Kc221 "Interview with Allison Sheridan from Podfeet.com"

Feb 23

A first episode in the “talk to my heroes” series where I interview the people I listen to on my Ipod. This week Allison sheridan of the Nosillacast Podcast. We talk tech, twitter and what its like to be a podcaster.Check out Allisons show over at www.podfeet.com where she hosts the Nosillacast Podcast. A technology podcast with an ever so light Mac Bias.

Shownotes

  • Time stamp
  • Soundseeing Tour : Refueling.
  • Interview with Allison Sheridan from “The Nosillacast” from Podfeet.com
  • Signoff

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KWTV210 : "Going Google"

Feb 23

This week we show you how to use Gmail , Googledocs and the Google desktop application across various operating systems. Take a look at how to share calendars , setup your Gmail, using Google Gadgets AND Google Gears to give you a complete offine-online cross platform Gmail Experience.We feature NYANA as an extra bonus to this episode !

Shownotes

  • Introduction by Nyana.
  • Welcome to Hoth
  • Setup your Gmail account
  • Setup Google Docs
  • Setup Google Calendar
  • Google Gears
  • Installing Google Desktop.
  • Signoff
  • Snowangel.

 

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Macbook Pro goes commando.

Feb 21
Nyana had some time and made this cool "commando – sleeve" for our macbook Pro.

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Sharing Itunes library between two users on the same machine.

Feb 20

Some problems have the simplest solutions, some are unsolvable.  And
some problems seam unsolvable and have the simplest solutions at the
same time. One of those problems is the one I have with Itunes in
“sharing my music directory” in Itunes on our mac so my wife can access
the music on that machine and on other machines in the house. Before I
go into great detail i’ll describe the setup we have. At our home we
have a couple of mac laptops and an Imac. On that Imac we have out
entire music collection. (we don’t have any cd’s anymore) we just play
everything from the imac. The itunes library that we have sits under my
account. So whenever I am logged in we can access it via Itunes. To
make it available to other computers in the house I enabled the Itunes
functionality to ‘share my library’ Thus every time I was logged in
other computers in the house running Itunes would be able to access the
music. Here comes the problem. Both Nyana and  I use individual user
accounts on our macs. Where it used to be a case of ‘this is YOUR
laptop , this is Mine’ its now something like ‘this is A laptop and
i’ll use it under my account”. So whenever my wife was home and logged
into the Imac she was unable to access the music stored under my user
account. It also meant that the library would not be shared out to the
other macs when I was not logged in.

So what did we want : We wanted to share out our Itunes library to
other macs in the house AND to other accounts on the same machine.
Apparently Apple’s “all to easy” approach seems a little
over-simplified in this case, resulting in a situation that is mega
hard to solve. I did some googling and it made matters worse. Apple
suggests putting the library in a shared directory, but whenever user A
adds something (music, podcasts, ripped files) this is not visible to
user B, It would solve part of our problems, but the risk of having a
borked up library is something that is very real. The problem is that
Itunes stores the music files in a folder, but keeps an index of this
file in a different xml file .. FOR EACH USER. So instead of just ONE
index file, you have TWO , hence the risk of mismatching music and
missing out on things.  Other hacks spoke of scripts, terminal commands
and even running a linux machine with Itunes running in whine. Complex
stuff !

On my way home in the car I thought of the solution. There is such a
thing as ‘fast user switching’ that allows a SECOND user to log in
while the applications and processes of the first user are still
running. Why not enable fast user switching, have my account (and the
subsequent ITUNES) running in the background as we “fast user switch”‘
into nyna’s account. That way she can log into the Imac and access the
music via the shared itunes library (that appears as a network library)
and she can access the library when she logs into her mac laptop. So
problem solved ! Ok, before ‘fast user switching’ I terminate as much
programs as I can under “my account” leaving only Itunes running. Next
up Nyana fast user switches to her account and away we go. When she is
done working with the computer she just logs out and I can log back
into my own (already running) session.

So we leave my own account running in the background, it eats up SOME
system resources, but our state of the art, 4 gig Ram Imac does not
realy care about that and we can listen to our music anywhere.

Link : Fast User Switching.  ( Ps : this is something that also works on Vista and XP machines)

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How low can you go. Day one.

Feb 19

The beginning is a delicate time. So says the princess at the beginning of the Dune movie. And some truth can be found in that statement. Yesterday I treaded carefully into a delicate beginning when I went looking for a linux distribution to install on my ten year old Toshiba Satellite for our little “how low can you go” experiment. With only 128 megs of ram, a celeron 366 processor and only a wired network interface, it was kind of challenging to find the right distribution to get started.

I started off with Googling around for a linux Distro that could do the trick. A little googling around brought several possible candidates to the table like DSL (Damn Small Linux) and Puppylinux. I had tried the last one and was pretty pleased with the results some time ago. However its not a .debian based distro, so all the apt-get stuff that makes it so easy to install software on my system would not work. So i went looking for “ubuntu flavored” alternatives.

2 immediately popped to mind being Crunchbang Linux and ELbuntu. The difference with ‘”standard” ubuntu is that they sport a lighter GUI. Elbuntu uses the E17 gui (famous from the GOS linux version that was hyped last year). After downloading and burning both I came to the conclusion that my system was too light for these light distributions. Crunchbang took ages to boot, Elbuntu took forever to give me its installation screen.

So I thought I would start from the ground up and begin with a Command line version of Ubuntu and choose one of the seperate distro’s on top. Hitting F4 at the installation menu of Ubuntu server provided me with ‘install a minimal system” and that is what I went for. The installation took most of the evening and when I get home tonight I should have a working (command line only) system to start from.

So next up its time to choose the GUI and find one that makes the old sattelite a little usable.

Links : Crunchbang  ELbuntu and the orginal article .

 

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