paul capewell’s blog

Hmm. Technology rules.

I’ve not really had the opportunity to make full use of iTunes Sharing before – only at home, sharing my iMac and MacBook libraries.

In halls it comes into its own, with hundreds of people all on the same LAN. You can browse and listen to other connected users’ iTunes libraries and they can to yours. You see the name of each library. Depending on the name of the library, the user can choose to give away some info on themself if they wish. For example, there is a theme emerging at Daisy Bank Hall of users putting their full names and building and flat numbers in the library’s name, enabling you to figure out who’s library you are listening to.

In terms of people listening to your library, iTunes goes as far as to tell you how many users are connected to your library at any moment. But that’s all it tells you, sadly.

I was intrigued as to what these strangers might be listening to, and a quick Google provided this Terminal command (for Mac OS X only): lsof |grep "iTunes Music"

I believe there are alternatives for Windows users, so if you need one, get googling.

When you put the above into Terminal it tells you what files are being streamed from your local library (as such, it also includes any files you are playing, so disregard those).

I currently have three users connected to me, and the result looks a little bit like this:

o64:~ paulcapewell$ lsof |grep "iTunes Music"
/Volumes/External HD/iTunes Sept 2008/iTunes Music/Bill Hicks/Rant In E-Minor/05 Pro Life.mp3
/Volumes/External HD/iTunes Sept 2008/iTunes Music/Talking Heads/Best Of Talking Heads/02 Psycho Killer.mp3
/Volumes/External HD/iTunes Sept 2008/iTunes Music/Bill Hicks/Rant In E-Minor/01 Fevered Egos.mp3

Two users both listening to Bill Hicks! Nice.

Unfortunately beyond that there is very little useful information. Another command will give you the IPs of those connected, but that doesn’t seem very useful, and nor does the fact that if more than one user is listening in, it is impossible to ascertain who is listening to what.

But it’s still a cool little command.

Two caveats with regard to iTunes Sharing: firstly, you can only stream – not transfer – files, secondly, each user only allows five ‘logins’ a day, which can be a little restrictive.

*****

Terrifyingly, this is my blog’s 300th post. Hurrah, and such.

Well, well, well.

I’ve moved in. Well, sort of. None of my stuff is here yet – that’s coming tomorrow evening. For now I am in a flat, and I’ve met my flatmates if briefly. One is a decent enough post-grad so he knows the ropes a little. The other two are Chinese fellas. Turns out I am apparently in the block for older/foreign students. That suits me as it is more likely to be a quiet place than other blocks, but you never can tell.

I’m unfortunately in a building furthest from the road and also on the top (3rd) floor. Moving in will be a bit of a trek, but it should be ok. And it generally seems fine. Will do my thighs good, chuckle. Lots of halls-living trends to get used to too, but I’ll get there.

The weather has been wonderful – blue skies, warm bordering on hot, very nice for exploring the surrounding streets. It would’ve been very disappointing if it was raining when we arrived.

By we I mean John and I – it’s very cool that we’re both in much the same boat. Nice to have a comrade to explore with. We’re meeting up for a bite to eat with Alan in a bit, and maybe poking our noses into Varsity where there’s something of a Daisy Bank knees up occurring later.

In a parallel universe, tonight there’s a fancy dress party and last night there was a big barbecue and lots of people went out to clubs and the union etc. I’m trying not to burn bridges, but none of that appeals in the slightest. I’m happy getting on with my own thing. This week will be more interesting as I will hopefully meet people who will be in my lectures and such.

In non-uni news, the Cornerhouse (arty cinema, gallery, cafe etc) is doing a sort of history of photography course. 8 weeks, Monday evenings, £45 for students. It sounds pretty interesting – just for beginners and from the beginning of photography onwards. I’ll see how my timetable looks this week and consider signing up to it.

Also, tomorrow new Kings of Leon and Mogwai records, hurrah! I like when there are big new release days (add to that TV on the Radio et al), and when they fall near important dates. They will hopefully be great records and become synonymous with the start of my life in Manchester.

That or I’m just a sentimental geek.

That’s all for now, I have a partial migraine.

