Sorry in advance for the inconvenience, but you need to register if you want to comment now. There’s a firewall blocking my server’s connection to Akismet (the service I use to block spam) and it’s resulting in an innudation of emails. (Thankfully these are “comment moderated” emails, not “comment posted” emails–although on reflection I shouldn’t get any of the latter, and I did get a couple….)

In any event, until the firewall issue is resolved or I find a better way to block spam, that’s the way it is. Not that it matters too much, since I haven’t posted recently. (I have been writing recently, actually, I just haven’t posted. One might argue that sort of defeats the purpose of writing, and they’d probably be right.)

Comments (0) | Site Stuff

Austin Shafran, a spokesman for Smith, who says he remains the majority leader, told an Albany radio show a lawsuit was definitely a possibility. The GOP broke Senate rules by not submitting their leader-changing bill to a committee or gaining Smith’s consent, he said.

Control of NYS senate in dispute, deadline looms | Markets | Markets News | Reuters.

Silly Republicans. Didn’t you know you need the majority leader’s permission before you can replace him?

Comments (0) | Snark, Sophisticated Commentary

So HUDS sells this “93 Gallon Canteen” that’s supposed to deter people from using disposable containers, like paper cups or bottled water. I bought one yesterday since I had over 100 bucks still burning a hole in my BoardPlus account, and as any good Harvard student knows BoardPlus is worthless unless you spend it by years’ end. Apparently the Food Literacy Project is also involved in producing these canteens to some degree, since they have their logo stamped on the thing. So I find it particularly amusing–and, well, somewhat embarrassing–that the blurb on the canteen (about how exactly you’re saving 93 gallons of… various things?) reads, in part, like this:

The EPA regulates tap water, ensuring it’s [sic] overall safety.

“It’s”? “It’s”? Are you kidding me? I think Strong Bad said it best, so I’m just going to leave this one to him.

Comments (0) | College, Snark

Shitty though it was, I’m still going to miss it.

The Associated Press: Yahoo to close GeoCities, other services in revamp

Comments (1) | Geekish

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton released this statement earlier today on John McCain selecting Barack Obama as his Vice Presidential candidate:

Today, John McCain put a former state senator with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Senator Obama shares John McCain’s commitment to warrantless surveillance programs, the agenda of gun manufacturers and increasing our military presence abroad — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.

Comments (0) | Snark, Sophisticated Commentary

Back when I used Windows as my primary operating system, I was very resistant to using iTunes. I prefered Windows Media Player for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it did a better job (understandably) of working with my Dell Axim handheld.

A couple years ago I took it upon myself to get a bunch of my music together and digitize it. I already had some music on my computer, but I had chosen to encode it at low bitrates (128 Kbps, and later 160 Kbps). I figured as long as I was going all out on content, I should go all out on quality too—so I elected to rip my music into a lossless format. This was not, after all, something I’d really want to do more than once, and once you’ve ripped something into a lossless format, it’s relatively trivial to change it all to another lossless format on a whim.

Of course, lossless formats don’t really jive too well with mobile devices, since as a rule mobile devices are limited in terms of storage. Windows Media Player didn’t have an issue with this, since I could configure it to automatically re-encode lossless files into lower quality (and smaller sized) files.

Then I got my MacBook Pro, and predictably took advantage of the opportunity to get a heavily discounted iPod. What this also meant was that I had to migrate my media collection to the Mac, and (by extension) iTunes. This proved problematic.

For one, I didn’t really intend on using my laptop as my primary computer (at least, not at first). I built a desktop PC that I had meant to last me awhile, and it seemed to make more sense to me to use my desktop at my desk, and my laptop on the go and at school. The problem here was that although I could run iTunes on my laptop and on my desktop, I couldn’t figure out a workable (and reasonable) method of maintaining access to my media on both my laptop and my desktop. I toyed with external drives, synchronizing files, copying iTunes library files—nothing worked the way I wanted it to. I wanted a workflow that would be easy to maintain, which meant I wanted things like metadata, ratings, album art to be the same everywhere. I also didn’t care too much for the idea of moving an external drive between my laptop and desktop, or even having to use an external drive on my desktop in the first place. The solution here was to just use the laptop for media.

Another point I discovered was that iTunes, for all of its supposed excellence in integrating with the iPod, doesn’t allow you to re-encode files it syncs to an iPod to a lower bitrate. The one exception to this is if you have an (oppressively small) iPod shuffle, in which case this option is built right into iTunes. For all other iPods, however, you’re out of luck.

The solution I came across here was a set of workflows that allowed me to duplicate my lossless files as lossy files. I then made a smart playlist with those lossy files and had that sync with my iPod. (This didn’t automatically keep my metadata (mainly ratings/playcount) in sync automatically, but one of the workflows facilitates this. If only I remembered to run it.)

Now today I was trying to update my library to feature album art. The first problem here is that in order to get album art from iTunes, you need an iTunes account—something I’ve refused to get because I won’t give Apple a credit card number. I got around this restriction by redeeming a code for some free songs that was readily available online (presumably as a part of some sort of promotion). Unfortunately, however, there were still a number of albums that iTunes (ostensibly) didn’t have art for, which confused me a bit, since I didn’t have any trouble finding a number of these albums in the iTunes Store. (I tried changing the metadata on my computer using iTunes’ clunky editor to match what was in the iTunes Store, but that didn’t work either.)

So then I had to search around for album art, which worked well for a little while—until I realized that I was adding artwork to my lossy files only. Since manipulating album artwork in the first place doesn’t exactly qualify as “fun” or “simple” in iTunes (at least not when you’re doing it on any significant scale), this pissed me off enough to write this blistering critique of iTunes.

There are a bunch of other interface issues that bug me. For example, whenever you edit metadata in iTunes and it takes more than a moment, you get this stupid progress bar—which prevents you from clicking anywhere else in the interface. So you have to wait for it to get your album art copied before you can move onto the next one (read: figure out which one the next one is), which is a pretty stellar waste of time. Podcast support is pretty unimpressive—sometimes I download podcasts without subscribing to a feed, but there’s no way to tell iTunes that those podcasts belong under “podcasts” and not “music” in my library. I really prefer Windows Media Player’s notion of a “Now Playing” playlist, which was an easy way to just pick and choose some songs on the spur of the moment and queue them up however you wanted.¹ I don’t like how any media file that I ever play ends up in my library automatically, to the point that I go out of my way to open files in QuickTime instead of iTunes. And, although this isn’t a complaint specific to iTunes, I’m really sick of companies integrating music stores into music players and not letting the user turn the “store” part off.

And a major part of my annoyance is the knowledge that these issues probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. After all, nowadays it seems that every update to iTunes is just meant to add some new syncing functionality to some new Apple product that I don’t own, to the point that media functionality is utterly neglected. It’s not like my complaints are new, or that I’m the first to express them—it’s just that Apple has been entirely apathetic to them and has practically zero incentive to improve.

Big surprise.

1. Party Shuffle mode is somewhat like this, but it’s more convoluted and less flexible than WMP’s approach. [↩]

Comments (0) | Apple, Geekish