Author: scruss

  • 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

    mantis

    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.

  • 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

    clicks in my H120 recording
    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.

  • 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 …

  • tim test

    Yesterday’s Tim‘s coffee, black, reheated from cold, is as identically mediocre as when drunk fresh. It’s a whole new meaning for Always Fresh.

  • ididn’tBook

    For a truly soulless evening, take yourself down to the BestBuy at Scarborough Town Centre.

    STC is a mega-mall, with the obligatory huge concrete and asphalt deadzone around it. Its current sales slogan is For what defines you, which must mean that its denizens are in a pretty parlous state, existentially speaking. Its only slightly attractive feature is its derelict KrispyKreme store, which opened as a flagship, then frazzled almost as quickly as a KK’s dextrose rush. Abandoned donut shops are Canada’s ruined abbeys; places of worship gone to seed.

    BestBuy itself is an outcast from the mall, in an especially ped-unfriendly way. Perhaps the only defined route there is through a monster split-level Wal-Mart, but I didn’t have enough hitpoints to make it through that particular slough.

    I’d checked their website, and it said that the store had iBooks in stock, at $50 below retail. Did the store have any on display? No. The Apple section was set behind the customer service desk, which was a scrum of slightly disgruntled shoppers. So I left without seeing one.

    I wandered in a bit of a post big-box haze to McCowan RT, a weird little station at the very end of the rails. At least I was rewarded with a beautiful sunset over the 401 at McCowan; all boiling red and purple. That’s about the best you’ll get near STC, and for free, too.