With all the talk of Steve Jobs today, I started to think about how much influence this single company, his company, had on my family and in my life. So I made a list of all the different Apple products that we had owned or borrowed over the years.

Apple 2e
PowerMac 5400/120
PowerBook Duo
Apple eMate
PowerBook Lombard
Bondi Blue iMac
Indigo iMac
15″ Flat Panel iMac
eMac (x2)
17″ PowerBook
20″ Intel iMac
24″ Intel iMac
27″ Intel iMac
12″ iBook
12″ MacBook
17″ MacBook Pro
G3 Tower (x3)
G4 Tower (x3)
1st Gen iPod Touch
1st Gen iPod Touch (x3)
iPad
iPad 2
1st Gen iPod Shuffle
Pink iPod mini
Airport Express (x2)
Airport Extreme

This just covers my immediate family and doesn’t include the Magic Mice, the Apple keyboards, printers, or other Apple software and accessories. Nor does it include the dead iPods, broken iBooks or other dead Apple devices that have been given into my possession.

Steve Jobs’ company has been an important part of my family’s existence. While I did not personally know him, I thank him for his dedicated work to make technology accessible to the average user. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends in these sad times.

Thank you Steve.

iTunes has a number of nice features for creating smart playlists, but sometimes you need something that is a little bit smarter. I have an almost daily commute that takes roughly two hours of my day, sometimes more if I have to travel for work. During this time I like to listen to podcasts and audio books. I listen to a daily podcast, Tech News Today, a weekly podcast, Security Now, and when those finish I switch to my audible book of the month, (currently Freedom(TM).)

I like to get my daily news before I worry about the weekly news, since the daily news is usually more time sensitive. I also like to listen to any news podcasts before I listen to my book, for the same reason. (Fiction lasts forever.)

Listening to different podcasts while driving can be a problem when the show ends mid-route. You either have to pull over to the side of the road to change the track or risk driving distracted while you change the track on your iPod. I had considered trying to set up a smart playlist to accomplish this, but never found the time to figure it out how to set it up to play the right tracks in order, until now.

The solution I found involves three different playlists, and a handful of iTunes sync settings.

I first made an iTunes Playlist folder called “Podcasts and Books”. And made three smart playlists inside of it.

I called the first one Podcasts. The first rule is that I only want songs that are not played. (I tried placing this criteria at the end, but then I was subjected to a series of musical tracks I have not currently listened to.) The second rule simply dictates which podcasts I want to appear in my list.

The second playlist I called “Unrated Book”. I originally wanted this playlist to be of unplayed books, but the play/unplayed counter lists some of my books as played, but don’t give it a play count. Using the rating as a standard I am able to add or subtract books from the list by changing the rating. Any new books I add to iTunes will be added automatically.

The third playlist is a smart playlist which combines the other two playlists. The biggest problem I faced was getting the tracks in the correct order. I wanted the older daily podcasts to play before the newer ones, and of course I wanted the daily to come before the weekly, and the weekly before the book. I couldn’t rely on sorting by name, or album because the book wouldn’t always come last. If I sorted by kind, I could get the MPEGs to come before the Audible files, but then the newer daily podcasts came before the older ones.

After looking at a number of sorting options, I discovered the “Category” column. The podcasts each had a specific category tag, but the books did not. For some reason Audible books that are in a smart playlist don’t carry their category content. (If you look at the Books playlist, you’ll see the category is “Audiobook” (some were also “Spoken Word”.) If you sort by category, it will use the name field as the secondary column and the podcasts are then sorted by number. (I’m hoping that the lack of category in the smart playlist is by design, because if it is a bug that later gets fixed, I’ll have to possibly redo the playlist sorting.)

I synced my iPod to see if the sorting would carry over, and I discovered I had an empty playlist on my iPod. Turns out not only do you have to sync the playlist (and it’s dependencies) to the iPod, but you also have to go to both the Podcasts and Books tabs and tell iTunes to include the content from specific playlists.

After setting that up, everything seems to work!

In retrospect, sorting of the playlist might not be as important as originally anticipated. As long as the podcasts are in the right order the books could come either before or after them, I would just have to choose the correct track to start listening and then tell the playlist to loop around.

Apparently I am one of the top hits on Google when searching for a cure concerning AirTunes suddenly dropping off the face of the earth.

In the spirit of possibly helping out others who have this same problem I thought I would write up a post of my experience and complement it with links to other sites that might be helpful.

