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Managing Podcasts in iTunes

Mark — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:15:52 +0000

I subscribe to quite a few podcasts. Since I have virtually no commute time, I only get caught up listening to everything on my iPod when I go on a long trip every few months. I’ve found that the default setup for listening to podcasts doesn’t work very well for this type of listening. Out of the box iTunes and the iPod work well if you are listening to all of your subscriptions a few times each week. If you only listen once each month the podcasts can be hard to manage. Here are two tips that will help manage your podcasts in iTunes.

Tell iTunes to automatically delete podcasts after you listen to them.

This will help keep your hard drives from filling up, but more importantly it means you won’t have to sort through a bunch of files to find the new items. This is simple to enable by going into iTunes > Preferences > Podcasts. Tell iTunes to keep “All Unplayed Episodes”. Now when you synch your iPod it will tell iTunes which items you’ve listened to, then iTunes will delete those items when you download new podcasts. They won’t actually be deleted off your iPod until you synch again.

Create a separate Smart Playlist for each podcast.

Once you get 4 or 5 podcasts, it can be difficult to find what you want from the podcast playlist. By creating a smart playlist, you can keep the files organized so you’ll always be able to find what you want. A smart playlist will show you all the podcasts matching a particular criteria. In my case I set it up to match a particular Album name and set that to the name of the podcast. You can find the podcasts listed individually under Albums on your iPod, but if you have a few thousand albums it can be difficult to locate what you want.

This example smart playlist will give me all of the “Thinking out loud – in color” podcasts in a single list that I can find quickly. You could combine rules to make a playlist that is more inclusive or restrictive.

Why I won’t buy an Intel Mac (yet)

Mark — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:54:33 +0000

A farmer and his wife visited the fair each year. One of the attractions was a pilot who would give passengers a short ride in his bi-plane for five dollars. The farmer wanted to ride the plane, but every year his wife would say, “five dollars is five dollars”. After 7 years, the pilot offered the farmer a deal. He said, “If you and your wife can go the entire ride without making a sound I’ll give the the ride for free.” The farmer and his wife were delighted with this offer and climbed aboard.

The pilot took them on tight turns, barrel rolls, and loops, but the farmer and his wife never made a peep. When they landed the pilot said, “I can’t believe it, neither of you made a sound, so the ride was one me.” The farmer said, “It wasn’t easy! I almost said something when my wife fell out, but five dollars is five dollars.”

I’m getting ready to buy another OS X based machine so I was very interested in the new Intel based Macs. For me it is a business decision. If the new computer can provide something allows me to work more quickly I’m very interested. If not, “five dollars is five dollars”. After looking closely I’ve decided that my next Mac will not be an Intel based machine. Buying the Intel machine just doesn’t make good business sense for me. Here is why:

First, my computer is directly tied to my income. If my computer goes down, I lose the ability to make money, so uptime is very important to me. This means I have to be able to be up and running in short order if my laptop is stolen, broken, or sent back to Apple for repairs. Currently the way I protect myself from these types of issues is by imaging my machine to an external hard drive. If my machine becomes unusable, I can simply boot up my Mac Mini or Strawberry G3 and be up and running with all my applications and files just like I had on my 17 inch Powerbook. If I’m traveling and my Mac needs repair (but isn’t completely broken) borrowing or buying an external hard drive lets me back up my machine and use it on any of my friend’s or family’s OS X based PPC machines.

If I were to buy an Intel based Macintosh I would lose this capability. I could back up my drive in the same way, but it wouldn’t boot on any of my existing machines. There aren’t any old Intel based machines just laying around that I can beg or borrow if I need to keep up and running if my primary laptop goes down. This may not be a big deal to someone who only uses their computer for sending email and browsing the web, but for a business user uptime is very important.

Second, the MacBook Pro hasn’t been out long enough to know if there are any problems with it. For play, I like to be bleeding edge. For work, it isn’t worth the risk. Last time I checked the space shuttle was still using 486 Thinkpads because they were proven. I not quite that extreme, but the same principle applies. The risk of a new unproven computer is too great for what I do.

