East of the Sun, West of the Moon

2005/9/22

Random iTunes Observations

Filed under: OS X,Software — Erwin @ 2:50 pm

Suppose that:

  1. iTunes is busy Determining Song Volumes on a couple of tracks.
  2. While editing a Smart Playlist and click on one of the pull-down menus (like the one containing Album, Artist, BPM, etc) or the one right next to it that typically contains things like is, is not, contains, etc, the network traffic (which was high because of the abovementioned process) drops consistently and returns to its previous high when I exit the pull-down menu.
  3. Further random testing reveals the same thing happens if I click on the Source pull-down for the Party Shuffle, on any of the iTunes menus, or any pull-down in the iTunes Preferences.

iTunes doesn’t seem to understand this whole multi-tasking concept.

Irritating bug of the day:

  1. You’re editing the meta-info on a bunch of tracks, in particular the Remember Playback Position and Skip when shuffling
  2. You use the Previous / Next buttons to manoeuvre to other tracks
  3. You run into one that no longer exists on the actual harddisk which causes iTunes to disable those two buttons
  4. When you then move on to a previous or next track that does still exist, those buttons remain disabled! You have to exit the info editor window and start a new one to fix that.

You would think that iTunes could use some competition, to encourage the programmers into paying better attention to relatively trivial stuff like this?

2005/9/20

Free at last!

Filed under: News,Software — Erwin @ 5:52 pm

It looks like Opera will be permanently free of ad-banners from now on:

Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.

Cool! As said before it’s not my primary browser anymore but I’ve paid for more than one licence in the past (two platforms and more than one major version) and would do so again in a heartbeat if it was my primary browser.

Best of luck to them, I hope to see many improvements and added features in the future.

Sounds good!

Filed under: OS X,Software — Erwin @ 4:11 pm

Last week I bought a USB headset, the Plantronics DSP 500 to be exact, so I could test Skype on the Mac Mini which, annoyingly enough, does not have any way to hook up a regular microphone, let alone a regular headset, of which I probably have half a dozen lying around.

Anyway… the headset works fine, as does Skype, but I was still a bit annoyed at having to go through the System Preferences to change which device would be used for audio output.

Coming to the rescue is… Rogue Amoeba Software with a small (free) menubar application called SoundSource that does exactly what I was looking for. Yay!

2005/9/19

A change of pace

Filed under: Family,OS X,Software — Erwin @ 2:30 pm

Starting last Thursday M has a different job in a different location, but within the same company. A move up, mind you. We’re 99% sure she’ll get to keep the job but officially it’s an interim position, so there’s always a chance someone else might respond to the (company-internal) job-opening.

For now, however, it means a few changes:

  • The alarm goes off at 6:00 AM, 30-45 minutes earlier than before.
  • She drives to work at 7:15 AM, because it’s a 30-35 minute drive to get to this new location, where it was less than 5 before.
  • This means the boys can’t get a free ride to school, so they’re back to walking or riding a bike. Nothing horrible as we live fairly close to school, even walking takes 15 minutes at the most, but with fall arriving soon, the weather may not be so nice for much longer.
  • While it’s a longer drive to work, the store hours are slightly different; it closes at 4:30 PM on most days, so she’ll be able to get home roughly around the same time as she did at her previous location, quite often even earlier due to the different job.
  • Assuming M ends up keeping the job, we’ll likely want to go car-shopping and get her a smaller, more fuel-efficient at that, car to drive to work, while keeping the minivan around for short trips around town or ones that require more room.

On an entirely unrelated note, have I mentioned yet how much I dislike NFS? Well, I do. I seem to have hit a bad spot recently between OS X 10.3.9, Linux 2.6.x, and iTunes 5.0, where it just won’t perform under certain circumstances that I can’t pinpoint nor fix sufficiently. The non-performance being that it stalls, which is great fun (not). The problem is that my collection is big enough that I can’t just say “Oh well, I’ll just store it locally” either, so I’ve been rather irritated for the past week.

2005/9/15

Snail mail

Filed under: General — Erwin @ 9:02 pm

It looks like the Domain Registry of America is back to its old tricks, but in a new form. A refresher on the old tricks:

  • Domain Registry of America DROA renewal scam (DomainAvenue)

    We have discovered that a company called, “Domain Registry of America”, has been emailing our customers with deceptive messages about domain transfers. The goal of the e-mails is to trick our customers into transfering their domain names away from DomainAvenue.com. The e-mails falsely claim to be a response to a transfer request made by our customers.

