iTunes CPU Hog??

Personally I love iTunes. I think it's the best digital audio system out there. I'll also be the first to admit that there could be something better that I don't know about, or haven't tried, but that's always the case with anything.

This entry is just a quick one about a problem that I recently had that I've atleast found a partial solution too. From doing some Googling out there it appears to be a fairly common issue.

The main issue was a sound distortion problem that has crept up over the last 1-2 weeks on my computer. I used to have pretty good sound out of my computer, but lately it's started to get crackly, or even hang up, every once in a while. Always seemed to be either when the CPU was cranking (which was a lot) or when some smaller program would have some sort of audio alert go one. (Skype was the big one for me.)

I couldn't figure out what could be doing it because everything was working. But those are the ways of Windows I guess. So I started to think it was the sound card and/or driver. I had already replaced the speakers with a set I knew to be good from working on another computer. Unfortunately my sound card was an OEM version and I couldn't get it updated. I completely removed it, rebooted, shut down, re-installed it, rebooted, loaded the driver automatically, etc and no luck.

I even reinstalled iTunes and Firefox and Skype to see if maybe there was a conflict. Nothing.

I even did an on-line chat with the help desk at HP (relatively helpful by the way) and they wanted me to do a system restore to the point before this started happening. I was already to do it this weekend, but was not looking forward to it.

So finally (why I didn't do this first I'm not sure now) I started doing some Googling. And I just decided to search for iTunes CPU because I was getting a ton of problems that were annoying me with iTunes locking up my CPU for literally 5-10 minutes after I shut it off.

Recently I'd updated my iTunes library with even more of my CDs and I was up to about 28Gb of space and over 6000 tracks. I was thinking maybe this was causing a problem. It turns out to be related.

iTunes has an XML file that it updates and basically tracks your entire library. This starts to get pretty big and so it takes a bit more time to deal with it. Generally it's not a real problem. However, my virus program apparently is updating it on a live basis everytime something goes to it and then does a complete scan when it's loaded, or shut off. That's what appears to be locking it up.

Somebody had a good suggestion to put a limitation into the Virus scanner so that it doesn't scan anything in your iTunes Music Folder and so I did that. I also shut off the virus scanner for opening or closing files (not programs) and that seems to have solved the CPU issue.

I still get the occasional crackling, but I think that maybe a related issue to when the CPU is going on something else so I still have some digging to do. But for all of you people (Mac or Windows) that have a problem with the CPU usage on iTunes you may want to look into the issue of the Virus scanners.

-Kent

Thanksgiving Thoughts

Well it's been a little while since I put a post up on my blog so I figure I had better get one down. What better than to put in some thoughts about yesterday's holiday.

Personally I love Thanksgiving. First and foremost it's a holiday where there are no gifts. This makes it all about the event rather than about having to get somebody something, or thinking about what you're going to get from other people. That's just too materialistic for me and when you take all of that crap out of the equation it's so much easier to enjoy something.

The second part is that it's typically a holiday that is stacked with tradition. Every family does their day a bit differently and so when you return home for Thanksgiving just getting into the unique rythems of your family's holiday schedule makes you feel at home. (There aren't many better feelings in the world than this!!)

For my family it all starts with breakfast. Yes, breakfast. I know that sounds strange, but that's what makes us unique. I'm not exactly sure how the tradition started, but it's along the time of probably pre-WWII so it's pretty old. I remember as a child (and so does my Mom when she was a child) of going to my Great Aunt Clara's house for breakfast. There would be around 30+ people there for breakfast. Aunt Clara would get up around 4am to start making breakfast. And it wasn't any normal breakfast. It was Chicken Pie. For those of you that don't know what Chicke Pin is basically think Chicken Pot Pie without the vegetables. They are made in standard pie plates and are just awesome. Then she would have homemade donut holes, cheese, and gum drops. Wow it's great.

Since my Aunt Clara passed away my Mom has take over for a smaller segment of the family and continued on the tradition. To make it even more specialy my fiance has totally fallen in love with the whole thing and now she even get's up at 5:30am with my Mom to bake the pies and get everything ready. It has allowed her to have one more thing to connect her to my family and I'm not sure if my family or her loves it more. I know I love it!!

My fiance (Xan, short for Alexandra) comes from a very small family. Because of that Thanksgiving was always special for her, but definitely different from what I grew up with. This makes her love doing Thanksgiving. She's gotten to be very good at cooking a full turkey dinner and now does a dinner for us and whoever from my family doesn't have other plans. Usually is about 6-8 of us and that's another great event. Helps to put a great close on a great day. (Although last night I was wondering if I was going to explode I ate so much!!!)

