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Switch week : Linux on the iMac and more.

I love Apple products. Seriously. I do. They have liberated me from a life of ONLY using windows into a world of creativity and ease of use. Over 8 years ago they made helped me switch from a life of cleaning up temporary files and cookies on Windows 2000 machines to a computer environment that allowed me to compose music, record podcasts, edit video’s and do so much more. On a Mac it ‘just worked’.  I still use Macs today. The high quality of their hardware is exceptional but unfortunately , so are their prices. Over the years a rift has arisen between what I demand of an operating system and what Apple has to offer. The fact that I have become a slider , who switches from OS to OS to get stuff done is not always very compatible with some Cupertino’s hardware and software interoperability’s. (Read : vendor lock in).  Luckily I am free to choose : I hop from Linux to Windows to OSX and use the best operating system for the task. I’m free .. free to “leave the walled garden” when I want to. 

We love our iMac.

So when my beloved wife started to notice that our 4 year old iMac was getting a little slow, I started to wonder what I could still do with it. Although I can still install the latest version of Mavericks on the machine, I do hear the silent whispers from Cupertino calling to “Buy a new Mac”.  Perhaps that would not be a bad thing. Sell it off second hand and buy a new one. Problem is : its a 24 inch iMac. It fits wonderfully on my wifes desk and brings her a lot of joy. The options we have is buying a smaller 21 inch or a bigger 27 inch iMac. In both cases we would have to spend valuable cash for a small speed increase.  Was it worth it ? I decided to ask the most important question I ask ANYONE who needs a new computer : 

What do you use it for ? 

To be honest : Niejana doesn’t use the Mac for that one thing that makes a Mac special : A reliable multimedia workhorse. She uses it to surf , do administrative tasks, manage her emails , her photos and stuff like that : No Final Cut Pro , Logic or any other of the great Apple production tools.  So I asked the question : Why not keep the machine but ditch the OS ?

_niejana_s_imac_after_a_couple_of_hours_of_tinkering.__Can_you_spot_what_s_odd_in_this_picture_on_February_16__2014_at_0857PM_by_Knightwise

Time for a light weight alternative.

Linux is the obvious answer. It runs on almost anything and has a high degree of versatility. Its many graphical interfaces are strange, alien and mostly built for and by geeks. But that was not what we wanted : The goal of this project was to offer the SAME experience .. only faster. So what LOOKS like OSX but IS in fact Linux. The answer : Elementary OS.

Elementary OS :  ‘I-can’t-believe-this-is-not-osx‘

So I bit the bullet, downloaded the 64 bit version of Elementary OS and installed it on the system. (No dual boot, no nothing). I don’t recommend going through this route if its your first time running Linux on a Mac. ( See our “Dual boot” articles to learn how) Elementary LOOKS like OSX and is a beautiful combination between the complexity (and power) of Linux (Elementary is based on Ubuntu 12.04) and a simple interface that LOOKS like OSX. 

Making it look right.

Installing the standard tools Niejana uses ( Chrome, Thunderbird, Openoffice, access to Gmail and stuff) was not hard, because we largely use “slider friendly” applications in this house. Next morning I just pointed at the machine, told her the “close” button was gonna be on the other side of the windows, and left for work.

Time to jump the walled garden.

So was I done ? No, I was just beginning. This is a cross platform household with Macs, Linux machines and Windows machines. That meant I also need to “liberate” all the data from iTunes and  iPhoto into an environment that would be accessible to both our remaining macs AND our linux machine. 

So hang in there.

This week you will get more tips and tricks about “liberating” your data from a proprietary application like iPhoto, iTunes, iCloud and others so you can access them in a “slider-friendly-world”.  Installing Elementary was just the beginning. Because whoever told you can only play YOUR music in CERTAIN application on SPECIFIC hardware … was wrong.

