Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

Tonight on Channel 10 (the only commercial TV station in Australia not to yet align itself with a web portal: c.f. nineMSN, yahoo7), we saw the premiere of the intellectually stimulating Australia’s Brainiest Radio Star at 7:30pm. I only saw the last two minutes, enough to see the winner fluke the last question.

What I want to know is: where were Dr Karl and Adam Spencer, of Triple J/ABC Local Radio? Surely they have to be amongst the smartest Radio personalities. And Dr Karl is hardly not a star!

The first question I saw was something about a cricket ball vs. a pendulum, asking the question a cricket ball has more degrees of … freedom. The joker answering got this wrong, which I’m fairly sure both of my champions would not have.

The determinant question asked What is the correct term for a group of 7 musicians? The contestant ummed and aahed, before shakily guessing (correctly) a septet.

Mr. Bojangles • Robbie Williams • Swing When You’re Winning ★★½

View Comments (0)  

I used to work at a Swimming Pool. I can category deny ever doing the following:

We used Polywaffles! Just kidding. We had to fish it out when kids shat in the pool. And then just put more chlorine in.
(more…)

View Comments (0)  

Whenever I need to do any calculations, I generally drop into python and do them from there. However, I came across a neat tip over on Mac Geekery: When You Need A Calculator.

I’ve modified is ever so slightly so it goes into a .profile instead of a .bashrc:

function calc
{
    awk "BEGIN {print $* ; }"
}

Sweet.

View Comments (0)  

I thought I’d already written up a post on this, since I discovered it about a month ago, but apparently not.

Blogsome has a nice little function called {is_asides}. It allows for easy alternate formatting of posts within a category called Asides. So, to have these fancy little numbers, the first thing you’ll need is an Asides category, with a post in it.

Then, in your Post Template, try the following code:

<div class="post {is_aside}{if $is_aside=='true'}Asides{/if}" id="post-{the_ID}">
(more…)

View Comments (5)  

A track just came onto my iTunes via Party Shuffle. It’s one I haven’t heard for a while, but reminded me of the time we went to see this band live. Especially notable, as it was at the Speigeltent, during the Adelaide Fringe Festival some years back, and it’s that time of the year again.

It was, I believe, just before Derek left Adelaide for the big smoke of Sydney. Well, Wollongong, anyway. He did work in Sydney…
(more…)

View Comments (0)  

iTunes displays half-star ratings, and stores all ratings from 0-100, not just the full star value. However, if you Get Info on a file, and go into the Options tab, you will lose any non full-star rating information that is stored for this track.

Game Show Host • Lo-Tel • Planet Of The Stereos ★★★

View Comments (0)  

I’ve updated my Insert iTunes Data (HTML) script for generating a block of text that describes the current playing iTunes track.

This version links to the iTunes Music Store, rather than Google. It is relatively smart, in that the track name link also has the artist name, and the album name does too, as long as the album isn’t a compilation.

The only (slight) bug is that the track name seems to need to be just the way iTMS displays it, so having (Live) might stuff up a link. This might be only if there isn’t a Live version in the iTMS.

I Can’t Tell You Why (Live) • Eagles • Hell Freezes Over ★★★★★

Code after the jump.
(more…)

View Comments (5)  

I googled for HTMLify Applescript, wanting to find out some simple code for how to escape the text in an AppleScript string, so I can pass it as arguments to a URL.

My site came up with the top link. I was hoping for a better solution to the one I had come up with!

View Comments (2)  

I’ve been busily rating all of my iTunes tracks, and consider that I’ve done a very good job. My Unrated playlist (Rating is 0; Played Count is 0; Genre does not contain Classical; Podcast is false) has only 224 tracks. My total library is 7741 tracks, so it’s about 97% done. Not counting Classical tracks and Podcasts, obviously.

Actually, if I take this into account, my Music Library is only 5962 tracks, and I’ve rated about 96%.

Anyway, you get the picture. An overwhelming number of my tracks are rated. So now, I just sit back, and count the money as it rolls in let iTunes choose my music.

I’ve got a Smart Playlist called Party Shuffler, which I set my Party Shuffle to use as the source, and turn on Play higer rated songs more often. The Party Shuffler playlist has the following Logic:

• Genre is not Classical
• Last Played is not in the last 3 days
• Genre is not Holiday
• Comment does not contain re-import
• Genre is not Books & Spoken
• Genre is not Interview
• Match only checked songs
• Live Updating

I might be able to get rid of some of the Genre stuff, by having the Skip when shuffling item checked on various tracks, but then I’d need to remember to do this to new music I import.

Oh, and I keep my rating window open, and every now and then re-rate the track that’s playing - especially if I’ve decided I don’t like the track quite so much anymore.

Wipe Out • The Beach Boys • Still Cruisin’ ★★

View Comments (0)