Third, one of the biggest benefits of an Intel based Macintosh would be to run Windows. Some people don’t understand why anyone would want to run Windows on a Mac, but when you get emailed a Viso document, need to create a Windows based installer for clients, want to use Quickbooks, or run many other programs that are currently only available on Windows, you need a machine that can run a Microsoft operating system. Until someone finds a way to install Windows on the MacBook Pro, it isn’t any more useful to me than one of the older PPC models.

Fourth, for my usage the raw speed of the computer isn’t incredibly important. Yes, I like having a fast computer, but when it really comes down to it waiting a few seconds to open an application doesn’t significantly impact my productivity as long as the application itself is responsive. If I was doing a lot of video editing or heavy Photoshop work, speed might be more important. Since most of my work is done in productivity applications, IDEs, or at the command line a slightly faster computer won’t help me get more work done.

Fifth, most of the applications I use will be running under Rosetta at first. Even if it works perfectly, this will negate most of the speed benefits of getting an Intel based machine. As vendors make universal binaries this will change, but many of the upgrades are going to be part of a version upgrade. I’m not expecting Microsoft to come out with univesal versions of Office for free. I’m guessing it will be part of the next version of Office. Since what I have works fine, I want to delay that purchase as long as possible.

Sixth, with the new MacBooks out people are more likely to sell their existing laptops for a good deal. Since the PPC line does everything i will probably need for the next 6 to 12 months, I can buy a computer at a discount from someone who is upgrading to a MacBook Pro. Since there there isn’t a real business reason for me to buy an Intel based machine, I’d rather leave the money in the bank. Later on when there is a business reason to upgrade to the Intel platform, I can sell the PPC machines without incurring too much of a loss.

Seventh, I have a lot invested in existing accessories. For example, I have 4 or 5 power supplies for my existing computers that will work with the PPC model laptops but not the MacBooks. I know that someday I’ll need to upgrade, but for now I want to leverage this investment as much as possible.

Eighth, Apple usually releases their high end product first and over the next 6 to 9 months fills in the less expensive models. Sometimes the lower end models quickly catch up with some of the specs of the first high end model. It wouldn’t surprise me if in 9 months there was an iBook replacement with the same speed as the current MacBook Pro, but $500 to $800 less expensive.
So what will I buy? I haven’t completely decided yet. Apple is selling refurbished 15 inch G4s for $1500 and I can probably pickup an older style G4 Powerbook for $500 to $800 from individuals. Either way I get a computer that will meet my needs for the next 12 months without paying a premium for the latest and “greatest” computer available.

Blackberry 7100t with OS X

Mark — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 02:02:51 +0000

The other day I was talking with my mechanic about cell phones and asking him how he liked his Treo. In the conversation it came up that he had a Blackberry 7100 sitting in the drawer and would be willing to sell it, so I decided to buy it and try it out. I was particularly interested in using the device for it’s email capabilities. Currently I use a Sony Ericson T610 which is a nice small phone with Bluetooth. The thing I like about the T610 is the fact it works with OS X on a Mac. I can easily sync my contacts and calendar using Bluetooth and when traveling it works as a digital modem allowing me to check my email without dealing with any wires. However the T610 is very hard to use for sending email or browsing the web from the device itself, so I was curious if the Blackberry would be any easier with it’s funky two letters on each key keyboard.

It turns out that the 7100t keyboard is much more usable than I expected. I can’t type 75 WPM on it, but it is better than most of the Palm and Pocket PC’s I’ve used with the exception of the Palm Tungsten C (thumb keyboard). It is easy to type a quick note and isn’t nearly as annoying as using the Sony numeric pad to create messages. It isn’t perfect, but it’s very usable. I didn’t feel the Sony keypad was usable for text.

One of the first challenges was getting the dataservice to work correctly with T-Mobile. With my Sony I had an unlimited internet plan for $20 per month. The Blackberry requires a special Blackberry plan. It costs the same amount, but it has to be setup on it’s own and you can run the normal dataplan and the Blackberry plan at the same time. This required a call to Tmobile, since my $20 per month plan doesn’t exist anymore, I got them to make a note on my account so I can go back if I decide I don’t want to use the Blackberry anymore.

