the8thsign » switch

New Macbook

Alec Peden — Mon, 22 May 2006 20:27:12 +0000

The switch is complete. On Saturday, I bought my first computer and it was a Apple Macbook. Now, I’ve owned computers before, alot of them as a matter of fact, but this is the first one I have ever purchased. In the past I’ve build all my PC, even built a PC just to run OS X. The fact is I probably wouldn’t be a Mac user today if OS X wasn’t cracked and distributed online.

Now for the goodies. I got the 2.0GHz Macbook in white with stock memory and hard drive. I’ve already ordered 2GB RAM for this and in a week or two I will order a 120GB Hard Drive to swap out. As is tho, this thing screams. Easily the best computer i’ve ever owned. I was alittle but off in the store by the 13.1″ screen but after using it I have to say the screen is absolutely brilliant, i love the glossy screen. The keyboard took about a day to get use to now I’m using it like a pro. The touchpad is great, can scroll pages and right click, and it works far better than i expected. I was assuming i would have to connect a mouse to it but there is no need with the new trackpad. So far I’m in love. I’m still in the process of setting it up and reinstalling apps and really wont be able to give it a run for its money til i get the upgraded RAM and HDD.

Here are some pics of me unpacking it

How i learned to stop being scared and embraced iTunes :: Part 2

Alec Peden — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:56:36 +0000

I’m a huge fan of Last.fm / Audioscrobbler project. I’ve been a member since April 2005 when i was introduced to it when Xbox Media Center added support for it. The guys over at Last.fm use and promote the usage of Musicbrainz to keep all your files tagged for accurate information. I remember trying it out when i first started using Last.fm and frankly i hated it. User Interface was lacking, program had some shitty documentation and was not intuitive at all. So as fast as it was install it was uninstalled. Tag&Rename did everything i could ever want, no reason to switch. Fast forward to November 2005 when Picard 0.5 was released and the article was on digg. I decided to try it out and it was far more user friendly than the previous Musicbrainz Tagger. I started tagging some of my new music that still needed to be tagged and it worked like a charm. The interface was clunky but what do you expect for a 0.5 version. I slowly started to get addicted to tagging my files using picard, what started as a new program to mess with had become a project. After a week of 8 hour days each, i had gone through my entire music collection and it felt good to finally have everything tagged correctly. I was actually surprised how much stuff was mistagged or missing. I had setup Picard to rename my files to a standard template so everything was uniform. So the next step was to delete all my cover art which i had label folder.jpg so it would show up in WMP/MCE and in XBMC. I was going to embed the cover art into the tags instead. Since Musicbrainz doesn’t do cover art it was back to trustly ol’ Tag&Rename. Album by album I went and added cover art into the files tag. When all the smoke cleared, i had rid my digital music collection of incomplete albums, mistagged songs, renamed everything as one standard template and added cover art to each files tag. When i would add new music it would now run through Musicbrainz before anything else. This is when Picard posed a problem. Everytime you opened it, it would load 700+ cds from the server. It would take 15-20mins to load the program. So i want back to Musicbrainz Tagger and set it up the same way. All i had to do now was drag and drop any new files into tagger and they would be tagged, renamed and moved to the correct folder. All i had to do was just download and embed the cover art using Tag&Rename. Life was good.

Until I made the switch from Windows to Apple a month ago.

The Switch
Tag&Rename was gone, Winamp was gone, Musicbrainz Tagger and Picard werent available for Mac OS X. My perfect system was now unavailable to me. Some changes would have to be made. Obviously iTunes was my music player of choice, i had been using it on and off in Windows for 3 years. First thing I did was turn off �Keep iTunes Music folder organized� and �Copy files to iTunes Music folder� when adding to library� and imported my files. One small annoyance i have is that when playing a music file in finder, it copies and adds itself to the iTunes library. I got around this by setting Quicktime to be the default player for Mp3 files. This way i can sample mp3 files without adding it to the library. I now needed a tagger and batch renamer. IEatBrainz is the recommended client for Musicbrainz on Mac OS X. IEatBrainz is a totally different animal as Picard and Tagger were. Its integration with iTunes was nice but that meant i had to add possible incorrectly tagged files into my library first. IEatBrainz doesn’t rename files like Tagger/Picard did either. For this i turned to Media Rage. My process now was the following:

