It’s amazing how far computers have come in the past 10 years. I remember when decoding a single JPG image took several seconds on my 386 CPU (that was around the same time I was dreaming about having a 1GB hard drive some day…). Even 7 years ago, encoding MP3s still took a many minutes per song and rendered the PC virtually unusable for anything else. Watching (or even encoding) movies on the PC was not even conceivable....
I just set my Linux box up as an iTunes server. After seeing how easy it was to get this working (not least because of Gentoo’s excellent package management), I’m almost annoyed at myself for putting this off for so long. :) The HOWTO Apple ITunes Server document on the Gentoo Wiki was absolutely on the spot and made this very easy, and the entire installation only consisted of a handful of comments plus some very simple config file changes....
I have not tried it yet, but according to this article, Podcasting is really taking off and supposedly already reaching 6 million adults in the US. For those of you who are not familiar with this term, here’s the Wikipedia definition for “Podcasting”. One of the original Podcasting websites, iPodder.org, has a huge list of available Podcasts, ranging from different styles of music to audio blogs and all kinds of other topics....
A little over a week ago, I switched to Gmail, and I’d like to report that I’m very happy with it so far. It is very fast and easy to use, and ideal for accessing the same email account from several different computers (such as my workstation at work, as well as my desktop and my laptop at home). Labels are very nice as well. They work pretty much like folders, but since Gmail organizes email by conversations, a label will automatically be applied to an incoming email if it represents a follow-up to a previouly labeled conversation, meaning that you can simply hit “Archive” once you’re done reading the email....
I haven’t tried it yet, but it is possible to set up Linux as an iTunes server, allowing any Windows or Apple machines on the network running iTunes to browse and play any music on that server. This sounds ideal for me, as my music collection lives on my desktop PC that usually runs Linux, while my wife and I often use our wireless laptops. This should even allow us to easily sync music to out iPods, albeit over the relatively slow 54Mbps wireless connection (which is why I usually just hook up my iPod to my desktop for this purpose)....