Pile of Dross

For a while now I’ve been using IPodDisk to access the music tracks on my ipod (managed from my windows PC) from my iBook, to play them through iTunes. However this gets irritating when I buy new cds and rip them to my ipod, as I have to add the new albums manually into my iBooks’s iTunes library. At home, my ripped tracks are stored on a linux server’s filesystem which is samba shared with the windows box. The linux box runs mt-daapd (now called FireFly Media Server apparently) allowing my iBook to access tracks remotely, and it has the nice feature of periodically rescanning for additions, so I wondered if I could do something similar for when I’m away from home - a daap server running on my iBook serving tracks locally to iTunes.

I started initially looking at mt-daapd but didn’t immediately see any dmg packages for Mac OS X and I didn’t want to install Fink - the documented way to do it, so I looked around for alternatives and found Tangerine however it required Mono which caused sufficent load to make using my iBook painful.

Further googling lead to the Nighty mt-daapd build page which does have dmg packages. Installing the latest release at the time (Firefly-svn-1450) worked perfectly after I changed the path to the Artists directory of my Ipod disk. Another benefit to FireFly over Tangerine is a Status icon to turn it on and off.

Last night, in a fit of insomnia , I created an account at Last.fm. In the cold, clear but slightly rain spattered, light of day. I’m not sure I’ll use it that much - mostly I listen to my ipod which gets connected to a computer whenever I buy a new album - i.e. very infrequently. I have setup an itunes server on one of my linux systems, shockingly easy it was with mt-daapd, but still don’t tend to have music playing that often. We shall see.

So this CD has been sitting at the end of my Amazon wishlist for a while now, and I finally got round to buying last week to fill out an order to free P&P. For the most part its pretty reasonable, some of the sharper edges have been smoothed over and tracks perhaps flow more than the originals did though perhaps some of the energy and vibrancy has been diluted, but it does emphasis what the lyrics bring to the tracks.
But there’s one track that’s just a travesty - Everybody Hurts. Without the lyrics its lost a huge amount of its power, but the whole track seems to have been done in a sort of jazz/swing style that seems wildly inappropriate and makes the whole thing seem like the soundtrack to some sort of eighties romantic comedy. Ick ick ick.

I think I’m going to make a playlist: R.E.M. plays the music of R.E.M. and play the two back to back, to compare better, though I do think I have a tendency towards “imprinting” - the first version I hear of a track, original or cover, becomes the definitive version to me, and any variance from that first heard version makes me cringe, which may make me partial to the R.E.M originals more than I should be.

So Serenity. Good film, go see.

(Yes even you philstine, sceptical Cambridge-dwelling folk - Go. See.)

It stands reasonably well on its own if you haven’t seen the tv series, I think.

But did they *have* to do *that* and at that point? I mean…

Anyway, also picked up the remaining two books in the Baroque cycle while I was in Reading and also the Lord of the Rings trilogy soundtrack. and then back home for pizza.

Very nearly bought a set of playing cards of 52 stag night pranks, but didn’t; relax Graeme (you too Annabel).

Oh dear, this blog does seem to have descended into acronym soup somewhat - Grid Acronym Soup to be precise. Still it does make slightly more sense if you know that C.M.S. here normally means the LHC experiment Compact Muon Solenoid, rather than Content Management System, but not much more.

I’ve bought the fifth Harry Potter (Audio)book off iTunes to listen to on my ipod on the way to work. I didn’t listen to it today due to a disagreement with iTunes about what the words

iPod Sync Complete

actually mean, so instead listened to a loop of Tori Amos’ cover of I don’t like Mondays, something that may possibly concern my fellow commuters if they knew :-). So no opinion on it so far, other than if the intention is to stop people buying unofficial then they may want to consider lowering the price to something a little less extortionate;I mean for 50ukp I could probably buy all the sodding paper books and still have at least tenner left over.

This means I’ll be “reading” 3 books:

Annotated DragonLance Chronicles, amusing if only for the attempts to claim that spelling differences were intentional

Quicksilver, picked this up before I left for DESY along with Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet and didn’t manage to finish it before I came back, which is the first time on a work trip that I haven’t finished all my reading material by halfway through. Indeed even reading it throughout the train journeys up north and back again I’m still only 4/5s of the way through

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as mentioned above