TVSync syncs your TV episodes with iTunes and your iPod or iPhone

TVSync-logo.png I’ve just created a glorified bash script that will intelligently (hopefully) synchronise downloaded or recorded episodes from TV shows with an iTunes library.

From the website:

This utility will automatically transfer video files of TV series (such as those downloaded from Bittorrent or recorded from TV) into iTunes for transfer onto an iPod/iPhone. It can import shows into a local iTunes library, or a remote iTunes library, over SSH.

Whenever the utility is run (automatically, every half hour), episodes from the configured shows will be converted to an iPod-compatible format, and imported into iTunes. The utility will do its best to set the correct metadata, including setting the items as type ‘TV Show’, and downloading episode titles from IMDB if it can’t be found from the filename.

Install it with the provided package, and it automatically is registered with crontab, to run every half hour. It can be configured to run locally (syncing with a local iTunes installation), or remotely, over SSH.

It works with almost anything downloaded, and with EyeTV.

Check it out at the TVSync page.

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Intelligent image resize

There are times when you need a certain resolution in an image (like if you want to use it as a desktop wallpaper), but all you have is a small version – which means if you try and enlarge it, you get either a blurred or pixellated version.

There’s actually another way, which doesn’t seem to have caught on yet, probably because it’s a bit tricky still. You can trace the image, making a vector version, then resize it to anything you like. Provided you’re starting with enough resolution, the effects can be quite good.

It’s all thanks to the genius of Peter Selinger’s Potrace library. It’s built into Inkscape, which runs on most platforms.

Start up Inkscape (If you’re running Leopard, I think you have to start up X11 first, manually), and open the image you want to enlarge. Select the image, then go Path, Trace Bitmap.

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Configure it to use colours, not smooth, and choose a good number of scans (the more, the more colours and better representation of the original image)

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Click OK and wait while it does it (this may take a little while). Once it’s done it’ll tell you in the status bar, and the ‘OK’ button will re-enable. Close the ‘Trace Bitmap’ dialog (with the window controls at the top, not by clicking ‘OK’, which will just do it again).

Now, to save the result, click File, Export Bitmap, choose ‘Selection’, and choose whatever size you want to export as.

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Done!

If you’re adventurous, you can also export as postscript or PDF, by going File, Print, and putting “> filename” to print to the file. For PDF conversion under OS X, put in “> ~/Desktop/file.ps”, then double-click on it in finder, which will open Preview to convert to a PDF (you can then save in Preview).

Before and after:

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My iTunes iPhone playlist setup

Files 2007 06 Iphone 34I used to manually choose the tracks to sync to my iPod Nano, but now I have 7-something gig to play with on the iPhone, it’s a bit too much. Instead, I use smart playlists to select which tracks to carry with me.

Two standard playlists, ‘iPhone Selections’ and ‘iPhone Exclusions’ allow me to specifically choose or disallow tracks to go onto the iPhone. Then, a smart playlist called ‘iPhone Inclusions’ looks like:

 

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Watch that ‘any’ selection in the top drop-down – a bug in iTunes resets it to ‘all’ every time you bring up the dialog, so you gotta reset it every time.

Finally, a smart playlist called ‘iPhone’, which is the one that is selected to be sync’d, looks like:

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That makes sure that tracks I manually choose are copied over, and the rest is automatically selected by rating and the date added (ideally).

Ratings, of course, are automatically set using AutoRate.

The one caveat is that because you can’t select more than one sorting criteria when limiting to a certain filesize in the smart playlist, you can just choose either to sort by add date – which means you’re guaranteed to get that great new album copied over – or by rating, so that you’re gunna get the best tracks. Not both, unfortunately, unless you limit the ‘iPhone Inclusions’ smart playlist too (but that means you won’t necessarily fill up the iPhone if you have lots of exclusions that would otherwise be included).

Other than that, it works quite well – I haven’t yet had a moment when I’ve missed anything on the iPhone.

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Inquisitor still works on OS X 10.5 Leopard!

InquisitorI read reports that Inquisitor was broken on Leopard because the InputManagers system has changed/been disabled. Not so!

