Slashdot Mirror

On the other hand, when I want a restaurant review, I want Yelp or something like Yelp. And when I ask Siri for restaurants, it gives me Yelp reviews. Google for some reason doesn't do this, and the results it does give for these kinds of searches are usually very disorganized and uncurated. I don't care if Siri is hardcoded to go to Yelp, it simply does the right thing and wins, while Google searches spit out a lot of stuff that's useful and a lot of stuff that isn't.

This is probably symptomatic of Google's monomaniacal framing of algorithms to provide all of their intelligence, instead of, you know, humans, and their deep corporate cultural bias against human decisionmaking in general.

... would it be possible for Apple to realize who their customers are and restore the ability to do two-way copying of MP3 (non-AAC, really) songs in iTunes? That got yanked a while ago, and it's an irritating functionality loss. There are alternatives (hat tip: MacWorld), but Apple's customer control tactics are almost as bad as the record companies'.

It's easy if you have this:

http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks/

And a geek can do it without if he wants. There's no DRM cracking going on there, just moving files about.

Alternatively, if you're just looking for fast local searching, there's delimport, which periodically sucks down your del.icio.us bookmarks and indexes them with Spotlight.

One of the benefits of Del.icio.us is that often the popularity of a particular link tells you something about its quality as a data source--but even better, since you can subscribe a a given user's bookmarks, you can use the link poster as another, more accurate, guide to data validity. I'd also like to point out for Mac OS users, that Buzz Andersen's free Cocoalicious is quite nifty, since it works even when the Del.iciou.us server is unavailable, and that Brent Spiner's news reader/aggregator NetNewsWire works well with Deli.icio.us, in part due to the magic of AppleScript, in part because one of its features allows you to subscribe to tag feeds from Del.iciou.us, Flickr, and Technorati.

try podworks
works great for me (i dont have itunes 4.7 yet) and it has a nice feature to preview the song you wnat to copy off the ipod.

The only problem with doing a copy like that is that it doesn't bring across your playlists, play counts or ratings. Also, songs that are .wav's do not have their meta data brought across as they cannot contain any.

Neither of the programs listed in the article seem to do either, and as a developer of this exact type of software, I know how valuable it can be.

Here are some of the options I find worthy (Mac OS X only):
- iPodRip - I wrote this, so it is a plug for me. Recovers everything. Ten unrestricted uses, so feel free to download it, recover and delete it.
- PodWorks - Cheaper than iPodRip but it contains restrictions. Does not recover all meta data.
- Senuti - Does not recover playlists or any meta data. Free, although if you wanted to recover for free, simply use iPodRip and throw it away.

In the end for most users it is all about ease of use and trust. You can't ask the developer of terminal or the Unix command line for assistance, but you can ask the developer of an application. You also may not feel safe in a CLI, where as a GUI can provide that comfort zone. Those apps only require a single button press and that gives users peace of mind.

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

I don't see why Apple would care. They haven't taken any action about the numerous song extracting tools like PodWorks, which might have caused problems. Adding songs to and iPod seems pretty useful for Apple.

As for FairPlay, well this looks pretty good - although this stands a much higher chance of catching the lawyers' attention. VLC has an interesting module which implements FairPlay. (You might recognise one of the authors ;-) If you have an iPod you should be able to play FairPlay protected files on Linux - assuming the iPod is able to play the files, that is. Briefly: the m4p file contains an encrypted audio stream. The key is stored on the iPod, encrypted with a key specific to the iPod (a function of the iPod device id, it seems). They've also worked out the system information for windows that functions as the system key, incidently.

well, you can load the other music directory to your ipod, then use a program like Podworks to put the music back into your private itunes library- a function that you cannot do with the stock ipod and itunes. This makes it very easy to steal music, still not one step, but it's not bad either!

and the software is only $8