2003-11-29 03:01:00 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Meta::Referers
When Amazon offered me a Norelco All-In-One Personal Groomer, I suspected that my definition of what an all-in-one groomer should do differed from Norelco's.
Little did I know just how much, though.
It turns out, this thing is a "Cordless, rechargeable, all-in-one beard, mustache, nose, and ear trimmer". Who ever knew noses and ears wanted trimming?
2003-11-28 15:16:00 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Misc::HowStuffWorks
So says Clyde Bruckman.
2003-11-22 20:05:00 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Meta::Motto
2003-11-22 03:01:00 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Meta::Referers
NoFauxxx is a new(ish) gallery of real folks (girls, boys, and others) looking delightfully real and naughty.
2003-11-21 18:46:00 | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0) | Smut::PrettyWomen
Names under which Stephin Merritt records, not guaranteed to be complete:
Stephin Merritt seems to be a friend of Daniel Handler's; at least, he has a blurb on the back cover of The Basic Eight ![[amazon]](http://molelog.molehill.org/blog/amzn-y12.png){kind=small}
, and he has recorded theme songs for the Lemony Snicket books.
Future Bible Heroes' other member is Chris Ewan, former keyboardist for Figures on a Beach, a group about whom I may be the only person who cares.
That is all.
2003-11-21 17:38:00 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | CopyrightCartel::Music::MagneticFields
(Yes, yes, I should be asleep. What's your point?)
iTunes comes so very close in so many ways to being great, and falls short again and again. It's rather more frustrating than if it was just unusable, in which case I'd not use it and not worry about it further.
iTunes has a reputation for supporting ID3 tags pretty well. It is in fact the only implementation I have that claims to support ID3 v2.4.
I wanted to leverage the genre, style and tone information I already had from the All Music Guide to build some playlists for the iPod. A piece of cake, right? The genre part is pretty much free: put the genre name (completely ignoring the old silly numbered-code concept) in the TCON field (text: content), and iTunes & the iPod would make genre lists automatically.
ID3 v2.4 has added a "TMOO" (text: mood) tag which would work just fine for the 'style' information. Oops, but iTunes doesn't pay any attention to it. Ah, well, there's the TXXX fields, explicitely designed for user-defined text information. Nope, doesn't pay any attention to those, either.
Okay, then, comments. ID3 v2.3 supports multiple comment fields, so long as they have separate language and content descriptors. This is a fabulous way to allow users to keep semi-structured data attached to their files without walking on each others toes. Unfortunately, iTunes only supports one comment (the english-language comment named ""); or is it one per language, with comments appearing and disappearing as users with different language preferences log on? Well, that's a pain, but so long as I stick to a tag/value convention in my comment text, I'll be okay.
Oops, not quite. Although iTunes can read comments containing newlines just fine, there's no way to add newlines to comments in iTunes' comment editor. So, I can't add comments in iTunes -- a sacrifice I can live with, I suppose.
Oops, it still won't work. iTunes only reads the first 256 bytes of a comment field. Okay, shorten up my encoding format (instead of multiple nice lines like "Tone mellow", "Tone sensual", there's now one line like "T mellow|sensual"). Oops, some still too long; okay, throw away some random data.
Now, to script up some smart playlists. Oops, there's no scriptable way to make a smart playlist. Okay, script up some dumb playlists. God, I can't believe how much work this is turning into, but at least I'm learning AppleScript (ha!)
Okay, all that is done more or less satisfactorally. Or it will be, after I write another script to sort the playlists into the correct order, since iterating through a selection of tracks goes in almost-but-not-quite a linear order.
Now, on to cover art.
The APIC attached picture frame is similar to the comment frame in supporting multiples, but when iTunes creates the tag it's always type 0 'other' with no description, so we'll stick with that. (side note: type 17, "brightly colored fish"???). Update my auto-tagger, run it across my files, and...VOOOM, images!
Well, sometimes. "The Beatles", 1: yes; A Hard Day's Night (UK): no; Beatles for Sale: yes; Help! (UK): no; Let it Be: no; Past Masters: Volume 1: yes; Please Please Me: yes; Revolver: yes; Rubber Soul (UK): yes; With the Beatles: no; Yellow Submarine: no.
The ones that don't work, iTunes recognizes that there's an image, so it doesn't show the "Drop image here" logo. It doesn't show the image, though, just a white box. Clicking on it pops up a white window. Dragging it to the desktop, however, creates a clipboard file -- and double clicking that file opens up a window with the image. iTunes is clearly reading it and exporting it correctly, just not displaying it.
What's different between the ones that work and the ones that don't? Good bloody question.
2003-11-19 04:30:00 | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) | Computers::Macintosh
2003-11-15 03:02:00 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Meta::Referers
Setting: a room of about 200-300 smart observant people; on the screen in front of them, a still frame of a movie showing six people standing in a dormitory-looking hallway in front of an elevator; three of the people wearing white shirts, three wearing black. The announcer explains that it's very important that we count how many times the people in white pass a ball fron one person to another, goes over this a few times to make sure we understand just how important it is. Then he plays the movie.
The movie's maybe 10-15 seconds long. The six people move around, in front of and behind one another; both black-shirted and white-shirted people are passing balls, and of course we're just counting the white-shirted folks. When the movie ends, a survey is done on how many ball passes there were. Answers ranged from 13 to 15.
Then, the announcer says, "So, who saw the gorilla?", and starts the movie again. This time, just watching the movie rather than focussed on counting, lo and behold -- a man in a fucking GORILLA suit saunters into the frame from the right, walks right through the group of people, right in front of our eyes, and out the left side of the frame. He was right there in front of us, we were all paying attention, we all must have seen him, and yet not a single one of us noticed him.
It is possible to not see a gorilla right in front of you.
2003-11-12 17:14:00 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Meta::Motto
2003-11-08 03:02:00 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Meta::Referers
2003-11-01 03:02:00 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Meta::Referers
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