Archive for July, 2009
Migrating iTunes windows to Mac
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on July 30, 2009
As part of my recent imac purchase came the chore of moving stuff over from my old hard drive which thankfully survived my old PC’s premature demise. Part of the stuff that I naturally wanted to migrate is of course my iTunes library.
Last time I moved my iTunes library is 3.5 years ago, when I bought my then new and now broken PC. At the time I wrote up a little howto on iTunes migration that over the years has gotten me tens of thousands of hits (dozens per day). Some people were kind enough to leave a message and apparently I helped out several of them with those instructions.
So, here’s the follow up.
Circumstances are slightly different now. I “consolidated” my library ages ago, which means iTunes moves all files to its own directory. Additionally, I reorganized my library, fixed tagging issues, etc. In other words, I put a lot of time into organizing my music and keeping it organized and would hate to start from scratch. Secondly, we’re several major iTunes versions down the road and they added album art fetching, genius and loads of other features.
So, I started out by following the original instructions of three years ago. This nearly works, except the music is not playable from iTunes for some vague reason. So no longer up to date despite a comment of some person who successfully managed a win to mac migration the “old” way.
Next I tried something that I didn’t believe would work but which worked anyway:
- Copy library from former C drive to where it is supposed to be on your mac (all files & dirs)
- Don’t modify a single file, they’re fine as they are.
- Start itunes
Right after it starts it “updates” the library and that’s it. That’s a lot faster & easier. Play counts, play lists, ratings, you name it. It’s there. Thanks Apple, this is a lot better than three years ago and exactly the way it is supposed to work.
imac 24″
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on July 28, 2009
Saturday morning I turned on my PC and basically the screen did not come on (I have it on standby). Suspicious but has happened before. So I press the powerbutton to do a reset and then it did single beep followed by 8 rapid beeps. That’s the bios telling you: this pc is FOOBARRED, please try installing a new motherboard. Or something. Good luck with that. Anyway, eight beeps and nothing.
After the predictable “godverdomme, kutzooi”, which needs no translation here, I calmed down and did what I was planning to do anyway (by coincidence). Which was visiting the local Apple store. Or rather the Gravis M&S store on the Ernst Reuter Platz here in Berlin, a nice big store specialized in reselling all the nice Apple gadgets along with a helpdesk and good support options (I hate putting expensive hardware in the mail). So, I basically already decided to go for an imac. Question: which one. Eh … why go for anything less than the biggest one? Sure it costs money but it I’ll be spending the next few years glued to its screen. So 24″, 3Ghz dual core cpu, 4GB ram, a 1TB diskdrive and a nice nivida chipset with 512MB (which will no doubt run X-plane just fine).
Anyway, they didn’t have one in store with an English keyboard. So they made the order for me and told me “one and a half week”. So, to my pleasant surprise, I got the call already today that they had my new imac ready. So I fetched it, plugged it in and enjoyed the famous Apple out of the box experience, which is excellent.
Then I went to work installing the basics: firefox, adium, skype and some other essentials. I haven’t gotten around to applying all the tweaks I have on my work laptop but will of course be doing that to fix e.g. annoying home-end key behavior and a couple of other things.
I am now in need of:
- A proper usb mouse (sorry but the mighty mouse will join its brother in a drawer)
- A USB2 – SATA converter to read both internal drives in my old PC with all my music, photos and other essentials. I have a pretty recent backup on an external drive but had gotten a bit sloppy backing up the last few months. BTW. I noticed that NTFS is read only on macs, so any tips for fixing that are welcome. Macfuse seems to be one option, any alternatives?
- To fix that, I will need a nice new big external drive to hook up to time machine.
Not all is great though:
- The keyboard sucks compared to the one that came with my Mac Book Pro last year. WTF is up with the weirdly small enter key and the weird symbols where it used to say page down, page up, etc.
- The mighty mouse still stinks
- All the mobile me and .mac spam on first launch is kind of annoying
Anyway, happy to be online again.
Maps on Ovi
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on July 7, 2009
Both OVI Maps, our maps and navigation client for S60 and the Maps on Ovi companion website (or MoO!!! as we refer to it internally), received a few upgrades in the past week. Maps 3.0 is a solid upgrade with lots of good new features that you will probably want to install if you are still using Maps 2.0 on your Nokia phone. Maps on Ovi is the website that goes along with it that features such niceties as synchronizing routes and pois from the site to your phone via OVI as well as a new Find Places feature, which is what me and my colleagues have been slaving away on for the past few months (particularly the places bubble that shows up on the map for some POIs).
So go check it out here: maps.ovi.com!
Our Find Places feature is at this point still a quite minor feature and the whole site is of course still in beta with lots of known issues and rough edges that are still being worked on at this point but improvements are coming of course and the site is actually perfectly usable at this point. Last Monday was the big 1.0 for our team and our first real publicly available feature set, which we will be building on in the near future. Getting it out was stressful and part of my work in the next few weeks is helping it become less stressful.
My personal technical contributions are limited to the content provisioning from various vendors such as Lonely Planet and WCities. You can find the same content also in the Nokia Here and Now client for S60, which is currently in Nokia’s Beta Lab, as well as on the device if you buy any of the premium content packages.
For the past few months I’ve been working with lots of highly talented people slaving away on all the frontend and javascript stuff as well as the pretty neat and cool server-side architecture. I can’t really reveal anything on that except to say that cool stuff will be coming from Berlin. So keep following us on e.g. the Nokia Youtube channel where our marketing people regularly post stuff, including videos featuring me and another one featuring Christian del Rosso that I reported on here earlier.
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