Links :

 

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Sync all your iTunes playlists to your Android phone with Tunesync

The thing with proprietary software solutions, is that they are great. Everything tends to work smoothly together right up to the point where you decide to wander off the beaten path of supplier XYZ. A couple of years ago I made the crucial mistake of pouring my entire music collection into iTunes. Now, some 10 000 songs later .. its still in there. Being totally OCD I have organized all my tracks into nice little playlists and enjoy my tunes in the “Apple walled garden”.  Whether I am playing them from the Mac, sharing out the iTunes library over iTunes to my other macs, blasting them from the Airport express speakers or syncing them to my other i-Devices.

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But a couple of weeks ago I could not help myself myself and crawled over the walled garden into android territory with my purchase of a Galaxy Note 2. And accessing my delicately curated iTunes library from THIS device turns out to be an near impossible task. The deep crevasse that divides me from listening to my tunes on my “droid” consists of an incompatibility to sync with iTunes (only IOS devices of course) and the total inability to get the music on my Android in an organised form. Sure I can browse the filestructure of my iTunes library and copy over files to the SD card on my Phone .. but iTunes has “reorganized” my music into folders according to artist .. not according to playlist.

Enter Tunesync. A two-part application app in the android store that saves the day. The deal is simple. Download the server part of their app and install it on your Mac that is running iTunes. Download the CLIENT side of their application and install that to your Android device. Make sure both are on the same wifi network and be amazed !

Tunesync detected my (massive) iTunes library and started indexing the playlists right away. After I selected the playlists I wanted to have on my Android it started to copy over the tracks AND the playlist order in my Androids music collection. 20 minutes later I had all the grooves I needed on my Note2. Tunesync regularly “checks” if the playlists are still up to date and “updates” them whenever I connect or start up the app.  I had expected some glitches and on one occasion Tunesync had given me all my playlists .. with no tracks inside ( it erases and re-copies all the  tracks on every sync instead of doing an incremental) but when I retried the sync it worked flawlessly.

Tunesync does one thing and it does it well, and the hilarious part is , it does it better then Apples iTunes-IOS wireless sync ! The app is 4.99 in the Play store and worth every dime.

Tunesync is available from the Play Store.

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Free your Music from iTunes with iTunes Export.

Its quite amazing when you stop and think that iTunes is almost 10 years old this year. Apple’s end-all-be-all monotheistic gateway for your music collection towards your iPod device, is an application that is loved and hated equally. Like a teenage mom, iTunes went from a young, innocent slender application whose sole purpose was to curate your music collection, to an over-bloated thirty-something iPod-Baby machine that had acquired more functionality (and resources) over the years. Right before Apple gave iTunes a much needed binary liposuction with version 11, iTunes was one fat mama. 

But that fat mama had started herding my music collection back in its younger years, and over the course of 10 years 15000 tracks have found their way into its arms. Over 100 playlists divide these tracks into manageable chunks and … I’ll probably never get them out again. Album art, MP3 tags, comments, stars, iTunes poisons my library with proprietary metadata and decides its a better idea to arrange the songs for me instead of my own ‘one album per folder’ setup. 

When I started using Linux and other operating systems more and more, I got annoyed with the fact that I could not access my iTunes music from a different OS then OSX .. and that bugged me.

Hence it was time for the great escape ! A search for an application that would export every track in every playlist that I had to a predetermined folder structure that would be compatible with parallel universes WITHOUT iTunes.   After hitting “The Google” for hours on end, I decided to enter the terms “iTunes Export” and came across a brilliant little application by Eric Daugherty called .. “iTunes Exporter”. 

How it works ? Simple : On Osx (sorry , its an OSX app only) close iTunes and fire up “iTunes Exporter” Select the playlists you want to export and voila : iTunes exporter creates a folder with the name of the playlist and exports the tracks (using their id3 tags as file names) together with a playlist file. The result is simple and brilliant : Your (non DRM’d) music exported to a folder tree, ready to be imported into any media system of your choice. Its handy if you iPod-iPhone or whatever iDevice ever breaks .. or you just buy an Android device.

In the words of some Scottish guy with an ax and a skirt : FREEEEDOOOOMM !!!

Links : iTunes Exporter.

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Turn Plex into the heart of your media consumption setup.

