SuperSync for iTunes synchronization rocks

Dec 16, ’06 11:40 AM

Back in August, I whined about iTunes and how multiple library management just sucked.  Well, somebody (not Apple, naturally) has gone a long way towards fixing it.  The app is SuperSync, and it’s available for Windows and Mac, with a "pair" of licenses (to allow syncing two libraries/machines for just $29, which is a bargain in my book. 

In addition to keeping iTunes libraries on two boxes/locations completely in sync (and with some amount of duplicate reduction, which I haven’t explored yet), it has a terrific "one-way" sync feature which is exactly what I needed.  Here’s the use case:  my laptop drive is much smaller (100GB) than my storage array, so I have two libraries, a large "main" one which sits on the storage array, and a "subset" library that lives on my laptop (and syncs with the iPod).  The "main" array has a ton of stuff I’ve merged from other folks, fairly obscure things.  The "subset" library has music I listen to all the time, all of my playlists, and is where I tend to rip new CD’s when I get them.Supersync

So the problem is how to make sure anything I add to the laptop’s subset library gets added to the main storage array library as well.  This avoids having to rip CD’s twice, and it also makes sure that music I get from eMusic or the iTunes store is available in both places (since the storage array drives the Mac Mini/stereo in the house).  SuperSync makes this easy — one of the synchronization modes is to "upload" things which are unique in the "local" library to the "remote" library.  Obviously this can work in either direction, depending upon which copy of SuperSync you initiate the action from.  This allows a very easy workflow for new CD’s or downloads — upload to the main library.  And it allows me to "switch out" music from the laptop and replace it with music from the main storage array, when I want to copy things from the main library to the laptop but not use up my precious remaining disk space on the laptop. 

I haven’t explored all of SuperSync’s features yet, and in particular I’m going to be interested in how it might help me deal with duplicates, since my "main" library on the storage array is chock full of duplication caused by unintelligent merging of libraries in the past.  I’m also interested in how SuperSync deals with playlists — I have a ton of playlists (one needs playlists for the iPod, and because libraries with thousands or tens of thousands of tracks are unmanageable without some kind of organizing metaphor) which tend to originate on the laptop/iPod combo, and then migrate to the Mac Mini/storage array.  But the process today is manual — export playlist/import playlist, and frankly this means that many of my playlists exist only on the laptop/iPod.  If SuperSync helps with this problem, I’ll consider my earlier complaints to be a thing of the past.

Of course, it would be nice if iTunes would simply do all this without the need for a third-party application, but perhaps this is the first step:  some entrepreneurs saw a need, fill a gap, and if they succeed, let’s hope Apple acquires and integrates the technology. 

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Back to school time…

Dec 14, ’06 11:07 PM

It’s official. I’m going back to the University of Washington this January, to resume finishing my Ph.D. in Anthropology. I haven’t written much about this because it hadn’t happened yet, and I suppose there was a chance it wouldn’t.

But I opened the admissions envelope today and discovered that the only stumbling block between me and school was that I can’t prove I had measles vaccinations. So next week I’m getting tested (hopefully) for antibodies to prove I’m not going to start an epidemic on campus, and it’s back to a much older way of life (in terms of personal history). I’m going to be working from home, naturally, but I expect to be on campus several times a month for meetings, the library, seminars, etc.

My original advisor, Dr. Robert Dunnell, retired back around the time I was at Internap Network Services, so I’ve selected a new committee. Dr. James Feathers, who runs the Thermoluminescence Dating Lab (where I worked in the early 1990’s) will be my committee chair, and Drs. Marcos Llobera and Eric A. Smith will be on the committee. I’ll select a GSR by January, it looks like.

I’m very excited to be going back, after a decade’s hiatus to work in the technology industry. Naturally I’ll try to write a bit about the experience as we go along. And of course, this spring I’ll get pictures up on the site when the cherry trees bloom on the quad…

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The Other Side of the Coin

Dec 4, ’06 9:41 PM

In contrast to last week, I arrived back on the island today after a weekend in Seattle to some decent weather.  Sure, it was raining earlier, but by nightfall things were clear and gorgeous here at the
house, with a sky devoid of low clouds perfect for displaying the glow of a waxing gibbous moon.    The internet assures me that "waxing gibbous" pretty much means we’re near the full moon, but I didn’t want comments full of "it’s not the full moon yet"…Dsc_0197

By the time I left Seattle (after just two days), it was like the snowstorm never happened down there.  Dry streets, sunny weather on Sunday, no snow visible in town itself (though I didn’t go up on Queen Anne or Capitol Hills – UW and downtown were my destinations this time around).  But once I hit the island, it was back to winter wonderland…slushy style.  The lakes are partially frozen, the ponds are still fully covered, and there’s compact snow and ice in patches on side roads and in recalcitrant drifts in Friday Harbor. 

But it’s still nice to be home.

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Alright…I Drastically Underestimated the Snow

Dec 2, ’06 8:18 AM

OK. So I had no idea how much it was snowing on the west side of the island. I’ve seen figures of 10-15″ of snow. Madden, from Steps, said he had 14″ out by his place, with trees and branches overhanging the road, and an OPALCO power truck crunched by a fallen tree. The snow quickly turned into a sheet of ice all over the roads, and much of the island hunkered down to wait it out.

