Sunday, September 26, 2004

MP3 ID3 Tag Editor

One of the first things I noticed when using my new Karma is that my years of ignoring the ID3 tags on my MP3s has made for a very difficult experience. The Karma pulls song information only from tags, so all of my songs with blank tags show up in the Karma's database only as their filename - it can't figure out what the song title or artist is just from the filename.

This pretty much sucks for wanting to play a specific album or music by an artist or even a specific song - seeing a list full of 'Track 01's is less than helpful.



MP3 Book Helper - shot taken from their site
Posted by Hello


So I headed to SourceForge, my new best friend, and quickly found a program called MP3 Book Helper. This thing is wonderful (and it works on more than just mp3s, you ogg folk)! The program is daunting in its complication, but a little time spent playing around, looking at the popup descriptions of icons and reading the help had me rolling quite nicely. In the past half hour I've gotten a few dozen albums cleaned up - tags derived from path and filenames (love this!) and then filenames better derived back from the tags. It will look up information from the freedb cd database, which can be helpful when you're not sure of album information. The program lets you preview your changes as well as undo them, which is very nice for when I accidentally leave a tag field set for change that I didn't want changing. Basically, this can do anything you can imagine relating to tagging your music.

What a great find.

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Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Synchronize bookmarks between browsers - BookmarkBridge

I used to rely heavily on some nifty key combos to open websites I often visited. For instance, I'd hit "win,a,f" to bring up the Start Menu, open the favorites list, and then select the (only) item starting with 'f' - thus launching my browser and loading FARK. All this was peachy when I used IE as my main browser and updates to Favorites immediately appeared off of the Start Menu.

Not so after moving to Firefox - it rightly stores its bookmarks separately. So that means that no matter what I do with my bookmarks in Firefox, the Favorites list off of the Start Menu never changes. And as far as I've been able to tell there is no setting to export your bookmarks back to IE's Favorites. Nor have I been able to find a useful extension to do this either.

So, in what's almost becoming my MO for finding software these days, I headed to SourceForge and found BookmarkBridge. It's not pretty, and it took a little extra effort from me, but I got it to work. The program does one thing and that's merge bookmarks from one browser to another. Unfortunately, while it auto-detected Mozilla and IE, it didn't pick up Firefox. Having messed around with my profile enough times I knew where to find the bookmarks file ( \documents and settings\username\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles\default.xxx\bookmarks.html ), so I added Firefox to the list and was set. And now I can just run it whenever I want my bookmarks exported back to IE (or to Mozilla, or from any browser to any other).

Hopefully a future release of Firefox will support this.

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Firefox supporters getting free GMail accounts

By now I expect most everyone who wants a GMail account (or two or three) has one, but as an enticement the people at SpreadFirefox have pooled over 2000 GMail invites to give away.

Who gets them? People that put a Firefox button, logo, or banner (that links either to Firefox's page at Mozilla or SpreadFirefox) on their website do. Here's the post about the giveaway.

I've already got GMail (and a dozen invites laying around unused), but since I use Firefox and love it to death I'm slapping up one of the Firefox logos.

So..if you've got a blog or site and no GMail yet, give this a shot. Download Firefox while you're at it, especially if you're still using IE, and enjoy.

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Thursday, September 16, 2004

Aural Pleasure


Rio Karma
Posted by Hello

Took me long enough, but I finally got one. And so far I'm loving it! The Rio Music Manager software that's included with it is decent but there is a far more complete package, Riorad Explorer, from Red Chair Software that I've heard makes managing the karma just the easiest thing ever.

So all I need now is a case to protect my precious and I'll be set. It takes these guys 30 days to make one, but they're supposed to be quality so I can wait.

1 Comments:

At 5:15 PM, Blogger asd said...

