Monthly Archives: September 2006

The Dork Report for September 30, 2006

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Me as a LEGO minifig

  • Like Doc­tor Who’s per­pet­u­ally pre­dicted fea­ture film, the Gen­e­sis reunion rumors keep com­ing back. Now The Sun­day Mir­ror cites a source claim­ing Phil Collins’ recent divorce has cleared the way for a 3-piece Bands/Collins/Rutherford Gen­e­sis reunion world tour in 2007. I call bull­shit, but we’ll see.
  • The LEGO Fan­list­ing, a col­lec­tion of LEGO links, includ­ing these clas­sic goodies:
    • Immor­tal­ize your­self as a LEGO “minifig” with The Mini-Mizer. (this is the clos­est I could get to me)
    • The LEGO set I always wanted as a kid! 1977! Wow! I’m old!
    • Field record­ings of LEGOs being dumped on tables.
  • The Guin­ness Book of Records belat­edly rec­og­nizes Doc­tor Who as the longest-running sci­ence fic­tion tele­vi­sion show (it crossed that thresh­old, oh, decades ago).

The Dork Report for September 28, 2006

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  • Claim a space for your­self on the offi­cial site for Neil Gaiman’s new short story col­lec­tion Frag­ile Things (and see if you can find Neil while you’re at it).
  • MyDreamApp round 2 vot­ing is open; vote for 12 out of 18 wannabe America’s Next Top Mac Pro­grams. My favorite (the only one I can pic­ture using) is still Ground Con­trol. The last round fea­tured guest judge com­ments by Mac gurus includ­ing Cabel Sasser from Panic, and this time the guests are emi­nent blog­gers from Dar­ing Fire­ball, The Unof­fi­cial Apple Weblog, et al. (although they seem to be gen­er­ally neg­a­tive about everything!)
  • AguaT, a free band-aid for iTunes 7 that reverts the but­ton styles back to iTunes 6-style blue glossy but­tons. I’m all for fix­ing Apple’s ques­tion­able design choices, but I’m not into per­ma­nently muck­ing around with my sys­tem:

    AguaT works by replac­ing ele­ments of the /resources/ folder in the iTunes appli­ca­tion. These changes are per­ma­nent to an instal­la­tion of iTunes, so if you think you may want to revert back to the default iTunes 7 theme, you should back up iTunes.app before installation.

  • An unnamed source told The Star that unspec­i­fied pro­duc­ers of the Doc­tor Who tv series “decided to make a big bud­get film.” What a tease; there’s no news here. Decid­ing to make a big bud­get movie is decid­edly dif­fer­ent from procur­ing a big budget.
  • Robert Fripp’s lat­est com­pressed overview of King Crim­son, The Con­densed 21st Cen­tury Guide to King Crim­son (1969–2003), comes out Octo­ber 16.

Joseph Arthur — Bowery Ballroom, New York

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Joseph Arthur and Michael Stipe

I hope to post my reac­tions soon (the five stars should give a hint as to the gen­eral tone), but in the mean­time, here’s some cov­er­age of the show on the web: The Tripwire’s review fea­tures excel­lent pho­tographs by Erin Chan­dler. Bill­board also reviews the show and posts a video of Joseph’s duet with Michael Stipe on “In the Sun.”

