B. Mann Consulting

Well, contrary to the lack of posting here, I actually have a ton of stuff tumbling around my head right now. And so, an Omnibus post that covers a couple of different items.

I've been heads down busy and haven't been attending (or organizing!) any social media type events lately. I did get out Wednesday night to attend the Freshbooks / Redwerks BBQ. Look, there's me holding a puppy (photo by Ianiv)! It was a beautiful sunny evening and the Redwerks rooftop patio is awesome. I ended up manning the grill, my secret ploy to meet everyone (at least, everyone that was hungry). It was nice to meet some new people and catch up with a bunch of regulars.

I'm trying Jungle Disk for my personal backup. In short, it's a cross platform app that both serves as a kind of iDisk as well as some simple backup operations, except that your data is actually stored on Amazon's S3 service. You pay a one time license for the application (and you can install it on as many computers as you want), and you pay as you go for storage. And can get your files from any machine.

I'm currently backing up my Documents folder to a Backup area, and then I also have a second "bucket" (that's actually Amazon tech talk, but it makes sense) that is a true archive -- I copy old stuff there and delete if off my local disk. I'm still debating whether it's worth it for me to put my entire iTunes collection online -- it would solve being able to get my music from anywhere, and it would cost about $12 / month (for 60GB). Not sure what the calculation is for streaming that music some of the time? And yes, this is like MP3 Tunes music locker.

So that's my use, but Jungle Disk *also* launched the WorkGroup edition -- which is the same thing, but lets multiple users in a company use it from a single Amazon account, with things like their own storage space as well as granular user permissions. So you can have a Finance folder that only senior management can access. And if you don't have senior management, then just think about how great it would be to have a small business shared file system that you can access from any computer, anywhere. That's $2/month per employee, which I think is a good price.

WordPress! I've been mucking about in WordPress core and theme code. Once was with Rachael's site, which I upgraded using the FTP dance. I really hate not having command line access.... The second was for the Bootup Labs Blog, which I moved off of WordPress.com so we could add some more plugins and do stuff like have a feed for every category / tag. Except, when I went digging around, it seems that the main feed is the only one that is ever injected into the link rel header. So, here's my feature request if you're interested in the gory details: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7190 -- heck, I might even submit a patch :P

An article I wrote on Sharing iTunes and iPhoto libraries between users is consistently one of my most popular pages here. iPhoto's most recent versions has photo sharing on the same machine using the network capabilities, but the iTunes "solution" has always had major problems: you end up sharing the same ratings, play count, etc. etc.

Additionally, since I recently had some hard drive corruption (this has happened more than once...) we lost a big chunk of music: backing up 80GB of legitimate music is *hard* (never mind consistently keeping an offsite backup up to date).

Lastly, I've long kept a "subset" of music on my laptop (e.g. no country, no opera, no Ani DiFranco). I haven't been great about keeping this up to date, but using rsync basically works. 

I recently rediscovered MP3Tunes and the concept of a music locker. It's only $40US/year for an unlimited size locker and syncing between unlimited computers (there is a free 1GB account that you can experiment with). This was a Flickr-size investment, so I decided to just go for it. On paper, it seems pretty perfect. Here's what MP3Tunes does:

• It keeps your playlists and music in sync with a desktop sync client
• You can selectively sync subsections (solution for my laptop!)
• Sync can be bi-directional or uni-directional 
• You can access/stream your music from the web
• There is talk of a mobile client for Symbian Series 60 

Sounds pretty much perfect. The *only* downside is that protected/DRM'd music can only be played on authenticated devices -- i.e. no streaming of DRM music. That's fine, I'm mainly interested in the sync/backup functions anyway...I'm not sure if I'll use the streaming function (although it will mean that I likely put a lot less music on my laptop).

I suspect that this is actually a "Part I" type of post. It took the Oboe Sync client something like 24 hours to just scan my music directory, and the actual sync has been running for 1.5 hrs. The projected total is ~340hrs (!! -- seems to run at about 60KB/s).

In closing, let me link to Streampad. I was checking this service out and it integrated with MP3Tunes lockers. Doing a little more investigating, it might going somewhere interesting. Here's what Fred Wilson had to say about it:

The primary objective of Streampad is to build an iTunes like service in the browser. Not as a browser (like Songbird is doing which is also a neat idea), but in a browser.

You can go to Streampad at any time and listen to services like hypemachine, internet radio, etc. But if you install the Streampad server on the computer where your music library is, you can listen to your entire music collection anywhere, from inside a browser.

Music anywhere is definitely an idea whose time has come. More interesting things to come, I'm sure (Last.FM integration to show what music I actually own?).