So I guess that's about it. Thanksgiving is a very special day and I encourage everyone to help make their own traditions to follow. It certainly does help to make the day even more special for you and those that you love.

-Kent

Xan and I are engaged.... finally

For those of you that know me and Xan you'll first be shocked and then hopefully you'll be happy for us. We're ecstatic about it!!

For those of you that don't me or Xan you'll first probably wonder who Xan is. Well Xan (short for Alexandra) is (was) my girlfriend for the last six and a half years. So it's a pretty good running joke between our friends and family. Well on Wednesday night I suprised the crap out of her and proposed. Definitely suprised her and everyone we know so that was great.

There's no dates and such for the wedding but it definitely won't be until next year. I'm quickly learning there are LOTS of things that go into planning a wedding. Vegas is looking better and better every moment!!!!

That's all for now as it's getting late. Hope everyone has a great weekend!!

-Kent

P.S. Happy Birthday to my niece Madison who has her Birthday today.

Batman Begins

Well I finally got to see Batman Begins. As my usual self I didn't get around to going to see it in the theaters, but I wish I did. All of my friends that saw it gave it awesome reviews and I should have taken their advice and gone and seen it on the big screen. However, I don't think the DVD was any sort of a disappointment to me. For me the major thing with Batman Begins was seeing a version of the story on how Batman actually comes to be. To me that's the best part of the whole Batman Legend and so this movie was definitely geared to me.

I won't spend much time giving a break down of the film. If you're looking for that please read my friend Jay's review of the movie on his blog as he does it much better than I ever could.


The only thing that this movie did raise for questions had more to do with physics and reality. How does a Microwave Emitter vaporize all the water in a city but not vaporize all the living creatures that are made up mostly of water? Maybe this is one of those questions that's ignored by everyone that didn't go to Engineering schools? We geeks just ruin it for everyone I guess.

But all in all this was a great movie. I really did enjoy the first Batman with Michael Keaton, but I think this new one is even better.

Definitely give this movie a thumbs up or whatever you want to call it. Check out the DVD and see for yourself!!

-Kent

Tips For Better Handwriting

Just as a really good example that this Blog is about a wide range of topics I wanted to include this entry about handwriting. For my friends out there that have written my handicapped chicken scratch you'll know that I'm the first person that needs these tips. This was actually pretty interesting and I know that the next time I do some handwriting I'll be thinking about what the author is talking about here. Definitely shows why my handwriting is tiring and why it's all a mess.

Tips For Better Handwriting: "

I think there are many people today who could use help with handwriting. If you're like me you do most of your writing digitally and your handwriting has gone to pot.

That's why these handwriting tips are so valuable. Handwriting is a skill. It needs to be practiced and requires technique.

After coaching handwriting and teaching calligraphy over the years, I’ve learned to see the characteristics of those who’ll be able to pick up the necessary motions quickly from those who’ll have to work a bit harder.

It's a bit of a long read, but it's very informative and there's some great tips in there. Thanks Paul for the heads up!
Handwriting Tips "

iPod Nano

OK if you haven't seen one of these things in person yet you simply can't understand how truly small it is. I've heard the description that it's the size of 7 credit cards stacked up and that's a very fair description. I held it up to my wallet thing that I use (which is basically a money clip with a credit card pouch) and it really is that small. I was telling my friend that had it that it's only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a men's and women's wallet for it.



I personally have the 40Gb iPod and never thought I'd fill it. I'm actually about 55% of capacity and I still have probably 50 cds that I need to eventually load on it. But I've got to admit that 4Gb is an awful lot of music and I probably listen to less than that amount on my iPod as it is. This amount is perfect for a work out, or a long road trip, or even a weeks vacation. The fact that it's a flash memory unit means less stuff to go wrong and it probably doesn't have any issues with bouncing or such associated with running. (Not that I've ever had any problems with my iPod skipping nor that I would ever actually run for any reason short of someone chasing me.)

We'll see how Apple keeps doing with these things, but right now they seem to be rolling right along.....

-Kent

External Hard Drive

I've been in the hunt for a good, low cost, external hard drive for a little while. I've been doing the usual debate of exactly what I should get and was looking at everything from tiny cheap units, to larger networked items. I finally decided on getting a Maxtor 200Gb unit.

So far it's worked very well. Setup was a breeze and the speed is pretty good. I can honestly use it for more then just backing up data. I've been putting the files that I transfer from TiVo (see my review) there and it works great transfering the files for viewing back. No delays are seen and it still leaves my main hard drive running pretty light so I can be doing other things with that.