Took me a minute to figure out alter-meaning you got out of the title. And since I never had anything dirty in mind when posting I think it's safe to call *you* the dirty bastard. ;)

 

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Saturday, September 11, 2004

WallPaper (alias crawlpaper)

Trying to Google around for a useful wallpaper changer can be a pain. It seems that everything that comes up falls in one of the following unfortunate categories:
  • supported by adware (or worse!)
  • endowed with a less than friendly user interface
  • missing features I want



Crawlpaper
Posted by Hello

Until I thought to check for a wallpaper changer at Sourceforge - there are so many great programs there that I figured somebody had to have something decent that met my needs. Enter WallPaper (alias crawlpaper) ("the hardcore of Windows desktop"). Wallpaper has a nice enough UI, lets me configure it as I please and includes a wealth of other features (image browser, mp3 player, tag editor, stream ripper, thumbnail generation, web crawler) that I still have yet to touch although they all sound cool. But at least I can easily manage the wallpaper list (you'd be surprised how many programs screw up this core task!), and if I ever wonder about something I can read through the documentation which is fairly complete. And it's always nice to know I can grab an hour of Secret Agent music from SomaFM to timeshift to my MP3 player for while I'm walking around. This program is far more than a simple wallpaper changer...

Addendum - I should note that the author has some adult images on his site. You don't have to scroll down to them when downloading the program, but they're still there. Tacky.

2 Comments:

At 11:13 AM, Blogger asd said...

I didn't notice any option in Picasa to even set a single image as a backdrop, let alone create a wallpaper playlist for it to cycle through. Maybe I missed something..

 
At 11:59 PM, Blogger asd said...

Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night...

 

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Friday, September 10, 2004

Hauru no Ugoku Shiro - Howl's Moving Castle


Howl's Moving Castle
Posted by Hello


Miyazaki has a new film coming out soon, and I can't wait for it. Spirited Away was wonderful, Princess Mononoke was great, and this looks to be captivating as well.

There is a nice extended trailer available here.

This article at Wired is how I found out about the movie. Having not yet seen Ghost in the Shell or Akira, I'm not that excited over the upcoming movies from their writers, also mentioned in the Wired article.

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Tuesday, September 07, 2004

amazingmail

Away from issues of software protection and piracy and onto a neat little company that's grown and found a niche and become quite successful. amazingmail lets you create postcards that they print and send for you. The fun in this is that if you're an amateur photographer or image editor you can do all the fun postcard-y image manipulations exactly how you like, and probably have things turn out better than with the storebought cards. Of course, these cost more in terms of time and money (I think it's $1/$1.50 a card for the 4x6/6x9 cards). But I've had fun with them - it's awesome to me that I can use as much of the card space as possible for images...embedding the text within the images and removing all the white space I can. The company lives mostly from businesses that use them to mail their customers but have kept around the individual side of things as well, which makes me happy.

The only problem is that I seldom set aside enough time to put together a nice card, which means I end up with a bunch of credits sitting in my account waiting for me to get off my ass. Heh..

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Monday, September 06, 2004

Slightly related to the last post...

Try a Google search for wares and look at the suggestion you're given. I guess the slang has surpassed the original word in use on the web. (someone pointed this out on Slashdot)

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Sunday, September 05, 2004

Reverse Engineer

Macrovision deals in licensing and copy protection technology. As a gamer, I recognize them because they produce SafeDisc, copy protection for some games. So what do I come across in checking jobs on Craigslist but this listing (you can also click the title of this post..blogger is so cool!).

Excerpts:
Responsibilities:
• To reverse engineering network protocols.
• To research, experiment, and document network protocols.
• To develop tools and methods for performing reverse engineering tasks.

Desired:
• P2P networks experience

Target Companies
• nVidia, Napster, Creative Labs, ATI, Roxio

They want to reverse engineer peer-to-peer networks, video/audio drivers, and CD burning? I can understand the first and the last - find a way to slow or prevent software from being shared on P2P networks as well as making games un-burnable (so you can't rip a copy for a buddy - I guess even with the prevalence of online activation via license key this has to be worried about). What's the deal with ATI, nVidia and Creative Labs (SoundBlaster) though? Somehow protect games so that audio won't play properly or video won't render correctly when copied? I'm far from experienced enough to make good guesses at what this means, but it should be interesting to see what comes out of Macrovision down the line.

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AdSense

So I found out that Google is encouraging bloggers (Blogger folk especially) to put AdSense text ads on their blogs. I'd always wondered about the program and figured this was as good a time as any to sign up and try it out. So - there are now ads on my page. I don't expect to make any $$ off of it, but always like trying stuff out - and here there is a benefit that google (<3 google) gets to count one more site as showing their ads. If there was an option for GMail-style ads I would've taken it - I think a half and half mix of ads and related links (not ads) would be cooler. Anyway, that's why there are now ads on this page.

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