Life and Times

Apple Airport Express & O2 Wireless .....

Having upgraded my hi-fi I wanted to stream music from iTunes on my MacBook, iPhone & iPad and the Aitport Express seemed to fit the bill. I could also get Spotify to stream with the addition of Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba.

I bought an Airport Express and tried to set it up by linking to the O2 wireless router and spent a painful 2 hours struggling  get the two devices to communicate - the AE kept timing out when trying to link.

After a bit of research I found that the WEP encryption was the culprit and after changing to WPA the AE and router got it together and everything went green.

I'm pleased with the result and after selecting the AE from within iTunes I can stream music to the Marantz ..... result!

Cheers for now,

K

iTunes Match Sorted

My previous post was about the frustrations I was experiencing with iTunes Match, especially where it would re-run the matching process every time I started iTunes.

I'm pleased to report that this has now stopped. I think it was caused because it had to upload some songs and that was causing it to re-match the library. All of my non-matched songs have now been uploaded to Apple's servers and so the matching process appears to have finished & I can start iTunes without it attempting to match the library.

I've downloaded 256kbs versions of all of the songs that were ripped using a lower bit rate so my library is squeeky clean. However, this has caused a problem that I wasn't expecting, in that my 160Gb iPod is now too small to hold my entire library ......

I've had to develop a strategy to store the music I listen to most on the iPod and keep everything else on the MacBook.

Cheers for now,
K 

iTunes Match is Driving Me Mad!

As a card-carrying Apple fan I signed up for iTunes Match as soon as it was available in the UK. I expected it to take a while as my music collection is around 23k songs but I was pleasantly surprised and thought it did a reasonable job.

There were some "funnies" where it matched most of am album apart from one or two tracks, which I can't solve at the moment and it's very slow uploading the unmatched tracks.

But what is really annoying is that every time I start iTunes it has to go through the matching process again, which takes an age. I've Googled extensively to try and find a solution, but the only thing I've come up with is to turn Match off. It'd be great if you could schedule the match process or have to specifically request that it run an update.

Anyone else experienced this?

Cheers for now,
K 

Amazon Kindle - A Couple of Months On ...

I've been using my Kindle since Christmas and its revitalised my reading. What I really like is the convenience and how easy it is to buy books & explore new authors. Amazon's book store is so simple to use that its easy to buy way too many books to get through. I've used the "download sample" functionality to try before buying. I think that one of the biggest plus points is the way books are kept in sync between my Kindle and iPhone. Its great to be able to put down my Kindle then pick up my phone and read from where I left off. This is ideal for those odd moments when I'm travelling and need something to read. I have tried to read newspapers on the Kindle & trialled The Times & Daily Telegraph and whilst I loved the convenience of having the paper delivered wirelessly every morning I felt that the lack of photos meant that the experience was somewhat lacking. On the other hand, I suppose that paying less than £10 a month for a quality newspaper is still good value for money, but maybe not when compared against The Times app on an iPad. I don't use the web browser at all, as the experience is just too slow in my opinion. So, overall I am very happy with my Kindle for reading & purchasing books and would recommend it without reservation. However, if you want a richer media experience, then you should probably look elsewhere .....  Cheers for now, K

Sync Your Files Between Multiple Computers/Devices

If you are like me, you have a laptop, netbook, iPhone and iPad (OK, so I don't have an iPad yet) you probably want to keep a few files or photos synchronised. 

For instance, very often I'll take my Acer netbook running Ubuntu to London on business as I don't want to lug my MacBook around with me. This means that I need to make sure that I have the latest customer information, price lists, etc loaded. Previously I used a memory stick to copy the files across, but now I just drag the files into my Dropbox folder and let it sync across all my devices that have the Dropbox application installed.

I always have my iPhone with me and the same files are available in Dropbox on the phone.

After making notes about my meeting on the train, Dropbox sync's the files and they are available on my MacBook when I get to the office the next day.

Dropbox is free for up to 2Gb of storage. Try it out here

Cheers for now,
K

iWork '09 - Still Not Usable For Me

I really wanted to like Apple's new version of iWork and downloaded the trial yesterday to see if they had fixed the "stopper" in the previous version of Pages.

Unfortunately, its still not possible to generate a word processing document that includes both portrait and landscape pages in the same document, so its still not the right application for me. I'll have to continue to use Microsoft's Office for Mac product.

Please let me know if anyone finds a workaround.

Cheers for now,
K

All NAS'd Up

It took a week from start to finish, but I now have my NAS drive installed and my entire photos and iTunes music library transferred.

The 1TB Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo installed easily enough but I had a few issues when I tried to copy files from my external USB to the NAS. I never really got to the bottom of the fault, but I think it was caused by trying to copy too many in one go. This meant that it took quite a long time to copy the photos and music files and verify that I didn't miss any during the transfer.

I have set it up to automatically backup to a USB disc plugged into the NAS every Saturday night at midnight.

Now its done I am very happy with the solution. It works very well and has reduced the clutter in my apartment. The NAS drive fits into my entertainment stand and is very unobtrusive. I haven't set it up to turn off automatically if the MacBook is turned off as I only got all the files across over the weekend, but I'll change the settings tonight and see what happens.

Overall, I recommend the Buffalo to any Mac user that needs a large NAS disc solution.

Cheers for now,
K

It's Time to NAS Up My Life

So, I think I have decided that its time to tidy up my apartment and get rid of the ever growing spaghetti of power and USB leads on my table and I'm going to do it using a NAS drive attached to my BT wireless router. I want to be able to turn on the laptop and access my photos using Lightroom and my iTunes library without plugging in a USB disk where they currently reside. Also, being able to backup the NAS automatically is important.

I use a MacBook Pro, which (I have learned) restricts my choice of NAS device somewhat. I borrowed a friend's WP MyBook World at the weekend and spent hours trying to get the thing to work properly. Google "mybook mac problems" and you'll get the picture. There are a few workarounds on the web, but none would work for me.

Today I took the bull by the horns and ordered a 1TB Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo box, which apparently is Mac friendly. Hopefully it will be here by the weekend and I'l be able to report on whether its as good as people say.

Feel free to comment if you have any suggestions or experience of Mac-friendly NAS solutions.

Cheers for now.

K