I’ve just gone to install yet another app on my iPod Touch and noticed my hard drive fill up again in seconds as hundreds of Podcasts came down that I haven’t had a chance to listen too yet. So, something has to be done:

1. I have to listen to more Podcasts!
2. I have to move my iTunes library to an external drive.

#1 I just need to do, #2 makes me a little nervous – but let’s give it a go!

1. First things first give your iTunes a spring clean, get rid of anything you don’t really need.
2. Give iTunes the new location where your media is going to live
   (Under Windows: Edit –> Preferences –> Advanced)
3. Make sure that “Copy files to iTunes Music folder” is selected.
4. Click OK, iTunes may offer to move your files for you (mine didn’t).
5. Tell iTunes to consolidate your libary (File->Library->Consolidate Library).
6. Go out for the day…

At this point iTunes has migrated it’s library to your external hard drive (it hasn’t deleted it, just copied it) you can check that everything has copied across by selecting a song and doing a File->Get Info to see where it’s being served from).

Now apparently…

A long as your external hard drive is connected and powered on files will be served from it. If it isn’t connected iTunes will default to the original location until it’s connected again (this could be useful for subset data and the like – I guess?!).

You can of course choose to keep your old library around as a backup – I’m not going to as I was doing this to free up space on my laptop! So I’ve deleted the iTunes Music folder (NOT any of the other folders around it like the itl file etc!).

Useful Tip!

If you start iTunes in future and your external hard drive isn’t switched on then you won’t be able to play an of the music from that drive (obviously), but you can download new stuff and simply “Consolidate Library” again when you reconnect your external Hard Drive! Now that I like!!! I’m not sure if I then synced my iPod with it that it wouldn’t wipe everything except the new stuff – has anyone tried this?

Going off at a Tangent

So far what we’ve done is to just move the Music library (and is the official Apple way of doing this). But what about the other stuff (databases, playlist, alburm art, ratings), surely it would be good to have all that in a secure offsite location to?

1. Copy Album Artwork, iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Library.xml files to the folder above your iTunes library you just created.
2. Point iTunes to this new library by holding down shift as you start it and selecting your iTunes Library.itl

Now you should be able to point any iTunes on your network at this library – outstanding!

photo credit: William Hook

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This made me laugh this morning – I’m sure I know people who pull the same photo in every picture they’re in as well – I might have to go hunting on Facebook later!!

More of them here – but make sure you look away regularly!

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing – let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

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Now before I start this – I don’t want you to get me wrong, I like Facebook, I like it a lot:

• I’ve got in contact with people I haven’t seen in years!
• I don’t have to send an email round to tell people what a fantastic holiday I had (I just post it and the photos and they can choose to look at it when/if they want to).

I do have some gripes though…

1. The amount of time-wasting people do on it. I scoot on have a look and scoot off (but then I  do have a billion and one things to do around the net!).
2. The fact that people use it as the number one method of communication now. Even SMS seems to be going out of the window for people to contact each other with such things as new births etc.
3. The security, last but by no means least and probably the biggest of them all.
   I tend to keep what I put on there fairly compartmentalized I know what I want people to see and wouldn’t upload it unless I did! The security to limit people is kind of complicated though (as I found out trying to explain it to a friend last week).

Items 1 & 2 there’s very little Facebook can do anything bout, this is proof how “mainstream” Facebook has become and they’re probably quite pleased about it. The third however is a very different story.

The security is clever if you sit down and take the time to build your friend lists (and associated access properties for those lists) correctly it can really work well. The problem is people don’t take the time to do this!

I’m a fan of opt-out of privacy rather then opt-in. Your profile should be locked down so nobody can even see it from the outset and then you should be able to unlock certain parts (photo’s etc) to certain individuals or friend lists as you see fit. I guess this would make it an “anti-social networking site” but it would be safer!

Look at the national security issue that arose this morning:
Lady Shelley Sawyers (wife of the next head of MI6) posted details of their children, holiday photo’s and the location of their flat on the website. This is after vast sums have been spent in the past to ensure he and his family are protected from security compromises.

This is all happening in the wake of Facebook’s planned security “simplification”, that word “simplification” scares me. In general it means it makes it easier for the company doing the simplifying and more of a pain for those using it (Orange have been a prime example of this over the years!).

So instead of setting different preferences for your photo’s, your job history, your date of birth, you’ll now have one privacy setting to rule them all (In a Lord of The Rings “One Ring” kind of way). Now whilst I can hear you saying – that’s great – finally they’re making it easy. Think again!

You want to show a couple of friends your holiday snaps, so you open up photo’s to friends – wait a minute – you don’t want them going into work (you don’t want the blokes from work seeing you in a bikini do you girls and boys?!?) so how do you do this. This sounds like it’s getting “complicated” not “simplified” to me?!

The above is an example you’ll “probably” be familiar with but the bigger one is probably your date of birth (used to generate Facebook birthdays and all those nice fuzzy messages from friends on your birthday!), how many sites have you entered your date of birth as a security question on recently? Do  you really want to open that up to friends, employers, ex’s, the bully from school that seems to have settled down now??