If there is one thing I love, then it’s performing acts of Blasphemy 🙂 Strickly technological blasphemy of course. The kind that makes operating system makers, virtual shopkeepers and DRM overlords grasp the few stray hairs on their balding heads and cry out “Blasphemy” into the digital night. To be frank : I love it to make tech do things it wasn’t supposed to.

With our Mac Mini as a central mediahub in our house, it holds all the movies and TV shows that I love to watch, and hidden deeply behind the magical fairy dust that is the Itunes library, lie hidden all my songs. Locked away in a proprietary cloud of pixy poo. 

Around the house we have several devices lying around depicting both the Cupertinian Apple, The green android goblin or boast a bold penguin. The owners of these devices have long ago banished the television from its monopolistical rule of the entertainment empire. These masters would like to consume any content, anywhere on any device. Wether this be Android, IOS, Linux or even Windows .. They would like to watch and listen to anything, anywhere .. and if possible, pickup on one device where they left of on the other.

I have done a podcast about these shenanigans once before (Remember KC0057 : Cross platform Streaming ) where I used a combination of XBMC and DLNA to get things where I wanted them to go. However technology is always on the move and there is always something better on the horizon.

Today I have been playing around with Plex. A central media hub that takes all of the content you have at your disposal (Audio or video) and “streams” that towards any connected device in the house. (Tablets, Phones and embedded devices) Aside from being the red-light district for your home media with the “plex server” It also offers a great front end to “consume” that media on whatever desktop (or media center pc) you are using.  If you ever feel the urge to crawl out from under your desk and enter the big airy meeting room with the high ceiling (Referred by some as “outside”) Plex even lets you connect back home so you can continue to enjoy whatever you have been watching before you were forced out of your house. 

So far I”ve enjoyed flawless transcoding and streaming of some of my favorite TV shows and ‘backed up’ movies to both my Tablets (Android and IOS) and am currently enjoying some music streamed from my itunes library .. on my Android tablet. Can you spell Blasphemy ? No ? thats ok .. you can just SCREAM it ! :p

The Plex server app is ‘Slider friendly’ and available for Windows, Linux, OSX and some “embedded NAS” devices. The clients will put you back a couple of bucks (about 5 or 10 depending of what you choose) on your mobile device .. but the quality and convenience is totally worth it.

In a couple of words. Download and install the Plex server, run the configuration wizzard ( Click yes yes yes and point it towards your media) Put the mobile apps on your portable devices and let them auto discover your Plex server .. Run to the bathroom and don’t come out until you have watched the entire series of Friends .. from your tablet or smartphone.

Never mind the family members who command the black monolith downstairs to consume whatever dribble they like to watch .. Get Plex and turn any device into your personal media station.

Links : PLEX. 

So have YOU played with plex ? Share your experiences or questions in the comments.

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Ubuntu 12.04 : Mount that iPad : Play .Avi : No iTunes :-)

We are very happy to line up one of our new guestbloggers on Knightwise.com. Its @McVries_ who kicks of the series with a great article on “sliding” from Ubuntu to IOS and hooking up your iPad .. without iTunes .. on a Linux machine.

Ubuntu 12.04 : Mount that iPad : Play .Avi : No iTunes 🙂 

iTunes has some disadvantages, and one of them is a rather serious one for any linux user. It just isn’t available. Although some older versions are said to be Wine compatible I have a Windows virtual machine setup to be able to use iTunes (amongst other tasks). But since spotify I don’t sync that much music anymore and for my daily dose of podcasts I’ve dumped iTunes a long time ago. But what about movies? Well, i recently figured out that it’s a lot easier for an Ubuntu user to transfer them to an iPad then for, let’s say, a Mac or Windows user. How? Directly from the Desktop! And in a lot of cases you don’t even need to bother to convert it to a native iOs format. Een .avi or a .mkv plays very well.

The Recipe: An iOs device, in my case an iPad, one USB cable, your computer running Ubuntu and (for example) OPlayerHD Lite (Free as in beer in the appstore).

