We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: director

  • but at least I didn’t jump up and down like Reese did in “Election”

    Last night at the banquet and annual awards ceremony, I was elected onto the board of directors of The Canadian Wind Energy Association (L’Association canadienne de l’énergie éolienne). The other new directors are:

    I’d like to thank everyone who helped me, and look forward to a busy three years on the board.

  • fauxlomo

    Portpatrick, with the Gimp faux lomo effect
    Portpatrick, taken with a Fujifilm MX-1200 pretending to be a lomo

    For probably no better reason beyond babbittry, I’ve always half-wanted a lomo. Half-wanted, that is, because of my previous experience with “Russian” photo gear (I’ve had a Lomo TLR, a Fed rangefinder, and a Pentacon six) and its legendary quality control. I’m also so done with film.
    A while back, Donncha wrote about a  GIMP Lomo Plugin. While it looked handy, the link to the code is now dead. You can find what I think is the same one here: http://flelay.free.fr/pool/lomo2.scm (or a local copy here if that link dies: lomo2.scm). Just pop it in your .gimp-2.2/scripts/ directory, and it’ll appear as a filter. The original author‘s comment on Donncha’s blog contains good settings: Vignetting softness=1, Contrast=30, Saturation=30, Double Vignetting=TRUE.

    I knew there was a reason I retrieved my old 1.3 megapixel Fujifilm MX-1200 from my parents’ house. And that reason is fauxlomo!

  • it’s official

    I’m standing for election to the CanWEA Board of Directors.

  • Uncle article in The Economist

    Liontower member Gideon Rachman has written a nice piece on Uncle in this week’s Economist: Whatever Happened To Uncle?

  • onward and upward, etc

    Hmm, looks like I didn’t get put forward as the WindShare rep on the board of directors of OSEA after all …

  • 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 …

  • 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.