What to Do When Your Computer is Away
The screen of my MacBook Pro (an aluminum one with an LED screen) is unfortunately one of the ones that is defective so it needs to be sent out. Luckily it’s been intermittent, and I’ve got an external monitor at work and one at home, so when it does go out, I could still work. It’s going out for repair tomorrow which means that I’ll be working with a MacBook. Using Foxmarks and del.icio.us keeps my bookmarks organized, and with Sxipper I manage my logins, so I just had to backup my passwords to use them on the temporary computer. Over the past few months I’ve been using Time Machine with an external drive, so everything should be backed up, but I’ve also been burning DVDs as well as copying files to another external drive. So my documents are backed up and most of my mail is through Gmail, so it shouldn’t be too much of a pain. NetNewsWire is great to use since it syncs and I won’t notice any difference in my newsreading. But the biggest challenge turned out to be what to do with my iPod and how it syncs with iTunes.If I was moving permanently to another computer it’s a bit easier, since you can just copy over the whole library folder with the settings and the audio and video files. But this move is only for a week or two, so I didn’t want to move stuff around (since the library is about 30 GB). Podcasts are a big part of my routine in driving now and I realized that if I wasn’t completely syncing everything on a new computer I wouldn’t get new podcasts.
Searching around led me to the idea of putting my iTunes library on an external drive and then using it as the library for the MacBook Pro and the MacBook. But when I moved over to the MacBook it started copying the files onto the hard drive, so I cancelled that. I probably could have got it working, but it’s probably better to play it safe since this is only a short-term thing. All the songs are on the iPod anyway, so that won’t change things, with the exception of podcasts and sending my listening data to my last.fm profile.
After a bunch of fiddling around I realized that if I manually sync iTunes, I can drag new podcast episodes onto my iPod on the loaner MacBook from iTunes there. That solves the sync and podcast problem, but what about the data for last.fm? This is where the new version of the open music player Songbird comes in. The latest version just came out and it allows you to send the data to last.fm as well as playing songs from the library of a connected iPod. So while I won’t get the statistics updated from playing while I’m driving, if I listen to music while I’m working on the computer through my iPod, it will be updated.
Now I can be productive as I wait for my MacBook Pro to be repaired.
