Caravel CMS seems to be used and developed by the Mennonite Church. It looks fairly well thought out, and worthy of further study.
Author: scruss
dvds by mail
I’m thinking of subscribing to zip.ca, the Canadian DVD-by-mail company. I’ve browsed their catalogue, and they have some good things. But they’re not very clueful with computer security — they just sent my trial password in plain text back to me over e-mail.
Rolser shopping cart
My late grandmother’s intense dislike of them notwithstanding, it looks like a shopping cart from Rolser Canada could be just the thing for the carfree-about-town. Lugging shopping bags about is teh suk.
The intensely tony Pepper Mill in Hazelton Lanes seems to be the stockist for Toronto.
batch renaming iTunes directories
In partial response to the Ask Metafilter question “How can I rename my music folders on my Mac based on ID3 tags?“:
#!/bin/bash # itunes_sanity.sh - fix dir names created by iTunes # only works for mp3s, and not actually tested on a Mac # created by scruss on Sun Sep 4 22:05:00 EDT 2005 find "$@" -type d -mindepth 1 | while read directory do artistdir=$(dirname "$directory") firstfile=$( find "$directory" -type f -iname '*.mp3' | head -n1 ) year=$( id3info "$firstfile" | egrep ' TYE ' | sed 's/=== TYE (Year): //; s/[^0-9]*//;' ) album=$( id3info "$firstfile" | egrep ' TAL ' | sed 's,=== TAL (Album/Movie/Show title): ,,;' ) echo mv \'$directory\' \'$artistdir/\[$year\] $album\' done
So if you were in the terminal, in your music library (one up from the individual artist directories), and you did:
itunes_sanity.sh Dan\ Jones Tripping\ Daisy
you’d get:
mv 'Dan Jones/Get Sounds Now' 'Dan Jones/[2005] Get Sounds Now' mv 'Dan Jones/One Man Submarine' 'Dan Jones/[2003] One Man Submarine' mv 'Tripping Daisy/Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb' 'Tripping Daisy/[1998] Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb'
If that looks okay, run the output through the shell:
itunes_sanity.sh Dan\ Jones Tripping\ Daisy | sh
and all should be well.
You’ll need id3lib, which is probably most easily installed from Fink. Also, this only works for mp3 files; I can’t grok the tag info for AAC files. And finally, this might go seriously screwy on weird characters in filenames. You know my feelings on that …
it’s toast
It seems that the concept of a toast rack is alien to Canadian kitchen retailers. Y’see, the parents are visiting soon, and last time they were here, there was a minor scene over toast sogginess. I tried two large kitchen shops; neither had heard of the concept.
I (still) believe in bugs
We found this praying mantis at the back of the office. Paul picked it up, but it flew off. It didn’t seem to mind having its picture taken.
This (my second) mantis sighting was much more interactive than my first.
Morning GO Trains, Union Station, Toronto
1/9/XX, and the smell of new pencils
Although school in late August for us I always derived the tiniest bit of pleasure from writing the date today, and seeing that it was the same as the year. This shows I was educated in the last century.
As it was the start of the schools year, I was writing with new pencils, and summer holidays were long enough for me to forget their wooden smell. So I remember writing the date, and simultaneously, the smell of new pencils.
sorry, little dude
A garden spider had built a large and elaborate web between the fence and the green bin. It looked happy there, and I was sad to dislodge it to take the recycling out.
clicking like the trilobite
Darn it, but my iRiver, with this recent firmware upgrade, now records a click about every minute it records. See the regular peaks? It hasn’t completely ruined my recording of Of Montreal, but it hasn’t helped.
(and apologies for the relatively huge file size of the image; I’m just learning my mac-fu.)
… and I thought that it’d hosed the recording of the encore by killing the wav file header. But some digging with sox parameters fixed it:
sox -V -t .raw -s -w -c 2 -r44100 broken.wav fixed.wav
how much do Of Montreal rock my tiny world?
A lot, is the answer. They were fantastic at Lee’s Palace last night. I did feel a bit of a shambling old galoot amongst the TLIKs, but we were all having too good a time to care.
And they played Jennifer Louise!
and all was quiet
The Ontario RFP deadline passed about four minutes ago. We can sleep now.
keyed up
Aiee, I forgot how a keyboard under Windows works! I’m hitting Backspace when it’s wanting Delete, and Alt when it wants Ctrl.
Macs’ll do that to ya, eh?
pech pech
I cycled out to the end of Leslie Street Spit this evening. It’s far. I got to the concrete pad by the lighthouse: Google Maps: Leslie St Spit: 43.61374° N, 79.34352° W.
My legs hurt. A lot. But it was pretty. I saw one of the beaver-felled trees, too.
timmantra
about the last thing you’d expect to hear recited at Tim Hortons: om mani padme hum, but that’s what I heard this lunchtime.
importing mail from Mozilla Thunderbird on Linux to Mac
How lucky that Thunderbird uses the same text mail format for storing messages. All I needed to do was scp individual server directories from under .thunderbird to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/saltname.default/Mail — that did the job!
I didn’t use the shared global inbox that Thunderbird uses by default. If you do what I did, you probably shouldn’t either.
yup
So I bought the iBook. So far, it’s plain sailing — but then it should be.
it’s a pencil blog
It had to happen: Pencil Revolution.
liquor CD?
Robyn Hitchcock‘s Mossy Liquor — a limited edition release of out-takes and weirdnesses recorded around the time of Moss Elixir, formerly only available on vinyl (ptui!) — is now available from iTunes Canada. Does this mean that it’s finally coming out on CD?
Hey Stinky!
The prize I got in my Duracell Pop the CopperTop was $1 off Gillette deodorant. I think they’re trying to tell me something …