Quick Note Regarding Comments

Comment spam is increasing. As a result, I've enabled captcha type validation to posting comments AND set them to where I have to moderate them before they appear. This is a pain for me even more than you. I do promise though that even comments that disagree with me or are negative about me will be published. I will not approve comments that are spammy, off topic or vulgar.

Who Besides Me Finds This Ironic?

KABUL (Reuters) - Some 5,000 Afghans chanted "death to Denmark" and "death to the Netherlands" in Kabul on Friday, protesting against the reprinting of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad in Danish newspapers and a Dutch film on the Koran.

Protesters gathered around a mosque in the west of the Afghan capital after Friday prayers chanting "death to Denmark", "death to the Netherlands, "death to America" and "death to Jews".

When all of this about the cartoons first came up three years or so ago, Muslims were upset for two reasons. Reportedly the majority were upset because the cartoons depicted Muslims as violent. A slightly smaller group were upset because it's against Islam to depict the Prophet.

So, who besides me finds it ironic that 5,000 Muslims call for death to Denmark, the Netherlands, America and Jews because of among other things, a cartoon depicting them as violent?

As further evidence of violent tenancies by at least some Muslims... It is against Judaism to eat pork. Yet we don't hear the Jews calling for the death of non-Jews who eat pork.

Just a Quickie Warning

I still think PoddoX is a great program. However... it appears that like a lot of 3rd party iPod transfer applications, it may have problems with iPods that have been accessed by recent versions of iTunes. Something about an encrypted hash table added to the iPod.

The result is that after using PoddoX, I lose everything on the iPod. It's still there but not in the database. It takes a "restore to factory" with iTunes to get it back at this point.

So I'm frantically looking at other software options and will post a blog when I have it all sorted out. At the moment, it looks like Sharepod and Floola may work with the new hash. (I've actually used SharePod and all seems well, just downloaded Floola.)

The programs that let me copy *.mp4 (DRMd AAC files from ITMS) to the iPod so far don't work with the new anti-3rd party iPod hacks.

Another interesting one I found lets me hook up two iPods and sync them or just transfer the files back and forth between them. Pretty cool really. More on that one later.

iTunes Alternatives for iPods (and Windows)

Now don't get me wrong, iTunes is a great program. In a few respects even better than Music Match Pro. But it has some warts.

For instance... I sync up my iPod at home. Then at work I hook it up there. iTunes comes up and deletes songs from the iPod that I don't have on my work computer. That's a pretty big wart.

Anyway, five years ago I registered some shareware Windows software called Notmad from Red Chair Software. It was alternative software to work with my Creative Labs MP3 players. The I got an iPod and registered Anapod from the same company.


In a nutshell, here's what Anapod does. Without iTunes, it lets you copy music, movies, audiobooks, photos, contacts etc from your Windows machine to your iPod... AND BACK. Yes, I can sync up my iPod at home, plug it in at work and copy the songs from my mp3 player to my desktop computer. Apple doesn't seem to have any plans in place for the loss of your music, whether purchased or in plain MP3 format other than buying the music again. It's entirely possible that at some point, your only copy of your legally owned music might exist only on your iPod.

Anapod offers much more though.. maintenance utilities for repairing corrupt iPod databases, removing entries for files that really aren't there and more.

Even better, you can stream music to your computer from your iPod and to go one step further... if I remember correctly, you can do this from other networked computers than the one to which the iPod is docked.

I've recommended Anapod to a number of people over the years.

Now for the wart.

I have two iPods. An HP 40GB and an iPod Photo 80GB (bought a week before the 160GB iPod Photo came out of course.) When connecting an iPod to Anapod the first time, you have to "authorize" it by entering the transaction code from when you purchased the software. Red Chair keeps a record of this along with the Device IDs of the iPods you've worked with. This makes sense as you are allowed or even expected to run Anapod on a number of computers.

A friend back east had the battery wimp out in her iPod Mini. The mini contained her only copies of 196 songs. If she sent it to Apple for the $50 battery replacement, she'd get a refurbished mini in return, minus her songs. So she mailed it to me. I bought a new battery and installed it for her. And in the process torn the mini ribbon cable that connects the shuttle wheel to the main board of the Mini.

So I buy her a new iPod. I connect her old mini to my work computer and Anapod. "Authorize" her mini and copy her music to her own folder on my hard drive. No, I do not do this professionally. It was just a favor for a friend.

I hook up the new iPod I just bought her and go to authorize it. When I enter it the transaction code, it tells me that I've already used it. ??? Yeah, no S#$T Sherlock. I searched Red Chair's site today and can't find ANY PLACE that says there's a limit on how many iPods you can use with their software. So I filled out the form to unauthorize her old iPod. It made me pick a reason from a list... options where "Replaced Under Warranty", "Lost", "Stolen". Luckily there is a comment box. Hours later I'm still waiting for an answer via email. And if I authorize THIS one, I'll just have to unauthorize it later as I doubt it'll ever see my computer again.

Not all is lost though. I found PoddoX! PoddoX is very similar to Anapod though it doesn't yet have as many features. OTOH, it is a single file Windows executable of about 100K, has no registration, authorization and is 100% free of charge! I downloaded it, unzipped it, copied it to my utilities folder, double clicked on it and selected the files to copy to the iPod. The picture at the top of this entry is of the PoddoX program.

UPDATE:
When on the Red Chair Software site, if you go to Anapod, then at the bottom of the page, click "Help and Support", then "thinking about buying" then "ordering and policies", there is no mention of a limit on how many iPods you can use with Anapod.

If instead of "thinking about ordering" you clicked on "A registered user" there's nothing on it either. This is what I used for my post.

I just stumbled across a mention of a limit though. You have to click on the "Store" link from the Anapod page. Then on "Policies and FAQ" which is different than "Ordering and Policies".


One of the items on the FAQ:

"What if my family has multiple iPods? If there is more than one iPod in your family's household, simply purchase the Universal Edition. Universal Edition may be used to cover iPods belonging to family members within a household (i.e. spouse or children), within reason.

Obviously, your purchase does not cover iPods that belong to other people such as friends, co-workers, roommates, or strangers; they need to purchase their own copy of Anapod Explorer."

So, "within reason" means two iPods according to Red Chair Software.
www.redchairsoftware.com/store/anapod.php will take you to the FAQ.

Links in this entry:
www.apple.com/itunes/
www.redchairsoftware.com
www.redchairsoftware.com/store/anapod.php
www.poddox.com
Apple iPod 80GB and 160GB models from Amazon (I get a small commission if you buy from these links.)

Did I Mention How Much I Love GMail?

I'm pretty sure I did. To the left is photographic evidence of one of the reasons I love GMail.

That covers mail in the past twelve days. 108 "real" emails, 1,213 SPAM emails. Lends credibility to the claims that 85% of all email is now spam.

Oh for what it's worth, I've moved ALL my mail for my domain from my ISP to GMail using their free business mail accounts. No one emailing me knows the difference and the only differences I can see are faster mail responses and no spam. For that, I'll happily put up with ads as I read mail using the GMail web interface.