iTunes 2
Posted: Wed 9 August, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Getting Organised, Weirdness 5 Comments »So, in yesterday’s post, Gordon commented that he’d had iTunes running for three years without a problem. Great, Bully for you. I will, however, just point out this comment he made on my earlier post about iTunes being a piece of crap that insisted on ordering things its own way, rather than some form of logic involving, oh, say a folder structure.
I used to have all my MP3s in a similar structure. Once the files are in iTunes though I don’t care where they are but that does mean you’ll need to tag the MP3s.
OK, so it’s run fine for three years. But the start-up was a pain in the arse, because of having to re-tag and edit all the files that iTunes can’t be arsed to do automatically.
As that post I wrote showed, ten days ago I’d only just started with iTunes. So I ended up with 6,000 files I needed to re-edit. Frankly, fuck that – I want a piece of software that “just works”, not some fucking hunk of junk that insists on me changing my workflow to suit it. So I uninstalled it, and went back to RealPlayer, which “just works” and suits me fine. I’ll maybe use iTunes for buying tracks, but I’m more likely to do that now through the website. (EDIT : Turns out I need iTunes installed to use the iTunes store)
But – hang on – RealPlayer’s now missing a buttload of tracks. Half the files have disappeared, and it’s saying they’ve been deleted off the hard drive. So I check – off to c:/music/faithless and – what the fuck? – there’s only two albums there. Which are, funny enough, the ones iTunes had no problem with. So where’s everything else?
Luckily I’d still got a total back up on the old PC, and was able to restore the full music collection. But it still took five-plus hours to transfer everything back across the network. Oh, and why does iTunes insist on ripping new albums (by one artist, not “Various”, before anyone asks) into a folder called “Compilations”? Or is that just something I screwed up somewhere along the line?
Maybe it was a coincidence, and nothing to do with iTunes. Maybe it was just a fuckup, or (as Gordon implies) me doing something wrong. But whatever, I won’t be using iTunes to “manage” my music again.
JPG vs RAW
Posted: Tue 8 August, 2006 Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Photography 5 Comments »In a post I wrote last week, Richard asked me a question.
Do you shoot JPG or RAW images. I understand that RAW images need more post-processing on your computer, but are there quality gains to be made by doing that?
Way back in November ’05 I wrote a bit about image manipulation, JPG, and RAW and basically said that at that time I was still using JPG rather than RAW.
And to be honest, that situation still hasn’t changed. I still shoot in fine JPG rather than RAW – and I’m probably going to attract howls of derision from other photographers now for saying so. But I just can’t get into RAW. I know it gives me a greater flxibility, a greater range of data and image information, and can allow me to do a lot more, and resurrect data from blown-out areas of a photo. All of which JPG just can’t do – you take the photo, and really that’s it (well, unless you want to spend a lifetime in Photoshop® doing image cloning, airbrushing, resampling, and all that bollocks)
It’s the workflow with RAW that I just can’t be bothered with, I suppose. And maybe that’ll change once I’ve done a set of photos and had them all fucked-up and blown out without the details I want. But so far – and we’re talking about five years of photos here – that hasn’t happened. Yeah, there’re a couple of images where I would like some more data, and where sections have blown out because of light/white conditions. But those sections are small, and it’s only when I’m looking at entering those images for a competition or something that it becomes an annoyance. And even then the annoyance is a minor one.
If I were taking shots of an important event – a wedding, for example – then I’d probably move over to shooting RAW + JPG, to make sure I’d got a backup for a one-off event. For the normal stuff I do, I’m quite happy to just keep using Fine JPG at the moment.
Maybe as time goes on I’ll get to a point where I do need to use RAW. I hope I’ll be able to identify when that time comes, and then I’ll probably also invest in some decent software to handle/edit RAW files, rather than just Photoshop (Sorry, Gordon, I just can’t get into Picasa at the moment either) but for now, JPG suits my needs just fine.
Crystal Web
Posted: Mon 7 August, 2006 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, News Leave a comment »So, 15 years ago yesterday, the Web was really born. Happy Crystal anniversary, Internet.
I first got online properly back in about ’92-’93, which was through a JANET line from Oxford University. A whole 9.6Kbps ( 9,600baud ) – for a university computer centre. I went on a couple of bulletin boards in the US, and while it was OK, and really pretty impressive to be able to be doing computer stuff trans-Atlantically, but still, well, it wasn’t really all that great.
Then in ’96 I worked briefly for a medical company doing some of the first websites. They were promoting their stuff internationally, and created a website to do it. And the beast started from there. Before long I was doing websites, and had my own personal one. (Thankfully, time has since deleted that monstrosity from history) I moved on to work for another company that did online versions of various academic magazines, and worked with SGML and XML. And since then, for the last ten years, I’ve been working on websites. And for the last four I’ve been writing D4D™ too – which is pretty scary in itself.
Dumping Off
Posted: Sun 6 August, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Getting Organised Leave a comment »And now the old PC has bitten the dust and been taken to the same dump as the Shuttle boxes.
This time it’s a truly old Compaq PC with a 1Ghz Athlon processor. The hard-drive got completely reformatted and repartitioned yesterday, once we’d taken off all the old data we might possibly need (which is now sat on yet another spare hard-drive) followed by installing Linux on it. So fairly secure and with data removed. Of course, it still won’t go in the same dump pile as the PC, so it’s going in the mankiest shittiest bin bag I can find – probably along with this week’s collection of dog-shit. Classy.
So now everything’s been moved onto the Dell PC, and all seems to be working fine. I’ve got rid of a hell of a lot of stuff along the way, but yeah, it’s all a lot more organised too. Can’t be bad.
Heading Towards 500,000
Posted: Tue 1 August, 2006 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 1 Comment »Now here’s a scary thing. If you look over on the right, you’ll see a thing about “D4D™ contains [x] words”
Currently it’s just gone over the 495,000 mark – which means that sometime soon I’m going to have written half a million words on d4d™. That’s a pretty impressive figure, or at least I think it is. And because it doesn’t take into account the rants and thoughts, I’m actually already well over that half-million figure already. It’s just I never did a word count on them, so I don’t know exactly what the figure is.
Anyway, it’s not meant to be a milestone or anything – I never set out to write half a million words, and be done with it, or anything like that. And really it’s just a geeky counter, with no real relevance attached to it. But all the same, to me it represents some kind of achievement, to have written that many words – and blethered on in general – for nearly four years (four years exactly, on August 9th) so while it’s ultimately irrelevant, I still find it worth noting.
Or something.
iTunes
Posted: Sun 30 July, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, General, Sweary, Weirdness 2 Comments »With the new PC, I’ve also installed iTunes to deal with a lot of the music. This has turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword.
For a lot of things, iTunes is great – burning CDs, building playlists, buying music downloads – all great. No problem with that at all.
However, it has fallen down big-style on one particular area. It just won’t read in all the files I’ve got. Well, I say that – it reads the files, but in a good 50% of the cases, it doesn’t get the relevant information. Now, Real Player has no problem with the files, and has always been able to keep track of who’s done them, which album, so forth, so fifth. But oh no, not iTunes. It won’t take into account the file structure ( i.e. they’re all kept in a file structure that goes /music/[Artist]/[Album]/[Tracks] )
So in order to make use of iTunes in general, I’m supposed to go through and re-identify about 6,000 files, enter in all the tag information – all of which is in the file structure, and it even shows in iTunes with the file structure identified. It’s just the information that’s fucked. Yet Real Player has got it all with no problem.
Have I missed something? Or am I just going to have to spend time going through the entire fucking file structure, editing all the ID3 tags for all the music that iTunes insists hasn’t got the right information?