Here’s the problem though – one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. How hard is it to just set an auto-away on your IM client. If you walk away from the computer it sets you to away when you are… yeah, away. People do not do this, they end up being always available, thus the creation of a new protocol… the YT protocol.

Once one person starts doing yt? everyone starts. It spreads like an infectious disease – or like that idiotic habit of flipping up your wind shield wipers at the slightest threat of a flurry. This renders the great presence information in IM nearly useless. For those fortunate enough to have an immunity to this disease, it stands for “you there?”. I can understand abbreviating long phrases, like bbiab or lmfao – but really, you can’t type out “you there?”.

I have a new group in my IM clients now called Broken. Anyone who types yt to me in an IM session is instantly moved to this list which will always remain collapsed. I wish all IM protocols had the “warn” feature that AIM has and I had a script to automatically warn them as a slight scarlet letter for those bad apples. I encourage everyone to pay it forward by blocking or hiding all buddies that choose to spread this. Thank you.

Check it out

On iTunes I can be listening to a podcast or an audio book then pause and sync with my iPod. When I hop into the car and hit play it continues where I left off. If I plug in my iPod when I get to work and I have iTunes there I can hit play and continue right where I left off. I want to have the latest podcasts handy at all times, and it would be nice to have some music on my digital media player as well. Syncing with iTunes mostly satisfies this goal by allowing me to select what playlists to sync, including smart playlists (which can search by relative published dates like “this week”). The last I checked, iTunes only supports auto-fill on the iPod shuffle which has always confused me. I want to have my latest podcasts, and then don’t waste the rest of the space… fill it up with some random music – it’s better than leaving it empty.

Portable media players are built to be sold, which sometimes coincides with usability and customer satisfaction, sometimes not. People use these things when they are away from their computers – running, gardening, doing housework, or driving. If a player makes me stop running or makes me pull off my garden gloves it fails to follow it’s primary purpose – play what I want and get out of the way. From what I can tell, most people don’t listen to podcasts or audio books. They load the music, shuffle, and never touch the thing outside of an occasional skip forward. When you listen to an audio book or podcast you need to pause when you get a phone call or talk to the toll booth dude – music you just let it go. Sometimes you miss something and need to scrub backwards. Often you need to fast forward past commercials. Podcast listeners also update their player daily, something that music-only users are unlikely to do. These features do not seem unreasonable, but most players perform badly with these requirements, and the iPod is no exception.

This is all fine, except I don’t use iTunes. My computers these days are filled with Linux goodness. Linux distributions normally include Rhythmbox, Banshee, or Amarok depending on which way you swing. I don’t have much experience with Amarok, but as of today Rhythmbox and Banshee both are unreliable for use with a portable media device. Yes, you can get them to work once, twice, or five times in a row, but that sixth time is a big fat failboat. They are sooooo close to being good, but in the meantime I end up not listening to my podcasts in the car.

The iPod is designed to work with iTunes and specifically attempts to lock out third-party clients – even though Apple doesn’t make a client for my platform. MTP devices as I understand are more open to different clients – but that still has not led to a reliable experience for my MTP device.

Banshee supposedly worked well syncing MTP devices, so I scored this Sansa c240 for $20 in hopes of being able to reliably listen to podcasts in my car again. Nope, it was no more reliable than the iPod – it’d flake out every few sync attempts. The firmware on this bad boy was beyond horrible. Each time the device starts the volume is at 50% – no matter where it was last time. To turn up the volume you must find a song, play it, then press the volume up button about ten times (can’t hold it) to turn it up all the way. On the plus side, at least it will remember where you were in a song if you happen to navigate back to the exact same track after booting. Oh booting – that’s another thing. It took about ten seconds to boot this thing up which is a long time to sit there waiting to find a song so you can turn up the volume. The default theme made it near impossible to see what was selected, and scrubbing through a track was super slow and difficult.

Enter rockbox, an open source firmware for a number of media players that is loaded with features. I had tried rockbox in the past on my iPod Mini, but was turned off by the unnecessary complexity of the system. This weekend though I put the latest rockbox on my Sansa, and I am rather impressed. After messing with the settings I now have a player that boots up much more quickly and resumes my podcast exactly where I was last. I solved by syncing problem quite simply – by not doing it. The Sansa is a mass storage device so I can just copy things to it manually – but once I get off my butt I’m going to just set up rsync to automatically make sure I have only the freshest of podcasts loaded when I plug it in. Rockbox can build it’s database on startup, which so far has been working quite well. With the iPod or Sansa syncing with Banshee it would always rebuild the music database, which blew away the bookmark on what I was listening to – and I spend half the drive home trying to scrub through an hour-long podcast trying to get to where I left off.

