June Meetup

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Fun conversations and gadgetry at the Webloggers Meetup last night.

Apple eMate, June Webloggers Meetup, Ralph's Grocery, Seattle, WAPhillip Torrone brought a bunch of old and new hardware, gadgets, and toys along, including an Apple eMate, a Newton, and his cell phone — which is actually an old rotary phone that he’s hacked the cell phone hardware into. Pretty impressive!

Chas and Pops and I spent some time talking about Podcasts, and the possibility of my turning my dj mixes into a podcast stream. I’m still not entirely sure if I’m going to move that way, but I’m at least running it around in my head.

June Webloggers Meetup, Ralph's Grocery, Seattle, WAJake was wandering around interviewing anyone who’d sit still in his vicinity for more than a minute, and tossed a few questions my way. Look for some rather brainless-sounding pauses, “um”s and “aaahh…”s from me in an upcoming podcast from him at some point, if he doesn’t edit me out completely. ;)

As things were winding down, I spent a little time chatting with Kristin and Ian, both first-time attendees. Much enjoyed were the possibilities of answering Jake’s “What tech issue would you ask your state representative about if you had the chance?” question with “Teledildonics“, and Kristin and Ian’s picture outside the local Department of Homeland Security office.

A walk home afterwards, accompanied for a while by Jake and Chas until they went off their respective directions, and the evening was done. Not bad at all.

iTunes “My Weakness” by Moby from the album Play (1999, 3:37).

Tron sequel back in the works?

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An item in Boing Boing about Disney comic books caught my eye today. Not for the comic books, but for the subject of one of them…

…Tron, an extension of the original film and the 2004 video game Tron 2.0, as well as a lead up to a second feature film…

Could the long-hoped-for sequel to Tron finally be back in gear? I don’t want to get too hyped up about this — the last time I did, it turned out to be a 3 — but I can certainly keep my fingers crossed.

iTunes “New World Firestarter” by Bloodhound Gang, The/Ministry/Prodigy (2003, 6:05).

DJ Wüdi Mix: Difficult Listening Hour 01

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Yesterday while poking around on my Audioscrobbler statistics page, I clicked through to look at the statistics for my own mixsessions, and was pleasantly surprised to find that there are a few other people out there listening to them. Not many — but even one more than myself was enough to get my attention.

Prompted by that, and egged on by having a server that’s able to serve things out at a decent speed, I thought I’d start posting my old mix sessions again.

All the mixes I’ll be posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the first: Difficult Listening Hour 01 (43m 03s, 39.43Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Depeche Mode ‘Headstar’
  2. Wink feat. Trent Reznor ‘Black Bomb (Jerry in the Bag)’
  3. Pop Will Eat Itself ‘Menofearthereaper (Concrete No Fee No Fear)’
  4. Coil ‘The Snow (Answers Come in Dreams II)’
  5. Underworld ‘Dirty Epic (Dirty)’
  6. Drum Club ‘Sound System (Underworld)’
  7. Rabbit in the Moon ‘Subfusion’

Download, drop into your .mp3 player, and — hopefully — enjoy!

Update: If I’ve got things right, I should be podcast-enabled now.

Update: I’ve used iTunes to create a CD cover image, ready to download and print for a slipcase, or toss into iTunes. This should be the last update to this post…next week I’ll have a better idea of what I’m doing, and should be able to get all these steps done in one swell foop. :)

I can dream…

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Today, one of Seattle’s newspapers (I don’t remember which) had a huge headline across the top of the page:

JACKSON FREE

My first thought on seeing that was wishing that it was a declaration of content, not just a news story. I’d be thrilled if everything I read was “Jackson Free”.

Maybe now that the trial’s over, we’ll get a bit closer to that oh-so-happy day.

iTunes “Mr. Angry” by µ-Ziq from the album In Pine Effect (1995, 5:36).