I did a full backup from my desktop to it the other night and it did take a while, but we're talking about copying an awful lot of data so I didn't really mind. I'll probably change the settings in the near future so that it only backs up my relevant data and not the entire program files of things that I could just reinstall if I ever needed too. (No sense in backing up hundreds of megabits of graphics from MS Flight Simulator and such.)

So overall a decent product. If anyone has suggestions on similar products let me know. I'll probably be getting another one in the near future if I keep finding stuff that I just can't live without in the digital world!!!

-Kent

Google Reader

Over the last week I've been playing with the latest Google product: Google Reader. Basically this is an RSS Aggregator that pulls feeds from blogs that you subscribe too so that you can read new postings without having to go and manually visit all those blog sights.

I've been reading some blogs for quite a while. Lately I've been following some of them more and more as I get a little more personally into this whole idea. The concept of anyone being able to publish thoughts to the entire planet is really pretty amazing. I actually get a lot of my information now from the web, and a lot of that is from RSS feeds that show up on my homepage of either My Yahoo or now Google Homepage.

Google Reader is apparently built on the new software called AJAX. I won't get into a great deal about what this involves here but it appears to be a new way of programming web sites for the future. It allows a great deal of flexibility for the programmer and the user alike.

The reader itself took me a few minutes to get use to using. Since it's still a Beta release from Google Labs there isn't a great deal of help information for it. But after a few minutes of experimenting I was able to figure it out and so far it's been working great. I'm assuming that when it's fully released it will be cleaned up a bit more to make the initial user experience a bit easier. Most likely anyone using an aggregator is a bit higher up on the computer savy end and will be able to figure it out like I did.

With the reader you are able to "star" entries like you can with Gmail so that you can go back and look at them again later. I would LOVE to see something like the "label" feature from Gmail so that I could save items related to different things. I'm assuming that the "filter" item is designed to help with that, but I honestly haven't tried using that too much yet.

Another cool feature is the easy ability to email an entry out via Gmail or to blog about an entry right from the entry itself. So far this has worked pretty well in my basic experiments. Perhaps you'll see some more entries now from me on small stuff I find on the web.

So all in all I would recommend this product. Yet again Google seems to be on the edge of the curve for leading the web.

-Kent

TiVo Update

Well it's been a sort of crazy week or so and I haven't been able to update my thoughts on using TiVo. So finally I'm going to sit down and post my thoughts.

I'm still disappointed with the fact that TiVo doesn't have a two tuner input so that you can record one show and watch another. There is apparently a bypass feed so that you can use your TV as the second tuner and that's not so bad, but you lose the funcationality of being able to pause the show you are watching, but not recording. Whatever did I do before I could do that?

Overall it's been a very good experience. I wish the $150 rebate was easier to get, but I suppose part of the reason companies give rebates is that they know a lot of people will be too lazy to fill out all the stupid forms required to actually get the money in 6-8 weeks and so they'll never have to give it back. (I think they learned this from Health Insurance companies.)

So far the only thing I am honestly disappointed with is the TiVo Desktop software. One of the big reasons I got this was to be able to easily transfer shows to my computer and then eventually be able to burn them to DVDs. I haven't tried the DVD feature yet, but I have transfered a number of shows. The first problem is the speed of the transfer. It takes over 45 minutes to transfer a 30 minute show if recorded at high quality. I suppose I could record at lower quality, but why would I want to? (Honestly though the quality doesn't drop that huge if you do.) The transfer speed is livable though. I usually pick what shows I want to transfer and then just let it go while I'm eating dinner, or while I'm sleeping.

The biggest problem is just the reliability and speed of the software itself. For some reason it has a really hard time loading. I will get a warning message atleast once that says Tivo Desktop is taking an unusually long time to load and offers to let me retry or cancel. From a quick search around the TiVo forums this is not uncommon. Usually if I just hit retry it will eventually load. I don't think it's an issue with my computer, but could be. Haven't taken the time to really dig into it that far as I can eventually get it loaded and do what I need to do.

Watching programming on the computer isn't too bad. It can use Microsoft Windows Media Player for the viewing so that's not too bad. If I ever get around to saving up to get a larger monitor I will probably use this feature more as I'll have more room to put windows side by side so that I can keep working while watching sitcoms on the side. Yes I'm a TV junkie.

Well I think that's enough about TiVo for now. I'm sure I'll post more thoughts on this in the future as I play with more of the in depth features.

-Kent

TiVo First Impressions....

Well I just got my TiVo. I can't believe that I waited so long to get one of these. I was living in Silicon Valley when TiVo and ReplayTV came out and was fascinated by the idea of their products. It was one of those "why didn't I ever think of that" deals. But they aren't cheap and so I just never got one.

