I use Vagrant with VVV extensively for setting up local development environments and have a couple of Vagrant boxes setup in my mac.
Recently I was running out of disk space in my Mac which prompted me to look around to see if there are any unnecessary files that can be cleaned up.
This let me to find out that Vagrant stores all versions of boxes that were downloaded even after upgrading them.
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Mac, Vagrant, VVV 8 Comments
Recently, I switched to a new Mac Retina (one of the numerous perks of working at Yahoo 😉 ) and wanted to install OpenCV in it using Homebrew.
I ran the usual brew install opencv command and got No available formula for opencv error message. I have personally ran this command before to install OpenCV and was wondering what went wrong.
After a couple of web searches and ‘hair tearing’, I found that the opencv formula has moved to homebrew-science and I had to do the following.
brew tap homebrew/science
brew install opencv
Finally everything worked. So even if you are facing the same problem, then you know what to do now (and possibly save some hair as well) 🙂
Oh, by the way, if you own a Mac and don’t know what Homebrew is, then stop everything and install it right away. You can thank me later 😉
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged brew, Homebrew, Mac, OpenCV Leave a comment
Yes, you read the title correctly. Now it is possible to run Android on iPhone (and can have flash too 😉 )
Planentbeing from linux on iphone project has successfully ported Android to run on iPhone. You can see the following video where he demos dual booting iPhone with android.
Man, seriously this guy is a genius and I really adore his reverse engineering skills.
You can also download pre-built images and source and can try it out, if you have an old iPhone lying around.
Posted in Android/Java, Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Android/Java, iPhone 5 Comments
Recently I got some MP3 audio books from a magazine CD. I wanted to upload them to my iPod so that I can listen to them during my compute to office. But then I found that these were in MP3 format and not in iPod audio book format.
The main feature of the iPod audio book format is that the iPod can remember the last listening position and also we can adjust the reading speed in case, which is not possible if it is in MP3 format.
I started looking for a program to convert MP3 files to iPod audio book format and found an excellent program MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. It is free, opensource and the best part is that it works.
Download the program and install it. Once installed start the program from start menu and then click the Add button.
Select the MP3 files and then click the Open button. (You can also press shift to select multiple files)
Arrange the files in the correct order and then click the Start Conversion button. You can also edit the tags if you want.
The program will ask to specify the file name and once given it will start the conversion.
Once the program finishes you can add the file to iTunes and then sync it with iPod. Happy Listening 🙂
You can download MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter from its download page.
You can also get some free Audio book from AudioBooksForFree.com
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Audio, Book, iPod/iTunes 7 Comments
Well a new Easter Egg has been discovered for iPods, which lets you to create your own screen saver for 5G iPods.
All you have to do is to create a new folder with name ‘Demo Mode‘ in your iPod and rename any existing video file as ‘Demo‘ and that’s it. Next time when you charge your iPod this new video file will be your screen saver.
If you are not able to follow the above steps, then there is also a pictorial tutorial available.
I have seen a couple of Easter Eggs in software’s and this one is pretty neat. What is your favorite Easter egg?
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Apple/Mac/iDevices, EasterEgg, ScreenSaver Leave a comment
The iPod specialists at iLounge have just released the Free iPod Book 2.0, an eBook chocked full of tips, tricks, and customizations for your iPod. It’s totally free and is available as two versions – Printable and wide screen and can be downloaded from iLounge.
It is a 194 page book with over 110 tips and tricks and is full of incredible iPod and iTunes information. If you are an iPod junkie like me, then you’ll definitely want to check this out.
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Apple/Mac/iDevices, Free Leave a comment
In my last post I wrote about SharePod and also a small step by step guide to copy your files from iPod to computer. But there was one small drawback, it works only in Windows.
And in the comments someone suggested YamiPod. Even this has almost all the features of SharePod and more over it works in Mac as well as in Linux. So if you didn’t like SharePod and/or you are not in Windows then you can try YamiPod.
I am yet to try in and will publish my thoughts on it after using it. Meanwhile if any of you are using it then do share your thoughts on YamiPod.
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Apple/Mac/iDevices, iTunes, SharePod 2 Comments
At last I have found a way to copy audio or video files from iPod to any computer. You don’t need to install anything in the computer and also you don’t need to tamper your iPod firmware which may make your warranty void. You can run the program from your iPod itself, which gives you the freedom to transfer files from any computer to your iPod and also vice versa. And before we precede just a line of caution.
Note: Don’t use this program to copy copywrited files. Use this program only for backing up your non copy-writed files.