The Problem

My problem seems to be similar to most, but my situation seems to be different. I currently live in a dorm situation, meaning there are a lot of people in a relatively close location. My Airport is sitting about 7 inches away from my laptop. I always have 5 bars of AirPort connectivity. My problem is that “at random” my AirPort suddenly stops playing music and disappears from my list of available speakers.

AirTunes stops playing and won’t start up again until one of two things happens, a) I unplug my AirPort and let it “reboot” or b) wait for an unknown period of time until AirPort decides that it has speakers again.

I decided to purchase Airfoil, from Rogue Amoeba, which did nothing to solve the problem, but it does allow me to have a small little window that constantly shows me the status of my AirTunes speakers. I have looked for a pattern, and I can’t find one. It happens at different times of the day, for different lengths, at different intervals, with different programs running, etc.

People at various forums tend to say that this is caused by different phones or microwaves that are on the same or similar channel and cause interference. I have a feeling that in my case it’s probably a combination of the two, and possibly something else as well, simply because there are so many people who could possibly be calling or microwaving at any given time. (Although one would think the large amount of concrete in between rooms would help dampen things…)

Possible Solutions

I think this is a situation where there is one symptom for many problems. One person claimed to have solved the problem by turning on “multiple speakers” in iTunes. This apparently worked for a handful of people, but the comments to the tip make it clear it won’t fix everyone’s problem. And there are several other soultions suggested in the comments as well.

Macfixit suggests that turning the network to a 802.11b instead of an 802.11b/g will solve the problem. I tried this a week or so ago, and it didn’t change a thing as far as I’m concerned.

MacNN has a thread about this as well, and while it doesn’t offer much for solutions, the members do mention a few things worth looking into when trying to diagnose the problem.

Apple’s site describes the problem in their knowledge base, but their solutions don’t help me. The ones I have tried didn’t work, and the ones I didn’t try… well, they didn’t help me either. (Several of their solutions don’t apply to me, and I am not dropping my router’s security. I just don’t want to do it.)

Apple’s discussion forums is full of posts about this. One posting claims the new 802.11n no longer has this problem

The best summary in the discussions is this post by Henry B.

Dropouts or cutouts in the music stream going through an Airport Express is among the most commonly posted problems here. Sometimes the problem simply cannot be solved.

For everyone having the problem, there is a new set of variables. Even using XP and a brand new laptop, give a problem when a 5 year old laptop didn’t.

Conclusion

The more I look into this, the more I think it’s impossible to find one permanent solution. The general thinking is that this is an internal bug cause by some code, or some setting that isn’t quite right. In some cases, I think this may be true. Overall though, I think the problem comes from external sources. If someone in your neighborhood gets a new phone, it might interfere with your network. Not knowing everything your neighbor is doing a few houses away, it’s easy to attribute the problem to that new security update you downloaded a few days ago.

There’s no way of being aware of what all is going on around you and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what’s going on in your machine. Many of us are probably experiencing several different problems that all result in one thing: AirTunes cutting out or dropping off.

My Current Setup

I can’t help but add in this little anecdote here at the end. It’s impractical for most people, but it’s my current solution.

I usually have iTunes running and playing music, but with iTunes and Airfoil running and playing music, my processing power is usually at 50% percent with just those two applications alone. Adding in, say, Photoshop or iMovie or another heavy program causes a huge slowdown in my system. I finally had enough, and decided to move the majority of my songs to my Windows XP box that I don’t usually use anyway. I then hooked my stereo directly to the computer and hit play. No more going through AirPort and thus, no more drop outs.

UPDATE: I tried it out and it still doesn’t solve the problem. Read about it here: http://apatheticthursday.net/2008/02/23/the-verdict-is-nay/

I think I have just discovered a possible solution for my ever cutting out AirTunes from my Airport Express.

My setup is ideal (mostly.) My Airport Express is sitting not 8 inches behind my laptop on my desk. I am never more than a foot away from my Airport Express. Signal is always great, but for some reason iTunes usually tells me that it can’t find any speakers on the network after only a few minutes of streaming music via AirTunes.

Today, I think I may have a solution, but sadly it is not free. I have not had ample time to test this, but if anyone else is having problems I thought I would throw this out there and see if anyone has given this a shot yet.

I (re)-discovered Airfoil today while reading through some RSS feeds.

After thinking for a bit I decided that I needed to give this a try. Instead of having iTunes look for the Airport Express I would have a different program, namely Airfoil do it. I have a feeling iTunes is the program that keeps looking the Airport Express anyway.

