Multiple Libraries in iTunes 7

By Josh Highland in music, software, tutorials

Yesterday I got a phone call from my friend Jeff. He had recently bought a video ipod for himself and some nanos for his daughters.

His question to me was how to keep his music seperate from their music, basically meaning seperate libraries. At first I told him that I didnt think it was possible, but I would look into it.

A few google searches later I had the answer. In iTunes 7 it is possible to have seperate libarys. To create and switch libraries, you have to hold down the shift key and then open itunes. Instead if it launching, it will present you with some options.





Now when My friend want his music, he just has to open his library, His daughters will do the same thing, but only have access to their library.

Its a cool feature, but a freaking stupid way to access it. Way to go apple I thought you cared about usability. There is nothing usable about having to hold down a special key when opening and application so you can access a new library.

Fix your ipod by spanking it?

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, iPod, tutorials

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Its common knowledge that you dont want to drop / slam / or hit your expensive electronics, you might break them. Well, what if your expensive electronics is already broken?

I’m writing this in response to the hundreds of comments I received on my blog post about replacing a broken ipod hard drive.

It seems that there is a very unconventional way to fix your broken iPod, without having to open it or spend any money…. beat your ipod up! You heard me right, Slap your iPod!

How to do this:

Hold your iPod so the screen faces the palm of your hand and slap the back of it a few solid times. That’s it.

I personally haven’t tried this, but based on the response to my previous blog post, its worked for over 100 people so far.

Why does spanking your iPod fit it?

Here are a few of my thoughts on why this might work.

  1. Your iPod might have stopped working if the hard drive connection came lose. Slapping the iPod might jar the connection back into place.
  2. The hard drive arm might have gotten stuck for some reason. Spanking the iPod might free up that hard drive arm.
  3. It might just be magic!

I really don’t know why it works but I guess it does. If you have any experience with this post a comment.

Follow me on twitter for more great tips. CLICK HERE – twitter.com/JoshHighland

MythTV vs. MCE 2005 : A fight to the death

By Josh Highland in hardware, software, tutorials

I have been running MythTV (knoppmyth) since June 2005. It rules. It was tricky to get set up, I was rusty on my Linux admin skills, its been years since I really used it. There were a few things about myth that I wasn’t really into, but I lived with.

  • couldn’t get my 802.11g nic card to work in Linux
  • I had a hard time playing video files over the network from my windows 2000 computer up stairs
  • Couldn’t get the build in media player to play work that well (mplayer)
  • NES emulation wasn’t that great
  • Hard to get the Hauppauge 350 remote to work
  • I had to hard time redirecting the output of the media player to the Hauppauge 350 audio out
  • Difficult redirecting the output of the computer to always go to the TV

I’m not complaining, it was fun to figure this stuff out. It took a really long time, and some of it I never
really figured out. My MythTv setup was awesome for recording TV. I’m proud of it, and I love it.

Earlier this month a guy at my work is a Microsoft die hard (he runs a .Net developers group) he got me a demo copy of windows media center 2005 to check out. I figured what the hell, I had some extra money (my wife just started working as a registered nur$e), I'll build a fairly simple MCE box and put it up against my mythTV.

To make this interesting, I decided to make this interesting, After install and testing, the winner computer stays, the losers OS gets flipped. I was willing to put my myth system on the line and check it out against "windows media center 2005 roll up 2" (damn that’s a long name).

Here is the cheap machine that I built for the MCE

  • ECS P4M800-M7 Motherboard
  • Intel Pentium 4 511 Processor (2.8 ghz)
  • 1 gig DDR400
  • pny GeForce 6200 (crt, dvi, s-video, component)
  • Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 MCE-Kit (tv tuner + MS remote)
  • A random left over 20 gig IDE Maxtor hard drive
  • A stray IDE-to-SATA adaptor
  • A spare dvd drive rom drive
  • A dusty old computer case in my garage

So for about $400 and some old parts I hacked together an ugly machine, but hey it booted, and that’s what counts.

