We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • aargh, why’d ya do it

    yes, it is windows
    Because the Mini-ITX box was sitting doing nothing all these months while there was much bickering amongst the driver developers. At least this will work, for smallish values of ‘work’.

  • iPod Shuffle: meh

    There’ve been a couple of times that my 256MB USB key wasn’t quite big enough, so I was in the market for a 1GB unit. Since the iPod Shuffle was only slightly more expensive than a plain memory key, I thought it would be a good purchase.

    Um, wrong. While it’s undoubtedly a decent (if slightly portly) USB key, it has huge deficiencies as a music player:

    • you can’t skip to the next album in the play list.
    • shuffle mode seems more like ‘play a few songs out of order from the same album until you manually skip to something different’.
    • why is my music hidden away in weirdly-named files?
    • iTunes doesn’t always sync all of the tunes in the playlist, leaving you with missing albums.

    For me, I think the most the Shuffle will be is a way of listening to the couple of albums I’ve bought on the weekend. It is small, light, and sounds pretty reasonable, but it won’t replace my iRiver H120 for musical goodness.

  • something went wrong

    this was supposed to be a map
    The mapping application I use did a bad thing. This was supposed to a grid overlay on a map.

  • best e-mail disclaimer ever

    You’ve seen those page-long legal disclaimers that legal counsels require on outgoing e-mails? Well, I’ve been dealing with an Irish company that has the best one ever:

    If this e-mail does not relate to Company‘s business then it is neither from nor authorised by Company

    Short, to-the-point, and all you need.

  • Software Paul didn’t think of …

    Can I just say that SimStapler is splendid?

  • Desktop Manager

    I have found my OS X virtual workspace manager: Desktop Manager. It does exactly what I want.

  • 3D Death Chase, courtesy Jasper

    3d death chase
    Perhaps the best game ever: 3D Death Chase. It helps if you play it at the full speed your computer allows 😉

  • geourl


    GeoURL

  • i think i’m supposed to have arrived now

    I have a wordpress.com blog now. Does this mean I’m something above a gamma-list blogger? Whatever shall I use it for?

  • world’s slowest USB

    I tried copying about 180MB of files from my old Thinkpad onto a USB key using the mini-ITX box last night. It’s supposed to have USB 2.0 High Speed, but it certainly hasn’t; it took several hours. It managed a little over 5 Kbytes/s on a single file.

    By comparison, the iBook moved the same amount of data from the key to the desktop in under four minutes. That’s more like it.

    I wonder what could make the mini-ITX box so slow? As far as I can tell, there are no USB1.1 devices on the bus. Unless the device was mounted ‘sync’ (where every write isn’t buffered, but immediately written to the USB key), it’s a mystery.

  • The $99 network printer

    I scored a refurbed LaserJet 4M+ from Centennial Computer Solutions for $99. Plug it in, connect the ethernet cable, set some things on the front panel — and I’m printing from anywhere in the house. I like.

  • I hate Sony

    While I like my Cybershot P100, I can’t believe that Sony would make the Memory Stick Pro incompatible with older Memory Stick readers. It’s bad enough that Sony had to created their own expensive, proprietary memory card format (which does exactly what better than CF or SD?), but to make it incompatible between revisions of itself is beyond inexcusable.

    Y’see, I scored a cheapo Lexar multi card reader from CWO the other week because it was quite small and takes both CF and MS. I discovered this evening, when it failed to read my MS Pro cards (in the adaptor) but happily read my mum’s plain MS card, that the two formats are gratuitously incompatible. Um, hello, earth to Sony R&D …

  • fido sms e-mail

    Looks like it’s down in some way; my daily condition monitoring e-mail didn’t get through to the fido.ca address, and neither did other subsequent tests.

  • Mozilla Update :: Extensions: New Tab Homepage

    Ah, New Tab Homepage brings happiness to this Firefox user. I rather got to like the lightweight Epiphany browser during my mini-itx odyssey. When you opened a new browser tab in Epiphany, it loaded your home page. The supposedly more advance Firefox never did this.

    New Tab Homepage fixes this, and doesn’t add any other tab-related cruft that I couldn’t use.

  • esr@microsoft.com?

    You’ve maybe heard about this ‘open source’ thing? You get one guess who wrote most of the theory and propaganda for it and talked IBM and Wall Street and the Fortune 500 into buying in.

     — the enormous ego of Eric Raymond, responding to a job offer at Microsoft.

  • Tiger’s Dictionary

    OS X Tiger's Dictionary
    I was pleased to see that Apple had included a comprehensive dictionary with OS X 10.4. The Oxford American is a decent enough reference tome, and the computer implementation isn’t bad at all.

    The typography’s fairly clean, if rather heavy on the whitespace. Cross references are active; if one clicks on the small-caps word whitlow, you’ll go to its definition (if you have to; it’s kinda nasty). For some reason, the Dashboard version of the dictionary doesn’t have active xrefs.

    Searching isn’t as good as it could be. As with most electronic products, it assumes you already know how to spell the word. The incremental search does allow that, as long as you have the first few letters right, the list of possible choices is quite small. Like all electronic dictionaries that I’ve seen, it’s not possible to browse the text in that spectacularly non-linear way that makes a real paper dictionary fun.

    It does seem to have a good few Canadian terms, but a true Canadian dictionary should be shipped with Canadian Tiger. Correct spelling isn’t just optional. It also only labels British and Canadian spellings as ‘British’.

    So, in summary, pretty good, but far from perfect.

  • Luxpro Super Tangent iPod Shuffle Clone

    Looks like the 512MW version is on sale in Canada as the Centrios. Wish they had the 1GB version.

  • there is no mini

    Seems that Apple have dropped the iPod Mini in favour of the even weentsier iPod Nano.

  • Caravel – the Mennonite CMS

    Caravel CMS seems to be used and developed by the Mennonite Church. It looks fairly well thought out, and worthy of further study.

  • 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 …