I’ll leave you with that thought, and we’ll watch with interest as Facebook “simplifies”

photo credit: hyku

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I really, really like the look of this application from TrueCaller.com. All you need is a 3G or WiFI connection and when a number rings you that:

a) Isn’t already in your phone
b) Isn’t anonymous

It goes and looks up the contact tells you who they are!

It doesn’t appear to work in the UK at the moment – which is a REAL shame!

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing – let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

For those that don’t know about the incidents of our wedding day and the floods – this will probably make interesting reading.. Link to full story: Here

Quite surprised by Google Books having all the content of a book that’s only two years old (well not even that – our 2nd anniversary is in two weeks time!)

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing – let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

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Clearly work think everyone is a five year old again!

This is also a test of emailing to Posterous!

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing – let me know what you think!

Posted via email from keiron’s posterous<

• That Boy Dilbert – He Gets Everywhere!

Testing again for Posterous!

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing – let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

• That Boy Dilbert – He Gets Everywhere!

I’ve just signed up with Hunch.com after reading Lifehackers review I figure anything that can help me answer some questions might be useful!

The signup process seemed to take forever after I’d provided my details – though the site had just been mentioned in LifeHacker and had 283 views on there (that’s probably not including those on their Feed Reader that picked it up the same way I did!).

Eventually it crashed with a 500 error, but I seemed to be logged in and able to navigate around my profile, it was only when I clicked “home” it ground to a halt again.

So I navigated to You -> Tell Hunch about You, let the interrogation begin….

Q1. Where is your home located?
Q2. Alien abductions, are they real?
Q3. Are you Male or Female?
Q4. Do you like Bumper cars?

After each question it told me the number of other respondents that had agreed with me. Most of them didn’t believe in Alien abductions I can tell you!

I abandoned it at this point as I was just getting too many delays and errors, I have a hunch that it’s because of their LifeHacker mention – maybe I’ll come back when they’re less busy!

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I’ve had a fairly tough year this year to date (some of which you’ll have heard about back in February), but I’m picking myself up again slowly, I’ve been back at work for a while now (with the assistance of my doctors and a few tablets on the way!). My panic seems to be keeping tabs on itself, and the stress levels are OK-ish so long as nobody rocks the boat (believe me, generally somebody rocks the boat at least once per day!!).

I have no energy for some things, and a massive renewed energy for others. I’m not sure where that sits with posting on this blog (I’ve managed to Twitter a lot and not blog much recently) I will try to blog more here, I’m just not one of those people who can produce a blog post everyday. But I do see a lot of stuff on Twitter and in my Google Reader I’d like to investigate/write about.

I’m doing lots of automation work on the business to make my life easier (and to support my customers better) so that really does take priority. I’ve also spent more and more time away from computers, in the garden (which is nearly complete thank goodness) and getting out with my camera.

What are your priorities at the moment, and have they changed now summer has come around?

I’m not sure where this blog post was going when I started it, and I’m not sure about how it ended – but I’ll post it anyway!

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I was heavily influenced by the register’s review, and an email from their sales team.

I’ve purchased a MyXerver 1TB along with a 1TB USB drive to run to it, and after the ParcelForce saga I now have them installed, I couldn’t have chose better as they look exactly the same when unpacked (just one in black and one in white!).

After unpacking I plugged in the MyXerver and started to write this post, given that the instructions said it could take anywhere between 1 and 3 minutes to boot I was impressed that by the time I’d finished typing the previous line it was booted and ready for use!

As the adminstrator I had to run the setup utility disc. I decided (unlike my usual self!) it might be wise to follow the instructions at this point..

The wizard looks fairly self explanatory, so let’s get started.

It appears to have recognized MyXerver correctly.

I’ve opted for a fixed IP, just in case I need to enable port forwarding on my router to this box (it will make life far easier if I do this from the onset I suspect!).

Next came the timezone and naming, I resisted the temptation to call it something humorous and left it as MyXerver, I was surprised to find it wanted to know my Workgroup name – not sure why at this stage!

Mission accomplished – I opted not to setup Flash Map as I wanted to keep this proprietary software as far away from this solution as possible (having had to install a CD for every machine with Netgear’s SC101).

Interestingly, the instructions told me to visit http://myxerver to configure the box further, in Firefox this resulted in a 404 after trying to visit http://www.myxerver.com and in IE it was simply a 404 – Page not found. Putting the IP address into the URL seems to have the desired effect though.

I managed to login and configure the device – I’m sure you don’t need to see all of that info!

Learning

I’ve discovered why it wants to know my workgroup, it has the ability to use Network Neighbourhood for mapping network drives with the users regular username and password – now that I like!

So that means each user has a private area, great – what about the global public areas that I want to dump photo’s and the link into?

This is found in the “Shares” section, and before too long I’d got a shared drive setup and 40GB of Photo’s transferring from my old NAS to this one, a process that took around 2 hours.

NAS > Backup Solution

I know what you’re thinking, I said this was my backup solution, and all I have at the minute is a new 1TB NAS. Here’s the best bit, I plugged in the 1TB USB drive to the back and configured and incremental backup from the NAS to the USB that will copy all changed files every morning at 6am…

Job Done!!

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