iTunes vs. Amarok

VS

After a few weeks of having an iMac I have decided I really dislike iTunes. When I was a Windows user I had always used WinAmp. It is not available on the Linux platform. In Linux I have grown to love an application called Amarok. It has most of the features of iTunes without all the clutter.

First of all Amarok doesn't want me to visit their store and buy more stuff. iTunes nearly insists that I visit the iTunes music store every time I turn it on. Some may call this a feature, I all it an annoyance. I would never purchase music laden with DRM (digital rights management). DRM removes the ability to play the music you just purchased on any other computer that is not "authorized". Sure there are ways around this but whats the point? If I'm going to purchase music it will be on a regular CD. Then I will put it on my computer myself. This not only gives me a hard copy in case I have hard drive issues, it also allows me to play it on any music player or any computer. So for me the iTunes music store is a waste of space.

Amarok does have ways for you to download music. Amarok connects to Magnatune who signs independent artists. Listen to the whole song and album before you buy it. You get to set the price for the music you purchase. What is it worth to you? Anywhere between $5-$18. Magnatune also gives their artists 50% off all profits. Compare that to traditional music distributors who give their artists $1 per album sold. In Amarok 2.0 they will introduce the ability to download music from Jamendo.

Music organization on Amarok is much more clear than in iTunes. You can organize your music in any way you want. By artist/album/genre/track/year/... Basically any MP3 tag. You can also browse through your music as it sits on your hard drive. This is very nice for those of us who like to keep our music organized and not in a big jumbled mess. Amarok also allows you to do a search through your music collection. And to top it all off, online radio stations are at your disposal.

iTunes does not allow you to browse through your music so easily. You can either search or use their simple Genre/Artist/Album sorting. When it comes to music organization and your ability to organize how you like it iTunes is weak. I also made the mistake to allow iTunes to organize my music for me. Oops. Now sorting back through all of it has been a major pain. When your talking about 35+ GB of music thats a lot of mess that iTunes made. My music folder turned into a jumbled mess. Yuck!

So there you have it, my feelings on iTunes. I don't like it at all. KDE 4.1 (Konqueror Desktop Environment) is currently under development. KDE 4.0 was released in January based on the QT4 graphical libraries. The promise of 4.1 is that it will be easily installable into any operating system. Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. As soon as it is released I will say goodbye to iTunes and install KDE 4.1 to reap the benefits of Amarok, not to mention Konqueror and Dolphin.

iWeb. A phenominal looking dissapointment.

As you may have read I recently purchased a new Mac. It has been pretty nice. There are a few things here and there that remind me why I keep Linux around.

My wife and I decided we were going to put together a family webpage with all of our family pictures, a family blog, an about us page, and perhaps some videos. I fire up my iMac and open up iWeb. At first I was extremely impressed and exited for the iWeb css themes and styles. It is easy to put pages together and they look great. So I published my webpage to a folder and then uploaded it to my cableone page. There was a few major issues

• The menu bar did not function. There were no buttons at all leading to any content on the webpage.
• All pages were added to the menu bar. I don't want or need all pages in the menu bar.
  
• The pictures page, which uses javascript, does not work properly.
• I could not organize my pictures how I wanted them. I want to organize them by year and then by album. Not all albums on the same page. This would also apply to videos.
  
• The Blog feature only allowed for one picture to be easily embedded in a blog post.
• RSS feeds only work with an Apple .Mac account.
  

After a little research I found out that these problems do not exist if you use the .Mac (dot mac) web hosting provided by Apple. I fireup Firefox and head on over to Apple's website to learn more about .Mac . The .Mac account will cost someone just under $100 per year. For this price your web page will work as it is designed to in iWeb. But what really kills .Mac is that it comes with a very dismal 10GB of storage. Just for comparison Google mail gives 6.5GB just for e-mail! So because I have 14GB of pictures alone .Mac is out of the question.