I got the 140 hour version because of the recent $150 rebates figuring that I'm going to fill it up for atleast a little while. We'll see whether this makes me watch a great deal more TV, or whether it does what I think it will eventually and that's that I'll actually watch a little less. I'll only watch shows I actually want too and not the stupid 30 minute sitcom that comes between two shows I do want to see. We'll find out soon enough.....

So far I'm loving the ability to pause live TV. I've been watching some of the President's Cup golf matches while doing dishes, eating, laundry, etc and I just keep pausing the show and then picking back up when I get done the current task. It's awesome to fast forward through the commercials and get caught up to the play live if I want too.

The thing that definitely is a short coming of the system is the fact that it doesn't have a second tuner built in. This is something that I would definitely pay extra for. I know I can wire up my home theater to act like that, but it's going to be a real pain and I still lose the functionality of my cable box because TiVo needs that in order to be able to get to the pay channels like HBO and such. I've got to think that it wouldn't be a huge price hit to add the second tuner to the TiVo box and would certainly provide a nicer interace to the user. You wouldn't need to have two sets of Audio and Video cables floating around all over the place. That's a big feature if you have a cable nightmare like I do!!

So perhaps in the future TiVo will go that route. Right now I think they've got to be feeling some serious heat from the local Cable companies offering the same service with their own digital cable boxes. I believe some of those new ones even have the second tuner built in and that's a definite plus!! I didn't go that route mostly because I wanted to support the TiVo idea and I wanted the extra functionality that it offers such as the TiVoToGo features.

So at this point I'm very happy with my purchase. We'll see how it keeps going as we move forward.

-Kent

Katrina Support

I'm not sure how many of my friends realized it, but I was supposed to be in New Orleans with my brother and grandparents the day Katrina hit. We were taking my Grandfather down to his army reunion, but they wisely canceled the entire reunion. I was disappointed because I knew he was looking forward to this for a while, plus I was excited to spend time with them, plus I was looking forward to seeing New Orleans. From the videos that I've seen on the news it looks like I'll never get the chance to see that city the way it was. Whatever they are able to rebuild with undoubtably be different.

There has been a major out cry lately for help for the people of the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately this all started late, but that's another deal. I encourage everyone to do what they can to support these people. I'm a firm believer in trying to help others, but now the "others" are Americans. I gave to the Tsunami victims as well, but these people are our own and they need our help. I've included a link to the Red Cross, but if you don't want to give to that organization for whatever reasons, I encourage you to find some others. Some young girls in our neighborhood raised $142 selling lemonade yesterday in just a few hours!!

Do what you can.

-Kent

Me with one of my classic "fake smiles" that is so.... I don't even know.....

Pictures of our dog Liberty

My girlfriend and I have a wonderful 3 year old Golden that we named Liberty. She's not the best trained dog in the world (our fault, not hers) but she is sweet. I think I finally figured out how to load multiple pictures in here, so let's try it.

Yup, there's at least one photo of her looking cute. Now here are a few more of her getting all the attention she can from me.

At some point in the future I'll upload some more, and maybe even include some of our two cats, Phinie and Duke, but we'll have to see. If they know I put them up on the web they'll never let me hear the end of it!!!

Gotta run. Hope everyone had a great Labor Day.

-Kent

My little puppy. She's so tired. 

Cool Remote Control Software

OK. So I've been looking for a remote control software program that would allow me to control my home desktop with my work laptop. I like the ability to sit down stairs on the sofa and watch TV and be able to use the computer. However, I want to be able to do things with programs that I have on my personal computer, but don't have on my work computer (like games) and also be able to surf the internet and download music from iTunes or free MP3 sites that I can't do on my laptop without then transfering all the files later. (A big pain.)

So a remote control program was the best solution. Unfortunately I don't have XP Pro on my desktop as that has it built in. I've found a few on the web and in magazines, but they always cost money and I wasn't at that need level yet. Luckily I kept my eyes open and I think I've found something.....

LogMeIn.com has something that looks promising. I can't comment beyond a quick testing period (including right now) but it seems promising. (The only thing I can't get to work is iTunes strangely enough.) They have a free version that does everything but files transfers I guess, but that's not the key thing I need, yet.

I'll update this in the future if I use it a bit, but so far it seems cool.

Well off to watch some more TV I guess. Later.

-Kent

First Blogger Blog

Well this is my first "Blogger" blog. I have another one on Friendster that I've been screwing with (http://kentsmith.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/) but I'm hoping that this one will offer some more options.

I'm not really sure how much I'm going to use something like this, but the whole idea of individuals being able to publish their thoughts, ideas, rants, whatever, totally fascinates me.

Let's see how this goes and we'll experiment from there.

-Kent

Craig, Jay, me, and Steve on the White Course at Doral