This is the warcry, stories from the battle front about a modern warriors search for Knighthood, stories of an epic loved affair lived out on a raging battle field.

A random geekpost

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

I haven’t posted a tech/geek post in a very long time but now I just feel I have to. As many of you know, I switched to Mac a while back and I must say I am fairly happy with the switch.

Together with the switch to mac and getting an iPod came the switch to iTunes something that I have been less than happy with. iTunes is a bloated music player that works well as long as you are on a mac and as long as you want to work with mac/iPod etc …. then I found ecoute a small little player that hooks up with iTunes seamlessly and as an extra bonus scrobbles your songs to last.fm.

Now having 4000 songs in your library (some years back me and Hanna thought we where moving to Africa and ripped our entire CD collection, a good thing to, we had three break ins in our car during the move and lost many of our favourite CD’s) is messy, most of them untagged and without artwork etc. I tried Song genie but it really barely made a dent in my collection. Enter Pollux, not only is Pollux recognising almost every song I chuck at it and find both artwork and lyrics, it simplifies it (yes you do not have all the bells and whistles of Song Genie) in a zen like way, it is also free!

It is now munching through my entire collection sorting tagging and adding artwork.

With these little helper apps, I am now much happier with iTunes.

02.10.2009 iPod View Comments

iPod guy

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

iPodguyI was told last week that the “iPod Generation” consists of people ages 18-34. This disqualifies me since i turned 35 last wekk. What am I to do then when my wonderful wife bought me a brand new iPod nano, a red one?

Well I guess the least I can do is make a cartoon, it was more than a while ago I released my last cartoon.

I obviously also need to run around college screaming my head of because I have my iPod at last!

30.11.2008 armyguy, iPod View Comments

Free Bible Software, anyone?

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

So here I am with my new Macbook and with a new OS I need to find good solid bible software. I need a good McBible or perhaps it should be called iBible.

I started out with MacSword. I have always loved the Sword project as it is GPL and therefore it comes at no cost. Gnome Sword is easy to use and very versatile but on the mac sadly my NRSV, NIV and Message would not work properly (no surprise as I compiled them from the Biblegateway website). In all fairness I have to say I still loved the layout and serene simplicity of macsword and won’t be removing it from my harddrive anytime soon.

So I decided to go for Accordance. Accordance is much more expensive (especially compared to MacSword at zero cost). As far as I can tell accordance is a brilliant piece of software and I am enjoying it fully and you can read a full review of the software here. Incidently if you make a comment on that article before 5th of December you stand a chance of winning a free copy of accordance introductory library package.

Now if I could only figure out how to put a bible on my new red iPod that my precious wife got for my birthday….

29.11.2008 Bible, Techspeak, iPod View Comments

It’s MY IPod!

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

I have a brand new Macbook Pro, I had the older model that I bought just a few weeks before they released the new model. It was a great machine, great specs, great performance. But as the new model came out I got really sad. My machine was still a great machine but not as great as the new one. I called the store and they agreed to replace it and just as a bonus we where going to get the great deal with a free IPod Nano as well.

As this unfolds it turns out it took them two weeks for the macbooks to arrive at the store. And so we are no longer eligeble for the IPod deal. I go to the store disappointed and demand my IPod. The poor fellow in the store try to explain to me that it isn’t that he doesn’t want to give me an IPod, but he can not. I get flustered and in my mind I think I have a right to have a free IPod, after all didn’t everyone else who paid ridiculous amount of money for a mac get one. The Apple representative kindly reminds me that we are allready getting a £400 discount because we are students. I know he is right but I do not want to acknowledge it.

With the same attitude my youngest daughter has when she lies on the floor kicking and screaming to get ice cream just before dinner. I feel had. Why do I never get the good deal? Why do I never win the lottery (but you never play …. THAT’S NOT THE POINT)? I wan’t to scream out: IT’S NOT FAIR!

A quiet voice in my head reminds me of people starving in Africa and homeless people right outside this building of commercialism but the child within screams in outrage and then bargains. Yes, but I am getting a RED IPod that means at least some of the money is given to aids research.

At that outrageously ridiculous argument the card house in my mind crumbles and I let go. I am walking out of the store with a fantastic computer, the best one I have ever owned. Letting go of my silly notion of having my way frees me up to enjoy what I actually have. Letting go of what could have been, lets me just savor what is! Richard Foster calls this the freedom of submission and he states “In the discipline of Submission we are released to drop the matter, forget it. Frankly, most things in life are not nearly as important as we think they are.”1.

  1. Foster, Richard J. The Celebration of Discipline (San Francisco: Harper, 1998) p. 111 [↩]

06.11.2008 Chivalric values, Christian life, Discipline, Patrik, Techspeak, iPod View Comments

iPod shuffle trouble in Feisty and an easy fix!

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Yesterday at Hannas request I gave her an apple and a hug for her birthday. It turns out Hannas brand new pink iPod shuffle doesn’t play well in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn despite what a superficial google scan might tell you.

Jump straight to the summary if you are impatient….

I tried to add songs to it with Rythmbox, Banshee, gtkpod, gtkpod-aac all these applications could add songs but none of them played (and yes I first converted my precious ogg files into mp3)

It turns out the device needs to be initialized on a windows machine with iTunes installed, so off I went to hunt for windows machines, luckily I realized that I have not yet formated a windows partition on one of my laptops so I was off to a good start. After that I tried to add songs to the iPod again with these various programs and while I could add songs some songs played and others didn’t and when I removed songs they dissapeared from all the programs but still played in the shuffle. Aaaargh and frustration.

As I was trying to install iTunes in crossover office and realizing that the version that works with crossover is to old for the shuffle I was ready to toss the thing and jump off a cliff when I found this little python script. Thank God for hackers! It is a tiny script that sits on your iPod and when you copied the mp3 files over to your shuffle in any directory you like with any name you want, you just run the script and viola

presto working iPod shuffle.

Summary

  1. Initialize (or restore if you allready have stuff on it) the iPod shuffle in iTunes on a windoze machine
  2. Copy all the music you want in mp3 format (get SoundConverter with ‘apt-get install soundconverter‘ if your files are in other formats) to your iPod shuffle in nautilus
    using any file structure that makes sense to you
  3. Copy in the rebuild-db.py script to the root of your iPod shuffle and double click it in nautilus (and select run)
  4. Eject your iPod shuffle and enjoy your music

26.04.2007 Feisty, Techspeak, Ubuntu, howto, iPod View Comments