Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

I’ve got about 5000 tracks I’ve purchased from the iTunes store over the last 8 years. That’s a lot of dough. And I’m willing to spend more–$25 a year more–to have those tracks available in the cloud. I also have about 30,000 other tracks, purchased from Amazon or eMusic, or ripped from my own library. [...]

So far iOS 5 has been just fine on my iPhone 3GS (yes, still), but for one important exception: I don’t think the phone has ever completed a sync without my having to eject it. The symptom is one of those things that gives long-term iTunes users pause: text in the iTunes status window that [...]

Last night’s news about Steve Jobs hit me hard. Not that it was a surprise; Steve was the one CEO I know who was most in touch with, and open about, his own mortality. Of course that was out of necessity; it’s hard to sweep pancreatic and liver cancer under the rug. But Steve’s response [...]

I got a nice gadget under the Christmas tree this year: a second generation AppleTV. Short take: I am way more impressed than I thought I would be. This fall we experimented with hooking an old MacBook Pro up to the TV in the living room and using the FrontRow UI to watch movies, but [...]

Almost six months ago, I managed to create a big mess 0n my outboard media drive with iTunes, when, while trying to consolidate all my music onto a new 1TB drive, I managed only a partial move and ended up with files strewn across the old drive and two different directory trees on the new [...]

I suppose it was inevitable. My last MacBook Pro was Apple’s first, the 1.83 GHz 15″ model that was the first to bear the name back in 2006. That was one in a series of upgrades that saw me getting a new machine every few years, thanks to a series of good product launches by [...]

For the love of me, I don’t know how I ended up here again. The last time I moved my iTunes library to a bigger disk, I was able to use the Consolidate Library command and let iTunes do all the file moves. This time… not so much. I was trying to do two things [...]

Four reactions that I agree with (parts of) in response to Apple’s iPad announcement yesterday: Doc Searls places the iPad in the context of vertical integration (apps all the way down to CPUs) and horizontal playing fields and says, “What you have to appreciate, even admire, is how well Apple plays the vertical game. It’s [...]

Looking at the new iTunes Store experience in iTunes 9, I had difficulty finding any information about iTunes Plus upgrades, Apple’s offer that allows you to upgrade your old DRM-crippled protected files to the new “purchased” format. Fortunately, it seems that the page is still there and working in the store, just not promoted. Bookmark [...]

I did the Snow Leopard upgrade last night, and it went OK. First step was to back up my MacBook. It’s an exaggeration to say that it had never been backed up–I do, or did, regularly back up files to my .Mac iDisk, but rarely if ever did a whole system back up. A $99 [...]

You can now pre-order Mac OS X 10.6, aka “Snow Leopard,” at the Apple Store for delivery on Friday. I forgot what it feels like to be excited and waiting for a Mac OS X release, even what is admittedly a point release with a handful of features. Some of those features are pretty cool, [...]

This one was counter-intuitive, but it worked. I’ve been suffering through static and interference ever since my Monster iPod FM adapter burned out and I replaced it with a different model. My Passat has the rear-roof-mounted antenna, and it’s apparently too far away from the FM adapter that I use for my iPod. It’s great [...]

I hesitate to write this post, but since I found very few reliable aids for surviving this error, I’m writing it up in the hope that it will help someone else. My MacBook Pro (first generation, dented side resulting in unreliable power cord connection, weak battery) shut off sometime overnight. Unfortunately, when I booted it [...]

I’ve had three iPod-like devices since 2001, four if you count my iPhone. The first one was the classic iPod 5GB with the mechanical clickwheel (that was a happy Christmas day). The FireWire port famously broke on it, and I picked up a 10GB model in time for my cross-country drive. I bought a 30GB [...]

Since my budget doesn’t move as fast as the hard disk industry increases capacity, I periodically use OmniDiskSweeper to go through and clean a few gigabytes of dross off my MacBook Pro’s 80 GB drive. It’s necessary, because without going through the exercise, I end up with less than a gig of free drive space [...]