Musings

Back From the Dead

As some reader may recall, a month ago I seized the opportunity and replaced my ailing G3 iBook with a new G4 model. When the new Apple Store opened, we decided to take the old machine in and see if it could be fixed. I’m happy to report that, not only did Apple fix it, they fixed it for free.

So now, my wife has a new computer, and I have three MacOSX machines to manage (Golem and the two iBooks).

One of the things you have to deal with when you have multiple machines is keeping your data in sync. That’s where rsync is your friend. Among that data are the many gigabytes of music in my iTunes Music Library. To simplify life, I have the command

rsync --progress -v -au -e ssh --delete "/Users/distler/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/" golem.ph.utexas.edu:"/Users/distler/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/"

aliased to put_music, which keeps things nicely up-to date. Less obvious, however, is how to fix things so that my wife can listen to the library of music that resides in my account on her iBook. The obvious Unixy things don’t seem to work. The only thing that does seem to work is to leave myself logged onto her machine, with iTunes running and “Share My Music” enabled. This just seems wrong.