Installing:

Windows MCE 2005 is a full install of windows, so it took a while. Much slower then installing knoppMyth (it took me 15 minutes to get knoppMyth installed the first time). WINNER knoppMyth

Set Up:

knoppMyth required me to signup with a company called zaptoit.com to get a channel listing. The software didn’t tell me to do this, I had to find out about it through message boards and a wiki. MCE asked me my zip code, then it asked what cable company I had. Then it programmed my tuner, and downloaded the TV listing guide.
WINNER MCE

Remote Control:



The mythTV uses a Hauppauge 350 remote, which isn’t bad. The MCE uses the Microsoft 2005 remote. The Microsoft controller wins hands down. The shape of it is much nicer, its balance is good. The mce receiver seems better then the 350 receiver. The mce remote also has dedicated buttons for jumping around in the mce application, there is also a button to launch the mce application if its not running or is minimized. I wish all my remotes were this nice.

WINNER MCE

Live TV:

I’m going to give this one to myth for ease of set up, but overall go with a tie. To get the MCE running, I had to download a mpeg 2 decoder. That was pretty painless, but I had to dig through some websites to figure out why the hell it wasn’t showing TV. The mythTV was great because I was using hardware based decoding that came with the pvr-350 TV tuner. Once I got MCE up and running, there was little difference between them. MCE did change channels faster then the myth though.
TIE

Recorded TV:

I like the myth interface for showing what shows I have recorded, but I like MCE better for setting up recordings. MCE has an option that allows you to start the recording a few minutes early and end it a few minutes late, WHEN AVALIABLE, just to make sure that you get the whole show (some times channels don’t start and stop exactly on time). If you have 2 shows back to back, it won’t record the overhang. If you have any overhang on the myth, it will report a conflict, and not record the second show. This has bitten me several times with the myth
WINNER MCE

Video Files:

I’m going with MCE on this one. It plays wmv, mpg, and avi files without any trouble. To get QuickTime working, all I had to do was download the QuickTime alternative and change one registry key. Now basically any video file I throw at it plays full screen and looks great. Myth on the other hand, I had a hard time getting videos to play. wmv files and avi still look like garbage. I had to modify a bunch of things to get the video and audio to play through the pvr-350, only to marginal satisfaction.
WINNER MCE

Audio player:

If you’ve seen one, you’ve scene them all. There isn’t a huge difference in these.
TIE

Interface:

MCE looks a lot cleaner then myth. If anything, Myth tries to copy MCE in many aspects but falls short. Something that MCE has that myth does not is the ability to shrink down the video that is currently playing, and continue to navigate through MCE, until you select something else to watch. Its just more polished and refined. It looks better when its up on your screen.
WINNER MCE

MCE Bonus Features:

"movies": MCE will look at the guide and see what movies are currently playing across all the channels that you get. It goes out to the internet and pulls down artwork and a synopsis of the movie. This is an awesome and impressive feature in my opinion. You can then watch, record, or drill deeper into information on the movie. You can see what actors are in the movie, you can see what other movies they were in, you can see when those movies come on, and set up a recording for them.

MythTV Bonus Features:

"games emulation": I loved the fact that I could play all of my old NES roms. The emulation was a bit slow and laggy, but it was awesome to play them again. I didn’t use this feature as much as I anticipated.

The Winner in My Eyes:

OVER ALL WINNER : MCE

Based on my experience of running knoppmyth next to MCE 2005, I'm going to have to go with the MCE as the over all winner. It’s not often that I back a Microsoft product over an open source project. What can I say though? Microsoft has done their homework and has put out a pretty solid application that does what I want it to, in a clean way that even my wife can use. Hopefully in time as mythTV matures and grows, I will switch back to it. Until then I'm going to run stick with my Windows MCE 2005

Coldfusion MX RSS Feeds

By Josh Highland in coldfusion, internet, tutorials, web 2.0

I am a web developer by trade. I write a lot of ColdFusion code for my job, I write a lot of PHP in my spare time. Being involved in both the CF and PHP communities, I have seen an overwhelming number of tutorials for things like generating RSS feeds using PHP, but not too many geared towards CF developers.