The Dork Report for September 27, 2006

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  • Because I just can’t help myself, a few more com­ments on iTunes:
    • The iTunes 7.0.1 main­te­nance update has finally dropped. I haven’t noticed any real speed improve­ments, but Apple has fixed the bug of drag­ging image files to the album art win­dow not work­ing. Par­tially fixed, rather… you can now only drag one image, not mul­ti­ple as you used to pre-version 7 (you can still do so via the pop-up Song Info window).
    • I’ve had an “iPod with Video” for months, but just now noticed an odd­ity. One of Apple’s touted fea­tures is the ele­gantly sim­ple “Shuf­fle songs” menu item. One click and you’re served up a ran­dom steam of the entire con­tents of your iPod. The prob­lem is, it draws from the entire con­tents of your iPod, includ­ing video! If a video comes up on shuf­fle, it plays the audio only, with a still from the video serv­ing as album art. Obvi­ously not look­ing at my iPod screen unless I need to change some­thing, the only rea­son I noticed this issue is that it started play­ing a song for which I know I only have the music video pur­chased from the iTunes Store. Video sound­tracks are typ­i­cally of a much lower audio qual­ity than a ded­i­cated MP3 or AAC audio file, so it sounded ter­ri­ble. To avoid hav­ing videos mixed in with your audio, you appar­ently have to forgo the Shuf­fle menu com­mand alto­gether, and take the extra step to nav­i­gate through the “Music” menus or to a playlist you’ve man­u­ally cre­ated yourself.
    • And finally, an iTunes smart playlist ques­tion: is there a way to refresh a smart playlist gen­er­ated by ran­dom? If you set up a smart playlist of, for instance, 10 ran­dom songs from the 1980’s, iTunes will cre­ate exactly that for you, but it appears to be frozen that way unless you change a cri­te­rion. What if I just want a dif­fer­ent 10 songs from the 80’s?
  • Jasper Hauser on design­ing an icon.
  • Steven Heller inter­views Gary Hus­twit, direc­tor of the doc­u­men­tary Hel­vetica.
  • A new record in nar­rowly focused blogs: Hawk Wings focuses exclu­sively on Apple’s Mail.app. Who knew there were so many add-ons?
  • After being in lit­i­ga­tion for nearly 10 years, gui­tarist Robert Fripp osten­si­bly “won” in the early 2000s, with Virgin/EMI’s con­trol of King Crimson/Robert Fripp solo record­ings slated to end in 2003. How­ever, he is still strug­gling to this day with the mega­lithic cor­po­ra­tion, which is using every delay­ing tac­tic (and invent­ing new ones) to avoid ful­fill­ing their legal oblig­a­tion to relin­quish the mate­ri­als they no longer own. In addi­tion, they have repeat­edly put Fripp’s music up for sale as dig­i­tal down­loads, which they expressly do not own the rights to do. How pro­fes­sional musi­cians sur­vive I’ll never understand.
  • Disco is hav­ing Toast for break­fast. A much-needed tool for the Mac, cool-looking and bless­edly cheap.

The Dork Report for September 26, 2006

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  • Green­peace asks for a greener Apple. Although Green­peace is most con­cerned with the nox­ious chem­i­cals in devices Apple mar­kets as dis­pos­able (aka planned obso­les­cence), Apple’s prod­uct pack­ag­ing has also long been an issue. Until recently, it seemed as if they had been mak­ing progress; iPod boxes, for exam­ple, went from large 6″ cubes stuffed with mas­sive hunks of sty­ro­foam to slim card­board sleeves . How­ever, they’ve taken a supris­ing step back­wards with their new plas­tic Nano pack­ag­ing.
  • Bril­liant singer/songwriter Joseph Arthur relaunches JosephArthur.com. One notable new addi­tion is dig­i­tal down­loads of stu­dio (the Junk­yard Hearts EPs are very rare) and live recordings.
  • Time trav­el­ling Doc­tor Who star David Ten­nant dis­cov­ers an unwel­come sur­prise in his own past: his Scot­tish ances­tors were Sec­tar­ian Protes­tants, aggres­sively anti-Catholic and home rule.
  • As usual, Amer­i­can Doc­tor Who fans must prac­tice their patience: the Sea­son Two DVD box set comes out on Jan­u­ary 16, 2007.

The Dork Report for September 22, 2006

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  • Aww, look! The cutest li’l space­ships you ever did see, from IconFactory.
  • Vot­ing is open for the MyDreamApp first elim­i­na­tion round. You can vote for up to 18 projects, so the task is really bet­ter described as choos­ing which 6 will have to leave the island. The three I find most inter­est­ing and/or use­ful to me are Blos­som (a vir­tual plant that feeds on pro­duc­tiv­ity), Ground Con­trol (an at-a-glance view of well, every­thing going on in your Mac), and Whistler (bring­ing music mak­ing to the masses in an amaz­ing new way, which if is tech­ni­cally pos­si­ble, could be huge).
  • Two of my favorite Doc­tor Who sto­ries are com­ing to DVD as parts of the Return of the Mas­ter DVD box set: “The Keeper of Traken” and “Logopo­lis,” plus “Cas­trovalva.” The exhaus­tive repair work done by the Restora­tion Team should put George Lucas to shame for dump­ing sub-par copies of the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­ogy out on DVD.
  • WHO’s a good dog? Park Enter­tain­ment posts details and a poster (WHERE’s the hyphen?) on their site about K-9 Adven­tures.
  • King Crim­son singer Boz Bur­rell died on Thurs­day, and DGM Live posts an free unre­leased mix of Ladies of the Road as tribute.
  • Down­load Peter Gabriel’s Pas­sion Out­takes, a boot­leg of unre­leased record­ings from the Pas­sion ses­sions and loca­tion record­ings for Mar­tin Scorcese’s The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ.
  • Goril­laz’ Phase Two — Slow Boat to Hades, a DVD of videos and live per­for­mances from over the past two years, is com­ing out in Europe on Octo­ber 30. Comes with a CD-ROM and an absurd amount of extras.

