acletras.com

Our Lower School tech coordinator passed this link my way a few days ago, and it’s worth sharing.  If your school meets the requirements and has at least 25 monitors, CPUs and/or printers to dispose of, Apple will haul them away and recycle them in an environmentally responsible manner FOR FREE.

This is keeping in line with Apple’s commitment to be more environmentally responsible by cutting down on e-waste, with current and future products, as well as retroactively.  We’ll be getting rid of several eMacs and a ton of CRT monitors, both which contain hazardous chemicals and materials.  If these were to simply be tossed in the dumpster, they would end up in a landfill and eventually seep back into the environment.

I’d definitely recommend giving it a look if you and your academic IT department have a lot of old computers to dispose of.  If it doesn’t violate the terms of the agreement, maybe even organize an old computer drive at your school.  Have everyone bring in their dead, extra, or old computers and monitors from home, and schedule a pickup with Apple.

[Link]

UPDATE: Techspansion bit the dust, so for now, the beta of Propagator can be found here.

Reading TUAW this morning, I found a new application called Audialhub from Techspansion, the makers of iSquint and Visualhub.  While browsing Techspansion’s website, I came across a free application called Propagator.

Propagator provides a GUI for pushing out files to Macs on your local network.  This is useful for OS X system administrators who wish to update all of their managed client machines with a specific file, most commonly property list (.plist) files.

This functionality can also be achieved using Apple Remote Desktop, but a free alternative is always worth taking a look.  My two favorite aspects of Propagator are it’s Common Places drop down menu for quickly specifying common locations to drop files (such as long ~/Library paths), and it’s Set Ownership check box for giving proper ownership of the file to the right user accounts.  The option to Lock Files After Copy prevents users (in my case, students and unknowing faculty) from messing with your work, accidentally or not.

Propagator is currently in public beta, so I’m interested to see if any other features or improvements are made with the final release.

I know I’ve had a lot of iTunes related posts lately, so I’ll try and make this the last one for a while, or this might just turn into an iTunes blog.

I recently reinstalled my G4 Mac mini in my car.  I put it in last summer and ran into power issues a few months later (the dealership is responsible but I’m done arguing with them).  I replaced the battery with an Optima Yellow Top and all is well for now.

I’m using the excellent AMP front end software developed by Aychamo on the mp3car forums to control my in car entertainment.  The only downside to my particular carputer set up is that I tapped into the factory amp from Volkswagen to deliver sound from the computer to the speakers.  This isn’t a very powerful amp and needs some kind of signal processing to put out anything I consider decent (previously done by my JVC head unit,  and it sounded phenomenal, so I know the speakers can handle it).

iTunes has a built in equalizer which is pretty good, but iTunes isn’t very practical for using while driving.  I’ve been looking for an equalizer that works with all sound coming out of the computer and over a year of searching later, I’ve found it.

Hear by Joesoft is exactly what I’ve been looking for.  It has an impressive list of audio tweaks.  Everything from your basic equalizer (sliders or curve) to several methods of emulating 3D surround.  It works great with AMP, so now I have to decide if I really want to bite the bullet and spend $50 on this software.

When I’m working on my computer and listening to some music, I’ll usually set iChat’s status message to ‘Current iTunes Song’ so those on my buddy list can see what I’m listening to.

This does just that, displays the song title only. I wanted it to also display the artist name, and the fact that it’s what was currently playing in iTunes (otherwise it would appear that I’m just promoting a certain artist and song to the world).

Navigate to~/Library
/Preferences/
iChat/com.apple.
iChatAgent.plist and open it in Property List Editor or a text editor. If you don’t have Property List Editor installed, I’d highly reccommend doing so. It can be found on your Tiger or Leopard install disc, in the Developer folder.

Find the entry called ‘iTunesMessageFormat‘ and change it to whatever you want. By defualt, it should say %Track. I made mine say Listening to: %Artist - %Track to show that I’m currently listening to a certain artist and their song. I’m not 100% sure what other fields will work, but I’d assume things like %Album %Year %Genre %Playlist etc would work.

Enjoy!

As you probably know, iTunes has had the ability to store and display album artwork for your music collection for some time now. This is useful for things like Cover Flow, listing with artwork, Front Row, iPods, iPhones, AppleTV, etc.

What you might not know, is that iTunes has the ability to easily create jewel case inserts (CD covers) in a variety of themes, which can be printed in full color.

Simply choose a playlist (regular or smart) or a folder from your source list and click File>Print.

A configuration window will appear allowing you to choose jewel case inserts, song lists, or album lists. It even prints crop marks allowing you to easily cut the insert down to size. My favorite is the White Mosaic themed CD Jewel case insert, which tiles artwork from songs in the playlist on the front cover, and lists the tracks on the back cover.

This is perfect for making a mix cd, as you’ll have a list of what songs are on the CD and their order, as well as a sampling of the album art for those songs.

If you’re like me, you have a massive collection of .mp3 audio files which, lets say you, acquired, online through various methods.

I’ve been on a quest to properly organize, tag, and convert every song in my collection and add it to iTunes.  As I said, the majority of these were acquired pre-iTunes store with it’s wonderful album art and metadata.

My process for adding to iTunes goes something like this:  add song to iTunes, convert to AAC, find mp3 version and delete it, search iTunes store and Amazon, etc for song metadata, correct any bad entries, remove “coolmp3″ notes, fix the case, add album art, create smart playlists for each album, rate each song, and finally, add the album smart playlist to the artist’s folder.

This sucks.

To help alleviate the pain, I’ve cooked up a Finder Plugin using Automator.  This plugin will take the selected songs in Finder, convert them to AAC first (so I don’t have to hunt down the mp3 version in my iTunes library and delete it), and import the song to iTunes.

Get it here.  Copy the file to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder.  You may have to create the folder if it doesn’t exist.

Now all I have to do is select the songs I want to import to iTunes from Finder, right click and choose More>Automator>Add to iTunes.  I still have to go through the song and dance of organizing metadata and album art, but at least this part of the process is now automated.