10 Reasons Why Itunes is Utterly Crap

I have an iphone 4. I like it. It is, in fact, the best damned phone I've ever owned. I have always hated Nokia phones. My Moto Razor V3 was good but the iphone is great.

Unfortunately, the iphone is saddled with itunes, making it far less attractive to me.

Here are some of the things that drive me batshit insane about itunes on Windows.

1) I have an ipod and an iphone. Stupidly, itunes cannot handle multiple devices, forcing you to use different Windows user profiles for each device as a workaround.

2) Itunes compounds that retardedness by not allowing you to have itunes open in two user profiles at the same time.

3) The latest Iphone software update is 666.6 megabytes! This is not directly a factor in itunes sucking but read on . . .

4) Despite such a ludicrous download size, you cannot pause downloads and restart them later, despite there being an option that suggests otherwise. Clicking pause immediately resets the download to 0/666 forcing you to restart from scratch.

5) Now, after four hours of downloading the update fails with nonsense "error -3259". This occurs on Windows 7 and Windows XP. Every. Single. Time.

6) Idiotically temperamental handling of a music library which resides on a network share. If the share is not up at any point all your music is "lost" until you re-add them again.

7) Itunes is incredibly resource hungry, to the point that when syncing a phone itunes becomes unusable. Making things worse is that if you happen to minimise itunes, it then stays minimised for the duration of the sync after which you cannot see the progress.

8) Itunes freaks out with large libraries. It can take literally hours figuring out what files require syncing, and that is before actually starting the sync! How are you meant to handle a 160Gb ipod when itunes freaks out at around 20Gb?

9) If you happen to combine issue 7 and 8 you start wondering whether itunes might have crashed after an hour or more of "sync in progress" on your phone and nothing but an unresponsive mess from itunes itself.

10) Stupid skin job on Windoze version to make it look like it is running on a mac. If I wanted a mac I would buy a mac. If you really want to be my friend make a (non succky) version of itunes for Linux.


God I hate itunes.

Next time around its an android phone for me, and that is purely down to the complete and utter shiteness that is itunes.

I don't have a problem with my iphone, but itunes is just fucked.

Shrink a KVM disk image

This only applies to images in the qcow2 format and does not apply to raw images.


First, we should clear as many unwanted files as possible from the machine.

Because simply deleting files with rm does not actually remove the bits (it removes entries in the directory table) we therefore need to convert unused space to an easily compressible state.

We can do that by writing a bunch of zero's to the disk using this command;

cat /dev/zero > zero.fill;sync;sleep 1;sync;rm -f zero.fill

Next, we use qemu to shrink the file (compress unused space)

qemu-img convert -c -f qcow2 source.img -O qcow2 dest.img

HOWTO: Direct mapping with autofs

I wrote an article on autofs for creating indirect mounts a while back but now I need to mount a directory in the / (root) directory of a machine.

To do this I will use autofs in "direct mapping" mode.

First, if you don't have the automounter service installed, install it now.

sudo apt-get install autofs

Next we need to edit the auto.master file and add a line to tell it which file contains our direct mapping definitions;

sudo vi /etc/auto.master

Add this line;

/- /etc/auto.direct


Now we need to create the auto.direct file;

sudo vi /etc/auto.direct

To mount "my_nfs_server" to "/nas" add this line;

/nas -rw my_nfs_server:/storage

Note: The directory "/nas" should not be created by you, it will be created automatically by autofs

Restart the automounter service;

sudo service autofs restart

Check to see if it has worked;

brettg@zen:$ ls /nas

files movies music pictures

brettg@zen:$ df -h 

my_nfs_server:/storage  1.4T  126G  1.2T  10% /nas