The Dork Report for September 20, 2006

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  • Yo La Tengo, Hobo­ken insti­tu­tion, says I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.
  • The endear­ing cat sites just keep com­ing; now we have My Fat Kat (I take it myfatcat.com was taken). I take back every­thing I ever said to Buck­min­ster about his weight. I mean, look at Andy crush­ing his poor owner (her­self not exactly svelt), for cry­ing out loud. (guest sub­mis­sion from Andrea)
  • Arrrr, I be for­get­tin’ Talk Like a Pirate Day yes­ter­day! Bah! ‘Til next year, maties! Undead mon­key! (guest sub­mis­sion from Lady Cut­throat Andrea)
  • Beck’s two-turntables-and-a-microphone D.I.Y. aes­thetic man­i­fests on his next album The Infor­ma­tion’s blank cover and four sheets of stickers.
  • I have a Rubik’s Cube on top of my TV, but I’m too much of an idiot to solve more than the top layer. Is it cheat­ing to read a solu­tion? My feel­ing is that any­thing that involves learn­ing algo­rithms can’t count as cheating.
  • MyDreamApp posts mock­ups of some of its con­tenders, which goes a long way towards clar­i­fy­ing what they’re sup­posed to do.
  • Another detailed iTunes 7 inter­face cri­tique. (spot­ted on Dsandler.org)
  • While every­one (or should I say, every­dork) is gang­ing up on Apple for chang­ing a sin­gle pixel on iTunes, one should remem­ber that the other giant com­puter mega­cor­po­ra­tion is far worse when it comes to inex­plic­a­ble inter­face design. (guest sub­mis­sion from Dave)
  • The MPAA’s Great­est Hits, com­piled on the offi­cial site for the doc­u­men­tary This Film is Not Yet Rated. The very first two items speak vol­umes. Also, I had never heard about Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fic­tion gambit:
    • “1994 — Quentin Taran­tino, fear­ing an NC-17 rat­ing for his cult hit “Pulp Fic­tion,” includes an effects sequence of a head explod­ing when he sub­mits his film to the MPAA as a diver­sion­ary tac­tic. As expected, the MPAA sug­gests that he remove the image of the head explod­ing (which he had never actu­ally planned to include) but allows him to hang onto the image of brains in Samuel L. Jackson’s hair (which he was wor­ried they would reject).”
  • Rhino’s boxed set pack­ag­ing design just gets bet­ter: A Life Less Lived: The Goth Box is bound in black leather and lace, and Tori Amos’ A Piano is, well, guess.
  • Weird Al wants to bowl with the gangstas in “White and Nerdy.” Mul­ti­plat­inum Weird Al nails it again. How can one man cram 800 jokes into 3 minutes?
  • AppleIn­sider reports Apple is scram­bling to slap together iTunes 7.0.1, which read­ers of pre­vi­ous reports will know this Dork Reporter eagerly awaits.

The Dork Report for September 17, 2006

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  • A new addi­tion to the lit­ter of kitty sites Stuff on My Cat (Stuff + Cats = Awe­some), Cats That Look Like Hitler (Kitlers), and Kit­ten­war (may the cutest kit­ten win), comes Cats in Sinks (It’s about cats. In sinks.). I don’t think there’s a way to link to a spe­cific Cat in Sink, but until then, here’s Buckminster’s con­tri­bu­tion. (guest sub­mis­sion from Andrea)
  • It’s your semi-daily Dork Report dose of Doc­tor Who:
  • Cur­rently enjoy­ing LEGO Star Wars II on my Playstation:
    • The offi­cial site is kind of fun; click­ing around earns you lego “studs” (the cur­rency of the game), which you can trade in for cheap down­load­able good­ies, just like Skeeball.
    • Some main­stream press reviews: MSNBC, Vil­lage Voice (there’s an odd error in the first para­graph… if the writer was actu­ally the nerdy col­lege kid he claims to have been, even one who would remem­ber that Marv Wolf­man wrote Cri­sis on Infnite Earths, surely he would remem­ber it had noth­ing at all to do with team­ing up DC and Mar­vel characters?)
  • The Maine national Guard is issu­ing “Flat Dad­dies” and “Flat Mom­mies” to the fam­i­lies of sol­diers serv­ing in Iraq and Afghanistan. No, really. (spot­ted on Big O)

The Dork Report Special Edition: My iTunes 7 Nightmare

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Apple iTunes 7 icon

As Engad­get reports, iTunes 7 may be more than a lit­tle flakey, and I have a night­mare story of my own.

