May 29, 2003
Metadata Hootenanny |
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Metadata Hootenanny lets you easily read/write all the metadata in a QuickTime .mov file, stuff like title, copyright info, etc. It also lets you create chapter tracks which allow your movie to have a menu for jumping to particular points. The normal Quicktime Pro way of setting them it to enter them in a text file and import it. This could be a nice for making QuickTime movies appear a little more professional.
May 27, 2003
Enabling Sendmail as send-only |
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This is something I've been wondering about for a while but never got around to hunting down. This Mac OS X hint explains how to set up Sendmail to start automatically at boot but to only be available locally on the machine. This is very good for setting up automated functions to email updates to you or to use it as a quick 'n dirty way of sending info or files by email from the command line. These instructions were written for OS X but I'm sure can be adapted for any UNIX.
Funny cat clips |
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This is a bunch of "Funniest Animal" type clips that have been edited together. Given the laugh track, it sounds like it was captured from such a show and it was pretty well done.
May 09, 2003
5-User Max in iTunes4 Sharing |
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I had read in a couple of places that iTunes 4's playlist sharing had a limit of 5 simultaneous clients but I hadn't seen anything definitive. Now I have.
iTunes 4: Idle Users of Shared Music May Be Automatically Disconnected
May 08, 2003
Transfers between MP3 Players |
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[Damn, I need more categories or something.]
Someone mentioned this on Slashdot so I went to see if it was true. You can copy MP3s directly from one Nomad Jukebox 3 (or Nomad Zen) to another over FireWire. That's pretty cool. I know the FireWire spec was written to support device-to-device communications but you so rarely see it used. It does mention, however, that it won't transfer DRM'd WMA files. The Slashdot comment was in response to someone desiring iPod-to-iPod transfers and presumably if Apple made such a thing, they would have similar restrictions on DRM'd files.
A "Super-Crasher" Web Page |
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There was recently a story about a little bit of web page code which can crash Internet Explorer for Windows. Today I came across a bit of code which can crash Mozilla on multiple platforms. I thought, "hey, combine the two and you've got one super-crasher web page!" Clicking this link will crash either browser. If you don't have an unaffected browser, here's the code.
<html>
<form>
<input type crash-ie>
</form>
<fieldset style="position:fixed;">
<legend>Crash Moz</legend>
</fieldset>
</html>
May 06, 2003
Problem between MT & WebDAV? |
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I followed some basic instructions for enabling WebDAV on this server. In the httpd.conf I uncommented the modules and I added a new directory with access controlled by an htpasswd file. I created the directory, created the htpasswd file and when I tried it (using iCal publishing) it worked. Browsing the blog worked just fine but I ran into trouble once I tried to save a blog entry. I could create, edit, preview entries but when I tried to save, the browser just spun its wheels. I couldn't save an entry again until I went into the httpd.conf, commented out all the stuff I added, and restarted the web server. I'll have to look into this some more, I'm sure at some point I'll want to use WebDAV. I noticed other problems related to the order in which Apache modules loaded, perhaps there's an order issue between mod_dav and mod_perl.
New Animatrix Short Online |
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Part 2 of "The Second Renaissance" (that sounds funny) is out now. If you're on-campus, you might want to download from here but otherwise, AOL has so much bandwidth, you're probably better off going to the first link. Plus the campus link is straight to the large version and the official site lets you pick the size you want.
May 05, 2003
May 15, Mark Your Calendar |
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William Gibson was right when commented on linking to this story, "Nobody, but nobody does cults like the Japanese." Members of a cult named "Panawave Laboratory" believe, amongst other things, that humanity will be destroyed May 15th by massive earthquakes. They also think saving Tama-chan, Japan's "celebrity seal" will save humanity. Saving Tama-chan from what, I'm not sure, but there is a separate story about Tama-chan getting hooked in the eye by a fishing line. Tama-chan has more than a passing resemblance to a number of anime characters which I think better explains the characters than Tama-chan's celebrity status.
Gibson tried to link directly to a story but appears Mainichi Daily News uses some kind of dynamically generated URLs so his link didn't work. Currently there a couple of stories on their front page, including a nice photo essay layout, but it appears you can use their search box to look for "panawave" and have good results.
A number of other snippets of text caught my eye, most of them because it's suprising to me that they're considered "Top News."
"Hard-up gangsters turn to Tokyo to flex muscles" [I'm not picturing what a down-and-out Yakuza would look like]
"Naked teen-age boy dies in apartment fire" [Why did they include the "naked" part in the headline?]
"Grass-eating hikers fall ill" [That's odd to see anywhere]
"Schoolgirl goes on deadly arson spree" [ditto]
"Tokyo Electric Power has been forced to shut down all of its nuclear power plants pending safety inspections." [Now that's news! Scary on a couple of levels, especially to someone like me who's more pro-nuclear power than most people]
"'Project Kaisei' A mystery novel on Japan's nuclear conspiracy." [This is weird because it's a link to Amazon appearing right below the above story!]
"Congratulating the people of Poland as they celebrate their National Day. (May 3) ... Congratulating the people of the Netherlands as they celebrate their Queen's birthday. (April 30)" [No way would a U.S. media outlet be that international and polite. Holy crap, this is like a regular thing, congratulating nations on their National Days and having blurb written by some representative of the state in response! That's kind of nerdy but cool.]
iTunes-BPM script |
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iTunes 4 added a "BPM" (Beats Per Minute) field to its ID3 tag choices. Of course CDDB and it's ilk don't include BPM in their information so you have to fill this in yourself. The standard solution is to use a program which has you tap (the mouse or keyboard) to the beat of a song and displays the BPM of your tapping. Assuming you're not totally rhythmically impaired, the BPM of your tapping should match the the BPM of the song. Here's a JavaScript Beats per minute Calculator which you can use at this page or download the source to run locally off your hard drive. Since adding BPM is something you may want to do in iTunes now, someone wrote an AppleScript to add a BPM calculator to iTunes. I haven't tried it yet but it seems like a good idea.
Star Wars Lightsaber Kid |
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I feel bad for this kid, but not enough to not post this link. Make sure to watch the original and the one with added visual and audio effects. Seriously, I'm sure we've all done equally dorky things in private but damn, don't leave evidence of it laying around!
Radmind reaches 1.0 |
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From MacInTouch:
Released after an extended beta-testing period, Radmind 1.0 is a suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machines. It can detect changes to any managed filesystem object (files, directories, links, etc.) and can optionally reverse the change. For Mac OS X, Radmind Assistant provides a graphical interface to the command-line tools. Radmind is free for Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris.
May 01, 2003
Daily Show: Bush vs. Bush |
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Here's a funny clip from The Daily Show pitting President Bush against Candidate Bush. Requires RealPlayer.
