11 posts tagged “mac”
I've been using Cordless RumblePad 2 as a controller to manipulate my Mac mini from the couch by using GamePad Companion. It worked okay but the application apparently is not maintained anymore and there are some actions that I'd love to map but couldn't.
So anytime I need more actions like changing the system volume I either have to use Apple Remote or ThinkPad X40 over synergy. it sucks. I was about to buy the bluetooth clickpad Dinovo Mini but it's pricy ($150) and I have been waiting for its price to go down, which doesn't seem to happen.
But fortunately I just found a better app to solve all of these problems: ControllerMate. It basically allows you to program blocks of events and actions based on any HID device inputs. Its modifier functionality to map multiple actions to one key is a killer.
Its GUI is so developers oriented and might not be easy to figure out if you're not programmer type. But once you go through the tutorial, it's brilliantly easy and it took just half an hour for me to map all of functionalities I wanted.
Now I can use the left analog stick to move the cursor (which can be accelerated when pushed with L1), right analog stick as a scroll wheel, right buttons as a left/right click, R1/R2 as Expose/Dashboard, and then use the arrow keys as arrow keys and also a replacement of Apple Remote when pushed with L1 button (using RemoteBuddy's Virtual Remote functionality), etc. etc. I'm so happy to be able to ditch my Apple Remote from my living so I can just keep it only to use in conferences with Keynote ;)
The only problem is that RumblePad consumes a lot of battery and needs charging quite often, like once in 2 weeks. I have a charger and a spare set of batteries, but it's boring to do...
For this couple of weeks I've been trying to get the best out of my iTunes library with as many devices as possible. So far I ended up installing and having things like these:
- Mac mini
- iTunes
- JewelCase
- iScrobbler
- Simplify Media
- Remote buddy (with Ajax Remote)
- PSP
- coverBuddy (unregistered yet)
- chumby
- SqueezeCenter (formerly known as Slim Server)
- iTunes-LAME
- iPod nano (want to upgrade to iPhone or Touch)
- Airport Express
I guess I want to draw a picture diagram of how these work together, but basically I can do things like:
- Turn my TV and home audio into a complete jukebox, displaying the cover art full-screen (Remote Buddy, JewelCase)
- ... and skip, rate and control that jukebox with Apple Remote (Remote Budy), iPhone (Remote Buddy Ajax ... yet to come) or PSP (coverBuddy)
- Listen to my home library from work (SimplifyMedia or SqueezeCenter)
- Listen to my iTunes library from my bedroom or bathroom (chumby + squeezeCenter)
- ... and control the playlist with PSP (squeezeCenter Handheld skin + PSP)
- Scrobble all of these play history to Last.fm (iScrobbler and SqueezeCenter Scrobble plugin)
Some of these "I can do this!" are just plain useless beside it's a nice hack. But having an unified library on my home computer and being able to listen to all of them everywhere and control via any tools is, AWESOME.
Simplify Media to share music
So, the previous blog post started a huge discussion of what's the best way to synchronize your data, especially music, between your work laptop, home laptop and home media center. For me they're MacBook at work, ThinkPad X40 for home laptop and Mac mini for the media center.
I knew there's a solution like VPN using Hamachi but i guessed there's a better technology for it since it's 2008, and viola, SImplify Media allows you to share your music at home from remotely, as well as sharing music upto 30 friends. No router config is necessary and it's free, works on both Mac and PC. I installed the software both on my work MacBook and home Mac mini. Just does what I want. Well done.
Copying iTunes Library from PC to Mac
So the only problem remaining is that I still own the other library (relatively new songs) on ThinkPad X40 drive. I usually listen to these songs using iTunes + Airport at home, and also syncing these to my iPod nano (which is pretty much short of the disk space), but it'd be much better if I can just copy those files to Mac mini.
Copying iTunes library on one computer to another, seems to be a hard problem to solve and it's a shame for Apple. Of course the obvious solution for that is just copy the folder containing mp3s, m4as and m4p (iTunes DRMed files) to the new machine and import these files. But that way song metadata like rating will be lost.
The apparently-easiest solution is to use iTunes's built-in "Export Library" menu, but again shame Apple, this doesn't do anything more than just dumping file information to a giant XML file. Files are still located in "My Music" folder and there's no way to copy those files while keeping associations to them. LAME.
So quick googling shows that there's a software to solve this problem: iTunes Library Mover. This does what I want: munge Library.xml to change the <Location> property to new portable drive and actually copy over the files. The video on the site is very easy to understand if my explanation doesn't make any sense to you. I tested it, but unfortunately, the software doesn't handle Unicode filenames very well. Alas Windows.
