My ideal job (well, if everything else in the IT sector falls through)

[taken from]

Skip to the full meaty article

I’ve been meaning to write about the pitfalls that I experienced during the process of getting Mac OSX working well on my main AMD-based PC because, although the support available on the net (particularily at insanelymac.com) is fantastic, I experienced some problems that were either undocumented, or took a serious amount of research to find and fix: I may as well write down what I found.

Maintaining a dialogue with readers would be really interesting: feel free to email me and I’ll do my best to help. Even better, leave a comment for others to see the conversation: I’m very active on this blog and I’ll see it pretty quickly.

I took lots of photos along the way but unfortunately the whole lot got corrupted by my Ubuntu laptop, along with my AMAZING front-row Travis photos that I had planned to post as well ( doh ).

Anyway, here goes. I did manage to salvage a few photos, so all is not lost.

Disclaimer: Please note: I messed around with this purely for academic research (and consumer evaluation) purposes: I fully intend to buy a Mac in the near future. I just wanted some fun first… Also, please make sure you backup everything you can’t live without before attempting this: the probability of having to wipe your system multiple times is.. likely.

Continue Reading »

Just come on stage, feeling pretty good

First Lady

Jesse Jackson

What an experience. 4am here, stayed up all night with scott and tom watching several live streams, great fun! History was made. See ya later, Joe the plumber! See ya later Palin! See ya later, Bob the Builder! See you later Noddy! Have I missed out any other republican mascots?

I never thought we’d see someone decent getting into office again after eight years of Bush. There’s a lot of faith been put in Obama, lets hope he’s as good as he seems..

To be honest, I’m not so bothered about McCain getting in or not (although Obama is much more palatable) , I mean..  that’s fine. I’m just SO glad that Palin isn’t vice president. I think she would have set such a bad example to women across the country (that you can go a long way without much knowledge), and would have portrayed America as even more of a sad joke across the world that unfortunately I feel it’s already become to many people abroad. Obama has got to be the way forward.

It’s 4am and I’m making no sense. Night!

Edit: Just seen McCain’s speech: it was very gracious and honorable to be honest. Nice one.

You knows it

Huzzah! I’ve managed to add the 5000 tracks automatically back into iTunes from the backup that I had.

An arbitary 5000 tracks got accidentally deleted from my library and (to cut a long story short) although I had a backup of the lot, I didnt want to lose the meta data associated with the tracks by re-adding them (i.e. ratings, playlist positions, date added,date modified, play count etc). I also wanted to avoid the time it would take to hunt down 5000 tracks and manually re-add them.

Here is the playlist of deleted files beforehand

My solution was to write a small Java app (which I’ll upload soon and make open-source) to parse the Library file, check which files weren’t where they were supposed to be, and then to copy them into the correct position according to the existing library file, from a backup.

Success: 5327 files were pulled out of the backup and placed into position! Saving me much time and effort.

Hurrah! Only 35 songs missing now!

The only files that weren’t copied were the ones that were moved AFTER I took the backup: the iTunes library file survived the deletion and so was under the impression that, relative to the backup, the files would be in a different location. Luckily, this totals only 35 files, which I can easily move myself. Awesome!

A beautiful sight:

Loading Library file: Wed Oct 29 19:24:23 GMT 2008
Done: Wed Oct 29 19:25:05 GMT 2008
5534 dead tracks detected.
Searching for files in backup folder…Wed Oct 29 19:25:11 GMT 2008
…
TOTAL: 5327 files moved.

Cool! I’m sure this is common knowledge by now, but I’ve only just got OSX so to me this is super cool. On windows, I always wanted to be able to natively play .FLAC files within iTunes, but there was no real way of doing it, and I had to rip my CDs in proprietary Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format instead.

On the mac, some legend has written a nice package called Fluke that allows you to easily get your flacs into iTunes. Game on!

EDIT: This software renders iTunes fairly unstable at editing flac files: I gave up trying to edit a bunch of Beatles .FLAC rips after it crashed about 5 times within 10 minutes. I recommend converting the FLACs to .WAVs in Max, and then imprting these (still lossless) files into iTunes and then converting them to Apple Lossless format to reduce the huge filesize somewhat.

Also, this fix allows iTunes to play .FLACs but it should be noted that it (obviously) doesn’t enable .FLAC usage on the iPod, which is something that didn’t immediately occur to me.

Note 1: You can’t add your own artwork unless..
Note 2: You just use iTunes store to get artwork (right click -> get album artwork)
Note 3: The coders got the .flac format past the vigilantly proprietary eye of iTunes by writing the codec for Quicktime and smuggling it in as a movie format with no video, I think.

Ian

Importing the music on the new HDD. At least now I’ve got a backup if iTunes decides to delete everything again. Plus, it’s formatted mac-wise now, hopefully less issues.

I renamed Justin Timberlake to Justine in a fit of frivolity several years ago

Windows rescued all my music, only for me to delete it again..

I used this guide for moving an iTunes library from PC to Mac (by deliberately corrupting the .itc file and having iTunes rebuild it from the .xml backup it keeps, which we cunningly edited to point to our new files).

After a premature victory dance (iTunes was importing the files! I could see my painstakingly crafted playlists again!!) I happened to take a look at the music drive and my heart stopped:

free space: 25GB… 27GB.. 32GB…

ARGH! Whilst iTunes was under the impression that it was “consolidating the library”, in actual fact it was moving the files to nowhere! null! zero! It was just deleting the buggers. Stupid piece of s@#t..

Commence my bitterness rising, panic setting in once again. I knew, at this moment, that I should have taken the opportunity to BACK UP when I had it (10 minutes prior to this moment), but that this was an unreachable fantasy again. Time to dig out the disk undeleting tools…

There’s a fairly niffty round-up of free harddrive recovery apps at lifehacker which I started to work through. To date I’ve recovered 10GB of the 30GB that were lost (making it a total of around 160GB recovered of a total 180GB that I had originally.. not bad, but still not satisfying for someone as anal as me when it comes to the music library.. these aren’t just files we’re talking about, they’re memories of when each track was important to me for whatever reason).  Restoration left me in the cold after telling me about all the files it could restore.. and then telling me “you don’t have permission”.. even though I was running as admin. lameness.

PC Inspector File Recovery (also free) allowed me to reclaim the deleted 10GB (mentioned above) straight away, and is currently running a long cluster-scanning scan to recover some more. fingers crossed.

EDIT: How is this any help? PC Inspector File Recovery has now completed it’s ’search for lost items’, and it turns out this feature doesnt do anything more than identify the file-type of every cluster on the hard drive. Useful.

I’m still planning [EDIT: It's written!] to write that hackintosh guide , but I’ll wait till I’ve got all the cracks worked out first. (I’m still too sickened about losing all this music to be enthusiastic about OSX.. even though it is the sex)

I’ve bought a 500GB drive which I’ll format OSX-wise, see if it deletes stuff off the native filesystem (grrrr)

More soon, then.

Ian