Michael Henley

Well I went back to school today – I honestly have no idea where 8 weeks went but still, here we are. Odds are I will find some mildly interesting things to post about during the coming term, though thanks to work etc. the frequency of these may be a little… diminished. Regardless I hope I can keep them as entertaining as they have been (Ed. entertaining?)

Recently I bought a MacBook Pro. I decided that for long enough I had been very anti-Mac, and that it was time to get one of my own so that I could get used to it first hand etc. Admittedly I did only even consider this because the new Macs run on Intel architecture, and so I could install Windows XP or Vista onto it using Boot Camp (which I have since done, although OS X is definitely my main OS on here). I was looking forward to the challenge of learning a new OS, and figuring out all the little technical hitches along the way – and for the most part I succeeded. OS X was not as horribly alien or unusable as I had suspected.

However, around the same time I was getting my Mac, my Dad bought a new machine for his home office – a Compaq running Windows Vista. From this machine our only printer – an Epson AL-C1100 Colour Laser – is shared around the network using the standard Windows Printer Sharing. When I purchased my Mac, I did so with all the assurances I was given by the Apple website that OS X integrates flawlessly with Windows networks, and that I would be able to access all of the network resources as before. How wrong it was….

It appears that the compatibility with using the shared printers isn’t there between OS X & Vista, like it was with XP. Bear in mind that I bought this machine in June, and so Vista had been out long enough for Apple to update their software, or update their site to inform me that there would be problems. No matter what I try, including all the solutions online that claim to fix this I simply cannot get printing working from my MacBook Pro.

The two machines are on the same workgroup, and visible from one-another. I can share files between the two, and mount the Vista box’s Public folder through Samba. I therefore know that for this my user credentials are authenticating properly with Vista for File Sharing. However, when I try to access the printer through the Printer Setup Utility on the Mac, I get an authentication error ‘Unable to connect to server with the provided password and user name Error: 256′ The internet has yielded no results for this, and neither has the Apple Support site. When I get the time I will make use of my AppleCare and call a human being for assistance, although I expect I will be told it is a Windows error and they can’t help me…

The second option I tried, and the one which worked for me, was using the Last.fm client. Before I did this, I bought my latest shiny new toy – the 15.4″ Santa Rosa MacBook Pro – and so this section is using the Mac OS X version of the Last.fm client. Having installed the program I noticed that there was an iPod section in the Settings menu. Once I set up my (Dad’s) 5.5G 30GB iPod to sync with the MacBook Pro’s iTunes, to a playlist called ‘iPod Music’, I tried to get it to scrobble. According to the Last.fm website, the iPod must not be manually managed for this to work, and this was how I found it to be as well.

In my experience, iTunes on the Mac must be closed before the iPod is connected. Whenever I have had iTunes open the ‘scrobble your iPod’ window hasn’t appeared. Remember that this is still an experimental feature at the time of writing, and so this may change in the future. If you do have iTunes closed when you connect the iPod, then it will automatically open when the iPod is connected, and the Last.fm window will also open (although sometimes it opens behind the iTunes window, so make sure to look for it). Also note that the scrobbling process is not totally automatic. The scrobble window presents you with a list of your plays, with checkboxes next to each so that you can choose to not scrobble some tracks, because for example, you have scrobbled another play later than that one, and so scrobbling it would trigger Last.fm’s spam protection. When you are happy, simply click ‘Scrobble Selected’, and these plays automagically appear on your Last.fm account. Simple as that.

I have not yet been able to try this with Windows, because the only Windows-managed iPod we now have here is my brother’s 2G Nano, and this is manually managed. I will at some point sync one of the iPods to Vista and see if those plays will scrobble too, although Adam Zethraeus has told me that he can’t get this working on Windows with his 5G.

Good Luck and Good Scrobbling…

I am a big fan of the music social networking site Last.fm (find my profile here), but one thing that I was never able to get working satisfactorily was ‘scrobbling’ of my iPod plays.

The first path I tried was taking my (ancient) 3rd Gen. 10GB iPod, and installing the open-source Rockbox firmware. This was a disaster. Rockbox was not originally designed for the iPod, but was ported over – while the programmers that work on it have done an amazing job – and bear in mind that the iPod I was trying this on was very old, and very battered – it wasn’t working well for me. It frequently crashed, forcing me to do a hard reset. When it did eventually play it would hang every 10 seconds, or so, while playing. I found the solution to this to be not having the song info open while listening, but to simply have the display set to the main menu – playback was then flawless (mostly…). The reason for this experiment was that the Rockbox firmware has a built-in option to create a ‘.scrobbler.log’ file which contains all the information of what you played, for how long, when etc. This is then uploaded to Last.fm either by a php script written by Paul Stead (found here), or by a .NET application called LogScrobbler (found here). The scrobbling side of things worked perfectly, and for the adventurous who want to try it, and who may have more success than I did, I wholly recommend it. If you have a DAP that is fully supported by Rockbox then this could be the way for you to scrobble your plays.

Part 2 – The more successful scrobbling attempts to follow later

At home, I use Firefox on all of my Machines, be it the MacBook Pro I am writing this on, my Desktop Tower, or my very old (and very almost dead…) Ubuntu laptop. The main reason for this is Extensions. Firefox Extensions must be THE killer feature that can make up for the bloatedness and semi-frequent crashes. The secondary reason, is that I really don’t like the default browsers installed on most OSs. Safari has never appealed to me, mainly due to its incompatibility with certain things – the first example that springs to mind is the Google Talk app built into the GMail interface, which doesn’t even appear in the interface in Safari. On the Windows side of things, the primary alternative is Internet Explorer… Until the most recent version, IE7, there was no tabbed browsing which made it pretty much unusable for me, because the multiple instances of IEXPLORE.EXE in the Task Manager drove the system into the ground. I actually don’t mind IE7 too much, and find it works quite well for most things I need to do.

At school, we are still on IE6. This is, to be frank, painful. IE7 is not wonderful, but in almost every way it is better than IE6. Being a self-professed geek I spend a lot of time on the computer, and one feature I never realised quite how much I would miss is tabbed browsing. I await the day eagerly when, at the very least, IE7 is rolled out across the network, or, and this maybe wishful thinking, when Firefox is installed network-wide, and not limited to my tiny corner of computers at school – CompSoc!

First post here… If you are reading it then you are already almost as insane as I am for writing it! Whether this will be entertaining, bemusing, or just plain dull I have no idea, but bear with me and we shall see where it goes….