Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

I love to browse bookshops. Back in the day, when I had money, I always bought at least one book. Now, I spend more time at libraries and second-hand bookshops.

On Saturday, as we tried to avoid the heat, we went to the movies at Marion Shopping Centre. We saw Mrs. Henderson Presents…, but more on that later. We ate at Shenannigans, but more on that later. We had a coffee at Coffee Club, and I won’t elaborate on that.

However, after all of this, we still had a little time free, so we went into Dymocks. I tend to looks briefly at the specials, and then head over to the Popular Science and Non-Fiction sections. After browsing for a little while, I came across a collection of the Onion.

I read a bit of it, and took it over to show Jaq, as there was something funny on the front cover. I think it was:

US Military clears A-Team of all charges

I used to love that show. Anyway, back onto the story. After flicking through it for a few minutes, I returned to the shelf I grabbed it from. And imagine my surprise in what section that was:

Now seriously, Dymocks. It doesn’t take a very long read of the Onion to realise that it’s not Non-Fiction.

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I updated to iTunes 6.0.2, and looky what I found:

Now, the trick is that it needs to be exactly 10, 30, 50, 70 or 90 in order to be a half-star. A rating of 75 will still appear to be three stars.

I think this is a bug.

I’ve written some code that does it better:

property star : «data utxt2605» as Unicode text
property half : «data utxt00BD» as Unicode text
property quarter : «data utxt00BC» as Unicode text
property threeq : «data utxt00BE» as Unicode text

on myRating(theRating)
	set theResult to ""
	repeat 5 times
		if theRating > 20 then
			set theResult to theResult & star
		else if theRating > 15 then
			set theResult to theResult & threeq
		else if theRating > 10 then
			set theResult to theResult & half
		else if theRating > 5 then
			set theResult to theResult & quarter
		end if
		set theRating to theRating - 20
	end repeat
	return theResult
end myRating

I’m currently using this to get the ratings data to add to my blog posts: at the moment it’s a FastScript that just inserts the data via the clipboard, but when Blogsome gets XMLRPC working again, it will be an ecto script.

It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me • Billy Joel • Greatest Hits ★★¼

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Invisibilia

I’m going to do one of these!

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I Guess We’ll Just Have To Adjust: The Creatures In His Head

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous video games…

Fall On Me • R.E.M. • The Best Of R.E.M. ★★

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I’ve spent a bit of time working on getting some plugins working under Blogsome. In particular, TineMCE-Wordpress and WYSI-Wordpress. Neither of them worked too well, and they both just removed the Quicktags.

I’ve also downloaded the TinyMCE source: I may implement a subset of that in a single file, and get that working with Blogsome.

I also tried getting the Gravatar plugin to work, but this fails, as the Post Editor seems to screw up the tags, putting in a close tag. And self-closing the tag fails.

<gravatar matt@schinckel.net> becomes <gravatar matt@schinckel.net></gravatar>

And <gravatar matt@schinckel.net /> gets changed into <img class=“postgrav” src=“wp-content/gravatars/blank_gravatar.png” alt=“a gravatar image”> by the plugin, not what it should look like. Which, by the way, isn’t Valid XHTML!

Note: these are not installed on the actual Blogsome server, but a Test one.

The More I See You • Chris Montez • Room Service ★★

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The last few days has seen extreme weather in Adelaide. 42°C for 4 days in a row. And this at the time we decided to:

• Chop down the 13 Cypress Pines along the side fence.
• Remove the old air-conditioner and brick up the cavity.
• Knock down the old greenhouse.

Mum and Dad were up from Naracoorte to help us - Dad manned the chainsaw and they brought with them a 14″ × 6″ trailer, which we loaded up with Cypress offcuts. We kept the trunks, as they are pretty straight, and we’ll use them for garden beds.

Anyway, we got all of that done - and a lot of it in shorter time than anticipated. The cutting down of the trees only took about 4 hours, which is lucky, as we may not have completed it otherwise. It was so damn hot.

I took a heap of pictures. One day I’ll get around to posting some more.

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I’ve just converted an Audio Book to AAC - I’m ashamed to say it’s The Da Vinci Code, but, well…

Anyway, I was a bit peeved that it doesn’t show up as an Audiobook when you use the search feature of iTunes. And none of the tips I came across seemed to fix it:

• Rename the file so it’s *.m4b instead of *.m4a
• Use the Make Bookmarkable script from Doug’s AppleScripts
• Set the Type Code to “M4B “

Then I read this, at macintouch (iPod: File Management):

If I remember correctly, an iTunes audio book is little more than a renamed AAC file. The steps necessary for making your own are pretty simple:

1. Convert the file to AAC format (if it isn’t already)
2. Make sure it’s not in the iTunes library. (Otherwise iTunes may not recognize the change.)
3. Set the file type to “M4B ” if you’re on a Mac (only necessary if you’re using a Mac)
4. Rename the file to have an “.m4b” extension
5. Add it back to the iTunes library

Look at #2. That does the trick.

Now, I just need to see if the Join Together and Chapterize script will ever finish…

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