Open new music folder and delete anything not related to the music files
Use Media Rage to rename the files to the same template i had used before.
Rename the folder to Artist – Album
Move folder to Music folder
Import new folder into iTunes
Run IEatBrainz on the new files
Find the Cover Art using iTunes Cover Art Widget and add it
Remove the genre if any*

* I don’t use genre’s as they are too hard deal with, so i ignore them all together
While this worked it was kinda a lot of work.

Problems
I own an iPod Shuffle and I never really had the need for a full featured iPod but the Shuffle was perfect for file transfer and the gym. I would use Autofill before i went to the gym. With a 10,000+ song library and only a 1G Shuffle i would get a lot of stuff i really didn’t want to listen too while working out. While my friend and me have similar tastes, they weren’t the same, so I had some stuff i would never listen to on my own but always keep it for the sake of having the biggest library i could. So I started weeding out albums i would never listen to but i would have to delete it out of the iTunes library first then find it on the hard drive and delete it there. Annoying at best.

I had starting using Playlists and more importantly Smart Playlists to my advantage at this time too. This really was my first step to seeing the true power and ease of iTunes. I started rating music, making Smart Playlists then autofilling my Shuffle from that and I finally got to listen to stuff i wanted instead of skipping 4 or 5 songs songs just to hear one song i liked.

There was only one small thing to do now. Find the courage to turn on “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder”. After what happened back in 2003 it was a bitter pill to swallow but 2006 is a near of change for me so i made a backup, duh, and checked the two boxes. Then i took a deep breathe and hit Consolidate Library.

It was done and know what, I haven’t looked back. My process now is:

1) Drag files into iTunes (they rename themselves and put them in the correct folders)
2) Open IEatBrainz and run it against Recently Added
3) Use Export Artwork to find and add album art automatically
4) Use iTunes tagger to remove genre if needed

Besides the easy of use now, i can delete in one place now and backup is a breeze now. Just save the iTunes folder and all my music, playlists, rating and playcounts are saved. I can even restore to a Windows machine running iTunes without a hiccup too. I’m also digging Bonjour sharing. Its nice to open up my laptop and start iTunes and have my entire collection ready to listen too or turn on XBMC and have access to all my playlists.

I can finally say I’m happy iTunes.

How i learned to stop being scared and embraced iTunes :: Part 1

Alec Peden — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 06:00:35 +0000

I confess, I’m a bit anal about my digital music collection, but who isn’t. We all have our little ways of keeping our music collection tidy and the way we want it. The obsessive-compulsiveness in us comes out when it involves collections of any kind for some reason. From the folders we keep them in to the way we name the files. Here’s a little back story.

When I was younger I collected mp3s like most people, single songs I liked with no such things as ID3 tags and everything just thrown into one folder using winamp 2.0 to play everything. Ahh the good old days when it took an hour to download one 5 megabyte song. Then came Napster and really changed the landscape of digital music. Without a doubt, Napster has been the biggest thing to hit the web since its inception. Apple’s success with the iPod and ITMS owe everything to Napster. Napster hit at about the same time @Home starting to hit big, Winamp 2 was out and programs to rip your own CDs were relatively available now. This is around the time I started looking at keeping full albums in my collection along with singles. It was easy to stick in one of my CDs, have it be looked up automatically using CDDB and have everything ripped, renamed and tagged for you. After Napster was taken offline, I turned to my good old friend IRC for my music now. The difference with IRC was it was hard to find individual songs, full albums were served. So when looking for a new song i wanted, I would have to download the full album. This is when i really started to eliminate single songs for full albums and actually building a �collection�. Between downloading full albums online and ripping my own I had a sizable, for the time, collection. Between 2001 and 2003 I had just keep my music in My Music folder using Artist – Album folder structure and having the tracks named Track Number (Artist) – Song.mp3 and this worked great for me. I could find the Artist and/or album i wanted fast and if i wanted to burn an MP3 CD for my, cutting edge at the time, Awia MP3 in-dash CD head unit in my car, it was as easy as dragging the folders into Adaptec EZ CD Creator 4.0 and boom, i would have a MP3 CD ready for my car in about 30mins. Long live 4x burners.

