Something's Awry…

Seems my Garmin is going a bit mental – those altitudes are very much out and that heart rate, whilst it looks reasonable, I’m not sure I hit 242 bpm!!

Time to sort out my bike and get back on that!

So I took the plunge this week and purchased iTunes Match. After using it for a bit, I thought I’d make a quick post about it.

Background

iTunes Match is a cloud based music system built into iTunes and iOS devices that allow you to upload your music to iTunes servers and lets you download it to up to 10 iOS and OS X devices. It’s primarily a music storage service, rather than a streaming service like Spotify as when you listen to the song on an iOS device, it downloads the music to the device, whilst playing it as it downloads (streaming would then wipe it from the device to clear space, this doesn’t). It also only lets you access music you already own, not letting you stream different music from a catalogue, so it’s useful for those with an already large library. In the UK, the services costs £21.99 a year and you get unlimited use over that period. Note, iTunes automatically sets itself up as recurring, yearly, payment.

How it works

As mentioned above, it only works with music you already own and have in your iTunes library. If you don’t use iTunes, iTunes Match isn’t for you. When you sign up, iTunes match analyses your library and matches all the songs you own to those in iTunes database. These songs are then instantly “uploaded” to your account (in theory, they’re already in the cloud, iTunes just let your AppleID access them). Those tracks that aren’t in the iTunes library (I have some obscure Russian rock in my collection for example…), iTunes then uploads them to it’s servers to allow you download them to your other devices.

Overall, the system is fairly quick – I did have to leave it going over night but then with 7,532 songs to analyse, it’ll take a while. iTunes managed to find ~5,000 of my songs in it’s database so I did have to upload 2,000 but it seemed to go quite quickly and when I woke, it was all complete. Enabling Match on my iPad was a simple case of enabling it in the Settings > Music. It then deletes all music off the device and lets you see all the stored music in the cloud (though you can set the device to only display local songs if you don’t want to browse your entire library all the time).

Advantages

I must admit, the main reason for me upgrading to Match was not the fact I could have instant access to my music wherever I was (though it’s nice to see the iPad being even less reliant on syncing with a PC) but the fact I now have a cloud backup of my music. If I delete it off my hard drive or I have a hard drive failure, I load up iTunes and redownload. Boom. Simple. And for £22 a year (for upto 25,000 non iTunes songs!) It sort of blows the cloud backup services out of the water (in terms of pricing and ease of use.) Considering I was only paying for backup space to backup my music, it no longer makes sense for me to keep paying for a cloud backup solution for my media files.

Another benefit it that some of music is 192kbps MP3 (or less) files. iTunes lets you download the better sounding 256kbps versions to replace them. Macworld have a fantastic guide on how to accomplish that here . It may take me some time though as iTunes finds over 4,000 songs under 256kbps! This does replace your MP3 files with Apple .aac files. However, these are DRM free and should play in most desktop players and non Apple portable music players, even if you decide to not continue with iTunes match next year.

Disadvantages

Unfortunately, there are some disadvantages to iTunes Match – the big one I’ve found is that some songs wont upload because they’re under 96kbps which is what iTunes limit to be uploaded to it’s servers. I think the most annoying thing about this is that some albums I have are VBR encodings and one or two tracks won’t upload from that album. However, according to my install, I have 35 songs that either aren’t eligible or there are errors uploading to iCloud in some way (it turns out the main reason for this was that the files were no longer on my computer but iTunes hadn’t detected them as missing). I found this by creating a smart playlist using the criteria in the image below.

That’s less than 1% of my songs so I must admit, I’m pretty impressed overall. And to be fair, most of the songs that are below the threshold bitrate are songs I’ve ripped from Youtube videos (or acquired from disreputable means, which thanks to an eMusic subscription, no longer occurs) in the past so it’s a good way for me to either delete them or go back and purchase the songs.

For those that use non Apple phones or tablets, you’re out of luck – you can’t use iCloud on it (though if you use iTunes on different computers, you can use it in iTunes). This obviously restricts the users to those of Apple’s products but this is a very much a business move that Apple are used to taking so should come as no surprise.

Overall

Overall, the iTunes Match experience is pretty damn good. The ease at which it searches through your library and finds the tracks you already have and then matches these to the iTunes catalogue is amazing. As I said, the amount of songs I have which were picked up was staggering – a 99.5% success rate. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a resounding success.

I know it’s not marketed as a music backup service (as Apple reserve the right to remove any items from the iTunes store at any time), but it it makes a really cheap service that’ll allow you to redownload your music, should a disaster occur and your hard drive die/wiped/eaten.