I haven’t bought a license yet but for several 10 minute stretches I was able to play iTunes without having any major glitches. (I did notice one small cut out, but I think it might have been my computer slowing down for a second or so.)

I don’t know if this stops all drop outs, because every 10 minutes I had to hit turn the remote speaker off and turn it back on again to get rid of the major static that comes in, but if I have some free time tomorrow I’ll purchase a copy and see if it solves my problems. If it does, it will be well worth the $25 purchase fee.

If anyone has had some experience with this already, let me know. Otherwise check back in for an update tomorrow.

I have decided that an iPod touch could replace my iPod Nano and my Palm Zire 31. It would also allow for me to check my college email account via the web. With the addition of Mail.app I could also check my Yahoo and Gmail accounts as well.

I decided, however, that I must wait until the SDK comes out. I am doing this for a few reasons:

• Practice waiting. I feel that as a person I am far too impatient with my expensive purchases.
• Pay off current debt. I need to save up a bit of money first.
• When the SDK comes out there are going to be some killer apps that I’ll be able to use.

When I have my iPod, I need to be able to do a few things with it, mainly check my calendar, change and add events, as well as add and check off To-Do list items. Until I have this functionality it can’t replace my Zire and it useless to me. I am not sure if the recent software update has fixed these requests, but I’m sure it won’t be long before it works.

What I’m really excited for, however, are the new apps that 3rd party developers start creating. Here’s what I think would be cool. I know some of these already exist, but I’m mentioning them because I’d like to use them when I get my iPod.

• Skype  App. Turn your iPod Touch into a VOIP phone. I already have $10 toward my Skype account, on the days I forget my cell phone I can still call people. Also the voice over internet chatting is free, so yippee for that!
• Adium App. If someone could get Adium running on an iPhone that would be sweet.
• IRC client. I know this one exists.
• Twitter Client. This one must exist.
• VNC App. Don’t think this one will happen any time soon, but wouldn’t it be cool to VNC to your computer if you needed access to a file?
•  Alternative web browsers? How long will it take before FireFox is running on the iPod Touch?

I’m really hoping that the iPod touch will be able to be my computer away from my computer. Right now my Zire is doing a great job syncing up, (it wasn’t a few months back.) But the lack of internet and mail is really the killer. We’ll see in a month when I have my new toy.

I love SuperDuper. I’s a great application for backing up, and well worth it’s price tag. When I heard about Time Machine, I thought it sounded like a really neat feature, albeit one that I would probably not use very often, but one can never have enough backups.

When I use SuperDuper, I usually try to close as many apps as I can, and leave my computer alone. Every now and then, however, I find that I need to check my email or quick view a web-page or listen to music while I am backing up, and I can do this with relatively no problem at all. When SuperDuper backs something up, it says: “Want that backed up? Okay, let me get on that. We’ll just plug away at it while you do something else. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

Time Machine has a different philosophy. When the computer starts up or is plugged back into the Time Machine external drive, Time Machine says: “It’s time to backup data! STOP EVERYTHING! GOOD HEAVENS MAN!! IT’S BEEN 60 MINUTES SINCE THE LAST BACKUP!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S AT STAKE HERE!!! THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE YESTERDAY!!! BACK UP DATA NOW!!!”

And Time Machine hijacks the computer throwing every available resource at backup up, almost giving the impression that this event is bigger than a national disaster.

To say Time Machine is a resource hog would not be adequate. Time Machine is a resource tyrant. For me, there’s nothing more annoying than logging into my computer, and suddenly having my computer grind to a screeching halt for 3 to 5 minutes while my machine merrily backs up all of it’s data from the past several hours that I haven’t been using my computer. (Even if I did make a few changes the night before.)

I did a clean install of my hard drive, I don’t have a whole lot on my computer right now. I have about 5 document files and I have added maybe a dozen of my necessary programs, there isn’t a whole lot that needs to be backed up. I imagined that Time Machine would do a slow backup in the background,  to me, that would make sense, but that apparently isn’t the goal of Time Machine.

Hopefully Apple will allow for some more customization of Time Machine, perhaps allowing a set processor usage cap, or allowing for a set time interval of backups (I’d do 12 or 24 hours.) Or perhaps just a simple check to see how much processor power the user is using at the time, and then taking half of what’s left. There are plenty of options, they simply need to be implemented.

Until then, I’ll just have to put up with my psychotic buddy and his hourly processor raids.