In terms of damage, I lost power one day, but was spared the 3 day outage of some folks up by Roche. My outage, however, did cause freezing in the pipes in the little cabana off the deck, since it was well out of reach of my wood stove. So naturally, on Wednesday night when things started to thaw a bit, the pipes in there exploded and started gushing water. Since I’d been planning to redo that room anyhow, an after-hour plumber’s visit turned “fixing” into “gutting the sink and shower just to find” the broken pipe. The destruction was accomplished in a fairly decisive, shock-and-awe sort of way (it’s amazing how fast a Sawz-all can remove a shower stall, wall boards, etc). But now I don’t have to worry about the plumbing in there and can have the contractor start on drywalling it out and finishing it off. And one of the wall heaters melted down and nearly caught fire on Sunday night, though I caught it immediately and the only damage was a couple of scorch marks on the wood floor. I ended up installing a replacement myself on Wednesday, since the electrician only had 2WD on the van, and couldn’t make it down the road.

Things finally started to melt yesterday, and the roads were reasonably clear today (but still icy each night as things refreeze).

The net result this week is that I’ve stepped up my half-hearted earlier attempts to add a generator to the house. I’m figuring out the loads I need to support early next week and getting something on order. OPALCO are nice folks, so I’m going to charitably assume that it’s simply a tough job keeping power infrastructure going in the islands. Regardless of why, this was the third major outage in November alone, the first two not really weather-related but instead county-wide outages probably originating on the mainland. So some generator capacity will help provide some redundancy for the overall system, keep me working and warm, and keep my blood pressure down.

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I Underestimated the Snow…

Nov 26, ’06 1:08 PM

OK, so living down here at sea level, on the water, I kind of underestimated the snow a little bit.Dsc_0039
Little of it is sticking to my driveway and road, although there’s a little bit on the roof.  But I just tried to go to town for groceries and the hardware store, and man…just getting to the main road required 4WD up the steep road, and when I got up to Roche Harbor Road, I discovered that it’s been snowing a bit longer than I’d thought.  There’s at least an inch, if not closer to two, and the road is treacherously icy, with ice coating the ponds and the fringes of Egg and Sportsman’s Lakes.  No snowplows have come this way yet today.  After the slowest quarter-mile ever, I turned around and headed home.  I have food for at least a week, a couple of pounds of coffee beans, and dry firewood. 

So, as I write this, fire stoked in the stove, limbs coated with snow are cracking off the trees all around and I’m hunkering down for the day.  Guess it’s time for a turkey sandwich and some hot tea. 

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Snow and Thanksgiving

Nov 26, ’06 11:17 AM

Well, it’s snowing.  More accurately, the snow seems to be mixed in with heavy amounts of soggy rain and pretty strong winds, at least up here on the north end of San Juan Island.  But I hear it’s snowing in Seattle too, at least on top of Queen Anne and other high spots.  For readers outside the Pacific Northwest, this is fairly unusual for us — typical after-Thanksgiving weather is either crisp-cold-dry or (more usually) soggy-wet.  But we’ll see if it sticks.  Whatever happens, the driveway (I live on a private unpaved road) is definitely making the transition from "soggy" to "swampy."  Thank goodness for the Land Rover – my other car would just sink and wallow. 

I’m recovering from Thanksgiving and a two week cold/flu which leaves me oddly uninterested in food, so this is also the first Thanksgiving on record where I actually lost weight.  But it’s time to start making turkey sandwiches before the shelves in the fridge bow under the strain of all the leftovers.  Friends and family came up for a first island Thanksgiving this year, bringing an accompanying dish or making one here.  But somehow none of them took leftovers with them on the exodus south. 

The turkey was a nice 15 pound free range bird, which I was able to find locally – a nice surprise.  I shortened the brining interval this year; not quite as much as Alton Brown’s six-hour brine, but I started it late the night before this year and gave it a good 12 hours in the brine.  The brine, as with last year, was two gallons of straight salt/water, with another gallon of apple cider added and a cup of bourbon.  To this I added black peppercorns, star anise, a couple of juniper berries, red pepper flakes, and a few bay leaves.  It seems to work quite nicely, and given the temperatures lately, I kept it out on the deck in a cooler and it worked well.Dsc_0026_2
 

Earlier in the week, I’d made a double chicken stock, and reduced by 3/4s this formed the basis of our gravy, seasoned and slightly thickened via the slurry method.  I’d also made a cranberry orange sauce (with lots of fresh ginger), as well as a cranberry-tomato chutney.  The latter was everyone’s favorite, and I’m kind of wondering why I bother with a sweet version every year.  The chutney (which came  from Allrecipes), also makes a great turkey sandwich later on, so I quadrupled the recipe and made several pint jars’ worth. 

My friends brought garden potatoes, cole slaw, roasted garlic mashed sweet potatoes, and a north African sauteed carrot dish, and Scott made a cranberry sausage cornbread dressing for the turkey (no stuffing the turkey!).  I complemented this with a salad of sliced golden and red beets, marinated in sherry vinegar & walnut oil, with blue cheese crumbles and Beth’s glazed spicy walnuts.  Served with 1998 Dom Perignon (this marked the end of my "month of Champagne" birthday) and the 2000 Mon Coeur from J.L. Chave, the dinner was spectacular and very tasty.  A very nice holiday at the new place. 

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

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