Yesterday was like an early Christmas. Today is like the cleanup afterwards.
I took the afternoon off yesterday to run some errands. I finally got a chance to hook up the new CPU coolers, case fans, cables and other assorted nifty stuff on my PC. You can see some of pictures along the way at my picture gallery. Unfortunately the camera battery died just as I was finishing up, so I didn’t get a good picture before I buttoned it up.
The 180Gb hard drive means that I can get all my MP3s collected in one place again. Since I lost a lot of them with the crash of the 40Gb hard drive, I’ve started up “autorip” and am feeding all my CDs into it. Because it’s such a huge drive, I’m ripping at a higher bit rate than I used to. I also did some magic to get what I could off my iPod – if you know where to look, the files are there on /Volumes/[ipodname]/ somewhere, but in a set of hash buckets (directories named F00 through F19). I scp’ed them onto the server, then used a program I got off CPAN called “mp3rename” to put them back into artist and album directories.
Of course nothing involving hard drives works easy for me. After installing the new drive, it took several attempts to get the BIOS to recognize both it and the old one at the same time. For a while there I thought the curse of hard drives was working in full swing as usual.
Of course the question when you’ve got 260Gb of hard drive space is how the hell do you back it up? 15Gb DLT tapes don’t seem adequate any more. Oh well, that’s a question for another time, I guess.
Also yesterday, Vicki and I got our Palm Tungsten Es. Vicki had no problems at all hotsyncing her old Handspring Visor, and then hotsyncing the new E. She liked it so much she started buying e-books. You can read about that in her blog. I had a few more problems.
The first thing I tried was to use coldsync to backup my Sony Clié, and then use it to restore to the new device. Oh, found out that Linux doesn’t like having two “visor” modules loaded at the same time, so in between I had to do a “rmmod visor” to uninstall the first one. Also, the hotsync device for the Clié is /dev/ttyUSB0 but on the Palm it’s /dev/ttyUSB1 (just like it was when I had a Handspring). After restoring, the Palm said “Cleaning up – please wait” and stuck like that. After about 10 minutes, I gave up and did a hard reset. Thinking that the problem was that the new device didn’t have my hotsync id set, I tried a “coldsync -mI” to initialize it, but that failed badly.
At this point I thought maybe the problem was coldsync, so I tried on my TiBook. Unfortunately, after doing the sync to the Palm, I got the same thing – “Cleaning up – please wait”. Thinking maybe it had a lot of conversions to do with my huge CoPilot database, I left it overnight. Next morning, still “Cleaning up – please wait”. So I reset it. Things didn’t seem that bad. Most of the apps I use were still working. Minicalc doesn’t support the high res screen like it did on the Clié, but there’s an update on their web site. CoPilot locked up hard when converting the database (not sure why it thought it had to convert it since I am pretty sure I had a version 4 database loaded). Laurie announced a new version of CoPilot today, so I downloaded it and generated a new database. I’ll try installing them both later. The weirdest thing was the address book, or “Contacts” as they call it now. All the entries were displayed in a weird order. And worse, the regular search didn’t work. Even worse, this new search thing they have locked the Palm up hard and required a reset. I used Filez to blow away the address book files and beamed the whole thing over from my Clié. Now things were in the right order, but still couldn’t search. Hmmmm, I thought – sounds like the index is corrupt. I added a new entry and deleted it, and now everything appears ok and the searches work. I figured adding a new entry would regenerate the index, and that appears to be the case.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to getting home and installing the new versions of all that software that I downloaded today.