Category: software

podcasting stuff

I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts lately on a fairly regular basis, and I decided to take the next step today, and actually start listening to them on my iPod. I’d been simply pressing them to audio CDs and listening to them in my car via the CD changer. This works fine, but I usually don’t want to listen to a given podcast more than once or twice, so it’s kind of a waste of a CD.

I decided to use my old first-gen 5GB iPod for this, rather than clutter up my newer iPod with podcasts. Getting this set up turned out to be quite a production. The old iPod was Mac-formatted, so, at first, I set it up to sync with my “received podcasts” directory via XPlay. That worked OK, but I thought I could do better by switching to iTunes. So I reformatted the iPod and set it up to sync with iTunes. I didn’t get very far. I started getting disk errors, so I reformatted again and set everything up again. I did a little better this time. I got one disk error at one point, but it’s been good since. I’ve been playing around a bit, trying to stress it and see if it’s going to keep working or not. So far, so good.

I also decided to upgrade to iTunes 4.8, just for yuks. That worked fine, except that it broke iPodder. I upgraded to iPodder 2.0.3, and everything seems fine now.

So, after all that work, I now have an iPod full of podcasts that I can plug into my car stereo via an old casette adapter. It sounds OK, but not great. I also ordered a car charger from XtremeMac, so I can keep the thing going, since the battery life ain’t what it used to be.

Version Control

If you want to set up a relatively simple yet powerful version control system on a Windows server, and you don’t want to spend any money on it, I recommend CVS. Start with CVSNT. Use Tortoise CVS as a front-end. Then, check this page for a quick and easy way to set up ViewCVS. Worked for me.

Beyond Compare

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time lately looking at file synchronization software. I’ve been playing around with Vice Versa Pro for a week or so, and it works reasonably well. I stumbled across Beyond Compare today, though, and I think I’ll probably switch to that. It’s got a slightly nicer interface, and it’s got interesting scripting capabilities.

Podcasting

I’ve finally started playing around with podcasts.
Software:
– iPodder – Free, simple. Integrates with iTunes.
Sounds:
– Superburst Mixtape from Warren Ellis.
– Insomnia Radio
I’m sure there’s plenty of other good stuff out there. Just more good music to listen to in the car!

Changes

I decided to make a couple of major software changes on my home computer tonight.

First, I switched from using Eudora 4.3 for my e-mail over to Outlook 2003. I’ve been using Eudora for nearly 10 years now, but I haven’t bought an upgrade in a few years. The old version was starting to flake out a bit, but I really didn’t want to pay $40 for the new version when I had Outlook sitting on my hard drive doing nothing. I got all my messages from Eudora to Outlook by the recommended method of first importing them into Outlook Express, then importing from OE to Outlook 2003. That worked pretty well, and even saved my folder structure with no problems. The resulting .PST file is about 100 MB. My Eudora directory was about 90 MB, so it looks like there’s not as much bloat to Outlook as I thought there would be. I notice that Outlook seems a bit sluggish compared to Eudora, but maybe that’ll get better after I clean up the mail file a bit.

My second big change was pulling my music library into iTunes and letting that be my default music player. I, of course, use iTunes on my Mac, but I’ve been using something called Zinf on my PC. It works OK, but it’s not as nice as iTunes. I’ve had serious problems with iTunes in the past, but the current version seems to be stable on my machine. I’ve got about 10 GB of music on my PC, mostly downloaded from EMusic. I’ll probably still stick with Nero for CD burning, just because I can’t imagine iTunes could possible work better.