First things first. You need to download a program called Share pod. You can download the program from its download page. After downloading extract the files from the zip file into a separate directory in your iPod. In order to do this you may have to enable disk mode for your iPod in your iTunes.
Now just double click the ‘SharePod.exe’ file to start the program.
The program will start and then will list the songs and play lists in your iPod. Now select the files that you want to copy to the computer and then click the ‘To PC’ button which is present in the top left corner.
A dialog box will appear. Specify the directory where you want the files to be copied and also select the template to name your file based on artist, album etc. After filling in the dialog box click the transfer button.
The files you have selected will be transferred to your system and once it is done a dialog box will appear confirming the transfer.
That’s it. Your files are now copied to your computer. The program will also generate and import XML file which you can use to import the copied files into your iTunes.
In the similar way you can use this program to transfer files from your computer into iPod without using iTunes at all. But if you are going to do this, then you should disable automatic sync in your iTunes, otherwise the next time you start iTunes it will override all your copied files.
As I have said before (here and here) I was not very happy with iTunes and now SharePod has come to my rescue and now I can separate my iPod from iTunes. If you are still wondering why to use Sharepod instead of iTunes, here is the list of advantages of SharePod
etc.
In spite of all these advantages, SharePod has some disadvantages too.
Hope this is useful and do let me know what you feel about the program.
This article is part of an ongoing series of posts under the title
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Apple/Mac/iDevices, iTunes, SharePod 39 Comments
Here is another use of your ipod (or any other mp3 player for that matter). You can refer you iPod for first aid tips incase of a mishap.
St. John ambulance service has some handy first aid advice which you can download to your iPod. This could be useful in an emergency, but its best if you give it a listen before you need it. They also have written First aid advice. All the audio files are available in 3 different file formats (mp3, AAC, Real) and can be downloaded from their online advice page.
If you are lazy to download these files manually, then you can also download them automatically using their podcast feed. All you have to do is just to subscribe to their podcast feed using iTunes (or using your favorite podcast reader).
Sussex ambulance service is also hosting some first aid advice files in their community page.
Hope you never get to use these advice but anyways do listen to them atleast once because just in case…
This article is part of an ongoing series of posts under the title ‘iPod Tips and Tricks‘. Here is the list of article in the series
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged aid, iPod/iTunes 1 Comment
This is just a continuation of my thoughts on iTunes and even now my opinion on iTunes hasn’t changed much.
ID3 Tags
Well as my quest for organizing my music continues I keep bumping on the short comings of iTunes. Recently I found that some of my files were having incorrect Meta information (ID3 tags) in my iPod. So I opened iTunes to check them and I found that they were wrong even in iTunes. But I was pretty sure that I corrected the tags of these MP3 files using a MP3 Tag Editor. I checked the tags of the original file in my hard disk and it was having the correct data. Out of frustration I clicked the file in iTunes and it started to play and the tag got automatically changed. Then only I released that there was no refresh/update option in iTunes and when you edit the ID3 tags of the files outside of iTunes it will not get reflected until you play the file in iTunes. What a great optimization design!!
In order to make my iTunes happy I started editing the ID3 tags in iTunes itself and iTunes was happy to refresh it and were updated in my iPod too. Little did I know that it was not getting changed in the original file and it was just getting updated only in the iTunes library. And I was searching for an option to write the tag information to the file only to find that even this was not present.
So the lesson learnt: update the tag information of the files using some other tag editor outside of iTunes and then double click all those files in iTunes and play them so that the correct tag information gets updated both in the library and also in the file. How user friendly!
Podcast
I bumped again on the short comings of iTunes when I was trying to download some podcast.
No resume option for downloading podcast: Some of the podcasts that I have subscribed are more than 100 MB in size and when downloading, half way through the connection gets lost or iTunes freezes and the download process start again from scratch. Bandwidth is pretty scarce here and also costly and I end up wasting my precious bandwidth (and some bucks too).
No scheduling option for downloading podcast: if it’s available then I can schedule all my downloads from 2:00 am to 8:00 am every day when my ISP gives me free bandwidth. (Those who are having BSNL Broadband could feel the pain)
No way to subscribe to more than one podcast from a search result at iTunes Music store. You have to select only one at a time and have to perform the search again if you want to subscribe to more than one.
Giving reviews about podcast on iTunes: If I have to write a review about a particular podcast then I have to have an apple id and in order to have an apple id I need to have a credit card and I don’t have a credit card (yes seriously, believe me) and so no apple id and no reviews too.
In spite of all these short comings I am still using it, just for one thing – My little cute blackie 😉
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices, Random/Personal Tagged Apple/Mac/iDevices, iTunes, Podcast 4 Comments