How to Hack The Complete New Yorker

I received my external 250GB LaCie hard drive today at work via UPS and it was a wonky thrill to look forward to taking it home and formatting it. After I did, I copied over all eight DVDs of The Complete New Yorker which took a few hours. If you have enough hard drive space and The Complete New Yorker installed on a Macintosh with Tiger (which comes preinstalled with MySQL, a program you need for this exercise), it’s easy, or easier than I thought, at least, to force the program to recognize all the issues on an external drive.

Most of these instructions I gleaned from the net, tested and clarified; I had to research and experiment with creating symbolic links (aliases) using the command line. That really took me back to my Amiga days with the Shell and CLI.

Nerd!

1. Copy the complete contents of the Issues folder from each DVD, as well as the contents of the folder /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/Issues on your local hard drive, to a single Issues folder elsewhere. In the case of this example, it’s located on an external hard drive: /Volumes/External HD/The New Yorker/Issues
2. Now that you’ve copied its contents, delete the /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/Issues folder. (We’ll create an alias folder to take its place in the final step.)
3. Make a back-up copy of the MySQL database, just in case; the file’s path is:
   /Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/ny-sqlite-3.db
4. In the Terminal (located in your Applications/Utilities folder), enter the following command. It updates The Complete New Yorker database to indicate that each issue is now stored in the Issues folder on the local hard drive:
   sqlite3 "/Library/Application Support/The New Yorker/ny-sqlite-3.db" "update Issues set DiskID = 9 where DiskID <> 9;"
5. Of course, each issue isn’t stored on the local drive; they’re now all on the external drive. So enter the following command. It creates an alias so that every time The Complete New Yorker attempts to access the Issues folder on the local hard drive, it will be automatically redirected to the Issues folder on the external hard drive. (Obviously, you’ll need to change the segment /Volumes/External HD/The New Yorker/Issues to reflect where you copied the Issues files on your own system.):
   ln -s "/Volumes/External HD/The New Yorker/Issues" "/Library/Application Support/The New Yorker"

Whew. The bottom line: Now when you launch The Complete New Yorker, it will atomatically fetch issues from the external hard drive. Ultra-fast searches and no swapping among eight DVDs. It is beyond me why the fine people at the magazine could not simply condense all of this tomfoolery into an installation option.