Good evening. First, I’ve published my favorite photos of 2006. Go check ‘em out, and tell me what you think.
Second I wanted to update everyone on the total success of the iPod smartlists that I am using. I have a nano, and as you know I have to keep a fresh set of music on the nano at all times, and it can only hold a measly 4GB of music which with net casts (oops - Pod Casts) and photos, and contacts, calendar and such comes to about 730 songs. It’s easy to hear the same song twice… Unless you use the technique that i describe in an earlier post.
Basically, you use the smart lists, and the fact that iTunes tracks the skip count from your iPod to constantly update your really favorite music. When you skip a song, the song gets excluded from your list of favorites, and since this list is the one that occupies the vast majority of storage, you’re golden. You can also do things like make a SmartList of songs that you haven’t listened to in the last month…
Using this technique, I sync about 10 to 20 songs a night onto my iPod, and it provides a noticable difference in my listening experience.
If you stop and think about what I have here, its kind of interesting. When you skip a song, that song gets excluded from the list. So the next time you sync your ipod, you get a different song that you have not skipped before. Unless and until you skip that song, it stays in your favorite songs play list. Once it gets skipped, it moves out of the playlist, and a new song takes its place.
I’m finding that bicycling is when I do most of the skipping, tho. I have my bike on a wind trainer in the basement right now, and I like to have all kinds of hyperactive music while i’m working out. This leads me to think that I need a more static play list for that. But when you think about it, I’m using this technique to really refine whats on the iPod, irrespective of the mood I’m in. So, I like to use this technique for now, as it will really refine the list of my favorites.At any rate, that project is going really well, and I feel that I am avoiding the trap that many are falling into where the iPod seems to favor certain artists, or songs, etc.
On the LDAP front… I’ve kind of done a restart, and have started to do more basic, baseline collection of logs from boot transactions between an OSX client, and an LDAP server. I’ve got discreet files that reflect the boot time activity of an OSX client in a certain state, and then a folloing log of the same client in a different state.
I’m hoping to use this information to further my research into how a client uses OpenDirectory, and Apple MCX settings that are stored in an OpenLDAP server.
It’s been kind of fun to do this, and I’ll be posting more information as I learn more.