Enter 2003 and Apple announces iTunes for Windows. Being the geek I am, it was download and installed within minutes of me finding out. First thing I do is import my music. Unlike today, iTunes didn’t ask if i wanted it to rearrange my music, something I had been fighting with Windows Media Player at the time to not do. After being a little pissed off it just did that, I went to delete the songs out of the library so I could start over. Little did I know at the time, deleting from the library also deleted from disk. By the time I realized what was happening and hit the reset button as fast as i could, the damage had been done. 70% of my music collection was gone. 4 years of building it to all be wiped out in a matter of seconds. I’m pretty sure I shed a single tear at that exact moment.

With 70% of my music collection gone and the remaining 30% renamed and moved around, it was time for a fresh start in my mind. But I didn’t want to start from scratch, thats a lot of work. Lucky for me, one of my friends has very similar tastes as me and we owned much of the same stuff. So with his library and what was left with mine i started my work of rebuilding. This started with the purchase of Tag&Rename for Windows, which i highly recommend. One of a select few programs i miss from Windows. After a few weeks of hardcore renaming, tagging and adding album art i was in a good position again. At the time i was using Windows Media Center in my living room so there for had to use Windows Media Player’s library features which i have come to hate. WMP uses Album Artist and ignores the Artist tag. I finally got feed up with seeing Unknown Artist in Media Center so broke down and started using WMP’s builtin lookup. Surprising it did what it was suppose to and only add missing information. And this is the way it stayed up until November of 2005.

Switch – Windows > OS X Apps

Alec Peden — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:07:45 +0000

Here are what I’ve been using as replacements for my Windows apps:
WindowsXP>OSX

Web Browser: Firefox>Safari
Email: Outlook>Entourage
Bittorrent: utorrent>Azureus
IRC: mIRC>Colloquy
Blogging: ecto>ecto
Flickr: Flickr Uploader>iPhoto/Flickr Export
Comics: CDisplay>ComicBookLover
MP3 Tagger: Tag&Rename/Musicbrainz>Media Rage/IEatBrainz/Export Artwork
Music: Winamp>iTunes
Last.fm: Audioscrobber for Winamp/Last.fm Player>iScrobbler/Last.fm Player
P2P: Limewire>Limewire
Office: Office 2003>Office 2004
Compression: WinRAR>Stuffit
PSP – PSPWare>iPSP
DVD ripping: DVDShrink>Handbrake/MactheRipper
FTP: FlashFXP>Transmit
Video Player: Windows Media Player>VLC
Xbox: Qwix>Xbox Browser
Burning: Nero>Toast
IM: AIM/Google Talk>iChat/Adium
Webpage: Nvu>Nvu
Finance: Quickbooks 2004>Quickbooks 2006 for Mac
VOIP: Ventrilo/TeamSpeak/Skype>Ventrilo/TeamSpeex
Todo list: Google Desktop with Todo Plugin>High Priority
Text: Notepad>Textmate
Photos: Pisaca>iPhoto

Some cool new programs:
Coverflow
GarageSale
MyMySpaceMail

Favorite Widgets:
I was never a fan of Konfabulator,now Yahoo Widgets. I never found anything really useful to me but I got to say I’m loving Dashboard. Here are some of my favorite non-default widgets:

Now Playing (Tivo)
TV Tracker
Bloglines Notifier
EasyEnvelopes
Stats for Adsense

Issues:
Ventrilo and Teamspeex can only use Speex codec, default is GSM, Have to change it on the server to work.
Quickbooks not up to par with Windows Version, tho i haven’t tried QB 2006 yet.
Skype not working on Intel Macs.
Office 2004 sluggish, Rosetta
ecto sluggish. Rosetta
Needed to used a patched version of Azureus
Firefox not Universal Binary yet, sluggish, Rosetta

Things I can’t do on Mac I can on Windows (so far):
Update the firmware on my MPx220 cell phone. Updater is Windows only.

