[m i a o w] the cat

So I don’t get nearly as much time online as I used to have and when I am online I have to get proper things done - like blogging, banking, email - leaving not a lot of room for musing from site to site finding out about the cool, new and interesting. So it’s kind of exciting for me (in a lame kind of way) to have upgraded to Firefox 3.

It seems very cool. It looks better and runs quicker on my macbook. The main reason I got it was because OH MY GOD it lets me read PDF files inline. It is that precise thing that has made me turn again and again to Safari (only to give up, yet again, when I missed all my Firefox add ons too much). Of course, with the PDF excitement was one real annoyance - no ability to tag and post pages with delicious… Oops! I had a few minutes and I double checked - this IS available, and much better than before. Yay!

I also upgraded to Leopard - the latest OS for mac. Of course, in my lather to upgrade I forgot that 1) I have barely any space on my puny 60gig hard drive for all the fun stuff that comes with it - I even uninstalled ITunes a few weeks ago and moved all my music to the PC in the loungeroom in an effort to claw back some space [sob], and 2) The first law of upgrading is it will Most Likely Stuff Things Up. Goddamnit. In this case, my very hard won printer drivers. Gone. Cactus. Ka-put.

When I think back to how looooooong it took me to get my ancient HP Laserjet 6L printer working, I have some serious doubts about ever getting it working again. My time online should be currently devoted to researching baby led weaning and selling things on ebay to fund our week away at the end of the month.

But what I’d really like to do is get a big stonking hard drive for my laptop so I could run the lot - ITunes, IMovie, IPhoto etc. etc. without having to free up space all the time. We were given a very cool Sony video camera with a 30gig hard drive when PartyPie was born, but we basically have no editing software because there’s no point - we don’t have enough space to dump the data off the camera! Grrrr. I need to discover if I can just put any old kind of hard drive in my macbook - I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to be some kind of uber-priced ‘apple’ brand. Anyone? Oh, and if anyone knows whether you can pull music into ITunes on a mac from a pc running ITunes on a LAN….? That would save me some valuable time in which I could be SLEEPING.

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COMMENTS / 4 COMMENTS

Hey Beth,

you sure can pull music from a PC to Mac via iTunes. Just make sure ‘Share my library on my local network’ is ticked under the Sharing tab in preferences on the PC and that ‘Look for shared libraries’ is ticked in the same place on the Mac.

Tony typed this on Jul 06 08 at 7:44 am

if anyone knows whether you can pull music into ITunes on a mac from a pc running ITunes on a LAN….? That would save me some valuable time in which I could be SLEEPING.
Yes

Dennis typed this on Jul 06 08 at 9:10 am

First of all, I’m using an HP direct Jet print server to run my ancient, but amazing, HP 5MP. It works with both macs and pcs. http://tinyurl.com/5me4ky

For my iTunes, iPhoto libraries, which get impossibly big to fit on an internal drive, I’m using a 500gig external LaCie drive. I’m not sure if you can actually use a shared library properly if you are planning on using iMovie to integrate to iTunes. You need at least this much space to do anything useful.

I would also recommend you stick to the LaCie drives, and only the firewire ones, we’ve been through over 10 other drives since we bought the LaCie (trying to save money) they are all in the bin now and the LaCie has NEVER missed a beat.

Running iTunes on a pc is a VERY strange thing to do! Especially if you have a mac. You could possibly store your library on the PC to save space but still have iTunes installed on your mac.

I’ve found the trick with the Apple stuff is to use it the way it was designed and not try to fight it with what you may have learned from other software approaches. Once you do that, you will really enjoy using it, it’s the BEST way to share your media to others.

dylan typed this on Jul 06 08 at 10:26 am

@ Tony - Thank you!

@ Dennis - ditto!

@ Dyl - I know I have a background in cp tweaking, tweaking, TWEAKING to make everything work, and I have really loved NOT having to do this with my mac. I would like to keep ITunes on my mac, but only for IMovie purposes, because the PC in the lounge is where we listen from and also watch vodcasts. In an ideal world I would have a LaCie 300gig external firewire drive (thanks for the heads up on that one) for back up and maybe a 160gig internal hd. I will reinstall iTunes on my mac (I only have 5gig free at this point) and see if it will pull in tunes from the loungeroom…. (when I’ve finished work today…which means probably almost NEVER.)

b:p typed this on Jul 06 08 at 11:20 am

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