onotob

The guys at Blizzard Entertainment have a great sense of humor, which never fails to make their games a joy to play and their web site a joy to visit every April Fool’s day. This year is no exception.

First, they have introduced a new hero class for the Wrath of the Lich King extension to World of Warcraft: The Bard. Yes, you can now shred your axe in a most excellent way, doing massive “Rock” damage to your enemies.

Also, Blizzard is entering the console world once again with World of Warcraft: The Molten Core! The first 40-man raid zone, where many an adventurer cut their teeth, is now available for the Atari 2600! Ten unique raid bosses with 6 unique models! Move in any of 8 direction! Has sound!

I lol’d.

Posted at 10:30 am.
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Posted at 11:07 am.
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I know, many people (nerds) reading this post will immediately say “duh”, but I just need to comment on this.

Shannon took a trip recently and when she got back I downloaded all the pictures she took onto a MacBook Pro I’m using. Last night she wanted to get those photos onto her own Mac, so we sat down next to each other and fired up the little Bluetooth File Transfer app that comes with OS X.

After selecting the files to send (about 100 images, between 1.5 and 2.5 MB apiece), the first thing I noticed was the terrible transfer rate. 75 KB/s at the top end, mostly in the 50 KB/s range. The next thing I noticed was that the transfer would fail every 5 pictures or so, causing us to start the process over again, manually picking up where the app failed.

After about 3 such failures, I remembered that OS X is built on UNIX and so we had a whole slew of robust applications at our disposal, namely SSH and SCP. So, I quickly made an account for myself on her machine and enabled remote login. A few quick keystrokes and the SCP transfer was started.

The transfer rate jumped into the range of 1.0 – 2.0 MB/s and all the files moved over seamlessly, all with very little initial setup. Even the OS X help files were useful, with a quick search for “SSH” bringing me straight to the document describing how to allow remote login.

So, score 1 for command line.

Posted at 3:33 pm.
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Posted at 9:53 am.
2 Comments

Posted at 11:34 am.
1 Comment

via videosift.com

Posted at 1:12 pm.
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Posted at 2:54 pm.
1 Comment

I started brewing my own beer recently, and I’m here to tell you, it’s pretty sweet. You can instantly tap into a rather ancient human activity, spend a little time in the kitchen playing some specialized equipment and at the end of it all you have five gallons of beer. Five. Gallons.

So, while I was pondering what a cool thing homebrewing is, I figured I might as well blog about it. A lot. On a site dedicated to such blogging. With JR, who is now also brewing.

And so WorldofWort.com was born. Hopefully, it will flourish.

Posted at 10:04 pm.
2 Comments

iTunes handles .m3u playlists in a way that has been found wanting by many advocates of streaming music. You see, iTunes thinks you would like to add the contents of an m3u playlist into your library in the same way that you add actual mp3 files. This works fine if the m3u contains only a single reference to some Internet radio stations continuous stream, but it fails quite spectacularly when the playlist actually contains a number of items, all of which will be streamed individually. MyTunesRSS, Jinzora and essentially every other personal remote music streaming solution uses m3u playlists in this way.

So, after discovering this problem in iTunes I quickly found a solution. Some kind soul out there had written a nice little piece of Applescript to fix this problem by generating a new user playlist in iTunes and adding the m3u entries to it. And some even kinder soul had wrapped this Applescript up into a nice little .app which can be associated with all .m3u files and does all this magic, well, automagically.

But then MacWorld happened.

So, it seems that the iTunes 7.6 update has broken this functionality. The code now throws the error:

Can’t get item 1 of {alias “Macintosh HD:Users:username:Desktop:playlist.m3u”}.

I am a total Applescript n00b so I cannot immediately find out what is wrong, so I’m posting this so that perhaps some Internet traveler will stumble upon it and, having the same problem as I, quickly find the proper solution. Everyone else posting about this issue apparently stopped blogging some time in 2006.

Here is the offending code:

on open m3uFileList
	tell application "iTunes"
		activate
		set newPlaylist to make new user playlist
		set name of newPlaylist to (current date) as string
		repeat with m3uFile in m3uFileList
			add m3uFile to newPlaylist
		end repeat
		play newPlaylist
	end tell
end open

Posted at 3:22 pm.
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Posted at 3:01 pm.
4 Comments