Skip to main content

Damn itunes

Ok, I don't generally use iTunes. (don's apple fanboy-proof suit). To me, it's like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, serious overkill to just play mp3s. But I also have a podcast, and since that's what most people use to listen to the show, I installed iTunes on my new vista machine so that I could check to make sure the new episodes show up right.

Well, since installing it, I've noticed that it just randomly will start up, for no apparently reason. Certainly not when I actually start it... I'll just be doing whatever, then I'll notice - hey, itunes just startd up for some reason."

Now, I think it's related to when I download an mp3 file - like through Juice, which is what I use to track podcasts. Although itunes seems to start at other times as well.

I've dug all through the damn itunes options and turned off anything that seemed to have anything to do with letting it "automatically" discover music or whatever. No luck. I even turned off the apple server - still no luck. So it was time for iTunes to go. This is retarded.

Of course, it doesn't have it's own uninstaller. That'd be too easy. A quick google search turns up this page. Does anyone else thing it a little ridiculous that it would take 24 steps - plus a reboot - to get rid of a damn mp3 player? I mean, that sounds like something you'd get from, I don't know Microsoft for god's sake. Ugh, good riddance.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another VI tip - using macros, an example

God I love VI. Well, actually, vim but whatever. Here's another reason why. Suppose you need to perform some repetitive task over and over, such as updating the copyright date in the footer of a static website. (Yes, yes I know you could do a javascript thing or whatever, just bear with me.) Of course you could just search and replace in some text editor, changing "2007" to "2008" (if you're stupid) - and you'll end up with a bunch of incorrect dates being changed, most likely. What you need to do is only change that date at the bottom. And suppose that because of the formatting, you can't use the "Copy" part of the string in a search replace - perhaps some of the pages use "©", some spell out "Copyright" etc. This is where vi macros come in handy. A macro in vi is exactly what you expect, it records your actions and allows you to play them back. To start recording, press q followed by a character to use to "stor...
6 comments
Read more

Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in...
1 comment
Read more

Cleaning content from OpenOffice using Perl

Open office is great software for a number of things - I use it as my office software instead of paying a premium for Microsoft office. But one thing it's not so hot at is converting documents to clean HTML. And one of the main things I use it for is adding content to sites that clients send me in word files or excel spreadsheets. Of course, you can always cut and paste, but that loses a lot of formatting. For example, if the content uses a lot of italics, bold text, etc. it can be a huge pain to go back and put all that back in. Another common situation is a client sending some sort of tablular data in a spreadsheet - for example a list of events. It's the kind of data that can change a lot, and it also needs to be in a table with some decent formatting to be usable. Doing it manually is a lot of grunt work. But grunt work is what computers excel at, and I'm not very good at. So I've developed a number of perl scripts to help streamline this kind of job. I'll go ...
3 comments
Read more