LiveJournal Oddness

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Just wanted to thank Leareth for letting me know that my LiveJournal feed had suddenly gone all pear-shaped. I’ve found and fixed the problem, and it should go back to normal the next time LiveJournal updates the feed.

Also, a quick note out to the other 22 LiveJournal users out there who are subscribed to the woody_eclectic feed — I have no idea who set that feed up, but it wasn’t me! While I’m thrilled that someone did, there’s two important side effects:

  1. I often don’t know when the feed gets wonky.

  2. I don’t get any comments left to the posts on the feed. If you’d like to leave comments for me (which, in my world, is always a good thing), you’ll need to click through the link at the very top of the post (which usually looks something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/Eclecticism?m=758). That’ll send you to my real journal, and you’ll be able to comment there.

Just thought y’all should know. ;)

iPhoto Quandries

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A few questions about iPhoto — things that don’t make sense to me.

  1. Why can’t I export items that are on a burned DVD (or CD, I assume)? I’d certainly understand not being able to edit photos, rename them, assign tags, and so on — it’s stored on read-only media. But why in the world can’t I export unless the photos are stored on my local hard drive?

  2. When I drag photos from an archive on DVD into my local photo library in order to export them, why can’t iPhoto keep track of the correct tags? While the tags are fine in the archive, as soon as I copy them into the main library, the photos end up tagged semi-randomly, usually with only one or two tags (and those often seem to be “wedding” and “family”, for some reason).

  3. What is iPhoto doing when it loads an archive from DVD that was created with an older version of iPhoto and it presents you with the “Updating iPhoto Library” dialog box? Obviously, it can’t be updating the database on the DVD, that’s write-only media. I think that it’s creating an updated copy of the archive’s database on the hard drive to use, but if that’s the case, why doesn’t it save that archive for later use? It seems to me that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to do that, and yet every time I try to load an archived photo library, I have to sit and wait for iPhoto to think.

Thanks to these three issues, I may end up re-importing my three DVDs of archived photos so that they’re all on my hard drive — and then hope that having all the photos available doesn’t slog iPhoto down too terribly. Not my preferred approach (especially as, given issue number two, I’d likely have to go through and re-tag all the photos), but as it is, I dread having to go back to old photo archives.

iTunes “Shining Star” by Earth Wind and Fire from the album Pop Music: The Golden Era 1951-1975 (1974, 2:50).

Less nudity, more polka

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Saturday, Prairie and I went wandering around downtown, hoping to get a glimpse of Seattle’s World Naked Bike Ride participants. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, as they changed their route due to the temporary closure of the Seattle Center’s International Fountain, and we missed seeing them.

It sounds like the ride went off well enough, though, according to the Seattle Times.

Seattle police kept an eye on yesterday’s ride, but there were no arrests or citations, and nobody called police to complain, said police spokesman Sean Whitcomb.

Seattle’s laws on public nudity are somewhat vague and open to interpretation, Whitcomb said. Being able to charge someone with public indecency depends on someone else feeling victimized, and on the actions of the nude person, he said.

There is no clear-cut language in the law to say when being nude becomes offensive, Whitcomb said. “What’s offensive to one person may not be offensive to another.”

Still, the day wasn’t a total loss. On our wandering we went through the Pike Place Market, and as we were in the lower levels, something in the bins of a used music store caught my eye. I stopped, backed up, pulled the record out of the bin…and started to laugh.

“You’re thinking about getting it, aren’t you?” asked Prairie.

“You know it! This is too good to pass up!”

She laughed. “Well, it’s only two dollars….” We headed in to the store. The clerk we dealt with was rather oddly bland — most music store clerks I’ve seen tend to take some amount of interest in what the customers are buying, but this guy had no reaction whatsoever — but one of the other employees saw what I was buying and complimented me on my choice.

Discotheque for Polka LoversAnd that’s how I became the proud owner of Discotheque for Polka Lovers, featuring Johnny Vadnal and his Orchestra.