If you are fully entrenched in the Apple eco system (like I am), then the £22 for the year is an easy choice to make – it’s reduced my offsite backup cost by 50% this year as I no longer have to spend so much on space for my music collection – I’m trusting it to Apple’s servers and my ability to store it on a portable drive at work. The ability to change the tracks on my iPad without being near my PC is also a good point (as you can now delete tracks from iPod and iPads in iOS 5). £22 for these benefits, to me is a price worth paying. And don’t forget, I can update those old sounding tracks upto the newer, better 256kbps tracks. Which is worth £22 alone!

So for a while, I’ve been using LaTeX to write up my work but every now and then someone wants a copy of my work in Word so they can edit it or mark it up and they cant use a PDF editor. This means converting my PDF into a Word document or my LaTeX file into a RTF document.

The PDF route was probably the easiest as everything was nicely laid out already and set out as it should be and various services on the web manage to convert PDF’s relatively well to Word documents such as Zamzar

However, the LaTeX to RTF option is also a possibility using the linux2rtf program however, that seems to be awkward at the best of times and annoyingly problematic at times. And it won’t run on OS X Lion because of the lack of Rosetta support (unless you build it in Macports but that requires a full LaTeX install via Macports as well!)

it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the answer was staring me in the face all this time. I’d blogged about Pandoc before here and it’s ability to turn Markdown into LaTeX code. Well, it does that and more. Turns out it can output to RTF as well (that’ll teach me to RTFM!) so a simple command of:

pandoc -s LaTeX.tex -o Output.rtf

gives me a very well formatted RTF document that matches the LaTeX document style pretty well.

For example, in the document in question, I was making use of the url package and the verbatim package quite regularly – Pandoc understands these and formatted them as described in the RTF! Excellent! I don’t know how well it would come with Tables, References and floats but that’s to try another day but considering it handled verbatim and url fine, I have high hopes. latex2rtf is dead, long live LaTeX to RTF!

So once again, top marks to Pandoc for it’s fantastic ability to read and convert documents!

So I blogged about Duck Duck Go earlier last year. See it here. I’m still using it as it’s a great search engine and I want others to know about it – it doesn’t have to be all about Google! So far I’ve only posted online but it’ll be easier to get more people interested now as they’ve just announced a Stickermule store here . My favourites probably have to be the Tesla and the John McCarthy ones.

Shipping is free to the US (though I cant seem to find international postage options for those outside the US). I’ll be ordering some soon!

Sometimes a web service comes along with a fantastic idea of how things can be improved on the internet. One of those services is Ifttt .

Currently a beta service, Ifttt allows you to create “flows” from web services to other web services. Essentially, you create a trigger action and then Ifttt does something with that action.

For example, this is one I’ve setup to test/use/

Any new post I make to this blog will be sent to my Evernote for archival. It’ll allow me to keep up to date with all my blog postings! The number of services and actions that Ifttt have as well is quite considerable and currently includes some of the big services such as:–

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Evernote
• Tumblr
• Email
• Dropbox
• Read It Later
• Youtube

Recipes, as they’re called, can be wide ranging from simple ones (such as linking Facebook and Twitter together so that when a Facebook profile picture is updated, it updates Twitter picture to the same (link )) to downloading new tracks on Soundcloud to Dropbox (link )

As it’s a growing company, it’ll be great to see it include more services as it grows. It’s a fantastic service that links together various different services that might not already be linked (Wordpress sends data to Twitter, but not Facebook. Now you can!)

I’ve reviewed Texpad once before here. I said it was a good, native, Mac LaTeX editor that had a lot going for it.

Well the version I reviewed was v1.0 and now it’s on v1.26 so I thought it was about time to review it again to see how it’s improved.

Improvements

The biggest one that the developers pushed was the code completion feature. This means it’ll complete any code that you start typing and will auto type the finish (for example, LaTeX codes are inserted as \begin{} and end with \end{} and Texpad will automatically create the \end command of whatever you inserted as the beginning command.)

Not only that, but if you’re using Bibtex for your referencing and have already added the Bibtex file location to the file, Texpad will automatically search it for the reference as you type. For example, if the Bibtex key for the item I want is Salter2011, I can type \cite{S and Texpad will display a dropdown list showing all the names in the Bibtex file with Bibtex key that begins with S. This easily allows me to then find the reference I need without opening my Bibtex manager.

Open to All

Texpad, unlike some other text editors for the Mac, doesn’t allow for any font to be used in the editor. It’s list of fonts, whilst decent, doesn’t allow the use of personal fonts. However, after emailing the developers and asking if this could be enabled (so I could use the fantastic Mono Dyslexic font ), they sent me the following email.

