Giles has been experimenting with keeping everything he needs in one huge text file, rather than the lots and lots of small text files most geeky folk prefer.

My first thought, not being a user of one of the wildly powerful text editors proper geeks use, like vim or emacs, was, ‘How in the name of crikey would you find anything?’.

One answer, for SubEthaEdit users, is to divide your file into sections as follows:

1. Open a text file.
2. Go to the Mode menu and switch to LaTex mode.
3. Start a section by typing \section{A nice descriptive name for your section}
4. Look at the SubEthaEdit menu bar - you can jump right to your newly-made section from there!

I don’t think I’ll be switching to keeping all my todo lists, URLs, wee chunks of writing and suchlike in one ginormous file, but this little tip has already made my life easier: just after reading about it, I was comissioned to write an overview of the Edinburgh Art Festival and Annuale, which involves seeing an awful lot of stuff, and I now have one easily-navigable file stuffed with a list of shows, events and associated URLs, notes from the shows I’ve already seen, and my reviews of those I’ve already written about. Very handy.

This is mainly for my benefit, but since I know absolutely nothing about using Linux, they might be helpful for people in the same boat. Folk who do know something of Linux, feel free to point, laugh or suggest alternative methods.

Anyway, before I installed YDL, my old iBook was mainly used to download files with P2P applications and play MP3s over the WLAN in my house, from the new iBook and the external drive plugged into it, so these are the things I’m keen to get up and running as soon as possible.

First of all, here’s how I’m streaming MP3s over the network. What follows will doubtless be heresy to experienced Linux users, but it works. (Reading forums and mailing lists I am beginning to suspect that anything one Linux user does is considered heresy by all other Linux users, and vice versa).

The following assumes you’re have one Mac running YDL 3.0 and another running OS 10.3.4, though they may well work with other versions of the two operating systems.

First of all, you need to get the YDL computer and the OS X computer talking to each other. There’s lots of ways to do this, but the only one I had any luck with was using Samba which is installed by default with YDL. (And, just to confuse matters, is meant for connecting Linux computers to Windows computers.)

Here’s how to set up Samba so your YDL computer can use files on your OS X computer:

1. On the OS X computer, open System Preferences > Sharing and check the box next to Windows Sharing.

2. On the YDL computer, first you need to make a directory where you can mount your OSX computer as if it were a CD or drive. Since there’s a mount directory already there, it seems reasonable to put it in there. Open up a terminal and type:

   mkdir /mnt/ibook

3. Next, you need to get your mount on. Turn back to the OS X computer, and at the bottom of the Sharing Preference Pane, it’ll say something like this:

   Windows users can access your computer at \192.168.1.2\yourusername

   Take a note of that, and turn back to the YDL computer.

4. On the YDL computer, in a terminal, type the following (all on one line):

   smbmount //192.168.1.2/username /mnt/ibook -o workgroup=WORKGROUP,username=yourusername

   As you can see, that’s the smbmount command followed by the address given in the Sharing Preference Pane, followed by the directory you made in step 2. The last bit tells Samba what workgroup you want to join - wittily called ‘WORKGROUP’ by default on OS X - and your username on the OS X computer.

5. After you type the smbmount command above, some information about the OS X computer will appear on screen, followed by a password prompt. You want the password associated with ‘yourusername.’

6. Now, if you didn’t get any error messages, you’ll be able to navigate into the /mnt/ibook/ directory you made before, and inside will be everything found in your Home directory on OS X. I’m guessing that if you’ve bothered to read this far you’ll know how to do that. If not, to see a list of everything in your newly-mounted Home directory, all ready to be used by the YDL computer, you could type something like:

   cd /mnt/ibook

   ls

With your Home directory mounted, you can now happily add MP3 files from your Music folder to whatever MP3 player you’re using on YDL. I’m using something called XMMS, which isn’t exactly iTunes, but does the job.

If you keep your MP3s on an external hard drive, there’s another step to make them available to the YDL computer. (Never having heard of symlinks, this is the bit that took me a while to figure out.)

1. On the OS X computer, open Terminal, cd to the Desktop and type something like this (again, all on one line):

   ln -s /Volumes/ExternalDrive/MusicFolder/ FakeMusicFolder

   The ln -s bit tells the computer to make a Symlink, which is the same as an Alias but works with all sorts of computers, not just Macs. The next bit is the folder on your external hard drive you want to make a link to, and the last bit is the name you want to give your Symlink.

2. That’s it really. Have a look inside /mnt/ibook/Desktop/FakeMusicFolder, or whatever you chose to call the Symlink, and you should see all your MP3s waiting and ready to be played over the network.

Other options I’m looking into: using web-based streaming apps like Netjuke or Andromeda (which would maintain the playlists I have in iTunes) and getting Appletalk running. Yes, Appletalk.

Next up: installing Bittorrent. I’m finding it increasingly ridiculous that when using Linux I can work out how to stream MP3s over a network with relatively little trouble, but haven’t yet managed to install the one application I really need!