  • Court bars Canadian domain slammer (The Register)

    On December 23, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requested that a federal district court instruct an Internet domain name reseller from making misrepresentations in the marketing of its domain name registration services. Domain Registry of America (DROA) told consumers that their domain registrations were expiring, leading many consumers to switch their domain name registrar.

  • Domain Registry of America “renewal” notices (EasyDNS)

This time no email, and not from Canada, but snail-mail, and a return-address from Buffalo, New York state, about 100 miles away from the original company. Their 800 number hasn’t even changed, actually (the scan in the last webpage lists it, and that’s from 3 years ago). Hmm, actually a year ago they were operating from a London (UK) address, apparently they get around, or to put it less politely, they’re trying to escape previous judgements, perhaps?

I’m familiar enough with the whole domainname system that I won’t fall for it but I wonder how many will, this time.

Home-Churching?

Filed under: Humo(u)r — Erwin @ 2:28 am

A lovely parody featured in The Onion that I would qualify as a must-read. :-)

2005/9/14

You want to remove what?

Filed under: Software — Erwin @ 2:08 pm

And here’s why I don’t let apt-get dist-upgrade run on auto-pilot but only run it every night to download the packages it thinks it needs:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  mythmusic mythtv mythtv-backend mythtv-frontend mythtv-themes mythweather
The following packages have been kept back:
  libmyth-0.18.1 mythtv-debug
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libnspr4 mozilla-browser mythtv-common mythtv-database mythtv-doc
5 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 2 not upgraded.

Right.

Update: To clarify, it works fine 90% of the time, but I’d like to have some say in it before it goes and removes the mythtv and mythtv-backend packages and would really prefer to keep the other ones installed as well. Not much point in having mythtv-common, mythtv-database, or mythtv-doc installed without those, after all. So what I do is run it as apt-get update -d dist-upgrade, so it’ll only download the *.deb files (that it thinks it needs) and the next morning or so I’ll eyeball the result (emailed to me) and decide to run apt-get update dist-upgrade or pick-and-choose what I think is actually needed.

Take a hint

Filed under: Humo(u)r,News — Erwin @ 1:25 pm

I don’t always agree with Bill Maher, or how he phrases things, but this closing was very entertaining and well put:

“Mr. President, this job can’t be fun for you any more. There’s no more money to spend–you used up all of that. You can’t start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard’s bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one’s speaking to you. Mission accomplished.

“Now it’s time to do what you’ve always done best: – lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It’s time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you’re saying: there’s so many other things that you as President could involve yourself in. Please don’t. I know, I know. There’s a lot left to do. There’s a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.

“But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You’ve performed so poorly I’m surprised that you haven’t given yourself a medal. You’re a catastrophe that walks like a man.

Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes.

“On your watch, we’ve lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you’re just not lucky. I’m not saying you don’t love this country. I’m just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side.

“So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: ‘Take a hint.’”

Thanks to Printemps (and Dil3mma) for the transcript.

2005/9/13

iTunes 5.0

Filed under: OS X,Software — Erwin @ 4:20 pm

Bah. Bah. Bah.

I had wondered why no podcasts were being selected from the smartlist that I specifically created to pick both (unplayed) podcasts and random music from the rest of the library. Turns out this is by design and all podcasts start out marked not to be played in Party Shuffle:

… You then have to select a single podcast and get info on it. In the options turn off “Skip when shuffling”. You then have to repeat for each other podcast.

Of course having to go in and mark each podcast entry defeats the whole point of having these things being fetched on autopilot and iTunes provides no way to indicate that certain podcasts should not have that flag on by default.

Time to start leaving some suggestions for Apple to ponder:

  • Make Skip when shuffling (and Remember playback position while you’re at it) available when editing multiple tracks at once.
  • Use a saner Previous/Next order when editing track info in the Podcasts collection.
  • Allow me to change the default per podcast (as opposed to needing to adjust individual podcast tracks).
  • Provide a way to deselect tracks that are marked Skip when shuffling in the smart lists, otherwise there’s a good possibility that when you select 25 podcast tracks randomly you end up with the wrong 25 even if there are tracks available that the Party Shuffle would play.

Time for lunchwork!

Bye

Filed under: News — Erwin @ 3:18 am

I don’t think he will be missed:

The top US emergencies official has resigned following criticism over the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), had already been dumped as head of the rescue effort by President George Bush.

News of his resignation came after the president visited central New Orleans for the first time since the disaster.

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