Trey’s Blog

After much research and consideration, I decided to make the switch from Mozilla Thunderbird to Apple Mail as my primary email client. Although this path seems easy enough, I ran into an issue where mail mailbox would crash Apple Mail when importing. I figured there was something corrupt, so I was almost to the point of giving up. I ran across a tool that seemed like a good option, and it was perfect. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, designed for migrating Eudora Mailboxes to most other popular clients, also included an option for moving Thunderbird mailboxes to Apple Mail. Almost as easy as Apple Mail’s native import, this tool handled everything and I’m now using Apple Mail.

Like the majority of digital camera owners, I have a huge collection of digital photos.  Since 1998, I had been using ACDSee to view my collection because of its speedy interface.  Somewhere along the way, ACDSee became another one of the many shops to incorporate a Photo Manager into their application.  Some may find this useful for tagging or labeling photos for quickly locating photos of a particular subject, but I have found that I mainly deal with photos in a date manner.  Since date is my primary classification, I have created directories such as 2001-11 and 2006-11 to hold photos taken within those months.  I haven’t had any issues with this as ACDSee did not force me into using their Photo Management features.  However, when I made the switch to Mac, I was without a good viewer of photos and directories of photos.  iPhoto is included, but it is completely wrapped around Photo Management requiring each photo be imported so it may append additional meta data with each one.  I don’t really care for this much overhead, so I just did without and continued the search for a application that better suited my needs.  QPict seemed to have a lot of following so I gave it a try and it seems to do a good job of giving my everything I need, but only one caveat is with the sorting of directories listed on the left.  There is seems to be no rhyme or reason to the sorting being used.  QPict costs $35 for their Standard license.  Today I found a FREE program that does a great job viewing photos and integrating with OS X as the primary photo viewer.  JustLooking offers the speed and ease-of-use I’ve been looking for, but it lacks a tree view for quickly navigating through my photo directories.  This is a tough call, but free always has a ring to it.  I’ll probably continue to use both and see which completes the package first.

I know most people prefer the use of application for all of their needs, but I’m the type of person who thinks that sometimes better results can come out of using specialized software. This is not always the case, but for my situation is works out better for me. I have my CDs backed up on my Linux box which can be seen from any device on my network including my Mac. I’m also very keen on keeping my naming convention the same for new directories and files. iTunes may be able to do all of this, but for me, I like the idea of trusting a separate application to give me exactly what I want. I found Max, and it appears to be one of the better encoders available at no cost. It can encode to FLAC, OGG, and MP3. I still prefer MP3 because of device compatibiliy. It also has the ability to connect to amazon.com and retrieve album art to be embedded in the meta data for each song. This helps if and when I add the album to my iTunes Library.

How I do things against the norm: Rather than using iTunes to encode my CDs straight into the iTunes Library, storing them locally on my Mac, I’m using Max to encode them locally. I then double check the files for quality before moving them to the music share. My wife would love nothing more than to be listening to some music downstairs and have the song full of JITTS and SCWARBLES. Once the album is moved into the appropriate genre folder, I manually add it to the iTunes Library. I don’t use the automatic feature, because I’d like to have the say of if and when something gets put into the Library. Ultimately, my music storage is easy, clean, and logical as is my iTunes.

For the past week, I thought my Mac was starting to crap out because I couldn’t connect to the MSN network using CyberDuck Adium, which worked fine weeks prior. Everytime I launched it, I got the ‘just crashed’ screen. Well today I setup Gaim on my Ubuntu box and tried to connect to the MSN network only to have Gaim autoclose itself.

Is this a case of being blocked by Microsoft since I’m not using a supported version of Windows Messenger? At the moment, I don’t know, but it really is bothersome.

Anyone has ideas for me to try to test this?

UPDATE:

I ran gaim on my Ubuntu box with debug turned on and noticed that everything was fine until it loaded the Encarta Answers contact.  I removed Encarta Answers from my Contact List and it launched without problems.  Seeing as this is a Windows Messenger only feature, I don’t think removing that contact will ever be a problem.

