After wasting way too much time yesterday, Songbird is my new media player.  Mike Arrington has written about them a couple of times, but I didn’t think much of it at the time when I read about it.

Songbird is pretty slick.  It has a very similar interface to iTunes.  It is built using Firefox’s framework and uses your OS’s native playback libraries, so it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows… with Linux it requires the gstreamer packages.  Reading the comments on their blog, I see that a lot of Mac users are even starting to dump iTunes in favor of Songbird because it can do a few web2.0-ish things that iTunes can’t do.  The backend is SQLite rather than XML, so it should scale better than iTunes too.

I also had to install plugins for iPod Device Support and the iTunes Library Importer.  It’s pretty cool that the Apple stuff is all plugins, because not everyone needs that bloat.

So I put it to the test…  First, I had it scan my external hard drive for music.  I stepped away to make some lunch and when I returned it had successfully imported 8069 out of my 8225 songs (the missing files were due to the fact that it can’t decode Apple DRM files (.m4p), but I will come back to that).  Then I realized that I shouldn’t have imported my music this way because when I ran the iTunes Library Importer to import my playlists, my playlists didn’t point to the right files.  So I deleted all of the songs from the Library and started over.  Deleting maxed out the CPU for about 20 minutes, but thats okay… iTunes probably would do the same.

Now, to get the iTunes library to import properly, I first had to change the file paths in "iTunes Music Library.xml" from Windows-style paths to Linux paths…

OLD:
file://localhost/E:/Music/Flogging%20Molly/Alive%20Behind%20The%20Green%20Door/05%20Laura.m4a

NEW:
file:///media/EXTERNAL/Music/Flogging%20Molly/Alive%20Behind%20The%20Green%20Door/05%20Laura.m4a

Then I ran the importer and it worked perfectly… again excluding the .m4p DRM files.

Now to get the DRM files unlocked and imported I used this… http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1553

And as for syncing the iPod… I just plugged it in a few minutes ago and it appears to be syncing.  If something fails horribly, I will update this post.  Otherwise you can assume that I am now a happy Songbird user.

This morning I have decided to port my iTunes library over to my new laptop.  Since I no longer run Windows on any computer, I need a new media player for Ubuntu which can keep my iPod synced.  I mostly have mp3 and mp4 files, but I do have several Apple DRM songs that I don’t want to lose.

Any suggestions?

I got my new laptop yesterday.  A super light-weight Dell.  It weights only like 3.5 pounds even after upgrading to the 9-hour battery.

My old Sony Vaio was a beast… 10+ pounds, 16.1" screen, awesome high res.  It was great for about 4 years, but recently has started to crash regularly.  Probably due to internal parts deteriorating because of how hot it’s non-mobile CPU and gig of RAM got.  And towards the end it had a battery life of only 15 minutes.

So last night I stayed up until 2:00am tweaking out the new laptop.  When I installed Ubuntu, I used 7.04 Beta (Feisty Fawn) because it had two new things I wanted… a sweet wireless manager and slightly newer versions of common apps (namely OpenOffice and Gaim).  Everything went very smooth and pretty much works.  But before I bravely wiped my Windows XP partition, I couldn’t find any posts about people successfully installing Ubuntu on this laptop.  I can happily say "it works!", and here are my notes on a few of the oddities I had to work through…

– "sudo apt-get install 915resolution" in order to get the 1280×800 resolution working.

– Turn off tap-click on the touchpad so it doesn’t click while you type… In /etc/X11/xorg.conf add this to the Synaptics Touchpad section: Option "SHMConfig" "on" …then log out and back in and install "sudo apt-get install qsynaptics".  Run qsynaptics to adjust the touchpad settings.

– Switch the two mouse inputs so that touchpad is primary and the other IBM-style pointer thingy is secondary so that the standard Gnome mouse speed controls affect the touchpad… In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, comment out this line in the Synaptics Touchpad section: Option "SendCoreEvents" "true".  Also comment out this line in the Configured Mouse section: Option "CorePointer".  Then at the bottom in the ServerLayout section add:  InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad" "CorePointer".  Log out and back in.

