Now that I’ve pretty much ended my quest for a great calendaring solution for the family, I’ve turn my attention to sharing our media. Like a lot of families, I have a ton of music, pictures, and video scattered acrossed a number of machines. I’ve corralled a lot of this data to one SAMBA share on my Ubuntu server. This is good – as now I have one central place for all data that my family can now avoid on purpose. “What server?”, “uh, where can I find that movie/song/pic?”, etc. No matter, I will win them over soon (well… eventually.)
In any event, my wife asked me last night to put some new songs on her iPhone as all she has is older music – her musice dated back to circa 2009. Biting back the first sarcastic comment that came to mind (“You can find it on the server..”), I said sure. This little exercise was going to eat through my evening. Just because everything is in one location, everyone has their own iTunes database and none of them are up to date with the contents of collection. I thought I would have to blow away her iTunes database and import everything in the library again, or I would have to at least manually add every new song. However, I found a neat little procedure that save a ton of time and thought I would share it.
I just found out about a feature in Mac OS X that I think is absolutely great — the ability to create encrypted volumes to store confidential data. My father and I needed to exchange some sensitive financial information over the internet recently and we both looked around for a solution to do this securely with email. Of course, much to our confusion/delight, there are a ton of solutions out there. One of the solutions I found was to create an encrypted disk volume — we didn’t use this particular method for our email exchange, but there isn’t saying anything that we could not have.
This is the second article in my Mac Goodness category. As I mentioned in my 
I’m starting a new category of blog articles specifically to track really interestingly cool things that I’ve stumbled upon or learned about the Mac and OS X. These article will probably be really short and maybe old hat for Mac veterans. However, I think these articles help relay some of the Mac experience and it’s intuitiveness to non-Mac or new Mac owners. I hope you like the articles and will leave some comments on what features you like.