The games and applications with Rockbox are quite impressive running on this craptastic Sansa. I particularly like bubbles, which appears to be a rebuild of Frozen Bubble, a simple Linux puzzle game. Once I get my podcasts syncing correctly I’ll probably write up a script to do an automatic playlist generation. I’d like to have a playlist each day that sorts my podcasts by published date so I can just play the top item to hear the latest content.

Further Thoughts

The Sansa device has a micro-SD card slot in it, which is nice because I have a 1GB card laying around (it’s virtually useless in my Moto Razr). The default firmware seems to just do an either/or thing – it cannot use the card and the built-in flash. Rockbox can and does use both, effectively doubling my storage capacity. I can use one card for music and the other for podcasts if I want. The reason that the screen is unreadable with the default firmware is because they blew out the contrast for some reason… that and the fact that it is a horrendous display. Rockbox lets me turn down the contrast.

Format support is a big reason some people choose rockbox. Normally I couldn’t give a shit about formats, I am fine using the patent-encumbered mp3 format. That said, I’ve noticed that sometimes albums gathered from nefarious places are in a lossless format like FLAC. If I don’t feel like reconverting them I can just slap it on rockbox and it works fine. Ogg vorbis is pretty popular among those who care about openness, so occasionally I may download a podcast in ogg format. Being able to play this on-the-go may come in handy someday.

Apple has a service called .mac that fanboys love and unwitting consumers are convinced to buy when they buy a new mac. To me, I’ve never thought of buying this $100/year service that includes a mac.com email address, 10GB of web storage cutely named iDisk, web hosting, and some synchronization and backup tools. I’ve got an email and web server / webdav server already, and $100/year seems like a lot of bread for some sync capabilities. They also have something called Back to My Mac which is effectively just VNC access to your home machine without having to forward a port through your home firewall.

There is a great young project out there appropriately named Dotmac for folks with their own server that don’t mind fighting through some incomplete documentation. $0/year is a good price for those sync features I’d say. I’ve got it running and I am pretty impressed. It is running happily on my home server and just works. Stacey and I have a nice shared address book now and I’ve got backups for things like my keychain, calendars, and dashboard widgets. Not too shabby.

office suite – OS X does not come with an office suite. For the most part I can get away with Google Docs, but sometimes you just need a rich client. For years I’ve been praying for Aqua port of OpenOffice, which someday will exist. Until then, I can run X11. iWork may or may not be good enough – don’t know. MS Office is still a PPC app, so my Intel mac uses rosetta to run it (slow with a memory bloat bonus).

media management – iTunes is great for music. I love coverflow and smart playlists. It still angers me though. iTunes breaks DAAP sharing – ensuring that only iTunes can share with iTunes. Yet another dirty little lock-in. Podcast management sorta stinks – but I can mostly solve this with smart playlists. Movie and TV show management doesn’t work well. I either need special applescripts and mov reference files to make iTunes somewhat of a usable movie tool for my existing media, or just buy everything fresh and new from the iTunes store. I’ll never use iTunes music store because it’s expensive and DRM laden. On Linux – I can use Magnatune and Jamendo on Rhythmbox or Banshee. Oh, and DAAP works in both Rhythmbox and Banshee as well.

instant messaging – The A/V features of iChat are top notch, but mostly I chat with text. I want a single client that does Yahoo, GTalk, and AIM and puts them in a single buddy list – iChat doesn’t do that – so I’d use Adium anyway. Pidgin, the built-in IM client on Ubuntu does.

browsing – I use Firefox over Safari. I love my plugins, like Adblock plus and FoxyProxy. Safari is fast, but that doesn’t matter much – the Firefox addons almost guarantee that I can browse how I want.

media playback – Quicktime is okay I guess. The interface is a bit bulky for me and of course to make it work with most media I have or find I need to install the Perian codec pack. I then use a program called NicePlayer because the interface is cleaner. MPlayerOSX is quite a bit better if you want to go away from the Quicktime backend – hmm, isn’t MPlayer called “the movie player for Linux”.

address book – Stacey and I both use a mac and since I’m too cheap to pay $100/year for .mac just for Address Book syncing I use a ghetto fabulous rsync script to the same end. I tried syncing with Plaxo, and that was a let down. Address book is quite cool with smart contact lists – and it ties in with Mail.app and iChat quite well… its just too bad I don’t use either of those applications anymore. On Linux rumor has it that Evolution can be used with Conduit to sync contacts and calendars all over the place.

