Month: January 2008

Wildest Police Videos – Who thinks those special effects are helping the show?

John BunnellHoly cow! My TIVO offered me “Wildest Police Videos” today in the suggestions section so I thought I’d take a peek. The special effects are even worse now than they were before when I gave up watching it a couple of years ago.

I really enjoy watching the type of videos presented in this show, and host John Bunnell, while a little big on himself, is an entertaining enough host/voiceover. But who is the genius who thinks that every time a car moves there needs to be the sound of screeching tires, or whenever a tractor trailer is shown that we need to hear a truck horn sounding.

Also, I think a good quarter of television viewers these days must have some kind of DVR unit now where they can replay these videos as they see fit (if not, and they want the replay ability, they can buy one). I think it would be useful to replay the action now and then for some crucial segment to make a point, but pointlessly replaying the entire video segment by segment over and over again is obviously just trying to fill up the timeslot with no value-add to the presentation. Even cutting to the host and having him stand there and describe the action is preferable to those terrible effects.

I finally got fed up with the excess and just deleted the program without even getting half way through it.

What is really needed is to have the already great action sequences with John’s description of the circumstances (largely what he’s doing now) and then, to fill in the time freed up by not replaying each scene a half dozen times, have some follow up to the action. You know, “Was sentenced to 5 years in jail.” or “The policeman was injured but returned to work after 3 weeks.”.

This stuff is already sensational enough, it doesn’t need any help. Just some context.

“David Blaine’s” Street Magic

This spoof on those street magic videos is great. What do you think would happen if someone *really* could do the tricks that those street magicians do… and doesn’t stop doing them?

The two hapless marks in these videos are a riot, and “David Blaine” takes himself *almost* as seriously as the real thing…

The other videos in this series are here and here.

How to fix choosing the wrong CDDB album when ripping CDs in iTunes?

RecallI run Vista Home Premium and am using iTunes 7.5 as I write this.

I’m currently ripping the latest Harry Potter audiobook so that I can listen to it on my iPod. For most discs I am prompted to choose which “album” I wish to use. For consistency I am going with each track named as a chapter/letter (i.e. 1a, 1b, etc.).

Somebody, with a different numbering scheme inadvertently used the identical album naming convention so, for one of my discs I had to guess (hey 50% odds, not bad right?) when I chose the “other album” I ended up with different chapter names.

Now, when I pull the CD out and re-insert it, iTunes has locally recorded the incorrect track names for me and associated them with some unique identifier on the disc. How to remove the association between an CD and the CDDB album information once you’ve selected it?

Since I don’t really use CDs except to rip them to my collection, losing that information is not a big deal for me. So I just shut down iTunes, went to “C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes” and deleted the “CD Info.cidb” file.

Start up iTunes, insert the disk and *presto* I’m again prompted for the album. I will, of course, be prompted for every audio CD I stick in my CD player going forward, but again, that’s not an issue for me.

How to rip an audiobook to iTunes so it has bookmarks

RecallI won’t debate the ethics of ripping and sharing CDs in this post. Suffice it to say that folks who know me know my stand on this issue.

Where I can get audiobooks already in MP3 format I just do that. It saves a LOT of hassle. I even will get them in DRM’d format as I don’t tend to listen to audiobooks more than once.

But there is still a lot of content out there that you can get only on CD that I want to listen to on my iPod (I don’t have a CD player in my car, nor do I intend to get one), so I consider it fair use to purchase the CD and rip it for my own use on my iPod.

Steps:

