John

Jan201020

I’m late to the party, I know. These two online music providers have been around for some time, and while have known about them I’ve never really taken the time to understand them. I don’t have a large music collection managed through iTunes; I’d say it’s about average sized, and I go through phases where I would add a lot of new music for a few weeks then add nothing for weeks. So new music discovery is often sporadic, and for the last year or so I have left the task to podcasts like All Songs Considered and those compiled by some of my favorite DJ’s. I used podcasts because they are easy; iTunes manages them, downloads them, removes them, and transfers them to my iPhone seamlessly. I tend to do most of my listening while working and for some reason I could not get Pandora to play in Firefox or internet explorer while in the office. I blamed our security policies but never really spent much time trying. I also did not try last.fm as Pandora has always been explained to me as the simpler to use service of the two. I didn’t want to install their plug-in to only find out I couldn’t listen at work.

Jan201019

Comments

My year as a vegetarian (nearly vegan)

Time flies by. It didn’t hit me on the day, but the other day I was reminded that it was just over a year ago (the anniversary would have been almost two weeks ago, on the 5th) I decided to become a vegetarian again (for the second time in my life). This time rather than chose the lacto-ovo route as I previously did many years ago, I chose to take it a steep or two further and become a strict vegetarian. Strict is basically vegan, which is what I tend to call it when dining out as most people have no idea what being a strict vegetarian is, but they tend to understand what vegan mean.

Jan201018

John

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iTunes podcast sharing between computers

: Image via CrunchBase

I listen/ watch a LOT of podcasts and mange them through iTunes on my primary mac. I find it pretty easy to keep current on the audio ones by listening to them on my iPhone while working throughout the day, but the video podcasts just seem to pile up because they require more attention and are harder to multi-task to. As a result, they rarely get watched on my iPhone, in fact I don’t even sync most of them.

So I have been looking for a workflow solution to keep current and get through the backlog of video podcasts. While I spend a good amount of time in the mornings and evenings at my primary mac I find myself using most of the screen real estate for photo processing or other tasks which doesn’t leave me with a lot of room to play the video podcasts on this machine. Moreover, unlike audio podcasts, I have found when playing a video in a separate window iTunes does not advance to the next video when the current one finishes playing. This requires a lot of back and forth between what I’m working on and iTunes.