mail – Like the rest of the tech savvy world, I’ve moved to gmail. I battled with Mail.app and my own IMAP server for years. I still have the IMAP server and Mail.app, although for the life of me I can’t figure out why I would want to use them. On OS X I go to Google and install their notifier application so I know when new mail arrives. On Linux the Mail Notification program that is built right in can notify me of new mail in my gmail inbox. Hmm.

calendar – I loved iCal like no other app… that is before Google Calendar came out. Come on – it’ll SMS notify me of events and I never have to sync? Add to that private URLs and easy sharing of the same calendar. Game, set, match. On Linux Evolution has just about feature parity with iCal, but the cool thing is that when I click on the little clock in the toolbar I can get a quick glance of what is going on today, cool. Evolution also can connect to my Exchange server at work so I can keep both my work and home life in one calendar. Oh, and I can share that back with Google calendar.

vpn – I have to install the Cisco VPN client on OS X to connect to work. I can use vpnc right from the application repositories in Ubuntu. It’s pretty easy to set up right through Network Manager… sometimes.

sync – Another thing I loved about the mac was its ability to sync my calendars and contacts with my mobile phone. Well I have a crappy Windows Mobile phone now, so I’m kinda out of luck. I paid for Missing Sync to solve this problem. Now I moved to Leopard and I am screwed. I’m not paying again.

photo management – Each time a new version of iLife comes out I obtain (through questionable sources) this new must-have version. Most folks use Flickr, PicassaWeb, Smugmug or the like – I’m no exception. Of course that’s not built in… but if you pay for .mac you can do photocasting. I am a Flickr Pro user. I paid for a plugin for iPhoto that lets me export to Flickr. The latest version of iPhoto was just plain broken for me under Tiger. Actually not just broken, it caused my machine to be quite crashy. Now it seems fine with Leopard, but in any case its a slow memory hog. Hmm, F-Spot is less flashy but has export to flickr, picassaweb, smugmug, and 23hq (whatever that is) built right in – loopy. Oh, and it doesn’t crash my computer.

advanced photo editing – I normally secure a version of Adobe CS3. These are great programs chock full of features that I have no idea how to use. Photoshop CS3 is $400 or more. I’m not sure the price of the whole suite, but I’m sure words line-of-credit would come into play if I were to obtain an legitimate copy. The Gimp and Inkscape do much more than I’ll ever be able to figure out, but they are a little more rough around the edges. I can run these on OS X, but of course need to install X11. What a kludge.

mouse – To keep my setup all maclike and pretty I bought a bluetooth mighty mouse. Of course, Apple has a different idea of mouse acceleration than any other manufacturer – so I had to seek out third party tweak tools to make me happy with the mouse. Hmm, the mouse works in Ubuntu without too much trouble and with familiar acceleration curves.

dorky stuff – The new Leopard tabbed terminal is great, but under Tiger I used iTerm because it was just better. I’m not sure why they disable anti-aliasing by default. Gnome-terminal is pretty solid as well.

I was super excited when MacFuse came out – a port of the FUSE userspace file system implementation for OS X. It lets me use things like sshfs to mount up my server. Oh, I can do this right out of the box with GnomeVFS and Nautilus – don’t even need FUSE. If I do need FUSE though, there it is, built right into my Linux distro.

application integration – I’ve tried going with an all Apple solution for a long time (everything but .mac) because when you drink the kool aid, life can be good. The tables are starting to turn though. Yes, iChat ties into Address Book contact details, ties into Calendar with the birthdays, ties into Mail.app email addresses ties back into iChat. That’s great. I don’t use iChat, Mail.app, and just use iCal a little. Apple is falling on its face when it comes to innovative ways of tying their OS into web apps. In Gnome pidgin ties into evolution (contacts) ties into evolution (calendar) ties into evolution (mail) ties into system clock. I’d say Linux is just slightly better for me, since I actually use Evolution at work. I’d need a doctorate to figure out how to sync my Windows Mobile piece of shit.

I don’t really find setting these things up to be particularly enjoyable. I’d like a system that I can install, fill in a username and password, and be done with it. If I can then “just work” I’m a happy camper. I’m just noticing that over the years I am doing more and more to make OS X work how I want to. In that time Ubuntu, Gnome, and Linux in general has pressed forward. I can see a move to all Linux in the not too distant future for me.

So you have all these pictures that you organize into a folder structure and thats how you like to work with them. Picassa web and Flickr are just confusing. Enter PicassawebFS and Fuse.

RSS Feeds as a file system. Gmail as a file system. An LDAP directory as a file system. Anything as a file system. That’s what FUSE is all about. This is seriously badass and Google has released this early version of FUSE for the Mac (which has been popular on Linux for a year or two).

Watch this video and become one with MacFuse.