iTunes Match

354 days ago

This week I finally dove headfirst into Apple’s iTunes Match. My collection consists of just over 2800 songs; my pre-fire collection of CDs ripped at 128k (thank you, River Road VFD, for rescuing the computer), 256k VBRs from much of my wife’s CD collection, a handful of Napster stow-aways (yar!), a few songs traded with friends, and over $600 of iTunes purchases.

I turned on iTunes match at let it run for a few hours. Over 1800 of my songs matched! I still mostly had the lower bitrate or DRM-laden versions. How to resolve the issue? Delete the local copies.

Three more iCloud Statuses presented other challenges:

Error: Convert the offending track to MP3.

Ineligible: Either a music video, or burn to audio CD and re-rip.

Duplicate: iTunes Match does not rely on the ID3 tags to find duplicates, which has been a great help for reducing duplicates from songs being mis-labeled. Duplicates are relatively easy to resolve once you find the dupe: just delete one.

The maddening realization for me was how often I had purchased the same song twice from iTunes (at least a dozen times). This may be the biggest advantage to iTunes Match: I always have my full music collection on my iPhone, so I know immediately if I already own the song.

Deactivating Delicious

457 days ago

This afternoon I deactivated1 my Delicious account. I feel the need to extract myself from websites that no longer serve a purpose to me. What Delicious once gave me I now use a combination of Xmarks and Instapaper for.

For some time I have been mulling over a reduction in my web footprint. Forget privacy concerns—this is about maintaining dozens of accounts across as many living, evolving web services. I worry about the security implications of so many different logins and passwords, almost as much as the security implications of unifying them all into one account.

There are a lot of reasons to leave a service, however. Eventually the pressure to turn an advertising profit will ruin Twitter. I have even contemplated extracting myself from the Google search-social-advertising-a-verse. This will likely happen when they finally force the new Gmail interface—which is garbage—on me.

1: “To deactivate your account, head to your Settings and click the “deactivate account” link in the “TOOLS” list on the right side of the page.” - Delicious Help

Google+ now on Google Apps

570 days ago

Finally.

This is well timed, as I have lost the ability to share Google Reader articles.

The setup process was not the most straight-forward, but the instructions are clear and offer very helpful links throughout. The only obstacle I encountered was the need to enable Google Talk/Chat.

Web-based MySQL Administration

623 days ago

I have been using one flavor or another of PHPMyAdmin for almost the duration of the project. The app has become ubiquitous; every web host that I have used in the past seven years has had it as part of their control panel. I have installed it myself maybe a dozen times.

Late last year I moved everything from LunarPages to FatCow; I did not feel like paying for two years of hosting and FatCow was a little cheaper. For whatever reason, FatCow’s PHPMyAdmin would not import a 500kb SQL file. I hated the idea of installing my own version of PHPMyAdmin because

  1. you either need to keep up with security updates or remove the installation and
  2. it was already installed by my host!

So I looked at two alternatives. The first was SQL Buddy and I ran into similar issues uploading the file. I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with the FatCow MySQL server, or maybe Comcast.

I finally settled on Adminer. Worked fine.

Blog Back, New Look

625 days ago

I have resurrected the blog portion of hraefn.net and converted to TextPattern. I like it so far; some teething pains tonight as I migrated from my local machine.

A few things are not working correctly, but it was important for me to get the site up and mostly functioning. I think a broken public website can be a powerful motivational tool…

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