After looking around at the most "top rated" hosting services I have found that Bluehost or Hostmonster are considered the most user friendly and best priced. They both happen to be owned by the same company. These web hosts offer 1,500GB of storage, a free domain name, hosting unlimited domains, POP3 and IMAP email, FTP accounts, web based email, secure shell access (SSH - I love ssh), log files, site stats, wordpress, PHP5, poll and survey software...the list goes on and only for the price of roughly $160 for two years.
As you can see, compared to .Mac the features are like a gang of thugs beating the crap out of some artsy fartsy. The only drawback this has compared to .Mac is the amount of bandwidth transfer data per month. HostMonster only gives 15,000GB of data transfer every month (which is still a phenomenal amount). Apple's .Mac doesn't specify the amount of data transfer allowed monthly so I assume it is unlimited.

So because iWeb depends so heavily on being tied into a .Mac account it makes itself useless to me. This is why iWeb is such a great looking disappointment. I even decided to dig into the iWeb html and css files to modify it. I was in for a huge surprise. iWeb's generated css and html are terrible. Good luck on figuring out what code displays what image or text. So I leave iWeb with a terrible distaste for a part of the iLife suite.

So long iWeb, and adieu.

iMac

The iMac is here! My setup has completely worked. OS X is pretty darn slick.

Three years ago Linux made a giant leap forward with XGL and Compiz. This added amazing desktop effects: a desktop cube, wobbly windows, water on the desktop... So when I first saw Windows Vista I thought, well thats spiffy isn't it? Then I plugged a usb thumb drive into it. That was the "WOW" effect for me. I was completely in shock that it had to install software for my new hardware, a simple usb drive. Its a usb drive! Just let me look at it! Then I felt like I was on a never ending elevator. (cue elevator music)... It just never stopped and I never got to look at my usb drive. So I go back to Linux and feel at home when my usb drive just shows up. It just worked.

Now I have taken another step out of my element and I sit here in OS X. When I first booted OS X it was more than a "WOW" effect. It was complete admiration. It was nice, beautiful, and slick. The user interface is well out of my element but it shouldn't take me long to get used to it. I am not so impressed with the way the mouse moves across the screen but after some changes in the preferences window I like it much more. I just wished it would work like it does in Linux. Flick your wrist and the mouse is across the screen. I hate having to lift the mouse up and bring it back to the other side of the mouse pad to finally get it where I want it. When it comes down to it I'm still impressed with OS X Leopard.

Anyways, here is the picture of my new computer station!

As you can tell my Linux box is well out of the way. I even hung the speakers so they were out of the way. This setup has satisfied the demands of the all powerful spousal unit.

So we bought an Apple iMac. Yeah, we are officially done with Windows, completely. For a long time now I have been using a Linux operating system and I have really enjoyed it. However, Linux is a little behind in the video world. Well, I should say the video world for the average desktop user. Unless you can shell out the cash for Maya (used by Pixar) or Autodesk Smoke (used by a miriad of companies) then your pretty much out of luck for a good quality video editor. We tried a number of video editors for Windows as well but preferred the simplicity of iMovie '06. Don't worry, iMovie '06 can be installed along side iMovie '08 which comes with Leopard. I also really like iDVD. If we really get into video editing pretty deep we may splurge again and purchase Final Cut Express, which looks pretty darn slick. And to top it all off Mac OS X is Unix based! How cool is that! That means I can still use a terminal to use programs like Imagemagik! Woot!

I told you that so I can tell you this next part. As I mentioned before I've been running Linux, and I really like it. However, the all powerful spousal unit has deemed it necessary to put the new iMac in place of my Linux box. This is very frightening to me. This computer may be old and is certainly showing signs of it's age, but it is still very useful. It contains a myriad of open source software that is versatile as well as fun. Besides, I'm still wanting to keep up with the latest and greatest of Linux distros. So instead of allowing Share to banish my Linux box I have come up with a solution.

So here is my solution to my problem. The new iMac will sit where that mess is on my desk. I'm pretty sure I'll move it around a little. My printer and computer tower will switch places. It will be a pretty sweet setup when its all done.

This is NAPA

I've been working at NAPA Auto Parts for some time. I did eight whole months with them in Boise and now I'm working for them in Idaho Falls. The store manager in Idaho Falls comes across as an unlikeable guy. All the workers know that deep down he is a bald cuddly teddy bear. His demeanor has inspired this badly edited scene from the movie 300.