I’m certain that there are all kinds of filesystems in the Linux world that support file creation dates, but the plain fact of the matter is if you perform a vanilla Ubuntu installation, your files will remain ageless.

Why should I care? In a word, Photographs. I keep everything I own on network attached storage devices that are formatted with popular Linux or Unix file systems that lack this information. When I move files between my Mac and one of these devices, the file creation time just doesn’t survive the trip.

I like to have the file creation timestamp match the EXIF time that the photo was taken—normally not a problem since the camera sets the EXIF time and file creation time at the same moment. Keeping the creation timestamp in sync with the EXIF timestamp makes it a snap to sort image files by chronological order. (more…)

In my last post I was lamenting the premature demise of my old Squeezebox server, caused by a nasty plague that afflicts tech gear: burst capacitors.

After a long search, sifting through eBay listings, reading the fine details of each offering, comparing options, I was able to find a nice newish Shuttle server, sporting good drives, far better cooling than my older one, much more memory, much better processing power, and a snazzy paint job applied by the former owner.

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It has been quite a long time since I have posted anything here—the spam bucket was choked with well over a hundred pages of who-knows-what when I first came back.

One thing I did notice was that several folks have taken advantage of the iTunes-to-Playlist script that I put together last year, and that’s always encouraging. I haven’t really done any work on tweaking or refining the script because there was a small bit of a problem in the homestead: my happy little Shuttle server died an untimely death.

I bought it off of eBay brand new for a little over a hundred bucks last February and was quite pleased with my purchase. It was a Shuttle K45, a pretty old platform with a lightweight processor, but more than enough horsepower to be a home Squeezebox server as well as a Wiki server and a CVS server.

But it was too good to be true. After I had settled in and set up my workflow around my silent little Shuttle box, it simply died one day. I pressed the power button to restart it and was greeted with a blinking light that was anything but encouraging—the server was dead. An autopsy revealed the probable cause of death to be bad capacitors.

If you find yourself dealing with wonky hardware problems, such as a PC that doesn’t boot or frequent BSOD when watching video, pop open the case and give the caps a gander. You might save yourself hours of troubleshooting effort. See below for details… (more…)

Last year I purchased a Traveler Guitar EG-1 in the mahogany finish, and I have enjoyed it tremendously—it’s great for rockin’ it out in my room at the Marriott while on the road. One tiny issue has marred what I would consider a perfect instrument: the sharp ends of the strings dig into your T-shirt and belly when you are playing.

I decided once and for all to fix this problem, and I hope that other Traveler Guitar owners can use this approach to save themselves from getting jabbed by sharp guitar strings. Read on for my cheap and cheerful solution. (more…)

I freely admit my dislike for iTunes—it’s a black box where you toss your music, giving full control over your library to Apple.

The problem is that sometimes you might want to manage your library in a way that Apple never intended, and then things become challenging. iPods, iPads, and iPhones pretty much force us to use iTunes, so why not figure out some way to lessen the pain?

I like the playlist tools that iTunes provides, and I find it very convenient to create Smart Playlists or to create Genius lists. However, I want to keep my Master Library of music elsewhere, far from iTunes. Wouldn’t it be great if I could share these playlists on my home network in a completely nondenominational format? Wouldn’t it be nice if my Squeezebox server would have those same playlists available? And wouldn’t it be spectacular if those playlists would magically appear on a network drive whenever the lists change in iTunes?

Read on for details on how I accomplished this and to download the free utility I wrote to handle this task. (more…)

I have tons of old photos that I am always in the process of scanning in. Some are pictures from childhood, others are from my time in the Navy, and still others are from family life before digital photography (somewhere around the end of 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1).

I have been struggling with making everything digital for years now, and there are stacks of photos and thick albums that remain uncharted territory. Every once in awhile I sit down and scan in an album.

Trouble is, unless you do the whole job at once, it’s pretty easy to lose track of where you have already been. And if that’s not bad enough, we always bought double prints—they didn’t cost much more, and we could give some away. Now how do I know if I have scanned the long-lost twins of some photos that are already on my computer? That’s a problem for another day.

Here’s how I make sure I don’t scan the same single photo twice:

That’s right, I leave breadcrumbs in the form of little dots on the back of each one.

Such a simple thing, but it saves me from a lot of head scratching and wasted time scanning the same stuff over and over.

Most of the time I don’t really bother with the timestamp information that my camera embeds in each digital photo. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I checked to see if the clock was right.

Scanned photographs are an entirely different brew. They typically represent events from the distant past, and scanner software EXIF data is hit or miss.

I looked for commercial software to handle a few special cases of EXIF data troubles, but came up empty handed. So I wrote a few useful AppleScript droplets that do these tasks quite nicely, and I will share them here. (more…)

This is all about getting another stamp on my geek card, so if that’s not your thing, you might want to just move on…

Anyway, some weeks ago I was thinking how cool it would be to have a totally fanless and silent little black box that would serve up something useful in my house, such as the wiki I use to keep track of my geeky pursuits.

The other day I managed to obtain a spare Soekris net4801 box, a device best known for embedded applications such as firewalls. Between last night and this morning, I spent about three hours working out the hitches and getting MoinMoin and Ubuntu up and running on this neat little box. (more…)

I estimate that in any given day I must use clipboard copy and paste operations a few dozen times—and if I’m working with multiple documents, such as when transcribing information from a spreadsheet to a Word document, that figure becomes more like a few hundred times a day.

But in all of those times, I almost never want my computer to paste “ransom note” text. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, I want clean text to be pasted, neatly blending with its surroundings. In other words, paste it as if I were typing it at the keyboard.

So why does Apple think we always want to paste styled text? And why does Microsoft think we always want our spreadsheet to suddenly be filled with somebody else’s 24 point Comic Sans letters instead of a nice unformatted date and time?

Here are my workarounds for this problem. Maybe someone can offer a few other workarounds. (more…)

Recently, someone at my sister-in-law’s school sent out an announcement to all of the parents, using a list of e-mail addresses maintained by the school.

The content was innocent enough, but when they sent out the mailing, they made a critical error: they had pasted the entire mailing list of addresses into the Recipients field in their mail program. As a result, every parent had every other parent’s email address. Some never noticed, and others didn’t really care. Several were displeased about this breach of privacy and let the school know about it.

That individual had committed the same error as many friends and family do when they want to share a message with many people.

This social faux-pas is easy to prevent, so I include here a quick set of instructions on how to maintain your mailing list’s privacy when you have a large mailing to send out. (more…)