The only downside is that I don’t currently have a turntable, so at the moment, I’ve got no way to actually listen to this treasure. Still, one way or another, eventually I’ll have one again (I’ve got a bunch of records I’d love to hear again, and there’s a family collection that regularly moves among myself, Kevin, and Dad).

It was just too good — or too bad — to pass up.

Text-only individual archives in Movable Type

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When I was first investigating John Gruber‘s excellent text-formatting system Markdown, one of the things that caught my eye on his demonstration pages was the ability to see the ‘source’ for any of the pages by simply replacing the .html extension with .text. I’d been wondering if it would be possible to pull such a trick for my site for a while, and got it figured out tonight.

You’ll now notice that just after the post date for each entry, there’s the option to go to a ‘text’ version of the entry. The URL is the same as the normal archive, except that it ends with .txt rather than .html. Clicking on the link will send you to the text-only version of the entry, which is simply the entry without any formatting applied to it whatsoever — just what I’ve typed, nothing more, nothing less.

For instance, here’s the text version of this entry.

I’m honestly not sure if there’s a huge use for this, actually, but that’s never stopped me from trying something before. ;) The biggest benefit I can see is that it allows for very easy copy-and-paste operations without having to worry about “smart quotes” fouling things up along the line. It also allows visitors to see the posts as they were written, of course — and thanks to Markdown, the text-only versions are generally just as readable as the formatted HTML versions, without lots of HTML code cluttering things up. Essentially, they look very similar to what a text e-mail might look like, with URLs placed after each paragraph, and references to each link at the appropriate point in the text.

I have noticed some caveats to this technique, however, which may put the usefulness of this entire technique into question.

  1. Safari doesn’t seem to display text files as pure text — rather, it treats them as HTML. This has the effect of running all paragraphs together as a single line, and rendering any HTML it might find. This has the rather unfortunate effect of defeating the purpose. If anyone has any suggestions as how to force Safari to actually display the text as text rather than rendering the HTML, I’d love to hear them.

    Update: Well, now Safari’s behaving and displaying the text versions as I’d expect them to display — as pure text, with un-rendered HTML. I have no idea why it didn’t do so the first time. This first caveat may be moot, then (which is a good thing).

    Update: John Gruber was kind enough to fill me in on why Safari will sometimes display the text as text, and other times will render it as HTML:

    Oh, and the reason that Safari sometimes refuses to show your text
    pages as plain text is because it tries to be clever. If anything
    that resembles an HTML tag appears in the first 100 KB or so of your
    document, Safari treats it as HTML, even if the HTTP headers state
    that it should be “text/plain”.

    Very frustrating, IMO. Apparently it’s a workaround for
    misconfigured servers that send HTML as “text/plain”, and it matches
    a similar workaround in IE/Win.

  2. Firefox will not wrap text files at the end of the screen, so each paragraph ends up as a single long line. Admittedly, this is technically correct, but without the word wrap, it’s a bit difficult to find something in the midst of a long paragraph. You could, of course, copy-and-paste the entire thing into a text editor before doing anything else, but that adds another step when working with anything.

  3. I have no idea what Internet Explorer will do with this, as I don’t have any version of IE on my computer.

If you’re still interested in implementing this yourself — or just curious — read on for the gory details. This is written for Movable Type users, of course, other systems will have to find their own techniques.

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Prices keep going up

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On my way home from work, I stopped off at the corner market, grabbed a 12-pack of Cherry Coke and a bottled water, and put them out the counter. The clerk scanned the soda, then the water…and then we both started laughing when the register displayed a total of $520,007.00.

That’s some expensive groceries.

Turns out the soda wasn’t in the computer yet, so after being scanned, it had asked for the price — and when he scanned the water, it read the UPC code as the price. Easy enough to fix, but it was a nice laugh at the end of the day.

iTunes “Happy Rave ’95 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Happy Rave ’95 (full mix) (1995, 1:10:03).