Alright, I don’t actually know enough about ‘open source film-making’ to waste your time and mine by trying to pretend I do, so I’ll cut right to the chase.

Big Buck Bunny is an animated short film by a team of very enthusiastic animators and editors and writers and is available free to download and in short, I recommend you download it! According to the wikipedia article, the project started at the end of 2007 and the film itself was premiered in April 2008 and made available to the public soon after. It fits very squarely into the Disney Pixar realm of animations in terms of aesthetics and it generally has the same cutesy, humourous feel to it. It features a handful cute, furry characters, primarily the big, dozy hero of the title.

One of the best things about it (if you’re a video nerd like me) is the sheer number of formats you can get the film in – just have a a gander here: http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/ (if you’re terrified by the number of options, I’d recommend sticking to the vimeo streamed version here, but if you know your computer can handle HD, go for your life, it looks incredible)

Projects like this make me very happy, and it’s good to know there is another film with a similar background (though a very different story and concept) in Elephants Dream and even a cross-platform, fully open source game featuring characters from Big Buck Bunny called Yo Frankie!, though that one might be for the geeks and nerds only for the time being.

The other day I popped into Oxfam for the first time in ages. I was looking for a few old copies of National Geographic but unfortunately didn’t find any.

Luckily though I kept looking at the books because I came across a couple of little gems.

They were published by Methuen in the late 1920s and are compendiums of H.V. Morton’s columns in the Daily Express – his thoughts of London. He has a sharp eye for detail and a wry sense of humour (well, for the 20s…).

I particularly love The Nights of London. Our man Morton heads out into different areas of London after dark to explore several familiar areas, including Piccadilly Tube station, the Embankment, Bank, and so on.

The following excerpt concerns a nonchalant cat Morton saw wandering around near the latter:

Anyway. They’re lovely books. I was sorely tempted to do an audio podcast of me doing some readings from them, but really the text itself is perfect without my input.

The last few days, I have let my inner geek out. It’s because I have so much free time.

Today I consolidated about 5 iTunes libraries into one (so that I have one to take away with me and no duplicates). It took about 7 or 8 hours. I haven’t even checked through it for tags and anomalies, but the core of the work – moving files around, importing, deleting, etc – is done.

Next up is my iPhoto library. Every six months or so I make a back-up, or change machines, or change hard drives, and so I end up with several, partial libraries. What I would love is one, large, central library. My entire history of digital photography in one box. Well, near enough (there’s a digital black hole pre-2003 for some reason, even though I’ve been a regular computer and internet user since the end of 1999). But that’s what I would like. I also need mirrored back-ups of the same. I don’t back up enough, and one day I’ll lose something huge and it will destroy me. It’s not even like losing one big chunk of something that would upset me most, it’d be the tiny little details that would no longer be accessible to me. The instant message chats, the silly cellphone photos, the text documents of silly digital scribbling.

In essence: I need to back the fuck up.

*****

Anyway. Tonight I’ve watched an incredibly mind-boggling and terrifying (but strangely fascinating) talk on how to survive a nuclear attack – and the natures of such threats pre- and post-1991.

After that I was blown away by the wonderful Brewster Kahle talking about digitizing the world’s knowledge. Initially I didn’t know who Kahle was, but as he went on to talk in wonderful detail about his project for digitizing books, audio, video and the web, the penny dropped. archive.org. If any project on the planet sums up my life’s ambition, interest and passion, it’s that one, in a nutshell. And Kahle himself is very engaging. He’s the exact sum of a librarian crossed with a crazy scientist (with a little Grateful Dead, 70s rocker thrown in). He’s wonderful and he embodies (pretty much) everything I want to be.

If you’ve never watched a TED.com talk before, maybe now’s the time? There are hundreds of talks, of around 15-30 minutes in length, on a huge range of subjects – not all of them geeky or scientific – and the common thread is that they are all really interesting. So go and have a browse and see if there’s a subject that intrigues you.

Oh and I’m about to watch one about a photographer/filmmaker who lost 30 years’ work in a fire, so I think my back-the-fuck-up motto will be replaying itself in my dreams tonight.