Ten Months with a Luggable Server: The Dell M6500

According to Dell, my Precision M6500 shipped around May 15th of 2010, which seems right to me. It has been pretty satisfying, but not without bumps.

The iTunes Advantage: Not What You Think

Apple’s enormously successful iPod/iPhone/iPad line have something in common with their iPod ancestors: you can’t even get started without a computer and iTunes.

This is given Apple a huge advantage, one that Apple’s competitors have failed to do anything about. And that advantage has nothing to do with songs, videos, apps or podcasts.

No, the real advantage of iTunes is that it ensures every iDevice user, first generation Nano to Verizon iPhone 4 to iPad, is an Apple customer.

The Epic Fail of Music Syncing under Linux

Ouch. Ask a silly question, get a ridiculous answer.

I have, as has been noted before, a Motorola Droid X. Mostly, I use Grooveshark, Slacker, and Pandora for my music needs, but I do have 5000+ songs on a server at home. On my desktop (wherever I might be) I access those songs via Ampache, streaming as I need them.

To sync some songs with my Droid, I turned to the wonderful Media Monkey, under Windows. The Monkey is a truly awesome piece of software; the kids and I have used it forever to sync music into various MP3 players. Always works. Edits tags with ease. Displays none of iTunes despicable bloat. Doesn’t crash. Handles a network music collection with aplomb. My oldest daughter goes to sleep to a playlist in Media Monkey!

I’ve used MM for so long, on so many different little players, of course it was where I turned first for my Droid.

Trivial. Plug in with Mass Storage mode, configure the directories for Music and Playlists, boom, works.

I promptly forgot about it. I don’t sync that often. Local content is music of last resort for me.

Until this weekend, when I was recovering from my Number One Daughter’s ten-girl sleepover. Traumatic events prompt the strangest questions.

In this case I asked, “Surely I can sync my playlists and music from Linux, right?”

When Venti Stops Being Twenty

My caffeine of choice is chai, specifically a morning Venti chai from Starbucks. I’m not a coffee drinker, but I love me some chai first thing in the morning. Starbucks sizes are wel-known: Tall, Grande, Venti. “Venti is Twenty”, a 20 ounce coffee drink. Except when it is not.

Your iPhone — The Time to Jailbreak is Now!

I’ve dabbled in jailbreaking my iPhone a couple times, with varying luck. When I had a 3G, despite trying several times, I only got it to boot jailbroken once. Usually it failed somewhere and got hung followed by a looong restore process. Since I need to use the phone this got old in a hurry.

The the Spirit hit me. And it was good!

November: That’s When I Leave Apple

Now I have a date: November 2010.

That’s the target date for me to leave my iPhone behind for an Android phone.

That’s the day I get out from under Steve’s thumb.

No Sh!t Allowed in the App Store? Oh Please!

Everyone’s entire iPhone experience is controlled by Apple. Ditto for iPad owners.

Good thing Apple is never mistaken about what a user wants.  I am awed by Apple’s ability to know not only what I want to do today, but whatever I might want to do in the future.

The Pleasant Surprise of Lucid Lynx Beta 2

I liked Unix from the first time I saw it, in the early ’80s when I took a class in the summer at my dad’s community college.

I’ve been using Linux for a good long time — I remember when the move the 1.3 kernel was in the offing. I’ve installed it on a ton of machines over the years. I ran my own IMAP server in-house for a while, until webmail made that stupid. I’ve got multiple Linux servers in my house, and a passel of them at work.

For years I worked on Unix boxes; some of my earliest Java coding was done on a Solaris box. But Solaris, like BSD, is too niche to use as an everyday platform on commodity hardware. So, half my hard-drive is an Ubuntu installation, and that’s where I do most of my work.

Why Can’t I Read Dune?

io9 Recently had a thread about sci-fi blind spots, supposed sci-fi masterworks that you have just missed. That got me thinking, and the ensuing discussion was interesting, but it left me with a question?

Why can’t I read the Dune series?

The Great Wall of Google

I admit it, I use Gmail for my everyday mail (in spite of the fact that Gmail still can’t search). I use Google Reader like an addict, on my phone, my desktops, my laptop, across platforms, wherever.

But I am getting more and more annoyed with The Great Wall of Google.