I like to use my laptop on the beach. Not that I get out much these days, but one of the things I often do is to flip my machine into inverted, or high contrast, mode. Recently I’ve been looking for ways to not switch the whole machine over. This can be as simple as throwing the background for Word to blue, which makes me feel all kinda’ AmiPro-like, or most recently, I’m using High Contrast Mode with iTunes. High Contrast Mode switches the background for the sidebar and the library to black. This isn’t for everyone, but I like it at times (just make sure to kill the Ping…
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10 Billion Songs
When the iTunes Store came out if you had told me that they would end up selling 10 billion songs you might have come across like a bit of an Austin Powers skit. But Apple has crossed 10 billion now in “staggering” fashion: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html
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Props
It’s really easy to bash on a company when they do something that bugs you. And let’s face it, since we pay companies our hard earned money (well, most of us earn it, others just kinda’ find it), we expect the world of companies. And in Apple’s case, we expect them to be flawless, and we scour over every line of code or every feature looking for the mistake they made so we can exploit it, er, I mean, complain about it. But what about when one of our beloved vendors does something that is just kinda’ awesome? I don’t remember when it showed up (I don’t even remember when…
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Thanks for the Free Stuff Apple
iTunes is doing a special on 20 free songs for the holidays meaning that you can score 20 free songs on free music Tuesday this week! And in addition to that you can get another free Bob Dylan song (how cool is that) and a free music video from Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Oh, and another free song from the 88. Then, by becoming a fan of iTunes on Facebook you get 20 more songs! Seems like someone is trying to kickstart the iTunes gift giving spree with a little free Christmas music. All that free stuff should leave plenty of money for buyin’ the new Jimmy Buffett though!
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Setting up iTunes Home Sharing
You can use Home Sharing on iTunes to build an iTunes Server! Feature request something enough and eventually it happens. Now that Apple has given us this great new feature how do you use it? First, authorize iTunes (if it isn’t already). To do so go to the computer that you will be sharing the library from, the Home Media Server if you will and click on the Store menu from within iTunes and then click on Authorize Computer. Next, enable Home Sharing. Click on the new Home Sharing icon in the iTunes side bar (under SHARED) and then provide the iTunes Account ID and password for the account you’ll…
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The iTunes Alarm Clock
I know, weak post Charles… Whatever, I think it’s cool so get over yourself – there’s still a little command line fu so it’s ok (right?)… Now on to: How to use iTunes as an alarm clock. I have at times been stuck in hotel rooms and chosen to use iTunes as my alarm clock. Yes, my phones (why does everyone in IT have more than one smartphone these days) can easily act as alarm clocks. For that matter, so can my travel alarm clock, the one they put in the room and the wake-up call. But some of us aren’t morning people and need our fault tolerance. Also, some…
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Keep iTunes in Sync
I’d still like to have a better way to have a centralized iTunes media server. But in lieu of that I’m OK keeping multiple libraries in sync. One way to do this is to use a tool such as rsync to actually synchronize the files. But this isn’t going to keep the iTunes library updated on what files were added. For that consider TuneRanger. TuneRanger will keep iTunes for Windows or Mac in sync. More importantly it will update your playlists to accommodate for the new location of your media. TuneRanger also makes a nice addition to the switchers toolbelt. You can use it to synchronize media from a Windows…
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Bypassing the iPhone Passcode
Cellebrite has a solution that can unlock the passcode on an iPhone or iPod if you have a computer that has synchronized with it. iTunes generates a Security ID for each iPhone or iPod that is synchronized with it. This ID is used to synchronize just in case you loose or forget the passcode. Cellebrite can use the Security ID file from iTunes as well. Cellebrite isn’t the only tool, there are others as well, many of which will allow you to mount the device with or without actually writing data to it. But what if you don’t have the passcode or a machine that the handheld has been synchronized…
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Controlling iTunes
Sizzling Keys is a free application for Mac OS X that allows you to assign hot keys for use with iTunes. But you can already do that, right? Well, if you switch out of iTunes then the hot keys don’t work. But with Sizzling you can have keystrokes that work to control the basic features of iTunes no matter what application you are in. I have not found an exact equivalent for Windows, although if you click on the Advanced tab of the iTunes preferences for Windows you’ll see the Show iTunes icon in System Tray, which will place it down in the lower right hand corner of your screen.…
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Managing iTunes en Masse
iTunes is cool. But there are some features that many organizations want to limit as when they are used by a large number of people they can become problematic. Apple allows you to manage iTunes for Windows and Mac OS X clients. For Windows, there are a number of registry keys that can be used and for Mac OS X there is the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist file, or more importantly the ability to Add the aforementioned file into the Workgroup Manager Managed Preferences. Once added you will be able to set a number of options to manage, including the following (which are self explanatory for the most part): allowiTunesUAccess disableAppleTV disableAutomaticDeviceSync disableCheckForUpdates…