There’s now a rather short Wikipedia article on Scots Tablet. I also discovered, thanks to A Spoonful of Sugar, that there’s a similar South American sweet called tableta de leche.
I guess we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns, united worldwide with bad dentition.
If you install the Aria Download Manager and the FlashGot Firefox Extension, you now have a painless way of managing multiple downloads. It makes an even better linux allofmp3 downloader than the previous suggestion.
Was at the CoinStar machine again today, 301 days after my last visit. I deposited 391 quarters, 316 dimes, 161 nickels and 514 pennies. That’s $142.54, or $128.57 after CoinStar’s cut. The small change weighed 4.4kg, and had a volume of approximately 1.3l.
So that means that we generate 47¢ in small change every day …
’tis the season, and since I’m not used to doing these things yet, and I can never give an album a numeric ranking, here are my Ten Best Music Albums of 2004, in alphabetical order:
There are a lot of new artists that I hadn’t heard before this year.
Music that discovered me this year, although not necessarily released this year, includes:
With my monstrous commute, I do listen to a lot of music now. And I like it.
So I registered with iTunes Music Store. With the buzz I was getting from users down south, I was expecting it to be like my favourite indie record store, only online. Um, no.
So I searched for artists I’m listening to right now:
Ah, I see. It didn’t seem to have most of the artists I wanted. In all, it failed to find:
As you’ll be able to find at least five of these in the most dismal mall chain store, it didn’t start off too well.
I browsed the music genres, and was shocked. There was no folk genre, but there was a roots one which seemed to overlap what I’d call folk and world. Confusingly, there was also a world genre. Oh, and people, disney is not a genre, it’s more a malignant/cryogenically-preserved state of mind.
(I was amused to see the appaling faux yokel band The Wurzels listed as roots. I guess they are, if you know the etymology of their name …)
So I found a RobynHitchcock spoken word track that I hadn’t heard from Millennium Thoughts. I downloaded it, and on trying to play it, it said:
I thought that the pretty proprietary interface would at least remember that it was me logged in at the store, and using the same computer. I guess that’s how paranoid those DRM types are.
Once I was over that, I decide to buy a whole CD: XO, by Elliott Smith. Since I knew that the service used a propritary encryption scheme, I figured on buning a CD, and ripping it later. So I selected the tracks:
and started to burn a disc. But it assumed I meant all the tracks I’d downloaded into some “playlist”, so now I have a CD with one Robyn Hitchcock track, and all of XO. Annoying. Especially when iTunes doesn’t burn CD-TEXT information to the disc, grr.
I wonder why iTunes uses something very close to the radioactive symbol for the “Burn Disc” logo?
I’m not impressed with iTunes Music Store. The content is woeful, the user interface is contrived, and the tracks are very expensive, and in a proprietary format I can’t use directly with my MP3 player. I’ll be giving it a miss in future.
I saw that they had the cutest critters in the pet store: hedgehogs! Best to keep ’em away from balloons, tho’.
I just watched the documentary The End of Suburbia. It explains, with wit and verve, that the suburban North American lifestyle is something that we can’t sustain. It’s got everything you need in a documentary: earnest Canadians, James Howard Kunstler, Toronto’s wind turbine, Prelinger Archive footage, and even a Cory Doctorow namecheck in the credits.
I just ate the most amazing chicken roti from Sea Town Restaurant, on Eglinton East near Ionview. Not merely was it at least the size of my head, but it wasn’t the usual saffron-coloured Jamaican curry, but a rich dark brown. It was also extremely spicy; up there with a Madras, at least.
We have to wonder why Single Serve Coffee.com – The One Cup Coffee Lovers Weblog exists. We already have th perfect ‘single serve’ coffee in the shape of a coffee grinder and a one-cup caffetière. And there’s no waste involved, unlike a pod machine.
I predict that in five years’ time, the single-serve coffee maker will be the yard sale sandwich toaster of today. The manufacturers will come out with new and incompatible pods, or stop supply altogether.
Remember, there are only two things you need to know about coffee: the perfect flavour for coffee is coffee; the perfect addition to coffee is nothing. Thus endeth today’s lesson.
Derek just bought an old view camera on eBay. If you’re quick, you’ll still find the original item listing. Here’s an image of its ground glass:
Now, look at that, and tell me that it’s not the image of David Firth’s disturbing Salad Fingers character?
Worst corporate-speak ever: iriver heart connection
I can’t be very enthusiastic about Apple (Canada) – iTunes, which launched today.
I like Bob Log III. He sounds like Beck or E in heavy disguise. Some of his music is definitely NSFW, but I think you might like:
If you like whacked-out electric slide blues, Bob Log III’s yer one mand band.
What’s a “smiling envelope” when it’s at home?
smiling envelope
You’ll need Perl, and Config::IniFiles.
Program: livemp3.
A sample ini file so you can see how to set this up: welch_rawlings_shepherds_bush.ini.
At the moment, this just generates output that you’ll need to feed to sh, but it handles renaming, converting and tagging MP3s to my satisfaction.
Update: it doesn’t handle FLAC tags, even though they’d be a good source of metadata. I may look into implementing that some day.
from The Mini-Mizer.
I’d almost forgotten about it …
World Scotch Pie champion named. And it wasn’t me, since it’s not about their consumption.