Blackberry works differently than I expected. The phone itself doesn’t know how to talk to an email server. The Blackberry service talks to your email server and the service communicates with your phone. The advantage of this setup is the fact that you can log into your Tmobile account and add an email account by only filling out a few fields. The service seems pretty intelligent about figuring out what domain name and protocol to use. It had no problem figuring out that for mark.shead@digital501.com it should use mail.digital501.com and connect using IMAP over SSL.

I think this easy setup is the reason Blackberry is so popular. It is very easy and fast for someone to setup who has no understanding of POP, IMAP, or SMTP. When you get a message the Blackberry service notices the new email and pushes a message out to your phone where it shows up in the messages box. This “push” feature is one of the major selling points of the Blackberry. For me it isn’t that important. I turn off any settings on my email clients that will play a sound when an email comes in, so I definately don’t want my phone to ding all the time. It isn’t uncommon for me to get 100 messages in a day and that is a lot of interruptions. The Blackberry service has a nice option where you can configure certian types of messages to notify you and others to be ignored. For example you could set the phone to notify you when you received an email from your boss or an important client, but silently accept all other messages.

Blackberry also has a feature for Exchange and Outlook users where you run software on your desktop computer. It interfaces with Outlook and sends notifications to the phone for meeting requests, etc. You can reply to these items from the phone and it will make the appropriate change in Outlook. This means you can accept meetings and tasks from your phone just as if you are on the desktop computer. I haven’t used this feature because I don’t have a desktop PC running all the time and most of my email servers aren’t running Exchange.

The downside of the Blackberry service is that many of the capabilities you expect to get with IMAP don’t exist because your phone isn’t talking directly with your email server. When I get a message on the Blackberry, I can open it and read it as expected. When I delete the message, it gives me the option to delete from just the phone or from the phone and the mailbox. Deleting from the phone and mailbox behaves as expected and eventually the message will disappear from the client on my computer.

However, if I delete a message from my computer, it remains on the Blackberry. Worse it still shows up as unread even after I’ve read it on the computer. I suppose this might be fine if a user spent most of their time using the phone and only occasionally used their laptop or desktop for email, but that is the opposite of how I work. With the current functionality I end up dealing with every email twice — once on my computer and then again on the phone. Over time I may adjust, but my initial impression is that this is a great tool for people who need to “look” busy, but really aren’t concerned about productivity. Ok maybe that is a little strong. I can probably adjust to it, but it just seems very non-intuitive to me.

Another important need was the ability to sync my contacts from my Mac to the device. With the T610 this was done through Bluetooth and works beautifully. Blackberry doesn’t support Macs so I thought it might be problematic on OS X. Fortunately there is a company called PocketMac that makes iSync conduits for various devices. They give away free software that lets you use iSync with your Blackberry. Once installed you can sync using the USB cable. The Blackberry comes with Bluetooth but it only works with audio devices like Bluetooth headsets. This seems like an odd limitation, but I think certian government offices don’t allow Bluetooth devices that support data transfer for security reasons, so the limitation might be to keep the government contracts.

They sync process seems to work just fine. It has the option of syncing your Sticky Notes with the Blackberry if desired. This would be very convenient if you wanted to use the device to keep notes and other text documents without sending them on email.

The biggest disappointment I ran into was the fact that I can’t use the 7100 as a modem for my OS X Powerbook. I knew that Blackberry didn’t support it, but I figured someone had figured out a hack. It turns out that the Blackberry doesn’t respond to commands from OS X at all, so there isn’t a way to write a script to make things work. From talking with Tmobile it works just fine with a PC but it requires the Blackberry PC only drivers to make things work.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with the phone. The navigation is easy to use and the keyboard is surprisingly usable. However, I’m starting to rethink wether or not I really need access to my email from my phone. I’d like to try a Treo type device sometime. The inability to get to the internet from the Powerbook is pretty much a show stopper for me. My connection through the Sony is very slow, but when I’m stuck without internet access I just leave it running and it keeps my email in sync on my laptop which keeps me in touch with anything important that is happening.

By the way, if you think you might want to use a Blackberry with a Mac someday, you should head over to PocketMac and download the software while it is free. I don’t know if it is a special deal or if they are going to charge in the future, so it might not be a bad idea to get it now just in case.