Random thoughts of a random mind
Goddamn Apple! You have to do better than this! A week’s worth of work down the drain just because you can’t handle sleep mode properly.
I was just playing some music with iTunes on my MacBook, leaving it on the table using battery power. Suddenly it goes quiet and I thought “ok, battery’s drained, it’s hibernating”. Imagine my surprise when I plugged in the power chord and pressed the power button. It didn’t recover from the hibernation – it booted! Everything I was working on was gone.
Yesterday while writing my thesis in the library, I was listening to some other person’s music she had shared through iTunes. It’s a nice feature they’ve got there, so it got me tinking “could I make my Linux server at home share my whole music collection like an iTunes share?”.
After some quick Googling I found out that it’s actually possible and the software is already out there. Just to compile and install. However, the instructions I found was either not verbose enough or not applicable on my setup.
On-the-fly-comment: Now I suddenly found out that there’s a project called firefly that replaces the daapd that I’ve been using here. This information makes this post almost completely useless, but I’ll go on anyway, skipping the part about compiling and hacking daapd.
So this was the scenario: I’ve got all my mp3s on my Linux server, which I usually mount to my desktop machine (also Linux). I can’t bother mounting the share on my MacBook (since I’d have to import the whole library into iTunes’ database and I don’t want that), but instead it would be nice to have the library accessible as an iTunes share. This is how I got it working.
As if I didn’t have a crappy morning already, my Mac OS X Mail had to start bugging during my morning routines by the computer. After countless crash-reports and relaunches I even rebooted, but without success.
I found some hints on Google, including one on disabling Growl Mail. This seemed to be the most realistic solution, but didn’t work. I also tried many other suggested workarounds like deleting ToDos in iCal, clearing some caches, hitting some keys when Mail starts and so on. Nothing helped. After even more relaunching and sending bug reports to Apple, and another five minutes of Googling, I discovered a thread that had solved the problem by deleting the GrowlMail.mailbundle directory from HD/Library/Mail/Bundles.
Luckily, that worked for me as well. So now I can finally start my day and look forward to whatever else Murphy has got in store for me.
I can’t understand why Apple has not included week numbers in iCal. Not even as an option. Well, luckily I found a php script that generates a calendar that you can import into iCal and that way get week numbers as “whole day” events. Ugly? A bit, but it might be worth it.
I made some own modifications to the script. My version accepts 0-2 parameters denoting starting year and ending year (if specified). If neither parameter is specified, the generated calendar defaults to the current year. If only starting year is specified, the script generates the week numbers for only that year.
The script can be viewed and downloaded here. Save the file to your computer and rename it to generate_ical_week_numbers.php. Note that you need php to be able to run the script.
Usage:
$> php generate_ical_week_numbers.php \ [startyear] [endyear] > week_numbers.ics
Then import the file week_numbers.ics file into iCal as a new calendar. That’s it.
The original script was found here.
So the story continues… Having done the area north of Como with winding crappy Italian roads, winding great Swiss roads, snow, ice and wonderful views, it was now time for the south.
Day three was Milan Day. We ditched our car and took the train to the city for some serious shopping and sightseeing. As it turned out, we got neither.