After connecting your iOs device you will see two mountpoints pop up in your filebrowser. One of them facilitates your photo import and the other one with a name like “Documents from {Username}” is the one we want now. This is the one that will help you ‘inject’ a file in almost any off the applications you have installed on your device. If you open it you’ll see something like this:

Documents

And OPlayer is in there as well. (Why do i use OPlayer? It supports .avi, mkv, and dvd-folders, locally and over the network). Double click it’s icon and finally you’ll find a folder called Documents and a folder “Inbox” within. Now just paste the movie you want to watch and watch it dive into your iPad at an enjoyable speed. Start the applicationon on the iPad, browse to the My Documents folder and Enjoy. Offline!

oplayer

onthetablet

Some caveats: Copying a 8 GB Matroska (.mkv) would prove to be rather pointless, the iPad isn’t hefty enough i found. Take a more modest one, around 2 GB for 90 minutes and it seems to work well. Avi is no problem at all.

Links : oPlayerHDlite

A post by Guestblogger McVries  http://www.mcvries.nl  A blog about my experiences using an opensource OS while working as a Windows sysadmin, and being the techno advocate for the organization i work for.

@McVries_   Skeptic IT Manager with a liking for open Source.

 

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Find duplicates in your iTunes library and think long and hard what to do with them

My hairdresser ( of all people ) came to me with an interesting question. He had 14 copies of Michael Jackson. I suggested he would start hiding his children, but it turned out he referred to his iTunes library. These 14 duplicate songs resided in several playlists throughout his massive library. His question was ” how do I track and remove duplicate songs ? “. My counterquestion was ” why should you want to ? ”

Tracking and deleting duplicate songs in iTunes is a doozy. The system is however flawed. Lets say we deleted 12 of the 13 instances of ‘Billy Jean’ out of iTunes. This would give us just one remaining playlist where the track remains and 12 others that have been ” Billy Jean lobotomized.”
This would have devastating results for the Billy Jean play count and would push a track so great that 13 different cd’s, albums and playlists decided to include it. Billy Jean would become an obscure track, only residing in the one untouched playlist.

If iTunes worked right it would delete the 12 duplicates but would “link” the gaps to the remaining tracks, that would be the only logical course of action leaving the user experience intact. But in the end the question is : Why would we want to delete them. With an average mp3 track at 3 meg and the average harddrive at a terrabyte .. Why bother ?

Still : the people behind Apples support article on “how to delete duplicate tracks from iTunes” still have some thinking to do.
Link : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2905

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IOS : Turn your tablet into a learning machine.

Our Tablets (wether that be iPads or Android Tablets) are probably the most coveted piece of technology you can find on our ground floor. Having chased our desktop computers upstairs to our Office and herding our laptops in the closet to wait for more productive tasks, they rule supreme. Aside from the average tasks of playing Angry Birds, checking email and waisting time on Facebook, our iPads do offer us another source of content that TV lacks these days. The ability to learn. If you are ever bored or craving new knowledge : here are three killer applications you can not mis out on on your iPad.

Ted Talks : Probably the best know ‘talks’ app on the iPad , Ted Talks gives you access to the thousands of speeches and talks that have been given on the Ted conferences throughout the world. You can search by keyword, browse the latest talks, check out the different categories, but you can also use the “entertain me” option. Just select the type of talks you want to explore, enter how much time you have, and the TED app will make a great selection for you to enjoy. Download the talks you like for offline viewing or share them online ,making you look far more sophisticated then you are to your social circles. Try the TED TALKS APP.

Kahn Academy : Having heard about the Kahn Academy from the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales himself, I checked out the website to find thousands of cool instructional video’s on a variety of educational topics. Nice ! especially if you are in the educational sector you can find a plethora of content with a far higher degree of quality and accuracy then Youtube ever has to offer. Try the KAHN ACADEMY APP.

