GarageBand is to Logic Express as iMovie is to Final Cut Express.

They are giving people low end versions of high end tools (which I suppose was obvious fom the beginning). This is exaclty what I want -- I want to play with audio but I can't justify the cost of anything that does anything useful. I could buy an Mbox, but even that is a struggle to justify, since I'm not really recording anything. I'm not sure if I'd enjoy playing around with it, but it'll cost me to find out.

iLife seems to be Apple's answer to this. $50 is a very reasonable cost when you consider what you get -- digital video editing, DVD authoring, multitrack recording, digital photo organizing, and (IMHO) the best MP3/AAC ripping/organizing utility available.

Okay, so I'm sounding like a commercial. But I'm excited. They keep raising the bar, and yet, contrary to Apple's reputation, keeping the price reasonable.

9:58:07 AM    comments ()  trackback []  

Hilarious. (from /.)

I will point out that while in the overall score of EvM, Earth is trailing, but if you look at just the USA missions, we have a 2:1 advantage over Mars.

Yeah, that's a provincial way of looking at it, but what can I say.

9:20:33 AM    comments ()  trackback []  

The biggest impact of all of this is drive space. I had been pretty comfortable before, but as I went through rows and rows of CD's, that free space just started getting lower than I wanted it to get. Plus, this was on my XP box, and the SlimServer software doesn't run as well on XP as it does on Linux. So I went to Fry's last night and picked up a 160G drive. It was the Western Digital drive that was on sale. I didn't care so much about speed, as long as it could serve the MP3's fast enough, and it's more than fast enough for that.

Now, I'm normally quite anxious about hardware installation. Especially when it comes to something on the IDE bus. It's supposed to be easy, but in my experience, it takes much fussing around with cables and jumpers before I can get things working the way I wanted. But not this time. I put the drive into the mounting hardware (I was putting it into a 5.25" bay), opened the computer case, slid the drive in, moved the IDE cable from the CD drive to the hard drive (I've used that drive maybe once on that machine. If I need it again, I'll plug it in), plugged in the power connector, and then tempted fate by putting the cover back on the computer.

I turned on the power, the machine found the drive, and Linux booted. I partitioned and formatted the drive, moved some directories onto it, put an entry in /etc/fstab, and rebooted one more time.

And it just worked.

Yes, I know that's the way it's meant to happen, but it never seemed to happen that way for me. There was always more fiddling going on. But then, the machine I used to do this to was many generations removed from this one, and they've done a good job at making it more foolproof.

But I have space for my MP3's now. Gotta keep ripping. I probably have about 400 CD's to go. I figure I'll have 1200 albums ripped by the time I'm done.

8:39:28 AM    comments ()  trackback []