Wow. I ran across this collection of 438 Windows XP Tips tonight when I was using Google to look for the way to log a user off when the screensaver starts.
The answer is in this collection (tip 81) – along with 437 other tips!
I’ll have to dig through the rest of them. I’ll bet there’s some gold in there.
This is a cool article about removing the built-in infra-red filter from your Digital Rebel camera. People do this so that they can perform astronomy photography, but it usually renders the camera useless for normal daytime photography.
This article explains how to replace the IR filter with a piece of glass, and that you can either use an external IR filter or setup a custom white balance setting to compensate for the lack of the built-in IR filter.
It’s a pretty cool hack and there are lots of photos of the guts of the camera. Also, at the end of the article is a list of good references for hacking the Digital Rebel.
Will I be performing this hack? Not too likely. But it’s cool.
This is too funny not to share. A silly little stop-motion film about a motorcycle gang.
After I downloaded the Bootie 2006 Mashup album I opened the mp3s in MP3Tag to check the tags and they were all cut off at 30 characters.
I assumed the tags were no good so I hand fixed them and blogged about it. I have had this problem in the past with mp3 tags.
Then the fine folks at BootieSF commented on my blog stating that they were sure the tags should be good.
I re-downloaded the files and started looking at them. I found a shareware mp3 tag editor – Tag&Rename and installed that. It showed that the mp3tags were fine.
It was time to hit Google. I found the ID3.org web site where they manage all the mp3 tag info. Man, there’s a lot of stuff there.
It turns out that ID3v1 is very limited. You get 128 characters at the front of the file and the fields are length limited. This is the format:
| Song Title | 30 characters |
| Artist | 30 characters |
| Album | 30 characters |
| Year | 4 characters |
| Comment | 30 characters |
| Genre | 1 byte |
The IDv2.x format is much more flexible and has a 256MB limit on length. It can go at the begining or the end of the file and can have whatever fields you like in it.
It would appear that the folks at BootieSF are putting both ID3v1 and ID3v2.x tags on the files. I have not found anything that states that you can’t do this, and Tag&Rename doesn’t seem to have a problem with this, but apparently MP3Tag doesn’t like it.
I have registered at the MP3Tag forums and posted a question, now I wait and see.
—
I have had a couple of back and forths with the developer of MP3tag and he says that the ID3v2 tags on the Bootie files are bad: “Mp3tag skips the ID3v2 tag because it contains an invalid TCON frame (incorrect frame length).”
I suggested that MP3tag should be fixed to read in the ID3v2 tags anyway and he said “No, I don’t think so.”
So my latest post was:
So it is not your opinion that MP3Tag should help the user by reading in all the ID3v2 tag information it can?
You would rather have reduced functionality and display the 30 character limited ID3v1 tags?
Sorry, I don’t agree. I really like MP3Tag, but a lot of the mp3s that I come across apparently have malformed ID3v2 tags and I’d rather use a program that helped me fix the bad tags instead of throwing away the data that is useful.
So I guess I’ll have to stop using MP3Tag and find something else. Which is a shame, because I really like MP3tag.
I guess I need to find a new mp3 tagging program. The one I downloaded to see what was going on is nice, but they want $30 for it (which isn’t too bad,) but the program isn’t that nice. Any suggestions?
It’s a shame because I really like MP3tag… Maybe the developer will come around.
Homeland Security run amuck.
FedEx refused to ship this persons containers even though they were *empty*. The reason they were refused was because of the words written on the outside! They said they looked like “bomb making materials” – even though they were empty!
This, I think, is rich: I just got back from the FedEx on Queen Anne, where I had been trying to ship a box of products from Greenwood Space Travel Supply to a potential client, just as samples of my packaging work.
I had them in a paper bag, mostly a collection of metal pint cans and a couple of brown apothecary jars. I was worried about how to pack them so they wouldn’t break, so I went up to the FedEx guy with the bag and asked him what kind of box I should use. He immediately pulled out—I think just by chance—the bottle of “Rocket Fuel,” which has a label that looks like this:
FedEx guy: Is this really what this is? Rocket fuel?
Me [laughing, used to this reaction from being at the space-travel supply store]: Oh, no, no, no. Of course not. It’s… made-up. Kind of a joke. It’s actually full of sugar, which I just put in to give it some weight, but that’s all it is.
FedEx guy: You can’t ship this.
The moral of the story seems to be that you should package up your “bomb making materials” at home before you bring them to ship.
As always, Keith is right on target.
I’m listening to this Best of Bootie 2006 mashup collection and totally grooving on it!
I must have more! And more there is. There is tons of stuff out there!
I started browsing around the BootieSF site and found all kinds of stuff!
Start here with more of A and D’s mashups.
Then you can go grab Party Ben’s stuff.
Head over to DJ Earworm’s pad for more goodies.
DJ Jay-R has some stuff in his annoying navigation ridden blog.
Dr. John has a bunch of stuff here and says he will send you a CD for free if you send him an email! I’ll have to do that.
Matt Hite over on Beatmixed has some stuff here, here and here.
Communist Remixes For The People have some remixes here.
Tristan Shout has stuff on his page.
Here are DJ Zax’s remixes.
I’m running low on link juice, so I’m going to stop now. But there is plenty more where this came from!
P.S. Free Download Manager and the FlashGot plugin are your friends!
Wow. This is an absolutely amazing collection of mashups. Fabulous song selections, amazingly well remixed. This one is going to stay on my Nano for a long time.
Make sure you grab the bonus tracks too. The Duran Duran vs. Rick James mashup is hilarious!
Updated: I had written “(as usual for these mashups the mp3 tags are a mess)” and the people at Bootie read my blog and added the comment below. So I re-downloaded the files and looked at them in a different tag editor and they seem to be fine!
It would appear that MP3Tag is chopping off the tags for some reason. Time to find out why that is.
So the tags on the files are fine!
This is so cool. The velociraptor is so awesome.