Here is some quick and dirty code that I wrote using CF MX to generate an RSS feed using some data that I had stored in a MS SQL database.

Download the source code here

replacing the hardrive of an ipod

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, iPod, software, tutorials

Follow me on twitter for more great tips. CLICK HERE – twitter.com/JoshHighland

My brother Justin loved his 20 gig 4th generation ipod until he dropped it at the gym one day. It stopped working all together and would make clicking noises when he would try to start it.
He had gotten it as a gift and didnt have the reciept for it, so he couldnt take it back unter warrenty I guess. Apple said that it would cost $250 to fix. Instead of fixing it, he spend the money on
a 30 gig 5th generation. I asked him for the broken ipod so I could tinker with it. After I got it from him, I decided that it would be cool to own an ipod, and that if i could fix it for less then the
retail price, I would be a head of the game. I documented my adventure of trying to fix my ipod, check it out.

  1. When I would start the ipod, I would get an icon of a folder and a warning sign. The ipod would then make a bunch of clicking noises. That make me think that the hard drive was crapped out.
  2. Since it was already broken, why not take it apart and try to make it work. There was no clear way to ebter the ipod, so I decided to pry off the metal back using the thinnest screw driver I could find.
    It wasnt that hard to work the screw drive between the metal and the plastic. I worked the screw driver down the side of the case, until it popped off.

  3. I flipped the ipod over, and opened it up slowly, I noticed that there was a ribbon cable connecting the guts if the ipod to the jacks mounted to the metal back. I was careful not to mess this connection up.

  4. The ipod uses an ide harddrive, the connector pulled directly off without any problems. I now hard the bad harddrive free,

  5. The drive had blue rubber bumpers wrapped around it, and on the back, there was a foam mat that was glued to the drive.
  6. Removing the bumpers was no problem, they pulled directly off with out any fight.
  7. I tried to pull the foam off the drive by pulling on it, but that wasnt working, so I desided to get a razor blade scraper and screape it off. It worked well.

  8. Once I had the foam off, I could see that it was a toshiba drive. Model MK2004GAL. I looke dofr replacements online, but was only able to find the model MK2006GAL. I compared the MK2004GAL and the MK2006GAL, and didnt see any big differences, so I ordered one. 3 days letter I had my new drive. It didnt have the apple logo on it, but who cares, it was only $100!
  9. The blue bumpers went on with out a problem, and fit like a glove.
  10. To get the foam to stick to the new drive, I went super ghetto and reached in my desk, and came up with a glue stick! Hey, it goet the job done.
  11. The new drive went in, just like the old one came out. I connected the IDE connection, and I was ready to close it up.
  12. I put the back on, and pressed down on it evenly. The back snapped without any problems.
  13. Next, I downloaded the ipod updater (11-17-2005) from apple.com, and installed it. I hooked up my newly rebuilt ipod, and did a restore. It went really fast.
  14. After the restore, I had to hook up my ipod to the wall charger. I didnt have one on hand so i tried all kinds of methods of going around it. In the middle of me trying to hack around it, My buddy chris called, I told him to bring over his wall charger.
  15. 5 minutes later Chris showed up with a charger. I plugged in the ipod, it reset itself, and then I was up and running with my newly rebuilt ipod.

I was really supprised at how easy it was to replace the hard drive in a 4th gen ipod. Im sure that someone is going to call me an idiot for opening the case that way. I dont care though. I got this thing working and that all that matters, and I did it for under $100. Screw apple for wanting to charge $250 for 20 minutes worth of work and $100 worth of parts.

I hope that through my experience, someone else can bring back to life one of their dead ipods.

Follow me on twitter for more great tips. CLICK HERE – twitter.com/JoshHighland