– Now, since Dell didn’t give us a middle mouse button, and I’m always going to use the touchpad buttons, change both upper buttons to a middle click.  In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, in the Configured Mouse section, add: Option "ButtonMapping" "2 2 2"

Fyi, ButtonMapping maps physical buttons to logical buttons.  For a 3 button mouse the first number sets the action for the left button, second for the middle, and third for the right.  So normally the values are "1 2 3".  A left-handed person might set it to "3 2 1".  And above I made them all middle-clicks by using "2 2 2".  It gets more complicated with 5-button mice.

– "sudo apt-get install libpam-keyring" in order to get it to stop prompting me for my wireless network keyring password every time I login.  Then "gksudo gedit /etc/pam.d/gdm" and add "@include common-pamkeyring".  Also need to set the keyring password equal to your root password, and delete your existing default keyring… "rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring"

– Lastly, 7.04 comes with Compiz.  To turn it on, Preferences > Desktop Effects.  But after you turn it on, it sets your workspaces to "1".  So right click on the work spaces and set it to whatever you want.  But then cube-rotate doesn’t work.  Disable Desktop Effects and re-enable it, and it will start working how you’d expect it to work.  But then never open the Desktop Effects preferences again, lol.  If you do, it will revert back to one workspace.  There is an Ubunto 7.04 bug open for this, so it should be fixed before it is released from beta (I’d hope).

Update: one more thing… comment out all of the dhcp lines in /etc/network/interfaces unless you need them.  This will make bootup speed a lot faster.

I think that’s most of what I had to figure out.  Everything else worked out of the box.

I’m not sure what happened on that previous post from my Treo, but what I was trying to say was…

Subject: Getting great customer service right now

My attempt at Dan Ciruli’s pushup (and situp) challenge ended last month on Day 72.  Since then I have been seeing a chiroproactor a few times per week.  I must have been doing the situps wrong or something, because that morning I could not get past number 25.  And a few minutes later I was on the couch and everything hurt.  I’m better now, but apparently my spine is abnormally straight and has been that way for a while, which might be what led to the injury.  So I’m here at the chiroproactor’s right now, lying on a table with electrical muscle stimulator things on my back.  In a few minutes they’ll “adjust” me.

Every time I’m here I am amazed at how great the doctor and the other two girls who work here are at customer service.  During my first visit I noticed they have three whiteboards on the wall with patient names on them.  One has a list of this month’s birthdays, one has a list of the patients who referred somebody to them this month, and one shows the patient of the month (not sure how I can earn that yet).  After my first visit , Dr Rathmann called me at home that night to check on me and to tell me that she can definitely help me out.  And every day, all three of them remember the names of everybody that walks through the door.  The also remember what each of us have going on in our lives and make good conversation with us.  And they always remember off the top of their head when my next appointment will be as they remind me while saying goodbye.  It is impressive.

They’ve given me a lot of information about taking good care of my back, such as proper sitting, sleeping and standing.  And I received a special ice pack from them in the mail during the first week.  On Monday they had a happy birthday balloon waiting for me when I got there (even though I do still have 4 more days left in my twenties) and I also got a birthday card in the mail from them this week.

They’re great at the details of customer service and you can tell that they genuinely care about the customer.  It makes me curious what their interview process is like.  It isn’t easy to find people like this.

It’s Tuck Chiropractic Clinic.  I highly recommend them.

Jon mentioned that the latest development branch of Beryl seems to be faster.  I had previously decided not to run Beryl because switching between windows was slow, among other stuff.  So I decided to try the development branch, and it is indeed faster.  I’ve been running Beryl now for two days and I think I’m going to stick with it this time.  Although I’m not cool enough for my windows to explode into flames though when I close them like some other people’s desktops around the office.

You can grab the latest unofficial Beryl packages here:

First, run:

KEY=81836EBF; gpg –keyserver subkeys.pgp.net –recv $KEY && gpg –export –armor $KEY | sudo apt-key add –

and add these repos to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb edgy beryl-svn
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb edgy beryl-svn

Now, if you have Beryl already installed, you can just run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.

Another recent Ubuntu change I made is I got rid of autocutsel because of minor annoyances that I couldn’t get over.  So now I will just have to get used to using two clipboards.