft Word.
• The formats are often very specialized. Quite often another tool can import such a document, but you usually lose something in the translation.
• You and your colleagues need to have the same editor software to view and modify the documents.
• They are often short-lived. This phase of a document’s life usually doesn’t more than a few months (though a template document might be kept for many years).
• A good backup strategy will need a short window between backups; these documents change often, so they should be backed up frequently.
• You may want to consider a document versioning strategy, so you can see how the document appeared at different stages during its life.

Here are some examples:

• Microsoft Word documents
• Visio diagrams
• Photos that you are still retouching
• Audio files that you are in the process of curating (e.g. applying ID3 tags)

Archived Documents

These are documents that are read-only, meant to be viewed but never modified.

• They often must be rendered in very precise ways, so each viewer sees the document as intended (consider a 1040 form from the IRS)
• They may be around for a long time.
• These documents should be less tightly bound to a particular software product. PDF vs. MS Word; JPG vs. Adobe Photoshop.
• They typically have a wider audience. You may share a work-in-progress with a co-worker or two, but a finished read-only document might be read by hundreds or thousands.
• Any user should be able to read these documents, with little effort.
• Your backup strategy is probably going to be more focused on longevity and less focused on frequency. These documents are in it for the long haul.

Why not start with a simple example?

Here is a screenshot of an application I use in my day job:

Just in case you did not recognize the unmistakable visage of this small molecule, I have labeled it appropriately.

This is an application called ChemDraw from Cambridgesoft, and unless you are a chemist you have probably never heard of it. My molecule is saved as caffeine.cdx in a format that only ChemDraw knows intimately (though there are other similar chemistry tools that can import this file format).

My point is simple: if your friend sent you a copy of caffeine.cdx, how exactly would you open it?

In contrast, here is a more accessible rendition of the same molecule in PDF format. Try it out; you should be able to view the molecule, and zoom in on details.

What if you had to show someone this document five years down the road? Do you want to have to chase down a possibly obsolete version of a very expensive application that might not even run on your operating system?

Obsolescence

Some time back I was sifting through some files on an old server at work that apparently had been written by me. Fifteen years ago I was attending night classes and writing many of my English assignments on a VAX running VMS at work (over my lunch break!). I was using some anemic version of WordPerfect that had been ported to VMS. This arrangement saw me safely through college, but was not conducive to long term document storage.

Do you have any idea what VMS directory structures look like? Maybe, and maybe not. Are these files compatible with the contemporary DOS versions of WordPerfect? Maybe.

Could I open these files on a Windows Vista machine in 2009 using Microsoft Word? With luck. What about using Pages from Apple iWork on my Mac running OS X? Doubtful.

Not only do we need to be concerned with special applications that only a select few (with expensive licenses) have, but we also need to consider that the file format might be obsolete beyond hope.

For an exaggerated example, consider the image of punched paper tape at the top of this article. I would have no clue what to do if I were given a roll of this tape.

Which do you keep?

Look at the characteristics of the document types listed above and see which one fits your document best. Quite often you will find yourself keeping both the original document and a PDF rendition. Indeed, this is what many professional document databases do.

If you can’t easily choose one, keep both. In most cases, I have found that I only need the PDF rendition for the long term and I couldn’t care less about the source document.

Summary

In the world of the paperless home, much of what we do is store digital copies of old documents for searching and possible reprinting some time in the future. Don’t make the mistake of keeping all of your documents only in their original editable format; you might just find yourself with a digital file that cannot be viewed!

Here are a few thoughts I have to share on these great media library projects. Not only are they never-ending, but the longevity of the task should guide some key decisions you make as you plod along.

Accept that it’s Never Going to End

I currently have ongoing projects to scan in every scrap of paper in my house, rip every CD to MP3, and scan in every pre-digital-era photograph. But the corpus is just too large. And I haven’t even considered ripping video; I have accepted that a full digital video library is a little too ambitious for me these days.

We need to be aware of this from the very beginning; if you feel like you bit off more than you can chew, you are normal.

Never Give Up

Try to keep your goals clear, so that you don’t lose steam and give up. Perhaps you are looking forward to being able to place the plastic boxes all in storage. Perhaps you can’t wait to be able to make those uber party mixes from your rich collection. In any case, every hour you spend doing the drudgery of ripping CDs brings you a little closer to these goals.

Prioritize Your Work

It is a whole lot better to spend your first days ripping your favorite music to MP3 than to be ripping some weird CDs your roommate left behind in college. Today I happily skipped over the Talking Heads CDs that I inherited from my brother—those don’t really need to be in my iTunes library, do they?

Keep it Simple

Make your work flow as simple as possible. You may still be doing this in three years—don’t over complicate things.

I have been working on my own collection for the past three years. When I first started, I was ripping the music on a PC using a tool called cdex to rip the MP3s and another tool called Mp3tag to edit the tags. These days I use iTunes on my Mac to do both of these tasks. If I had some really fancy work flow going, it might not have been so easy to change machines. By keeping things simple, I was able to do exactly the same thing today that I did three years ago.

Choose Good Settings

…for your software. You don’t want to have to do this again, do you? And don’t go cheap on the bit rate, if you have the space.

In addition, you will probably want to decide between the convenience of a universal format versus the power of a proprietary or niche format. In my example, I opted to use MP3 for all of my music instead of some of the other, more powerful, formats available. I was stung once by the switch from PC to Mac where the handful of CDs that I had ripped to .wmf files were no longer usable.

