SonicChicken blog

I’ve been using Delicious Library to catalog our DVD’s, CD’s, and books for almost two years. It’s great for keeping track of your library, especially if you loan your books and such out to your friends–just drag the item being loaned onto the person to whom it’s being loaned.

DL will also keep track of video games, which doesn’t do me a lot of good since I don’t own any. But I do have a modest collection of boardgames that I’d like to catalog (and track!) in DL. I sent this feature request to Wil Shipley soon after I started using DL. Lo and behold, this morning I read the following (from “Transitions and Epiphanies”, about 1/3 of the way down):

…I start asking if the world even needs an app that catalogs books and DVDs and now boardgames when we could all be under five feet of water in a few years.

(Emphasis added.)

I’m running the current version (1.6.6) of DL, and there’s nothing to support boardgames in there, so I think this is a new feature being added to the upcoming version 2. I’m firing off an email to Wil begging to beta test the new version.

Scott McGown has started a Mac-users email list for CSUS. Here’s Scott’s invitation:

You’re invited to subscribe to the new MACUSERS-L listproc. MACUSERS-L is a discussion list to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information concerning the use and support of Apple macintosh computers.

It doesn’t say anything about campus-only, and I just subscribed from my gmail account so it looks like off-campus addresses are accepted, but: this is a listproc mailing list, and it’s especially finicky about off-campus addresses. In order to subscribe successfully, I had to send a plain-text (no HTML, no MIME!) message formatted exactly like this:

blank-line
SUBSCRIBE MACUSERS-L firstname lastname
END

Leave the subject blank and send the message to listproc at csus. edu.

This is a brand new list, and I haven’t seen much traffic yet. The only significant discussion so far has been re Parallels versus VM ware/Fusion.

I love Mac OS X, but every once in a while I manage to screw up one (or more) of the network folders I dropped into the sidebar. (On this particular occasion I changed my mind after I started opening a network folder and clicked “Cancel” on the keychain access prompt.) Now every time I click on the network folder in the sidebar of Finder I’m getting the following message: The volume for “network-folder-name” cannot be found.

I’ve had this happen before, but I can never remember how to fix it. A quick search turned up this thread which suggests blasting the entire com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file, but that’s a bit harsh if you have a dozen folders in the sidebar and only one or two of them are broken! Instead I chose to edit the plist file and delete the broken folders.

Double-clicking on ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist should open the Property List Editor. (If it doesn’t, see “to Diana” comment on this post.) Click on the exposure triangles for Root, useritems, and CustomListItems. Find the broken folder–they’re in the same order that they appear in the Sidebar. You can click the exposure triangle for a numbered item and see if the Name property matches your broken folder. Once you’ve selected the correction Dictionary item, click the Delete button:

Now if you open a new Finder window you’ll notice… That you still have the same problem. Doh! You need to restart Finder. Click on the “Apple” menu (top left of the screen) and choose “Force Quit…” (or just hit Apple-Option-Escape on the keyboard). Select the Finder application and hit the Relaunch button.

This doesn’t really fix the problem–the broken folder is gone, not repaired. But it’s better (imo) than whacking the entire Sidebar preferences file.

Well, I finally got around to trying out Delicious Library. In a nutshell, it rocks!

I downloaded the demo and tried that first. I didn’t have an iSight camera, so I had to type in ISBN’s and UPC’s by hand. This wasn’t much fun for the few books I tried, but at least information (title, author, publisher, etc.) was returned. Hand-entry for videos sucked–out of 4 relatively recent DVD’s I tried, not one had any information returned. I tried the ISBN, UPC, and any other human-readable text printed in barcode blocks, but I couldn’t get DL to successfully look up any of these DVD’s. I only had two CD’s in the house, one of which was by a local artist. The lookup for the mainstream CD went smooth, but Mike Comfort’s CD had to be hand-entered.

Typing in UPC’s and ISBN’s and such isn’t something I’m willing to do for all my CD’s, videos, and books, so I went ahead and picked up an iSight to see how that worked with the DL demo. ($150, ouch! But I figured I could try to return it if it didn’t work for DL.) After hooking up the iSight I was able to fill up the DL demo shelf (25-item limit) in just a few minutes. It worked great, so I went ahead and bought a license for the full Delicious Library. After forking out $150 for the iSight, spending $40 on DL was a bargain!

With the iSight, my “lookup success” was:

• 20/20 books
• 50/52 videos
• 3/4 CD’s

Most of our books, videos, and CD’s are in storage while we remodel our house, so I don’t have a huge sample.

This is a great application, when combined with an iSight. I’m looking forward to exploring it further. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’d still like to see support for boardgames added to this package. (I don’t own any video games, but I have over 100 boardgames that I would like to catalog.)

Update 2006-01-10 19:49:07 According to the DL Help, any FireWire digital video camera will work. I’d guess that there are some much cheaper alternatives to the iSight.

I also scanned the rest of our library at work this morning, 145 books total. Of these, 14 had no barcode (or it was covered by a bookstore sticker), so I had to type in the ISBN’s. Only one book with a visible barcode failed lookup, a 10-year-old book on HTML.