Re: FOAD iTunes

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From: John Sinteur
Subject: Re: FOAD iTunes
Date: 18:54 on 08 Nov 2004
On Nov 8, 2004, at 4:59 PM, Mark Fowler wrote:

> update.)  Yes, this does mean that this is a PER IPOD not a PER 
> COMPUTER

Things that need to be - or not be - "per-computer" are difficult for 
Apple.

Another example: I've got a G4 desktop at home, and on the road I have 
an iBook. I want to keep my mail on whatever computer I'm using, and 
after mucking about with unison for a while I bought a 256 Mb flash 
disk.

Since I'm a paranoid idiot, I created an encrypted disk image on it, 
and my ~/Library/Mail is a symbolic link to that encrypted disk image - 
so every time I want to read my mail on a computer, I insert the flash, 
double-click the volume after it mounts, double-click the disk image 
file to mount the encrypted volume, and launch Mail.app.

So far, so good. It works rather nicely, except double-clicking a lot 
to get the Mail volume mounted is silly when you run an operating 
system that has "folder actions". For those of you who have managed to 
avoid OS X so far, the idea is that you can write a little script that 
gets run every time something happens to a folder (such as being 
opened, items being dropped in them, etc). So I wrote a folder action 
that mounted the image and launched Mail.app after I insert the flash 
disk. Happy as a clam that this actually worked, I copied the script to 
the iBook, only to discover that my iBook felt that "folder actions" 
were disabled for the flash disk.

OS X has chronic Altzheimers when it comes to remembering wether folder 
actions are turned on or off for a removable disk. Crap. Apparently the 
idea that you move removable volumes around is a new one.

I hear that the next iteration of OS X will have some new features to 
make your home directory less bound to a specific piece of hardware. I 
suspect that this will be limited to "your entire home directory", 
since my home directory will not likely fit on a flash disk any time 
soon. Bugger.

-John

There's stuff above here

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