If you are ripping everything to some killer lossless format, be sure you are looking far down the road and considering compatibility issues.

Back it up!

Make sure your backup process is ready for the increased load. If your backups consist of burning DVDs (or worse, CDs) of your data, you will very quickly tire of this, and you may just abandon one of the most important parts of your work flow. Oh, and remember, if there aren’t two copies in separate places, it isn’t a backup.

A couple of months ago I bought two of those nice pocket-size portable hard drives, and I always leave one at the office and I swap them once per week. This works for me: they are 320GB hard drives, providing plenty of room for all of my thousands of scanned documents, tens of thousands of photographs, and many thousands of MP3s, with plenty of elbow room.

When ripping a CD collection, the data risk is lower since you still retain the original CDs, but it still is a lot of work to rip them all. Don’t overlook the backup, or you will cry when the hard drive crashes.

Know Where You Have Been

Come up with a simple “bread crumb” mechanism to know where you have already been. You want to be able to quickly identify the music CDs you already ripped, without having to bring up iTunes every time. Keep the three year horizon in mind, so you choose a technique that will not be mysterious to you after some time passes (Hmmmm…. did I dog ear the corner of the CD insert to mark it? Where did I put that notebook where I wrote them down?)

I chose simplicity: I have one of those nice metallic Sharpie markers, the silvery kind. I put a small dot on the hub of each CD after I ripped it, just above the center hole. This way, several years from now, I should easily be able to spot the CDs that haven’t been introduced to my digital library.

I do this with photographs as well. As I scan them, I put a small marker dot on the back of each photograph, in the corner.

Finally, Enjoy Your Music!

I am quite capable of getting all wrapped up in the process for the sake of the process. Don’t forget to actually listen to the music you ripped!

I would like to share with you a pair of similar free utilities, one for the PC and one for the Mac, that allow you to easily evaluate exactly where your disk space is going.

(This topic was recently discussed on the Mac Geek Gab podcast, which inspired this post.)

The Old Way

In the past I would often poke around the hard drive, checking out the “usual suspects,” occasionally finding a few plump temporary files or some stale unused applications that could be dumped. When I needed to do a more thorough cleaning, I would run a “find” for files larger than, say, 10MB, and I would sort them in descending order and hack away at the resulting list.

But I have never been satisfied with the results of my efforts—there has always been some lingering feeling that I just wasn’t seeing what the true space hogs were on my system.

Then I found an application that uses the concept of Treemaps to display your hard drive in a colorful visual form.

Treemaps

This is what a treemap of my Mac hard drive looks like:

The application has used color coding and rectangles to represent files on the hard drive in such a way that accentuates clusters of similar items.

Each directory is represented by some rectangular area in this image. The colors represent different file types (e.g. MP3 files), making it easier to spot large sets of similar files, and easier to visualize where your space is going.

For example, the thin yellow rectangle is highlighting the space (in blue) occupied by my iTunes music library. The large red area on the right (seen by the tool as a single file) is my iPhoto library. The area between those two sections is my current video recordings from EyeTV (in green), along with all of my text documents.

You can see quickly from this image that photos, video, and music occupy the lion’s share of my hard drive. Most of the remaining jumble across the bottom is the Mac OS X operating system and all of my program files.

At a glance, I can see that if I deleted all of my EyeTV recordings, I would free up a large percentage of my drive space.

It is through this tool that I realized how impractical tools like Xslimmer are for me. These tools save disk space by removing non-Intel binaries and unused language files (Mac applications often come with Intel and Power PC binaries packaged together). But even if I deleted my entire Applications folder, it would only free up a corner of the map above. I just wouldn’t gain much by slimming down application files and language resource files.

Since I work with both Mac OS X and Windows, I found a freeware version of this utility for each.

Disk Inventory X

This is the Mac utility that I used to make the screenshot above. Here is the application developer’s website.

Besides showing the treemap, Disk Inventory X provides a file browser tree and a sidebar with information about the color coding. You can bring up an Information pane that shows the details of whatever item you have selected in the treemap.

Again, I have selected my iTunes library. You can see in sidebar that blue means “MP3 Audio File.”

WinDirStat

This is pretty much the same application concept in an open-source version for Windows. Here is the developer’s web site. Scroll down to the bottom of their page for the download link.

In this screenshot from Windows, I selected my C:\Program Files directory. You can see the white rectangle on the right side, showing us exactly how much space all of my programs occupy.

Other notable features on this screenshot: my system page file is that fat bluish rectangle in the bottom right, and the collection of red in the upper left is a large quantity of Windows patches.

Summary

Both of these tools provide an excellent means of visualizing exactly where the fat is in your hard drive. The price is right. Try one today!

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 topics such as video, music, and photography. She provides clear guidelines for prioritizing your efforts and crisp checklists.

In addition, this up-to-date book (January 2009) provides a good source of information about the leading software products available, with advice on features to look for. For example, while discussing photo management software, she mentioned the advantage of being able to select a large group of photographs and batch-rename them to something like “Egypt 001.jpg” through “Egypt 100.jpg”

The book gets geeky enough to whet the palate, without going too far. Topics such as EXIF data and nitty gritty settings for scanning photos are covered in depth.

Here’s the book on Amazon