So ... I ended up writing my own tiny perl script itunes-mover.pl to do the same thing, but with special care on Japanese filename mp3s. It needs some tweaks and only runs on Windows with ActivePerl, but it's not that difficult to change it to run on Mac, if you want to copy iTunes library from Mac to PC or Mac to Mac.
iTunes slowness and Unicode woes
That way I could dump all music files on my PC iTunes and imported all of them to my Mac mini iTunes, while keeping the album artwork and ratings. Apparently there's a playcount metadata in library.xml but it was not preserved. But anyway, now I can listen to my entire music library from work. Great thing, but still two other issues.
The default iTunes has a problem with non-ASCII (Japanese Shift_JIS especially) MP3 ID tags and i've got lots of corrupted tags like you can see. So if you have non-English artists or songs in your library, better patch your iTunes with Tune-up iTunes before importing the entire library. I should've done that.
The other thing is now that the iTunes has 5000 songs, 25GB on extra hard drive via USB 2.0 (HFS formatted), I'm finding the app constantly being slow, with that spinner thing in the center of the screen. I guess it's just USB connection is the source of the problem, but Library.xml should have all the data necessary to list the songs view and it's on its primary disk. Hmm.
Software hate still goes on... but anyway, it's getting a little better. Next thing: Free my music from iTunes store DRM protection. I did that using QTFairUse before dumping files on X40, but my Mac has 1000+ of those files already. I could copy these files back to Windows and run QTFU to decrypt and then sync back, but there seems to be Mac version of it: ffh. Might wanna write a frontend perl script to automate that process again...
I started using the standard MacBook at work and I quite like it, besides some annoyances I'm trying to solve now (most of them are hardware related, like Apple Keyboard and/or Emacs-like keybindings conflicts etc.)
I am still using my ThinkPad X40 at home, and while I am absolutely in need of Windows apps and love ThinkPad's trackball better than MacBook's (how painful it is to use different keyboards at work and home, especially English vs Japanese), it feels like I should switch to Mac, and the fact is that I own my Mac mini already.
Should I buy a new MacBook (no Air, thanks), or use my work MacBook at home (hmm it's heavy to carry around for 15 minutes every day and night) or keep using ThinkPad and use Mac mini over synergy ... or something else, like eeePC?
The biggest concern about buying new MacBook is that I'll need to sync some desktop data, like that of TaskPaper, Camino Bookmarks and iTunes Library. I guess FolderShare can help on that ...
Today I started a new habit of watching football (soccer) games on TV. Just play the football game in its 2x speed (using VLC's fast forward playback) and play music on iTunes, just randomly. I can't hear the commentary but who cares? Much better than being annoyed by Roy Hudson's freaking commentaries.
Watching a couple of games in its full length is kind of boring, and always makes me sleepy during the game, unless it's really an exciting game or a live broadcasting. This way I don't get too bored but still can enjoy the game.
Yesterday I watched some quick tutorials for Quicksilver on YouTube and was impressed. It's basically an application launcher but it has tons of sweet things like Actions and Triggers, kind of like an universal UNIX shell for Mac OS X. I tried to install it and how it's quick to control via keyboard.
It might look sort of funny that I'm controlling my Mac mini, the media center PC with keyboard over Synergy2, but it's much quicker than mouse anyway. I'm using RemoteBuddy for quick pause/stop/rewind stuff for viewing and listening to video and audio, but for more complex operation keyboard is much suitable) Now I can type Ctrl+Space "fav" to go to my favorite page on Nico Nico Douga, for instance :)
So, QuickSilver default Hotkey was Ctrl+Space. I just left it as a default, but it was actually taken by Spotlight. So I changed Spotlight Hotkey to Ctrl+Cmd+Space.
Today I found a Windows alternative Launchy, which basically gives you a text-based launcher with lots of shortcuts and search functionalities. Looks very good. And the default keymap was Ctrl-SPC, again. Because I use XKeymacs, the software to emulate emacs-like keybindings for all Windows software, it conflicts with its Ctrl-SPC mapping, which does "start-select-region".
So now I have:
- Ctrl-SPC: Quicksilver on Mac, start select region on Window
- Ctrl-Alt(Cmd)-SPC: Spotlight on Mac, nothing on Windows
- Alt(Cmd)-SPC: Toggle IME (Japanese input method) on Mac, Launchy on Windows
This is way confusing. I should rethink about the hotkey mappings, at least unify Launchy and qs shortcut.
Lazyweb,
(A bit of context: I have media files both on my Mac and Windows at home and want to subscribe to all of them using Videocast client like Miro. I always forget which episode I've watched and not.)
Know of any existent software that
- scans local filesystem for media files, mostly video files (like .mp4, .avi, .mkv)
- and publishes RSS feeds with enclosurs, suitable for videocast subscription?
