Mental Hygiene » media

Benjamin likes to bounce.

option8 — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:18:11 +0000

60 days of music

option8 — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:00:54 +0000

at some point later today, i will have finally finished playing through my entire iTunes library once, with no repeats. this was an exercise partly to give me a continuously varied soundtrack while i work, and partly as a means of discovering the music i already own, but never gets played.

to do so, i’ve set up a “playcount zero” smart playlist thusly:

play count is 0.
no audio books or podcasts.
no Christmas music. (i have a late November-December 26 playlist just for those)
live updating (so, once a song is played, it’s removed from the list)

then i reset the playcounts on all my music to zero.

i’ve been listening to this playlist continuously while i work for the last several months now, watching it dwindle from 57 days down to a few hours. i’ve discovered quite a few things along the way.

i have a lot of duplicates, unlabeled or mislabeled tracks. i’ve been weeding out most of those as they come up.
my wife’s music collection, which i added into mine when we moved in together, isn’t too different from my own. with the exception of all the a capella she has in there.
there’s a lot of crap in there that neither i nor my wife will claim. seriously, Ashlee Simpson? where the hell did i get that from?
a lot of tracks have several minutes’ silence in the middle, followed by a “hidden” track at the end. very annoying. anybody have a suggestion of how to separate those tracks automatically?

idea for Amazon

option8 — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:18:52 +0000

here’s an idea for Amazon. i know, they’ve got enough money, what with being the central repository for all the world’s media…

anyhoo. i’m an avid audiobook consumer. i really do prefer the Audible version of many books to the dead tree version. one thing making me lean in the direction of getting a Kindle is that it can store and play audiobooks as well as e-books. Amazon is now the owner of Audible, which is what triggered the following thought.

one problem with a lot of audiobooks (for instance, one of my favorites The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman) is that there is no way to handle illustrations, charts and graphs in the audio-only format.

i’m sure you already see where i’m going with this: embedded with the Kindle version of the Audible download, there should be a bundle of the images, illustrations and other visual material that would normally be lost in the translation to audio-only.

and, if Amazon/Audible is smart about it, they make it an open enough format that other audio players that have high enough resolution screens (iPod, iPhone, internet tablets, etc) can support the mixed format, too.

flipping pages example.

option8 — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:44:25 +0000

click on the images above to see another new “gadget” i’m working on. it’s a script that uses jQuery and CSS to achieve a rudimentary “page flipping” animation without Flash. still a work in progress. more examples and documentation will be found here: clickheredammit.com/pageflip

share and enjoy.

your kid sucks at piano.

option8 — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:22:10 +0000

required reading

option8 — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:58:30 +0000

my 3:37 of fame

option8 — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:57:28 +0000

That’s me on Letterman in March of 2006, performing a post-it portrait of Biff Henderson.

This, of course, the ultimate result of the Elvis mosaic.

Terry Pratchett

option8 — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:41:25 +0000

one of my favorite authors, and the funniest writer alive, is dying.

damn.

been there. done that. wrote the HOWTO.

option8 — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:23:50 +0000

what was it i said about imitation and flattery?

forget it. i feel ripped off now.

remember VH1′s PopUp Video?

option8 — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:22:13 +0000

with my newfound freedom, the result of working for myself, i’ve found i have a good deal more creative energy than i have paying clients. as a result, i’ve started working more on my own pet projects, like the sudoku solver. i’m working on a new project these days, another one of those ideas that came to me in the shower.

for some reason, i was thinking about music videos, probably along the lines of “video killed the radio star, but then MTV killed the video, so all we’re left with is crap”

anyhoo, it got me thinking of VH1′s PopUp Video. somehow, that led me to the idea of a PopUp-Video-like overlay for YouTube.

so, that’s what i’m working on. a means of annotating any video on YouTube, Google Video, or other similar services. the interface and implementation are fairly clunky at this point, but when it’s a little more polished, i’ll post it either here or on ClickHereDammit.com.