As far as I can tell, you can't tell iTunes when you want to check for new podcast episodes – it simply adds the periodic time (e.g. 24 hours) to the last time a check was done.

My ISP has changed their broadband usage system so that half of my monthly transfer allowance is "off-peak" (from next month, 2am to 10am). This really doesn't suit me well, as I typically spend only about an hour to two hours (8am or 9am to 10am) of this time online, so what I end up with is a huge chunk of unused allowance, and maxing out my "peak" allowance.

I don't want to change my habits so that I schedule everything for download. The point of having broadband was that I got what I wanted when I wanted it. The exception to this is podcasts, which are all time-shifted anyway, so I don't care when they download. They also account for a reasonable portion of my downloads (in terms of size – particularly the two video podcasts). So I really want these to download these around 4am.

One way to do this would be to get up at 4am one day and manually update. However, I like my sleep. That also means that if I ever decided to 'check now', I'd have to redo this.

So, my solution is to write a little Python script that tells iTunes (via COM) to update all podcasts, set iTunes to only update manually, and have Windows run this Python script as a scheduled task. If you want to do anything with this script, help yourself (it's really only 6 lines).

#! /usr/bin/env python
"""Tell iTunes to update all podcasts."""
import win32com
import pythoncom
import win32com.client

def main():
    pythoncom.CoInitialize()
    app = "iTunes.Application"
    iTunes = win32com.client.Dispatch(app)
    iTunes.UpdatePodcastFeeds()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

technorati tags: itunes, podcasts, time

I found out (via GeekBrief.tv) that a beta of Skype 2.5 is available, so downloaded it.  I use Skype quite a lot for text messaging (because MSN is so unreliable), as well as some SkypeOut calls (if the lag was a bit less, I would happily switch to it for all my outgoing calls, since Telecom has put me in Helenville, which is nowhere near me and so I make no local calls) and the odd Skype call (I have one in-law, my parents, my sister, and one friend that I can call – not a large selection!).

2.5 adds some nice little features.  Making SkypeOut calls is much simpler, since I can dial ’09 414 0800′ rather than ‘+64 9 414 0800’, and it will add the New Zealand bit for me.  If I have to call another country, it’ll sort out the country code for me.

Much more handy is the ability to SMS ("txt") through Skype.  I would much rather txt via a computer (when at home) than via my phone.  For a long time I used the fantastic smspop service (great interface, great price), but it sadly died a while back.  I looked around for a while, and the best I could find to replace it was ipipi.com, which is ok, but not great (price-wise, or interface-wise).  Using Skype seems to be pretty convenient.

However, it is pretty pricy – €0.13 per txt, which comes out to about NZ$0.27, which is about 150% of what it costs to send via my cellphone.  So I’m not really sure the convenience is worth it.  But if the price drops (or the cost of txt’ing via prepay phone in NZ increases) then I’m sure I’ll use it a lot.

technorati tags: skype, sms, txt, beta, tools

Until today, I hadn’t bothered entering any contacts into my Address Book in OS X.  I did have lots of contacts – but they were all entered in my wife’s account, since she uses it more, and it was convenient to have everything in the one place.

Today, however, I started using Delicious Library (more about that later, but in short: get it), and it integrates with the Address Book for maintaining borrower lists.  So I really needed the entries in my Address Book, too.

Thanks to the great Hawk Wings plug-in and add-in list, I found address-o-sync, a donation-ware utility that lets you sync Address Books across machines via Bonjour.  It’s not entirely clear from the developer’s website, but this does include sync’ing between two users (if they are both logged in at the same time).

As an aside: they have the most bizarre license I have seen – they require members of U.S. President Bush’s Administration to pay many times more than anyone else, as a political statement.  Their software, their rules, I guess, but it seems weird to me (an oft-times software developer) to mix politics into a software license.

technorati tags: addressbook, osx, deliciouslibrary, hawkwings

A post on TUAW pointed me towards Google Calendar – it's just fantastic.

Now, I really only have experience with Outlook's Calendar functionality, which I used pretty heavily in 2002, 2003, and 2004 (and some of 2005) when I was sitting in the office at Massey all day.  Since I switched to working at home I've intended to start using iCal, but just haven't got around to it, and since these days I do most of my work on a Windows laptop, that isn't an ideal situation anyway.

I'm also using gmail more and more [does anyone still need invites these days?  I have heaps] for mail that I do want to interupt me, and leaving the browse-at-leisure mail to be processed with Mail (which does get a copy of all the gmail mail, as a backup).  So gmail is open in Flock most of the time.

So I can see myself using Google Calendar (gCalendar, TUAW calls it) quite a lot, especially if a little calendar turns up in gmail next to the (unused by me, at this point)
chat box.

The interface is great – my connection is only 64Kbs at the moment, and it's still pretty smooth.  All the niceties that you expect from a Google product are there.  Try it out yourself!

technorati tags: Google, Mail, Calendar, email