This morning, after confirming my backup of important files was complete, I dropped in the Ubuntu 6.06 install CD and was surprised to see how easy they made the process. The install CD is now the Live CD with an install launcher on the desktop. So for anyone wanting to try this OS, they can play around before they decide. If they want to go with it, they simply double click the Install icon on the desktop and they begin the install. When the install is complete (only took me about 8 minutes), the user is prompted to remove the CD and reboot. I do so and was up and running without a hitch and the configuration error I was getting for the past two versions was now gone. There was nothing wrong with the previous versions, but somewhere along the line, I messed something up. Within two minutes, I had my second harddrive enabled (for my music), shared directories setup (which included installing samba), and my shared Printer configured. I had to leave for work, so the rest will have to wait. Good, clean, quick install… couldn’t ask for anything more.

If you are running version 1.0.7 or 1.5 beta of Mozilla Firefox with the AdBlock extension (v0.5+), odds are you are not getting the Flash you deserve. Apparently, the new flash plugin (v8) perceives the Obj-Tabs of AdBlock as security threats and doesn’t allow the display of any presentations while those are present. The fix is quite easy, but you will lose a small fraction of AdBlocks usefulness. To fix, open Firefox, click on Tools–>AdBlock–>Preferences–>AdBlock Options and deselect Obj-Tabs. After this, you should be able to refresh the page and see all of the glorious Flash. Here are some before and after shots of the fix (macromedia.com).

Before

After

For those looking to keep track of what you are doing, but don’t have a PDA or a notebook, this is a free online solution for you. RememberTheMilk.com does a fantastic job of keeping things simple yet very very useful. You can organize your to-do list and even send items to your list via email. This application is still new, so just imagine how good it will be once it starts maturing. They are using the ever-so-popular AJAX combination to provide a seamless interface.

Check them out!

I just ran across this site (open source versus) and though they did an awesome job of comparing Open Source software with the closed-sourced alternative. They’ve compared Outlook Express with Mozilla’s Thunderbird, Windows with SuSE and Ubuntu. Check them out here.

I just read this on Newsforge and thought it was cool. An OpenDocument Fellowship. Very nice.

Read the article.

Read more about OpenDocument and OpenOffice here.

See the OpenDocument Fellowship Homepage.

When I read this article, I wanted to leap into the air cheering. I think this is big news on a topic I’ve been supporting since I first heard of it. Essentially, Google sees the potential of OpenOffice in the productivity suite war against Microsoft, and decided to bring in some help for the OOo Team. Read the article.

See my previous entries about OpenOffice and OpenDocument:

OpenOffice version 2 OpenDocument (Part 1) OpenDocument Part 2

For any Ubuntu lovers out there, I found this to be very cool. I friend of mine has got Ubuntu loaded and working on his Tablet PC (Compaq TC1000) including the ‘magic’ pen. Check it out over here with photos.

For those looking for a way to sync your music files with your Philips GoGear media player, you’ll likely find that MusicMatch is the officially supported tool. However, for those who wish to use this with Linux, MusicMatch is not an option. It only took me two minutes to find this set of tools available for the Linux community provided by the Linux community.

Linux Digital Media Manager (LDMM) has the ability to add and delete MP3s from the device, and manage the album and artist databases. It has a GUI front-end and a straightforward interface. It was written in Python specifically for the HDD060, but should work fine with the HDD070 as well.

openGogear is a suite of tools for working with Philips GoGear HDD0xx MP3 players. Though these devices can be mounted with the standard usb-storage module, these tools implement the file indexing required to hear MP3s. openGogear has a debian package available. JGoGear is the Java-based GUI front-end for openGogear.

PyGogear is obviously written in Python exchanges information about the tracks from a Sqlite database file, usually named MyDb. This program reads the ID3v1 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts the most important ones in the database. There is no GUI available yet, but it is in the works.

pymaj was rewritten from pyGogear 5.8.4 with some changes and folders support added. Program can read the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts them in the database. M3U playlists are supported as well.

See my previous post regarding Philips GoGear here.

Update: Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) mounted the HDD070 as ‘Philips MassStorage-Disc: 1.9GB Removable Volume’ available under ‘Computer’. Its actual location is /media/usbdisk/. Under this device, you’ll find the following structure:

/_system/
    /firmware/
        /FWimage.bak
        /FWimage.oke
    /media/
        /audio/
            all mp3 files here...
            MyDb (the file that contains the ID3 index information)
/drmv1pm.tmp