Just create /Library/InputManagers and move ~/Library/InputManagers/Inquisitor into there, then chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers.

Restart Safari, and it’s back!

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Connecting an iMac up to your TV

Update: Please note, this technique is the ‘lowest common denominator’ option, which will give the least quality image, but will probably work with any TV. If your TV supports it, the best options are VGA (the easiest option, and what I use with my 42″ Samsung TV and my Mac Mini), HDMI, or component.

I just drew this diagram to show my aunt and uncle how to hook up their iMac to their TV. Just in case it’s useful for anyone else:

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Everything can be bought at a standard electronics shop, except for the Mini DVI to Video adapter, which can be bought from an Apple shop, or from Apple’s online store.

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Using Quicksilver with iTunes

200710151014I tend to play a fair bit of music while I’m working; sometimes I want to hear something in particular, and sometimes I’m happy to just let the shuffle do it’s thing (although some tracks I’ll skip).

Quicksilver makes all this really easy when used in combination with iTunes’ Party Shuffle. Firstly, I have the iTunes module installed in Quicksilver. Then, I’ve set up the hotkeys Ctrl-Shift-Left/Right for prev/next track, and Ctrl-Shift-Space for pause, first, for quick skipping of tracks, mostly. Also, I have Ctrl-Shift-Up for Search Artists, which lets me quickly select an artist/album/track to play.

I get iTunes playing the Party Shuffle playlist, which does nice things like plays more popular tracks more often (although you have to rate tracks to make that work – try AutoRate).

When I want to hear something specific, I press Ctrl-Shift-Up, type an artist, select an album, perhaps, and hit enter – my default action is ‘Play in Party Shuffle’, which puts the selected tracks at the start of the shuffle playlist and starts playing. So, that music starts playing immediately, then, once it’s finished, iTunes goes back to shuffling tracks, so the music keeps coming without further intervention.

If I wanna just cue tracks, I can select music, then tab to the next field and press ‘n’, which jumps to ‘Play Next in Party Shuffle’ – that cues up the selected tracks for play after the current track finishes.

I can select more than one track using Quicksilver’s ‘comma’ trick, selecting an item, then pressing comma to add it to the list. If I’m searching for a particular track by name, I bring up Quicksilver the normal way (Ctrl-Space), type ‘tr’ to ‘Browse tracks’, right arrow, then type the track name.

Thus, I never have to do any mucking around searching through music using the mouse, and I can concentrate on whatever I’m doing, not selecting music.

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Optimising performance for OS X

Ttp4A seemingly unavoidable trait of all operating systems is the notorious slow-down – it doesn’t seem to matter how nicely you treat the system, after a few months it’ll start grinding to a halt (or is it just me?). This has happened to me in Windows, Linux and OS X, and it drives me absolutely crazy. The only way I knew to go back to a zippy system was to reinstall the whole system, which is pain, pain, pain.

An operating system divides the filesystem up into fixed-size blocks, which it reserves for storing files – as many blocks are needed to store each file. When you delete a file, it clears the associated blocks for later use. However, this inevitably leads to free blocks being located all over the drive, not in one contiguous segment, and that means that for the next file, blocks have to be selected that are located far apart on the drive. That means when that file is read, the hard disk has to seek all over to be able to gather all pieces of the file – slow.

A popular maintenance task for Windows users is defragmentation – this takes all the used blocks on the drive, and clusters them all together at the start of the disk, so that blocks containing data for the same file are located together, and the free space is all together. That means the system has less work to do to read files.

I’d read in several places (including Apple’s documentation) that defragmentation (otherwise known as ‘disk optimization’) isn’t really necessary on Mac OS X and probably won’t make much difference. Bollocks!

I just performed a defrag using the excellent Tech Tool Pro 4, which took around 24 hours (yikes); it made a huge difference to the snappiness of the system, though – comparable to when I entirely reinstalled the OS.

So, I highly recommend it – don’t listen to the nay-sayers, this makes a big difference. Just make sure you have the time to let the machine chug away for a day. Alternatively, just do a few hours at a time – you can stop it, and continue later.

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