And then KMail crashed on me. No bug report for you!

I was able to recover some of it, from syncing back from the iPod and the playlist I still had loaded at the time, but it looks like I’ve lost about 2/3rds of the ratings. And I have backups of the MP3 files themselves, but not of the directory where it looks like Amarok stores the metadata, though it’s not clear if that would even help if it’s a version problem. Oh well, at least it’s easier to re-rate them on the fly through the iPod…

Maybe I should have gotten bigger containers, though. The mixed bowl you see there is still only a tiny fraction of the entire collection…

I got my power bill today, and I am indeed paying less — it was down from $57 to $42, and according to the stats I used 204 kWh this month versus around 260 kWh last month. It was also reflected in a nice little graph that remained fairly steady and then suddenly dropped.

Still, that was only about 21% of my usage and I could probably drop it further. I have a server system as well, and if it draws 200W on average, that’s 144 kWh per month right there. It does have to run 24/7 though, so I’d have to replace it with better parts (as previously discussed) rather than eliminate it, and if doing so saves another $15 per month, then it would pay for itself in a mere…80 months or so. Yeah, I know, I should be doing it anyway just for conservation’s sake. If I think of it like a game, then my min/maxing instincts start kicking in…

My main worry was about its ‘pocketfeel’ (hey, if food critics can have ‘mouthfeel’…) so that I can fiddle with it without having to take it out and look at it, and it does have a few quirks there: the shake-to-shuffle feature requires a *really* vigorous shake, which would be kind of embarrassing to perform in public and can’t be done within the confines of a pocket, but using the dial to advance to the next song isn’t a big deal. The ‘hold’ switch is a bit tricky — I can run a finger along the top to turn it off, but have to get the edge of a fingernail and find the switch to turn it back on. And I have to watch out when adjusting the volume. If it’s lying too horizontally, it switches into Cover Flow mode and you can’t adjust the volume there, so I have to make sure it’s tilted a bit upwards before changing the volume. They’re only minor problems, though.

I also managed to get it working with Amarok by installing iTunes on my XP machine and reformatting it with a Windows filesystem. And, as I hoped, it does indeed sync back updated ratings, play counts and times, and updates last.fm. The only quirk is that unmounting it still leaves the iPod saying “you must eject first…” on its screen, but it seems like unplugging it at that point doesn’t cause any harm.

Update: And it turns out I can sync it to both Amarok for music and iTunes for automatic podcast management, if I disable automatic syncing in iTunes and I make sure to sync to Amarok first or the rating and play count updates will be lost.

Update update: Ugh, okay, podcasts have some problems when I do it that way, with multiple copies of them showing up each time I switch between clients. I’ll have to try doing the podcasts from within Amarok as well.

There are apparently still some kinks to be worked out with its support under Linux, since it’s still brand new, so for now I’ve only fooled around with it in iTunes. I’d prefer to get Amarok working with it though, since the collection database is more easily synced there and I’d rather not have to reenter all of the ratings and such into iTunes.

Oh well, I’ve just filled it up with random songs for now.

While setting it all up though, I noticed that one of the directories being copied contained a set of backup files I’d made earlier. And the destination directory also has a couple other archive files from previous incarnations of the system. And some of those archives probably contain other backups within them, leading to backups-within-backups-within-backups…

I could just delete them all, since if I haven’t touched them recently they probably don’t contain anything all that important, but my inner packrat tends to balk at such impulses. I’m always afraid of things like wanting to return to some game that I was mostly finished but whoops, I deleted all the save files inside an old backup… At some point I’m going to have to just expand them all out and merge them into one consolidated set of files, and then pick out the pieces I actually want to keep…

There’s decent support for the iPod under amarok now, so it might be fairly painless to sync it up with my existing library on the Linux server. Or I might experiment with the ‘proper’ iTunes way for a bit too, especially if any of those games catch my eye, though it’ll be a bit more of a pain to keep the library synced then.

I guess the ventilation in that box isn’t as good as I thought, so I’ve opened up the case to let it cool off a bit, even though it lets a bit more noise escape, too. It’s dropped the temperatures by a few degrees, at least.

Maybe I should start worrying about replacing it with a better system sooner than I thought…