A review of Mojo, an iTunes library sharing software
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Review, Software
A little over a year ago, I bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS, or the “Slug” as it was called, in order to hook up an external hard drive and share my MP3 collection off of it using Apple’s DAAP. It went well, but as I rarely needed my MP3 collection when I was out of the house it ended up being one of those “because I can” things and I returned the Slug.
In a nutshell the procedure went like this:
- Local machine:
- Install DAAP server
- Install SSH server
- Setup SSH key files (as opposed to passwords)
- Setup port tunneling using SSH
- Remote Machine:
- Install iTunes (unfortunately the best DAAP client at the time)
- Install SSH client
- Setup port tunneling through the the SSH client
- Attach the SSH key file to make it auto login (or not, depending on security)
- SSH into the server, and Voila!
So, if you’re still with me you can tell that is requires a bit of work, and is definitely not easy and intuitive to setup.
Fast forward to the year 2008 and “Mojo is here“.
Mojo accomplishes everything outlined above with one small intuitive little client, it actually goes above and beyond as its list of features include; zero configuration, instant download capability, and playlist synchronization.
It still relies on iTunes though unfortunately.
As of release 2.5.1, Mojo is offered as free software, with its only limitation on the number of peers in your friends list. Alternatively, for the small price of $10.95, you can upgrade to Mojo Pro, which currently gives you three licenses, and lifetime upgrade membership.
The only thing really souring the deal for me is its mac only status and iTunes dependency, but I believe there is a windows version in the works. And as for the iTunes/DAAP dependency, well I’ll have to wait till Mojo starts supporting WMP/UPNP.
Tags: apple, daap, itunes, Media, mojo, network, p2p, Review, Software, ssh
Lincoln Navigator vs Toyota Sequoia
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review
Man what a bad time not to have my camera on me. I think I need to carry it around with me everywhere so I can always be able to snap lots of images, although I don’t know how much people who visit my Flickr would appreciate that.
Me and my dad went to the Toyota dealership to pay the lease on our Toyota Sienna today, and while we were there we noticed that they had the Sequoia in stock finally. So we took a good look at it, opened all the doors, sat in all the seats - the usual.
We’ve been thinking of a new SUV and as my dad is a Toyota fan I told him they have something big enough to compete with the huge Ford’s, like the Expedition or the recently discontinued Excursion. But I had been debating on whether to get the Sequioa or to get something like the Lincoln Navigator as that is more of a “name brand” in luxury SUV’s.
We couldn’t go for a test drive in the Sequioa but on the way home we decided to check out the Lincoln dealership to really understand the differences firsthand. Upon first glances the Navigator looked nice, well of course it did otherwise it wouldn’t be as famous as it is. What surprised us was the lack of a step/rail to help you get into the SUV, but much to our surprise and delight the moment you open a door, the rail actually comes sliding out from underneath in time for you to step on it. That seemed a little fishy to me, so I stepped on and jumped a little, needless to say it survived.
Tags: car, lincoln, navigator, photos, Review, sequioa, suv, toyota
Los Angeles Convention
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Events
Well I got back from LA on Sunday, and man what a trip!
View the Flickr Set for pictures of the trip.
The trip started out normally, drove to Hamilton and met everyone else, we all got into our mini van and off to Buffalo!
The flight was supposed to leave at 7:30 PM, but because of a huge ice storm, the flight was canceled. So in order for us to arrive in LA in time for the start of the Convention we had to drive down to Rochester and catch the 5:40 AM flight, because we had our own car it wasn’t too big of an issue to drive down, and we actually drove another stranded passenger, Gary Hohler, there as well. Gary introduced himself as “working for a small company called Adobe“, and so we hit it off pretty well.
After getting around 2 hours of sleep in an airport that was getting renovated Gary and us parted ways, we caught our flight to Chicago, and our connection to LA.
Upon arriving at LAX we had very limited time to pickup our rental car, check into the hotel, and have quick showers and change into something presentable. Which we managed to do in reasonable time, but unfortunately we forgot about the line to pick up our registration packages. Which was so long that it went all the way down the length of the centre, and around the side, we decided to go grab something to eat because it had been quite a few hours since our last real meal. By the time we came back the line had diminished a little and we got in relatively quickly.
We had quite a few entertaining drives, from finding Indian restaurants that only served Chinese food, to getting lost in downtown looking for a 7/11 that we had been to only the night before, and having people walk into an airport terminal carrying car tires.
Tags: convention, flickr, los angeles, photos, trips
Beta Software
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Software
As you may or may not know, I am a huge supporter of Opera, for a number of reasons.
And as that’s the case, I like to stay bleeding edge with the beta builds, but unfortunately the latest build (9815) tends to be temperamental. When it gets into one of its moods, it will crash a few times until it stops sulking and starts working. Now for normal people this would drive them insane, but that’s because they don’t use Opera.
Even if Opera crashes constantly on me 4 or 5 times in a row, I know that I can always open it up and it will resume exactly where I left off. And hey, that’s the price one pays for being current.
Now this is all well and good, but this is when the real problem starts, a couple of days ago I decided that I was going to see what the hype on Firefox 3 was all about. Yes I do keep Firefox installed on my machine even though I use Opera as my browser. The only reason I use Firefox is for web development, although I personally am against Firefox, I respect my viewers choice and opinion (as short sighted as it may be :P ).
Up till now the best tool for web development has been Firebug, which is the unfortunate reason I need Firefox installed.
But back to the crashing, Firefox 3 is also in beta, and while not as temperamental as Opera, it has its own little quirks.
And here it goes…on occasion I have had to resort to opening..IE (gasp, shock, panic, anger) and pasting a messaged URI in the address bar.
Not a good position to be in.
Oh Opera, please release another build!
Tags: beta, firebug, firefox, Opera, Software
Guinevere
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Asides
Well it’s certainly been a while since my last post, so I thought I would at least throw up some pictures of our (relatively) new cat, Guinevere.
Guinevere has been getting along quite well with our dog Merlin, although Merlin is still a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes down to a one on one confrontation…go figure.
On a side note, I finaly got off the fence and decided to go with Flickr over Google’s Picasa.
You can check my photos out at, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pchander.
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