The Captain’s (B)log

I’ve just spend something like seven hours over the past two days adding ID3 tags to all of my old MP3′s.

In case you didn’t know, ID3 tags are little bits of information that are encoded along with your MP3′s that tell your MP3 player of choice (be it Apple, Sandisk, Zune — yeah, right, a “Zune”, HURR) what the current song’s title, artist, album, etc. are.

Neat, ain’t it? Yeah, it just doesn’t know it by magic.

Now, unfortunately, depending upon how you get your MP3′s, this information is not always included along with the files. (Say, for instance, you ripped your own MP3′s from your private CD collection.) Some CD rippers are thoughtful, and ask you to include artist and album information (though this is still a pain in the ass to fill out, since you have to do every song separately). Some programs (oddly enough, ones you usually don’t pay for) are smart enough to go online to several big open-source CD information sites, check the track lengths on the CD you’re trying to rip, and then figure out what CD it is, filling in the ID3 information for you!

Yeah, that’s if you’re lucky. However, if you’re like a lot of people, you have a massive collection of old MP3′s — most of which you have no idea where they’re from — and none of them have appropriate artist/album/track information. Most of them will have correct file names, but that doesn’t mean crap when you put them on your iPod or whatever. They’ll just show up as a bunch of “Unknown — Unknown Artist — Unknown Album” tracks.

Well, half of all my MP3′s were like this, and it was pretty pathetic.  I’ve always had the intention to fix them all, but it’s a big, big job to take on, and every time I started I put it off.

So, yesterday, I sat down, and I was all like, “I’m going to do this.”  About seven hours later I was done.

What helped me do it?  A little program called EasyTag, available free from your favorite Linux repository. Not the most beautiful program in the world (especially on my small laptop screen, as Easy Tag is obviously to be used with three columns of information), but it works!

A little word to the wise, if you’re planning on doing this yourself, to your own MP3 collection — EasyTag doesn’t edit files directly and right away. You have your big list of files there in the middle column, and you edit their ID3 tag information on the right. You can do a bunch of files like this, and then when you’re finally ready for your changes to be applied, then you click on the little “Save” icon (which will forever be a bloody floppy disk, now and until the end of time, even if no one uses them anymore). Only then are your changes applied to your MP3 files.

Just reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop — DEAR GOD, the sheer amount of problems this has fixed is incredible.

Processor scaling doesn’t work yet, but I swear it’s a good thing. Not having my speed jump all around has made UI response a thousand times quicker.

My apps using Adobe AIR work perfectly, as far as I can tell (a lot of problems erupted when Adobe released the final version 1.5 for Linux, as you can read about here

Well, I did just that, however then my installation of Ubuntu 8.10 wouldn’t correctly step the processor up/down (because it had been configured with a Celeron, which doesn’t support those things).

Well, as I found out (somewhere on the Ubuntu forums), all you have to do is add “p4_clockmod” to your running modules (edit the file “/etc/modules” and place it at the end) and then restart.

Simple as pie. I’m quite surprised at the amount of speed switching this processor does — I’ve seen it step from 2.6 GHz to 2.2 GHz all the way down to 600 and 300 MHz. Amazing, and great for energy use and cooling, too.

A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.

Technology | Change.gov.

I’m gonna hold ya to that, Barack.  That’s one campaign promise I’m not going to forget about when 2012 comes around.

(Just for the record, this is not an announcement of who I voted for/will be voting for.  That usually always remains a secret with me.    Though, I won’t be hesistant about publicly supporting an Obama presidency in 2012 if he’s been a good president.)

…for pseudo-pipelined JavaScript. I’ve seen it done before, and it’s always seemed really neat — I’m really curious to see if it can be done dynamically…

BitTorrent, Comcast, EFF Antipathetic To FCC Regulation of P2P Traffic

If you can, try and give this a read — see if you can get the message.

It’s not bandwidth that Comcast is trying to protect, it’s the flow of information — that’s why they’ve gone after Bittorrent, now that Bittorrent is a media provider, too.

If you’re using Ubuntu on your laptop, do the following:

Go to “*System > Administration > Services*” in your menubar, and then enable “*Hard disk tuning*”.

Then (and this is just a bit more complex, but not very), type “*Alt + F2*” to bring up your “*Run Application*” dialog box, and type in “*sudo gedit /etc/hdparm.conf*”.

Then, scroll all the way to the bottom, and type in:

/dev/sda {
apm = 254
}

Save the file and then restart your computer. That is all.

[ "Source":https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695 ]

Just got finished installing my new Pentium III-S in my gaming PC using some wonderful “Arctic Silver Ceramique”:http://arcticsilver.com/ceramique.htm — more later, but I will say this: while I didn’t see much of an improvement right away in raw CPU speed (my clock speed _didn’t_ change, for what it’s worth), my 3dMark score went up by about 300 points.

Hey, not bad for $19!

Yep. A completely incongruous series of events which led to its poor little LCD screen being smashed upon my knee.

First, I was wearing a pair of pants that I had that couldn’t use the side pockets on — the pockets were too small (what the hell were they good for then, eh?), and couldn’t be used for anything more than my pair of keys.