It would be something similar to MyTunesRSS (reads iTunes media library and publishes RSS), iTunesRSSServer (the same, written by me) or mod_index_rss (Apache module to extend mod_auto_index). If you know one, let me know so i can avoid duplicated efforts.
I want something that runs either as a standalone HTTP server or CGI script, and I actually wrote one to subscribe to videos in my Windows external drive from Miro running on my Mac.
It works well but now that I have so many video files both on Windows and Mac, I'd like to rewrite it to:
- make it run on cross platform (Mac, Windows and Unix)
- support multiple channel per directory and OPML feeds
- smart folder function based on filenames and regexp match (e.g. {Program Name}.S01E01.HDTV.blahblah.avi)
- support .torrent feeds as well (optionally)
- publish raw files without an external web server if needed
In other words, it'll be something like tvRSS for your own files on your hard drive.
This app would be similar to Plagger but I'll probably use Catalyst as a framework so it can be either standalone, CGI script of FastCGI. Also I want a catchy and googlable name for the app. Currently I'm thinking of "Remedie" or "Remediess" which is a semi-anaram of Media RSS.
BTW I'll host the file and entire project on googlecode to avoid the potential risk being sued by Japanese "net police" since the app might be considered to help piracy *cough*.
Now I'm back home in USA and tested the Amazon MP3 256kbps VBR files over AirTunes.
It's choppy. Boo.
My understanding of the AirTunes protocol is that the iTunes decodes mp3 files to WAV (or whatever raw data) and encodes them to Apple Lossless and sends it over the wireless network to AirTunes in an encrypted format. Fix me if I'm wrong.
So the fact that it's choppy with 256kbps MP3 but not with 128kbps MP3 indicates that it's a client problem? I'm running iTunes 7.4.2.4 on Windows XP and stream the music over AirTunes. The wireless connection is 802.11g directly connected to the Airport express.
I'll shut down bunch of apps on Windows to see if it fixes the problem, if iTunes needs more CPU to decode the higher bitrate files. Otherwise I'll copy the mp3 files to Mac and plays locally (without AirTunes).
Lazyweb,
How much RAM do we realistically need to run Windows XP with Parallels on Mac OS X, possibly on Macbook? I guess the answer depends on how much RAM you allocate to the guest OS of Parallels, but my mac mini at home has 1GB memory but with a couple of memory hoggy apps running (iTunes, Safari, Miro, VLC, iStat pro etc.) the behavior seems to get a bit laggy these days. For a reference, here's the top result:
SharedLibs: num = 195, resident = 35.8M code, 4.52M data, 9.62M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 10825, resident = 273M + 16.2M private, 85.4M shared
PhysMem: 259M wired, 451M active, 299M inactive, 1010M used, 13.3M free
Since my work laptop (ThinkPad X40) is almost dead, I'm thinking of switching to Macbook. I definitely want to continue using Windows XP and some apps on it. Also, would like to know which model you recommend ... I can't carry a heavy laptop that weights more than 2kg :) 15.4" MacBook Pro maybe?
Hooked up the Mac mini to the new TV. So far it's been great.
- 56" is a great size for my living room. I was thinking it's too big, but it's actually the right size. Not too big.
- Installed Synergy2 to control Mac using ThinkPad. Working fabulous, except I needed to install the universal binary to run on Intel Mac.
- Hooked the cable and did scan the Cable and Digital Cable. Most TV channels from Comcast are available for free thanks to the QAM Tuner built in this model. I can watch HD channels (CBS, ABC, NBC etc.) as well and 720p/1080i picture quality is good.
- For some reason 1080i channels look better than 720p. When I tested with my 42" plasma (720p) in Japan, 720p looked better. I guess it's because my new TV is full HD.
- Connected 500G LACIE HDD to Mac mini and mount it to play vids.
- Enabled Windows sharing and access the other 120G HDD connected to my windows to play the fresh files I download using WIndows. It gives a gap when I play bigger files because it's network sharing. I need to think about how to sync these data.
- Connecting Mac mini with VGA and it just did 1920x1080 out of the box, but it gives me a little bit overscan (there are ~5% of black area between edges). I'll need to find the way to fix this by no overscan.
- Installed Remote Buddy to control lots of apps (QT, VLC, iTunes) using Apple Remote without using the Front Row. This is an awesome software.
- Tested Last.fm player, Joost, Nicovideo and Rimo on the screen and they worked all great. This is why I got Mac mini, not Apple TV!
The only problem I have is that with 1920x1080 setup, and I sit 10 feet distance from the TV, I can't read the characters on Mac! I configured the Finder font size up to 16px and it's almost readable but other applications like Safari or iTunes are almost impossible to read. It's mostly because of the distance and my eyesight, but need to think a bit about it.
