Binary Bonsai

It is remarkably rare to see your latest iTMS purchase accompanied by a digital booklet in the shape of a PDF file. Remarkable because whereas a physical booklet requires the use of large color-corrected printers, ink, distribution outlets, delivery vehicles (and men), loss in profits and much more, digital booklets require only ‘print to PDF’, and you’re done. Considering that, I do wonder why all my albums don’t come with booklets.

When they do however, it makes for a nice addition to the otherwise pretty non-tangible purchase that is digitally distributed music. In fact, in the degradation from LP to CD to digital audio, the only thing truly missed by the too-busy-with-life-or-too-sane-to-be-anal-audiophiles portion of the population is the art of proper packaging.

Yes, you can still go out and buy your Amon Tobin on LP with beautiful luxurious cover art the size of your head or order up the latest ultra-deluxe limited edition from Nine Inch Nails and get fantastically well-crafted paraphernalia you’ll look at maybe once a decade. In fact, when you take into account the work some b®ands put into creating their packaging, buying digitally is really a damn shame (never mind piracy).

Well played Lars. Well played.

Now for the bait ‘n’ switch in which we turn our the attention to how iTunes deals with those accompanying PDF files in a most annoying manner.

It lists them in the same file-listing as all the music tracks, which makes sense, after all where else would it list it? But what happens when you’re in coverflow view and you double-click an album-cover to play said album and PDF is listed at the top of the album’s files?

The album doesn’t actually play, as you might expect. It simply opens the PDF file! And adding insult to injury, the PDF file opens in your PDF-reader-of-choice — which in my unfortunate case, is Adobe Acrobat — taking you away from iTunes and probably launching you into the teeth-grindingly long process of telling Adobe Updater ‘please, with all due respect; fuck off’. This will probably take up to several minutes, depending on your system and the PDF being opened with what app, before you can return to iTunes and actually play the album you wanted to listen to in the first place.

Listen. No. Alright? Just no. Bad designer.

This is a perfect example of the system performing an ‘expected action’, which in the user’s mind is most likely absolutely unexpected. After all, when would you expect double-clicking an album cover to open a PDF file? And even worse, this is the only action you can perform in iTunes which will actually transport you away from iTunes!

Other than the recessed headphone jack (possibly the stupidest design decision in the history of ever), there’s only a single thing about the iPhone annoying me on a daily basis, and which, together with the non-glove-compatibility of the interface, has convinced me that yes, the iPhone was most definitely ‘Designed by Apple in (sub-tropic) California’.

The remote control ‘clicker’. It catches on to zippers like a Turkish vendor on a tourist. The shape along with the location along the wire, makes it perfect for incessantly snatching onto anything and everything semi-solid in the neck area, which in my case happens to be the zipper to my jacket.

Had the clicker been entirely smooth, from end to end, this wouldn’t be a problem. And no functionality need be sacrificed. Everyone gets what they want, we all become friends and world peace ensues.

Thank you Steve.

Or how I learned to stop worrying, and love Apple’s Time Capsule. Which, with the purpose of having you empathize with the effort it took to finally find a solution to my Time Capsule woes — a device I bought to rid us of previous problems, not to cause us new ones — requires a break down of our rather intricate home network setup.

Coming into the house we have a 20mbit tube, the router of which acts as a DHCP server and then goes directly into the 500GB Time Capsule under the TV, which is the backbone for the tethered part of the network as well as network entry-point for a 250GB HDD where I mainly store my music, its internal switch hooks up to the 1TB NAS, the media center Mac Mini (Godiva) running Plex and a wire running into our bedroom — to my workstation setup — where it connects to a 1Gbit switch, which goes into an old 802.11g Airport Extreme — which is also the print-point — and my MacBook Pro (Valkyrie), when I need the speed o’ teh wire. Right next to the Time Capsule, there’s an Airport Express, tethered to the Xbox 360¹ (Xuul) and a PS3 (Glortho) on wifi. And finally there’s a second Airport Express in the kitchen, again, simply for streaming music to the speaker there. Finally, aside from the consoles and the Mac Mini, there’s a MacBook Pro, an old Powerbook (Freya) and an iPhone (Monolith), plus various other devices from time to time.

Now, here comes the interesting part. I had been having some serious problems getting my money’s worth out of the Time Capsule up until this week. Not only did it suffer bandwidth degradation over time, but Time Machine would often have problems mounting the backup sparse-image on the Time Capsule (even if it was already mounted!)², which was concerning, as I’ve come to rely quite heavily on Time Machine keeping my stuff safe. Needless to say, I was mildly annoyed that the two things I bought the thing for, speed and backup, weren’t working as advertised.

