All those magnificent men / women in their flying machines

Nope, not talking about the movie, but am using it to reference another set of machines.

I have been busy digitizing and reformatting my entire media collection the last few weeks in anticipation of the arrival of my AppleTV device (which needs the help of someone coming in from the US, so if anyone is heading in that direction and back, please give me a shout!). I finally managed to convert most of my video files to work in the AppleTV format and added them in the library. Only way to test how they would look is if I went into Front Row on my iMac and saw how the library would show...since I assumed that's how the AppleTV interface would look like too.

To my surprise, my Movies section was showing every piece of video I had added to my library. Now some of these videos are part of TV series' which I am in the process of ripping from my DVDs. Things like "Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister", "The West Wing", "Coupling" and "Seinfeld". Problem is, all these shows with all their many episodes from many seasons were now showing up in the list of Movies in Front Row.

To my dismay, the solution on the Apple support website was anything but. It said I had to change the media type of the files to something other than TV show, then move the files out of the library, delete the media references from iTunes and then push them back and change the media type back to TV shows. This is no solution! There had to be an elegant way to do this.

Evidently, Doug thought so too!

He created these Applescript scripts which can be added to iTunes and which help fix this problem with ease. An adult solution to a problem that should not exist in the first place.

This is one magnificent man in his flying (computer) machine!

The reason my post title says "men / women" is because of another reason I had to go to the community to solve my problem.

I have been trying a new software which will help me backup some of my stuff from my iPhone a little easier than iTunes can. Was having a bit of trouble getting the connection to work and so thought I need to restart the phone. Ended up restarting in recovery mode (force of habit what with all the hacking to jailbreak my current and earlier iPhone). Here's where another set of magnificent men/women came to my rescue.

All I did was download iRecovery, type in "setenv auto-boot true;saveenv;/exit" and there it was! My phone booted like normal.

There have been so many instances when some selfless coder sitting in some remote part of the world has come to my assistance without even knowing it. These people put out these pieces of code just because they encountered some problem and thought that making the solution public would help someone. Or maybe just because they love this stuff. Either ways, people like me benefit from the brilliance and work of others.

This post is to thank these magnificent men and women. They have made my life a bit better and a little less stressed. Thanx a lot, folks!