Pile of Dross

So yes, I’m still alive despite not having written anything here for 3 months.

So what have I been up to? Not a huge amount really. I spent a week in CERN at a conference in January but other than that have just been kicking around Didcot.

I have finally succumbed to temptation and bought myself a new tv - a Philips 32″ LCD HDTV (32pf9731d/10) which cost *mumble* quid and its very very nice.

March is shaping up to be a very hectic month for various reasons

So I’ve been using the setup described in Pile of Dross » Using iTunes to play tracks from an iPod it doesn’t manage for a while now and it works quite well; however I do have 2 gripes with it.

1. You can’t create on the fly playlists.
2. Too many things to do in sequence - connect Ipod, start IpodDisk, Start Firefly.

While googling for an answer to the first I found a partial answer to the second :

Do Something When is a bit of software that makes it easy to start applications when drives are mounted. I’ve set it up to start IpodDisk when my ipod is connected to my iBook, removing the need to go searching in my Apps folder for IpodDisk, Firefly has an icon in the status bar so is less of a hassle to start.
I’ve also set up DSW to start up SuperDuper! whenever I mount the backup directory over the network - I have occasional pangs of guilt about how infrequently I backup the laptop.

I suspect that if I poked into Automator and Applescript, these would have been fairly trivial to do myself, but DSW wraps it up in a convenient package.

I’m still looking for ways to satisfy my first gripe, all the solutions I found basically involved streaming the shared tracks onto the local disk and playing them from there. This may be the only way to do it, but it bothers me in some undefinable fashion - it just seems wrong, its entirely possible to make random interactive selections, so why isn’t it possible to queue these selections up?