  • I tend to listen to lengthy audiobooks (ones that I really wouldn’t have the time to read) so they often have many CDs. In iTunes I go to Edit > Preferences…  then click on the “Advanced” tab and then on the importing sub-tab I temporarily set:
  • “On CD Insert” = “Import CD and Eject”,
  • “Import using” = “AAC Encoder”,
  • “Setting” = “High Quality (128 kbps)”  <– personal preference, you can set for “Spoken Podcast” but I like the higher sound quality better.
  • Start putting your CDs in and, with luck, you’ll be offered albums from CDDB that will label your tracks for you. When  there is a conflict (sometimes different CD tracks are uploaded for the same CDs – usually by folks with differing ideas about how the tracks should be labeled), you’ll be offered a choice of available albums. You aren’t given anything more than the album name (no track details) at this stage, so pick one and make sure that you pick the same “style” from now on so that all your tracks will be labeled consistently. I’ll post a subsequent article about how to correct an incorrect choice in a few days.
  • Once you’ve pulled in all of your CDs fire up xnview (a free graphic and photoviewer) and navigate to where your tracks are located. If you don’t know where this is, right-click on the track in iTunes and choose “Show in Windows Explorer” (sorry Mac users). You may find that your tracks have been stored in more than one folder depending on the naming that you got from CDDB. In xnview, select all of the *.m4a files (aac encoded) and right click to select “Rename…”.
  • You’ll be presented with a dialog titled “Batch Rename” (as of xnview version 1.91.6). In the upper right corner check the “Extension” box and type “m4b”. You’ll see all the files you selected with the old name and the proposed new names showing at the bottom of this dialog. Click “Rename”.
  • Back in iTunes, select all of the tracks that you’ve just renamed and delete them (you’ll see little exclamation points appearing beside them as iTunes figures out that it can no longer find the files).
  • Then select File > Add Folder to Library… and choose the folders with the renamed files in them.
  • For ease of listening I create a smart playlist for these audiobooks:
  • I usually use the “Album Name contains” and use some significant part of the audiobook name
  • I also specify that the play count < 1
  • Make sure you sort by the track name. If you end up with a bad sorting order (sometimes happens with > 9 chapters), consider making two smart playlists and then use the Rating to separate them – one star rating for the first 9 chapters, none for the rest and then add this as a criteria for the smarplaylist.

Then, when I’m driving (my most frequent listening venue) all I need to do after I’ve selected the playlist and listened to the playlist starting from the beginning. If, in “settings” on the iPod, I have “Shuffle” set to “songs” then my iPod will stop after each track (my preferred method). I hit the middle button 4 times and I get the next track (the “count” parameter above excludes the one(s) I’ve already listened to). If I have “Shuffle” set to “none” then the iPod will play each track in sequence.  This is different between my older generation iPod (which does not refresh the list dynamically) and my current one (iPod Video – 30 GB) so YMMV.

Hopefully you find this useful.

Want a quiet dinner with just your spouse/friend? Head to Disney World

This Story doesn’t have a lot of meat to it, but what it *does* say speaks volumes.

I have a feeling, since the average American now has WAY TOO MUCH disposable income to help them decide where they should take their kids, that this is only the beginning of such exclusions. Maybe we’ll see kids welcome at normal “family times” and not in the later evening when folks would expect to be able to have a pleasant adult atmosphere. A time when most kids are most certainly getting cranky and restless because *gasp* they’re kids and their moron parents insist on inflicting adult venues and expectations on them.

I feel for the kids, but more, I feel for everybody else who paid to sit next to them…

Near Relativistic Travel Question

I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe episode #128 where they discussed the realities of near relativistic speed travel. One thing I was not clear on was, what happens if you need to have a fleet of ships exploring all of them traveling to the same destination from the same destination?

2 scenarios:

1) You travel some tiny percentage of light faster than your companion ships.  Do you arrive, and now that you’re not traveling at the same speed as the other ships, have to wait potentially thousands of years for your fellow ships?

2) You’re all accelerating at exactly the same rate and traveling at exactly the same speed. But because of relativity, all other ships experience thousands or even millions of years for your journey and you, likewise experience such for their journeys? So, in effect, you’d all vanish relative to each other and you’d never see each other again?

I’ve sent them an email with this question but I’m sure they get so many that they won’t be able to respond (ah, the problems of popularity…).

Prediction: Within 2 years it will be pretty common for thieves to be using RFID

RecallI heard recently about thieves who were using handheld RFID scanners to determine the contents of tractor trailer trucks to see which ones would be worth breaking into.

Such a double-edged sword can be these devices which offer so much convenience for retailers to maintain their inventory.

One of the practices that keep shoppers safe, especially at Christmas when the buying frenzy is at its peak, is to keep purchases out of sight. The trunk of your car is usually good for this. It’s pretty risky to break into a car, especially if a thief doesn’t know that he’ll be rewarded for his efforts.

But picture someone walking through the mall parking lot, a small scanner in hand (or up sleeve) surreptitiously reading the RFID tags for everything within each vehicle. Heck, with the right technology, I’m sure you can do this from within a moving car so one can pretend they are simply slowly looking for a parking spot. Then, once recorded and evaluated against increasingly available RFID tag databases, all the thief needs to do is go directly to the vehicle(s) in question and surgically extract the items of value.

I suppose the next step will be the “Shopper’s Package” that will be offered on vehicles much like you can get a “Sports Package” today. This “Shopper’s Package” will have some kind of stealthing or interference technology that will prevent exactly the scenario above.

There is never a shortage of possibilities…