Tag Archives: Apple

Putting iTunes on a Diet

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iTunes64ContentsAs much as I enjoy my iPod, I’ve never been thrilled with iTunes – Overly bloated (91MB vs. 24MB for Windows WMP) and overly complex (Try creating a Netcast Playlist with iTunes 9), it adds features (and virus vectors) that I don’t need nor want. Worse, it adds all this unwanted functionality without checking with the user!

Turns out the iTunes64Setup.exe installer can be opened and dissected. Using an ZIP program (I use 7-ZIP, but WinRAR and WinZIP should work as well) open the installer. If your target is a simple iPod, extract the following three programs and put them in a subdirectory: iTunes64.msi, QuickTime.msi, and AppleApplicationsSupport.msi. Open a command prompt, navigate to that folder and run the following:

AppleApplicationsSupport.msi /passive
QuickTime.msi /passive
iTunes64.msi /passive

If you’re installing for an iTouch or iPhone, add

AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi /passive

Under no circumstances install the AppleSoftwareUpdate.msi as that will just add back all the bloat features and start offering you Safari again. The “/passive” switch allows the installation to run unattended.

Someday Songbird or MediaMonkey will add better Podcast functionality and then I can finally chuck iTunes, but for now I’m happy with what I have.

Are they kidding?

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cutandpasteSpeaking of Fan Boys …

It was a couple months ago – I don’t recall where I saw it – But hundreds of Apple developers had gathered for an announcement of upcoming iPhone features. The crowd gasped, awed and applauded wildly when “Cut and Paste” was announced as a feature that Apple software engineers had struggled with but were finally rolling out.

Cut and Paste? Struggling? How hard can “Cut and Paste” be? Every computer since my original 1984 Macintosh has it. Wild applause for cut and paste. Unbelievable.

Cut to this week’s WWDC in which Apple developers were treated to the newest and greatest gadgets. Our local news channel showed a clip of new iPhone features being announced. As the speaker got to “Video,” the crowd erupted again.

Let’s see. Video on a smartphone is a big deal? Every smartphone I know of that’s manufactured today has a video camera. Where do you think most of the You Tube content comes from?

So here’s the deal – I’m certain 99% of the developers are cross-platform developers and know all other smartphones come with video capability. So I’m equally sure they’re just being polite by applauding.

But when a couple hundred polite people applauding a non-event becomes 6PM news, what does that say about the news, the event host, and the people who took time out from their day to see the non-event? Unbelievable.

Fixing Time Machine

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timemachineApple’s Time Machine operates pretty much like everything else from Apple, one size fits all. Essentially, it’s an automated backup program that performs an incremental backup every hour for 24 hours, then daily for a month, and finally weekly until the backup disk fills up.

There are plenty of hacks and developer tools to slow down the backup frequency (it is a bit too frequent for me), but I was having a different problem – My backup disk, while four times larger than my primary disk, was nevertheless filling up in less than two days! With incremental backups, it should never fill up!

Today I discovered the culprit – Like many other users, I run virtualization software for Windows and Linux applications. Parallels is the most popular OSX virtualization software but I prefer Sun’s VirtualBox – It’s free!

Anyway, virtual machines require virtual storage, and they do that by grabbing a chuck of the Mac’s disk space. On my Mac, I gave Windows 30G and Linux another 10G. See where this is going? Yup, every time I ran Windows or Linux, the archive bit was set on these monstrous files and Time Machine dutifully backed the 40G up. 24 times a day! No wonder my 500G backup was filling up! Filling up with useless virtual disks!

Time Machine offers the ability to exclude files from backup. So I excluded these two files:

  • /Users/[user]/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/Ubuntu 8.10.vdi
  • /Users/[user]/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/Vista Ultimate.vdi

I’m guessing Parallels behaves similarly and probably saves virtual disks similarly. Find them, exclude them, and all your backup problems go away!