Trouble adding an album in iTunes - No artwork and brackets ( ) in the album name

This nearly drove me mad !

I wanted to add a previously ripped to MP3 album to iTunes.

I keep a copy of MP3s for iTunes apart from my main MP3 collection so I checked the tags were fine (using ID3 Tag edit) and copied the files into the appropriate folder.

Added the files to the iTunes library and no sign of them.

I looked down the bottom of the list and after the "z" artist, there they were with no metadata.

I corrected this using the iTunes editor and added the artwork. This took a couple of goes but seemed to work.

I synced with my iPhone and..... NO ARTWORK !

So, what was odd about the MP3s ?

I found a different cover JPEG, that didn't help.

Deleted and re-imported the MP3s, that didn't help.

After a day I started to wonder if the fact that the album title had brackets could be a problem.

I changed the album title removing the brackets in ID3 Tag edit and imported again.

No good.

Then I looked at the file names in Windows, that still had brackets in the "advance data" so I deleted that and imported again.

SUCCESS !

Correctly imported, recognised the tags and the album artwork takes and transfers to the iPhone.

It seems that iTunes has a problem with album titles with brackets (Parenthesis)  in them.

The Dell 1250c Printer in a domestic network

I couldn't find anything about this so I had to figure it out myself.

Hopefully it will help someone else.

We have a couple of Buffalo NAS drives which can support printers.

I used to have an HP Inkjet printer attached to one of them but someone else needed that and I got a Dell 1250c Colour Laser Printer from Tesco for £50.

It seemed to me that if I got 3 times as long from it as we had from the HP before it needed new supplies I would be ahead.

However there was the matter of getting it to work over USB from a networked NAS drive.

This was much easier than I feared. It came with a disk of stuff (drivers etc) which I installed on my XP  Laptop.

That didn't do much other than install various bits of monitoring software which couldn't find a printer.

I then tried a manual printer add (using "have disk"picking the Dell inf file at the critical moment from the CD) and using a new port (local IP port created using the IP address of the printer and the print queue \lp for the Buffalo).

To my amazement it worked fine.

I followed the same manual add for the Windows 7 Desktop.

To my further amazement Dell have a driver DMG for Mac OSX which worked with my 10.4 Macbook.

I installed that then added a Network printer in "Print and Fax" as with the XP machine. Once again it "just worked".

I'm not sure who deserves prizes although one to Dell for doing a Mac driver when they make PCs is due.

If there are more detailed questions I'll do a follow up.

Best of luck !

The Draytek 2820n

After being a bit disatisfied with the facilities offered by my Netgear DG834G I was looking to find a broadband modem/router that did more.

I wanted multiple WiFi networks so that one would access the Internet only and the other would have access to devices and compluters wired to the router directly, ideally I wanted the ability to use 3G as a backup if the ADSL failed and I wanted the ability to directly connect a USB printer so we could print from a laptop without turning a desktop machine on.

The Draytek 2820n was a fairly good fit and while around £150 for a new one seemed a bit steep as against a £30 - £50 Netgear I thought I would give it a go as the alternative was a pile of seperate boxes.

There was a bit of a learning curve with it, not helped by the support documentation and firmware being out of step with VLAN creation. The multiple WiFi networks was easy to set up. A "legacy" WEP network for things that don't support WPA, the rest on multiple WPA networks with access to internal resources (PC, NAS) as needed created through VLANS on a tick box basis.

Very good.

There was a bit of paper wasted before I got the printer on USB working well (following the instructions for Windows, it "just works" with the IP address for Mac OSX).

All in all very pleased.

There have been a few connection drops but this may be the "training period" with the BT ADSL. I also sometimes got them with the Netgear.

If I could change the Draytek what would I add ?

1) More USB ports so I could have a small USB key for some Internet accessible storage as well as the printer.

2) More USB ports so I could have a USB broadband modem on it as well.

3) More Ethernet ports, 8 would be good, as I've used all 4 and would like to avoid a small extra hub.

All in all, the Draytek 2820n is a worthy upgrade from the Netgear.

Shared Google Calendars on iPhone/iPod Touch

From

http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&topic=14252&answer=139206

but here to be accessible and in case it goes away.

"Google Sync allows you to choose up to 25 Calendars with the Calendar app on your Apple device.

To select which calendars to sync to your Apple device, follow the steps below:

1.Open the Safari browser on your device and go to http://m.google.com/sync.
2.Sign in with your account and select your device from the list of devices that you've set up for Google Sync."

Amazingly it "just works".

I remember with other devices a curious "private URL" was used. Perhaps this works from the MAC address of the iOS device.

Very clever !