Hi Chris,

Texpad 1.2.6 is in the AppStore now. Among other fixes and new features, there’s a hidden feature being delivered on your request, which I’m sure will be useful to many other users. Texpad now searches for installed fonts with the string ‘dyslexic’ in their name and lists them in the menu. I do not have the font you mentioned on my machine, but have tested the functionality with other fonts. I’d appreciate if you gave it a quick try at some point and let us know if Texpad correctly lists the fonts you need in the menu.

Merry xmas.

Jawad

And indeed, Jawad is right. The changes appear perfectly.

As can be seen, the font list shows the font and selecting it works perfectly. So the editor is now in a much better position to allow anyone and everyone access to LaTeX.

Overall

Overall the improvements have added to Texpad immensely. It’s now a very functional LaTeX editor that is constantly being updated and works perfectly well, with an active development team that are rapidly adding features and improvements to the software. Hopefully, 2012 will see the software improve considerably on it’s already fantastic base.

Texpad can be found on the Mac App Store .

Ok so its the end of the year and so its probably time for a quick yearly round up. This year has been a year of change for me. Quite a successful one as well to be fair and some of the changes have been quite drastic and range over a multitude of different areas of my life.

Technology

First and foremost change has been my total embrace of Apple and the Mac. This time last year I hated Apple and all the they make. Now I own almost one of every product line Apple make! This change of heart came from getting my first mac in February.some messing about with my old Windows tower machine left me looking for a new machine that was small (to fit in my room) and more powerful than an Atom based desktop (typesetting LaTeX documents on an Atom is slow and painful!) The only system that seemed to fill these needs seemed to be the Mac mini. It was certainly small and powerful enough to play HD video and so with Apples 14 day return policy in mind, I ended up getting one. And was blown away. My own keyboard and mouse combo (I’m a bit of a Logitech fanboy when it comes to peripherals!) meant it was just like my Windows machine before but better. The 14 days passed and no way where Apple getting the machine back from me! From there I slowly expanded my Apple products line when I saw how good iTunes was on the Mac. The windows version had always annoyed me and I hated it and didn’t want an iPod as I’d have to use it. Now I had a mac, it worked pretty flawlessly and did what I thought was the holy grail – it would let me create playlists on the pc and then sync those to my device and work flawlessly, something Winamp promised for Android but whose promise fell short of it’s actual implementation. So with that in mine, the iPod appeared (though I did go for the classic as I have a lot of music and wanted it all without having to pay silly money for the 64GB touch). Then my phone upgrade rolled around an therefore an iPhone seemed right. Finally, the holy grail was bought and an iPad was added to the happy family. The iPad is a great device and I’m yet to see an android tablet approach it in terms of usability. It’s just so slick.

In terms of other technology changes, 2011 has seen me break free from Googles control of my data – on iCloud release, I moved all my contacts etc to Apples servers. It made more sense to stay native, as Google also collected all my search terms. Now they struggle with that as I now use DuckDuckGo for most of my searching needs.

Health

This year I’ve managed to cycle over a 1,000Km. Which might not seem like a lot to those that cycle, but considering that I only got my bike in the the year before last, to go from no cycling to 1,000Km in less than 2 years I feel is somewhat impressive. This, combined with a change of diet in the later half of the year saw me lose about 10Kgs. This weight loss will hopefully continue in the new year! In fact, I’ve even started running in the past few months which has been something I’ve never considered before! Again, this will hopefully continue onwards again in the new year and hopefully my feet will have toughened up and allow me to run the longer distances I’d once reached.

Work

This year has seen me travel to Sri Lanka to present work on the results of my PhD. I’ve also spoken to ISO insurance services in the US and London regarding the work that I’m currently doing and it seems that they are potentially interested in my work. Fingers crossed something will come out of it at the end as it would be nice to see my PhD being used in the real world, rather than just sat on the shelf in Loughborough library.

So there we have a fairly basic round up of this year. Onwards to 2012!

Slowly increasing the distance again. Slight ache of the feet after this one but that could well be the full day of airsoft yesterday as well.

Well about time I got back on the bike for a ride and since my feet are still aching from running (I tried another yesterday as feet felt fine in the evening the day before but I got about 3 minutes in and stopped). Anyhow, nice day for a ride, bit chilly and moist but the new fenders/mud guards I have protected me extremely well so didn’t get wet at all really which is a bonus. Downside, my winter tights need replacing ideally – they fit but awkwardly. How did I wear them last year?!