electric relaxation

[While I'm nerding the f--- out...]

I really like using playlists to keep an arbitrary subset of my music sync’ed to the iPod; it’s the only sane way to deal with, for example, a 20GB iPod and a 45GB music collection. So conceptually what I want is the following:

1. The ability to keep a subset of my music tagged for iPod use
2. Easy addition and removal of music from the subset in (1).
3. A singles playlist suitable for use with the various shuffle modes, with no more than one entry for each song I’ve deemed “single-worthy”.

As an aside, my definition of a single is essentially a song that I really like - that is, one that I have at least at some point played many times on repeat.

Anyway, while these requirements seem simple, they’re actually quite hard to achieve with standard playlists. For example, using a standard playlist, you can only remove music by actually operating on the list, rather than your complete collection. Moreover, since standard playlists are just lists, there’s nothing stopping you from accidentally adding the same track multiple times - easy to do once the singles list gets large. Now you’ve screwed up the shuffle situation, and it’s really obvious since if you shuffle by artist, you’ll end up playing the same song multiple times.

So what I use instead are smart playlists, keyed off two pieces of metadata. The “Grouping” field in the iTunes tag is a free-form text field not really useful for anything else as far as I can tell, so I hijack it for this purpose. I got this part of the solution from Doug’s Applescripts for iTuneswebsite; I adopted and chopped apart the Add/Remove groups scripts.

So I create two smart playlists, iPod Albums and iPod Singles, each populated with music that has the corresponding tag present in the grouping field. To add and remove the tags, I use the scripts to operate on the current selection in iTunes.

Since my Mac died, I’d been doing the Grouping metadata management manually via the track info editor. This eventually became tedious enough that I rewrote the scripts in VBScript for use in Windows.

iPod Playlist Management Scripts

The file is a tarball rather than a zip because Gmail refuses to let you upload a zipfile with VBscripts in it for “security reasons”. I figured they just didn’t bother scanning tarballs at all, but it looks like they still check them on download. Weird.

I got my T42 laptop to output DVI 1600×1200 via the port replicator/docking station, by porting a large patchset that I randomly found attached to a bug report in the Xorg bugzilla over to the Ubuntu ATI driver sources. I am utterly amazed that I actually managed to accomplish something productive via the magic of open source (leaving aside for a moment the question of how this deficit of functionality arose in the first place). Perhaps as an act of atonement I’ll take a day off from my incessant Linux bashing. Or at least a half-day.

Anyway, in case through some miracle another lost soul out with the same issue stumbles upon this page, here are the relevant goodies:

• Patch against Ubuntu Dapper sources
• Ubuntu Dapper package (rebuilt with patch)
• Rebuilt radeon_drv.so

YMMV. Note that this driver is not compatible with the current radeon kernel modules in Dapper. So you have to prevent radeon.ko from loading. The easiest way I know is to just move it out of the way. I don’t care since DRM/DRI is broken for the RV350 card (a.k.a. the Mobility 9600) anyway.

Steve Jobs’ not so secret blog. I happened upon this while, in a fit of Google Rage, I was scouring the internet looking for others who sympathize with my view that the $100 laptop is nothing more than an inane megalomaniacal attention-grabbing scheme.

Ride: Old @$$ Ferraris, 308GT and a 28x something
Where: Outside Bottom of the Hill in Potrero

There must be some kind of exotic car shop, or dealership, or just a bunch of flush druglord kingpins living right outside Bottom of the Hill. I found these two gems on the same street that I spotted the Gallardo. Too bad the pictures are so dim. I actually think the budget camera on my Nokia 6600 has a better night exposure mode than Lisa’s Razr.

Helicopter crashes on YouTube. Prompted by the MythBusters episode where they bust the myth that a postage stamp on one of the rotor blades can crash a helicopter.

I found this linked in a Slate article examining the public’s misplaced trust in news photography. It’s a compilation of notorious digital manipulations in the media.

Ride: Old Ass F— Land Rover
Where: Berkeley

A friend’s roommate drives this crazy ass ride. He says it runs great. I say it’s great that it runs at all.

Ride: Bentley Coupe
Where: I-280 S near Portola

… Bentley Coupin’, switchin lanes. Another midday marvel on 280. This one hopped on at Alpine Valley/Portola, hot on the heels of the Aston Martin.

Ride: Aston Martin DB9
Where: I-280 S near Sand Hill

280 and Sand Hill, weekdays after 11 AM. That’s when the nice cars come out to play. Makes sense, what better way to kill a Thursday than driving down to the Stanford Golf Course in your Aston Martin.

Update:
Maybe this really isn’t that weird, but the funhouse warping in the second image really trips me out.

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed in a press conference that an AOL-style accident, in which copious amounts of personal information were divulged, could never happen at Google. No matter how confident you are in your Chinese wall and whatever other magic tricks you have in isolating and protecting that information, making such a bold claim just seems like a really bad idea to me - as in an invitation to a rude awakening and embarassment.