ItunesU : For thousands of years TV shows have taught us that you need to be a jock to get a scholarship and get into some fancy college or university. Well that no longer is true. With the ItunesU app you can now not only download lectures and talks from the best universities in the world , you can also download complete interactive courses to take on for free. An amazing treasure-trove of information awaits ( Personally I listened to a few amazing lectures on astronomy and was blown away to see that , not only did it keep up, i was also able to learn something) Turn your local Starbucks into an MIT auditorium with your iPad and iTunes U.

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The pro

handcuffsThe word alone sounds repulsing to me.

Proprietary : The word alone sounds repulsing to me. Being an open source – cross platform fetishist, anything that is locked into the boundaries of a certain manufacturer is probably comparable to the used toilet paper of satan himself. Anything that veers away from open standards and locks users into the steel confinements of a certain brand or manufacturer is no worse then the sing sing prison. Just think about it. Special document formats that implore you , no , FORCE you to buy a certain peace of software in order to open them. A peace of hardware that only has drivers for a certain operating system. Or an on line music store that will only allow its content to be played on one brand of players. Anything that promises advanced functionality at the cost of the consumers liberty to buy what he wants is something Cruellla Devill would probably love. I hate proprietary stuff. Whether its office document formats, Itunes-music-store restricted music, or even some fancy sort of USB connector variation that will only fit on that one stupid dell machine. If it ain’t open , I don’t want it ! I scream in defiance. What good is a fantastic slideshow made in powerpoint if I can’t open it on my mac, Why the frack would I buy a song on Itunes if i can’t play it on my cheap ass mp3 player, Why in hells bells would  I encode my music in WMA format if my linux machine won’t be able to read it.

Oh ow , caught in the net.

But , willing or unwilling, i have slipped into the net of these close quarters and have witnessed the power of this fully operational battlesta.. erm .. proprietary software. This week I installed my old Mac Mini as a server at home. Giving it some extra firewire storage-space I bestowed upon it the tasks to store all my pictures and music , and do some video capturing on the side. Your basic run of the mill media server. Using a great program called SHAREPOINT i was able to share any folder I liked using the universal SAMBA protocol. For reasons beyond my comprehension mac does not allow sharing just any folder, just the home folder. Probably to prevent you from turning your mac into a file-server , but hey , come on .. its MY MAC remember ?  Nevertheless I got it working nice and dandy. Writing a little logon script with automator gave my other macs access to the shares and that was that. Then I stared using Iphoto and Itunes on the mac server to manage the pictures. That way a boring server was also good for some music playing and photo slide-showing. Think of my mac mini as a power-station (not quite a server , but not quite a workstation). When I got downstairs on my macbook (after connecting to the shared folders using my Ubuntu workstation) i booted up my Itunes and saw…. The mac mini’s music directory.. magically shared through the wonders of AFS (apple file-sharing system). And behold : The Iphoto library on the server was available as well ! And it was surprisingly fast. Sharing files (streaming video) between macs using AFS was faster then doing the same thing with my linux machine over the open source standard of SAMBA.

Its magic .. damn you ! 

So there you have it . By some technology indistinguishable from magic my macs had talked to each-other and decided on a little functionality to brighten up my day: Share pictures and music just like that. Wether the other kids in the room ( my Ubuntu station and Windows machine) could join or not (they couldn’t) was none of their concern. Too bad really. I mean , I feel good about the fact i can share pictures and music from a centralized place .. but am appalled at the fact that somewhere somehow I have fallen for the proprietary marketing trick. It comes with its advantages of course. But the next time I sit behind my Ubuntu workstation … and curse for not being able to access my Itunes .. I know i’ll curse : Damn you proprietary devil !

 To top it of ? A video for you guyz 🙂

 

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The Guy Goma / Cuney Mixup

The Story is ALL OVER the internet , so we carry our bit .. Just read the little intro below and click play. See how one of the biggest company's in the world (Apple) is represented by .. A random sollicitant coming in for a job at the BBC! (Don't miss the first second of the introduction and check out the face on poor mr Goma). " Guy Goma, a graduate from the Congo, appeared on the news channel in place of an IT expert after a mix-up. But Mr Goma, who was wrongly identified in the press as a taxi driver, was really at the BBC for a job interview ("

 

 

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