Thankfully (or not), there was little “mid” pocket on them, about halfway down the leg that had a zipper and everything — perfect for those items that are too big to put in your side pockets, right? So, I stick my cell phone in there and forget about it. It’s sitting around banging against my knee when I walk, but at least it’s not falling out of my pocket and getting lost.

Well, later on Nina and I go to my sister’s house for supper (she was cooking Italian sausage soup that night, so at least that part of the night was good), and she’s showing us the new bed that her and my brother-in-law had recently got, and she’s all like, “Jump up and see what it feels like,” and I jump up on it, knees first like an idiot, and then Crack! it’s broke.

I knew just from the way the “crack” felt that it was broke. I pull it out of the pocket and the LDC screen looks like someone’s spilled chemicals inside it — those things look weird when they break, I’ll tell you what.

Luckily enough for me, my phone still worked — I just couldn’t see anything on the screen. Text messaging is impossible, of course, but at least it still functions as a phone.

And that’s that. What do I do? I bought it outright so that I didn’t have to get a 2-year contract with my cellphone company (almost unheard of where I live), and I don’t have the money to pay full price for a new one right now. So, I thought about repairing it myself.

I actually wanted to give Alltel a chance to make some money (why the hell not — they’re one of the better cell phone companies in America), so I took it up to them to ask if they could fix it. I was willing to pay a little bit more for “quality” service from them, if they could fix it immediately.

Well, I found out that not only do they not repair cell phones at the local Alltel shop where I live, but that they couldn’t even send off for the phone to be fixed — they said that it wouldn’t be “cost effective.”

Read that as: “We’re selling these phones to you at a 1000% markup — you’re paying $300 for something that cost us like $30. Why the hell do we want to repair it? Just buy a new one.”

Sorry, Alltel — no can do.

So, I go on Ebay and find a new LCD screen for $20. Hell, it’s worth it — even if it doesn’t work and I have to get a new cell phone in the end, I’m only out $20.

Well, there’s a new addition to my family of computers — it’s my wife’s new portable laptop, Henry. (You just _always_ have to name computers — if you don’t, it’s bad luck! Kinda like with ships.)

!http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1157/1342842965_7bb70e7705_m.jpg!

Nina needed a slightly smaller laptop so that she could sometimes bring it to school — eh, who am I kidding? _Slightly_ smaller? No insult meant to the laptops we already had, but I’m firmly convinced that they were never meant to be portable — just _smaller_ than desktops. My personal laptop and hers are 15-in *8 lbs.* _monsters_, from about four or five years ago.

Now, this nice model (the Compaq Evo N410c), is from that era too, but for its time it was made with a completely different paradigm — it’s only 0.9 inches thick, weighs slightly less than 3.5 lbs, and is only 12 inches, diagonally.

…and I got it all, used, on “Ebay”:http://ebay.com, for less than what people pay for iPods.

…_used_ iPods.

We’re running “Ubuntu 7.04″:http://ubuntu.com on there right now, with all the bells, whistles, and fancy effects, and it’s more than capable of running it (3D-emulation worked right away). Not only that, but the installation was slick as shit, too — I’ve never had one run more smoothly than it did with Henry. Even the bonus wireless card that the seller included (one with a Prism GT chipset) worked right away, with absolutely no tweaking needed whatsoever…

The battery seems to be quite old, though (laptop batteries _never_ last very long), so I’ve ordered a new one that should be here soon.

I’ve been fiddling with my cars lately, too, in various efforts to fix them and tune them up.

The Beetle was brought to Montgomery in the guise of performing a break-light switch recall, and whilst it was there, I told them about a “funny vibration” we had been hearing for a while — I cringed the entire time I did this, knowing that, if it turned out to be something under warranty, the examination cost (about $70) would be covered, but if it wasn’t covered under the warranty, I had to fork over the dough.

Well, turned out the noise, which I had been thinking was an exhaust leak and malfunction, turned out to be a rear wheel bearing that was slowly wearing out — oops (it was my second guess, to tell you the truth). However, it’s covered under the warranty! Yeah!

My other cars have not faired so well. Ever since doing an oil change on my white Mustang (and disconnecting the battery so that I could clean off the terminals), it’s been shutting off at weird times and sometimes refusing to start up at all. I actually got a chance to check around the engine compartment today, and during the course of my examination, I decided to pull one of the spark plug boots off (just to take a random look)… and the spark plug boot fell apart in my hand, with most of it still remaining on the spark plug.

Yeah… I don’t know if that’s what had been originally causing my problem, but I’m sure it doesn’t help.

My purple Mustang has been having problems of its own, as well. It’s been “pinging” (a sound caused by ill-timed detonation of the fuel inside the cylinder) for a while now, but it’s gotten worse. I bought a “timing gun”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_light about a year ago with the intention of fixing the timing on my purple Mustang (if it needed it), but I couldn’t figure out how to use it with my car (the front engine compartment is very, _very_ cramped).

Well, today, a year’s gone past, and I’ve since figured out how — by moving my upper radiator hose two inches to the left.

That’s it. Why the hell couldn’t I have figured that out sooner?!? Now, to figure out what the hell I’m looking at and how to fix it!