Syncing my iPod with Ubuntu

In a previous post I listed some of the things that I still do in Windows that I needed to be able to do in Ubuntu before I could truly consider it to be my Operating System of choice – one of these was to be able to sync my music and podcasts onto my iPod Nano. Now as every iPod owner knows, these things are simple brilliant – but Apple do not provide a version of iTunes for Linux so what are we to do?

Well as ever the Open Source community has a number of answers and there are some fine iTunes alternatives out there. We all use our iPods differently and mine it mainly used for listening to Podcasts during my daily commute (about 40 minutes each way). I do have some music on the device but this is normally pretty static – when I get bored of what is on there I normally blitz the lot and start again.

iTunes is a good application for managing Podcasts because it will not only download new episodes as they become available and automatically sync them to the iPod when I plug it on, it will detect which ones I have listened to and remove them – freeing up space for new content. To consider another application to be a genuine replacement it needs to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Installing AtMailOpen Webmail Client on Hosted Server

I have a reseller account with my hosting provider which allows me to manage multiple domains (this being one of them) and also provides email services for each of them. The thing is that the two webmail clients it provides, Horde and SquirrelMail are [frankly] clunky and long winded to access – the latter being an issue with the implementation rather than the applications themselves.

To login I need to provide a full email address as the username (any you can see how long this domain name is) and a password. Then I’m presented with the option of loading Horde or SquirrelMail as well as enabling Auto Load the selected application. If I select SquirrelMail then I’m taken directly to my Inbox but if I select Horde then I’m presented with a ‘language selection’ screen which also contains a Login button. While SquirrelMail is a basic email client Horde also has a Calendar, Notes, Tasks and a News Reader – but they both look a little dated.

Now while I can handle the login process and live with dated interface it’s not something I would like to provide to other users – I’m just worried that I will get phone call after phone call about how to use the applications and complaints about the user experience.

I have a domain which will soon be hosting a WordPress blog that my girlfriends daughter will be using to keep in touch while she is working abroad for six months before starting her college studies. I didn’t feel comfortable giving her the standard email client offerings so decided to configure AtMailOpen instead. Read the rest of this entry »