And I had tried literally everything I could think of. At the end of the day, I had the Time Capsule set up as a WDS main unit, with the other three 802.11g airports running WDS remote. WDS being necessary for bridging the ethernet ports of the airport expresses, and it wasn’t working as intended.

I had a sneaking suspicion that the g-units were what was bringing the network down in speed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that since I really needed the g-segment. So it took me a little while, not being a networks expert, to figure out how to go about it, but what finally saved me was this:

I dropped support for 802.11g on the Time Capsule and instead tethered the Airport Extreme to the ‘backbone’ and set it up as a WDS main on its own 802.11g wifi network, with the Express’s hooking into it as remotes. Then I ditched support for g on the Time Capsule, and created an 802.11n wireless network, and set it up as 5Ghz (wide channels), and not 2.4Ghz, which is not only where our own g network is, but also a rather crowded frequency in our neighborhood.

Both wifi networks are on the same backbone, meaning I can easily stream music from my MacBook Pro to the Airtunes ports, control the MBP from my iPhone and otherwise go back and forth exactly as I please. And it’s fast enough for me to backup, serve music and even, for hobbiest levels, manage photos wirelessly.

Awesome.

1. Which is fucked for two reasons. One, the Xbox doesn’t have bult-in wifi, and I’m not paying the price MS wants for their wifi module, so it has to be tethered. And two, the Airport Express is only there because the Time Capsule does everything except Airtunes. Gee, thanks Apple. ↩


2. Check out the support forums; they’re flooded with people suffering Time Capsule woes. And not a word from Apple. I’ve had quite a few friends ask me about it as a solution to their problems, and I haven’t been able to recommend it to them, not least because of Apple’s lack of support for this unit. Not at least I can tell them what worked for me, but that’s hardly good enough. ↩

Hey, everybody bitching and whining about your iPhone plans out there in the world (yeah Canadians, I’m looking at you, whiners); I think it’s official now. Denmark has one of the worst iPhone plan in the world (though it looks like Norway beats us).

Not to mention Telia, which doesn’t have the best reputation in the country either…

So, you know, the next time you’re a Canadian whining about Rogers and their iPhone plan, consider that ours is not only more expensive, but worse in every conceivable way. In fact, you can’t get a plan for your iPhone in Canada that’s as bad as the ones we have here in the Northern countries.

Think about that for a moment.

Currently our household has 3 Macs. A 1.66Ghz Mac Mini (my workstation, called Valkyrie) w. 1GB RAM, a 1GHZ Powerbook w. 512MB RAM (Rikke’s machine, called Freya) and my 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro w. 2GB RAM (Godiva). They’re all running Leopard and share the wifi network (on which there are several other devices, as well as a 1TB network HDD). Connected to the Mac mini is a 250GB disk for photos and music and a 500GB disk for time machine backups.

Here’s the deal; I want to hook the Mac mini up to our 40” Bravia and use it as our media center, running OSXBMC on it as well as whatever other applications it would make sense to run on there. In turn, I would then have my 20” Cinema Display, wireless keyboard and mouse and the external HDD’s sitting without a workstation.

This is where the MBP comes into play, because I then want to use that as my primary machine from now on (where it’s been my secondary up until now). But I’m not sure if I can live with some of the issues that crop up in doing this. So I’m looking for some qualified help here:

• The iTunes Library. This is the biggest issue. I’m approaching a 160GB library, which is currently hosted on an external HDD. My MBP’s disk is a mere 120GB, so there’s an obvious problem here. I play music through our Airports, and if the MBP doesn’t carry the music, I can’t do so unless I’m wired. So I can either keep my music on the external HDD so I only have access to it when I’m ‘wired’. This sucks, because if iTunes discovers that its ‘library disk’ is gone, it resets that location to the MBP itself, and so I have to manually change it back all the time. Or I can prune it down; though I’d rather not to be honest. Or I can keep a sub-set of it on the MBP. Or I can keep it on the Mac mini. If I keep it on the Mac mini, I can’t manage it though, except on the TV or through a VNC connection, and that feels a bit bleh. Man, do I ever wish Apple would allow me to manage shared libraries… Or I can find some other solution that eludes me.
• iPhone. I need to have a loose wire for syncing the iPhone if I’m not wired up to the display. No biggie. But again, the iTunes issue.
• Now You See It, Now You Don’t. I’m afraid of applications leaving their windows on a screen that is no longer there, when I unplug the cinema display. I generally think OS X deals with multi monitors well (opposite Windows, cuz DAMN!), but I’m unsure if this is a problem at all?

And of course, anything else that might be of interest.

Comment are open.