Building a Hackintosh – OS X x86 on PC hardware

Alec Peden — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 07:58:11 +0000

Here is what i used to get OS X 10.4.3 x86 up and running using PC components as my everyday PC. This should last me until the Intel Mac Minis are released and I can actually get my hands on a real Mac.

I used macosx_10.4.3_8f1111_for_dtk_userdvd.dmg, converted it to ISO using UltraISO and then patched it with JaS 1111a Generic Patch v4.2b PPF. Burned it to DVD and that part was done. Next was putting together the hardware.

Motherboard: Foxconn 915GL7MH-S Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 915GL Micro ATX Intel Motherboard – Retail – $66
CPU: Intel Celeron D 336 Prescott 533MHz FSB LGA 775 64-Bit Processor w/ Execute Disable Bit Model BX80547RE2800CN – Retail – $89
Memory: Corsair VS512MB400 512MB DDR400 PC3200 CAS2.5 Value Select Memory Retail x2 – $40.99
Hard Drive: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer – $123.99
DVDROM: Pioneer DVR-110 16X Dual Layer DVD�RW Drive (Black) – $46.50
Case: Generic from local PC shop – $65
Keyboard: Apple Pro Keyboard – $29

Total: $501.47

Alright, now that we got our PC ready, its time to install. Now I’ve read a bunch of different methods to install involving partitioning with partition magic, windows diskpart, using vmware etc. I didn’t need any of that.

1) Boot up the PC with the DVD in the drive and set to boot.
2) At the Installation Screen, goto Tools > Disk Utility.
3) Choose the drive on the right.
4) Click the Partition button and choose 1 Partition from the drop-down menu. Hit the Partition button on the bottom to partition the drive.
5) Close Disk Utility and continue the install.
5) Click on the Customize button and Uncheck the Developer Tools and whatever printer drivers you don’t need.
6) Finish Installing.

Problems i ran into:
While USB keyboard and Mouse worked during the install, it didn’t after first boot. I had to use a PS2 Keyboard and Mouse to finish the setup then deleted AppleFPMemDriver.kext and AppleTPMACPI.kext from the Extensions directory. After that i rebooted with USB keyboard and mouse plugged in an they worked with no problem after that.

Sound output only works out of Line-Out, not Speaker-Out.

I’ve made the “Switch”

Alec Peden — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 03:42:58 +0000

One of my goals this year was to switch from Windows XP to Mac OS X. With Apple switching over to Intel, and the introduction of the Mac Mini, it was the perfect time. When Apple announced last year that they were switching to Intel, my thoughts were that the Mac Mini would be the first to get the Intel treatment. Well, January rolled around and Apple announced new Intel based Macs but no Mini. Foiled. Since i was feeling the itch, i decided to scratch it. I got my hands on 10.4.3 DVD and patched it with JaS 1111a Generic Patch v4.2b. Since I didn’t know what to expect, I wanted to test out OS X first to be sure i could use it on a daily basis. So i installed another hard drive into my PC and disconnected the Windows hard drive. This way i would be forced to use OS X to do what i need without just switching to XP and getting it done. The install worked for the most part except a few small things which were due to unsupported hardware, mainly video drivers as i had a Nvidia card. I’ve used this setup for about a week now and i am hooked. I can do everything i do on a daily basis and do it better and easier. It is now time to build a dedicated box for OS X supports with full hardware support and make the switch permanent.