First, some back­ground: I use a Power­Book G4 17″, with a very, very large iTunes library of 16,000 plus tracks, stored on an exter­nal 250 GB LaCie Firewire hard drive. Per­haps unwisely, I was doing sev­eral things at once shortly after down­load­ing the brand new iTunes 7: lis­ten­ing to a smart playlist on shuf­fle, and batch edit­ing tags in another smart playlist (specif­i­cally, edit­ing the Album Artist tags of all my com­pi­la­tions to read “Var­i­ous Artists” — see The Dork Report for Sep­tem­ber 13 for more infor­ma­tion). To com­pli­cate mat­ters, I was run­ning Last.fm in back­ground (itself freshly updated to Ver­sion 1.0.6).

After batch edit­ing tags for sev­eral min­utes, I open­ing the batch info win­dow for another dozen or so. iTunes sud­denly stopped play­ing a few sec­onds into Pink Floyd’s “Time” from The Dark Side of the Moon, and then froze. I noticed Last.fm had frozen as well. I waited until it seemed nei­ther would free up on their own, then I force quit both. I relaunched iTunes, but it was not­i­ca­bly slug­gish (many spin­ning psy­che­delic piz­zas of death for me). I selected a song to get info, and noth­ing hap­pened. I tried another and a tiny excla­ma­tion mark appeared next to it (which I know from expe­ri­ence to mean that a track has been man­u­ally deleted or moved on your hard drive and iTunes can no longer locate it). I ner­vously switched to the Finder and clicked on the music folder on my exter­nal drive. To my hor­ror, the folder was empty, and the cus­tom icon I had applied long ago had disappeared!

Need­less to say, I feared the worst: sev­eral giga­bytes and years worth of music col­lect­ing (not to men­tion irre­place­able tracks pur­chased on the iTunes Store) gone. Not know­ing what else to do, in fact think­ing doing any­thing else might make mat­ters worse, I quit iTunes and restarted my Power­book. The exter­nal drive took longer to mount than usual (I’ve read that Mac OS X checks disks for errors on startup, so per­haps it sensed a prob­lem and was run­ning a repair). Once every­thing had started up and set­tled, I used Disk Util­ity to ver­ify both my inter­nal and exter­nal dri­ves, with no errors reported. Tak­ing the prover­bial deep breath, I opened up my exter­nal Firewire drive… and the folder was back to nor­mal. I launched iTunes, and again, every­thing was nor­mal. As if noth­ing had hap­pened. Thank god, right? But ter­ri­fy­ing that sev­eral giga­bytes of files could dis­ap­pear and reap­pear so easily.

Shaken, I ran Backup to bring my Home folder back­ups up to date, and promptly went to bed to try and calm myself down with a nap.

There are a bevy of other prob­lems being reported on Mac­in­touch, includ­ing the very odd case of large chunks of people’s libraries being flagged as “Explicit.” But I think my story wins.

So. Lessons learned:

  1. For cry­ing out loud, buy SuperDuper already! I’ve never prop­erly backed up my music col­lec­tion for the sim­ple rea­son that I don’t have another drive big enough to dupli­cate it. Time, I think, to start delet­ing crap I never lis­ten to nor wish to keep, and bring it down to a size more eas­ily backed up.
  2. Resist the temp­ta­tion to down­load new soft­ware as soon as it comes out. At the very least, don’t stress-test it with pre­cious, irre­place­able com­puter data.

The Dork Report for September 14, 2006

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  • Zune comes in (eww…) doo-doo brown.
  • I need to find a copy of Scott McCloud’s Destroy, the most vio­lent comic book ever!
  • Despite what their name implies, the Star Wars “Orig­i­nal Tril­ogy” DVDs are cer­tainly not defin­i­tive releases of the orig­i­nal films. The offi­cial word from Lucas­film is that the orig­i­nal edits of the movies are included as bonus mate­r­ial to the spe­cial edi­tion ver­sions, and as such are mere dupes of the 1993 non-anamorphic (hor­ror!) laserdisc ver­sions. (guest sub­mis­sion from Dave)