Schinckel.net

There are a few new things in AppleScript support for iTunes 7.

artwork:

downloaded (boolean, r/o) : was this artwork downloaded by iTunes?

playlist:

special kind (none/Audiobooks/folder/Movies/Music/Party Shuffle/Podcasts/Purchased Music/TV Shows/Videos, r/o) : special playlist kind

track:
episode ID (Unicode text) : the episode ID of the track
episode number (integer) : the episode number of the track
gapless (boolean) : is this track from a gapless album?
season number (integer) : the season number of the track
skipped count (integer) : number of times this track has been skipped
skipped date (date) : the date and time this track was last skipped
show (Unicode text) : the show name of the track
video kind (none/movie/music video/TV show) : kind of video track

Most of these are expected with the addition of the new features: gapless playback and TV/Movie support. At least now we can programmatically change the tags for TV shows. There are two there that are quite interesting: skipped count/date.

They are available as columns in the list views too, I just hadn’t noticed them yet. Now it will be possible to have smart playlist additions like: skipped count < 2.

Apple released version 7 of iTunes yesterday, and, since I culled my RSS feed list, I haven’t yet read a review of it. Unusually, I’ve already downloaded and installed it (I guess ADSL is worth it, then), and I thought I’d put my thoughts out there. It’s taking me a while to locate the icon in a list - I never realised just how much I’d become accustomed to the green notes - now they are blue. Still, no big deal there. I quite like the new sources list - having Music, Movies, TV Shows and Podcasts listed separately is good - it means I can clean up my library a bit more easily. It does make the sources list rather long, but a little more on that later. The most obvious change is the two new types of view: in addition to the list, you can group by album, or use the cover browser. The third seems pretty cool, but until the gapless playback determination has run, I can’t tell if it will be speedy enough on my setup. My music is all stored on a network hard disk, so the link here may be the bottleneck. Still, being able to flick through the covers is cool. I really like the other new view, which groups the tracks by album. I have come across a slight side-effect though. I have two albums with the same name, but by different artists. This means they alternate when in the standard viewing method, but this can be fixed by setting the Album Artist tag for each track. What’s coolest about this new view is that you can remove the album art viewer from the bottom left of the window, since this is now available in the main view. This allows more space for playlists, as I suggested above. Podcasts have gotten a nice couple of features. The first is that the number of new podcasts is shown like in Mail after the Podcasts source item. The second is that when downloading podcasts they appear in the “Downloads” list, rather than in the “screen” section at the top of the window. I don’t know if they’ve yet implemented resumable downloads, or the ability to alter the number of concurrent downloads. The new interface feels okay too, although they’ve broken system support for double-arrows at each end of a scrollbar. Overall, I think I like it. It will be interesting to see how speed goes…

I’m not yet sure how I feel about Christopher Alexander and his ideas about what has been wrong with Architechture over the past 100 years or so. I think as an exercise (more for my own mental stimulation than anything else), I’ll listen again to the programme recently broadcast on ABC Radio National (no Podcast, but I figured out a way to download rather than stream it…) and perhaps summarize and critique his ideas. Of course, there’s always the chance I won’t finish doing that…

Bold all of the following television shows which you’ve ever seen three or more episodes of in your lifetime. Italicise a show if you’re positive you’ve seen every episode of it. If you want, add up to three additional shows (but keep the list in alphabetical order). 24 7th Heaven Adam-12 Aeon Flux ALF Alfred Hitchcock Presents Alias American Idol/Pop Idol/Canadian Idol/Australian Idol/etc. America’s Next Top Model/Germany’s Next Top Model Angel Arrested Development Babylon 5 Babylon 5: Crusade Battlestar Galactica (the old one) Battlestar Galactica (the new one) Baywatch Beavis & Butthead Beverly Hills 90210 Bewitched Bonanza Bones Bosom Buddies Boston Legal Boy Meets World Buffy the Vampire Slayer Bug Juice Chappelle’s Show Charlie’s Angels Charmed Cheers Columbo Commander in Chief Coupling Cowboy Bebop Crossing Jordan CSI CSI: Miami CSI: NY Curb Your Enthusiasm Dancing with the Stars Danny Phantom Dark Angel Dark Skies Davinci’s Inquest Dawson’s Creek Dead Like Me Deadliest Catch Deadwood Degrassi: The Next Generation Designing Women Desperate Housewives (This was one day I was sick, and they showed them all day…) Dharma & Greg Different Strokes Doctor Who (new Who) Dragnet Due South Earth 2 Emergency! Entourage ER Everwood Everybody Loves Raymond Facts of Life Family Guy Family Ties Farscape Fawlty Towers Felicity Firefly Frasier Friends Futurama Get Smart Gilligan’s Island Gilmore Girls Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Green Wing Grey’s Anatomy Growing Pains Gunsmoke Hannah Montana Happy Days Hogan’s Heroes Home Improvement **Homicide: Life on the Street House **I Dream of Jeannie I Love Lucy **Invader Zim Invasion Hell’s Kitchen **JAG Jackass Joey - they made more than 3 of these? John Doe LA Law Laverne and Shirley **Little House on the Prairie Lizzie McGuire Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman Lost _**Lost in Space** Love, American Style **M*A*S*H MacGyver Malcolm in the Middle Married… With Children Melrose Place Miami Vice Mission: Impossible Monk Moonlighting Mork & Mindy Murphy Brown **My Life as a Dog My Three Sons **My Two Dads NCIS Nip/Tuck Northern Exposure Numb3rs **One Tree Hill **Oz** Perry Mason **Picket Fences Pokemon Power Rangers **Prison Break Profiler Project Runway Psyche _Quantum Leap __Queer As Folk (US) **Queer as Folk (British) **ReGenesis **Remington Steele **Rescue Me Road Rules ROME **Roseanne Roswell Saved by the Bell **Scarecrow and Mrs. King **Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Scrubs Seinfeld Sex and the City Six Feet Under **Slings and Arrows Smallville So Weird **South Park Spaced Spongebob Squarepants Sports Night Star Trek **Star Trek: The Next Generation Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Star Trek: Voyager Star Trek: Enterprise Stargate Atlantis Stargate SG-1 Superman Supernatural Surface **Survivor **Taxi Teen Titans **That 70’s Show That’s So Raven **The 4400 The Addams Family The Andy Griffith Show **The A-Team **The Avengers **The Beverly Hillbillies The Brady Bunch The Cosby Show The Daily Show **The Dead Zone The Dick Van Dyke Show **The Flintstones The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air The Golden Girls **The Honeymooners The Jeffersons **The Jetsons The L Word The Love Boat The Mary Tyler Moore Show **The Mighty Boosh The Monkees The Munsters **The Mythbusters The O.C. **The Office (UK) **The Office (US) The Pretender The Real World The Shield **The Simpsons **The Six Million Dollar Man **The Sopranos The Suite Life of Zack and Cody **The Twilight Zone **The Waltons The West Wing The Wonder Years The X-Files _**Third Watch** Three’s Company **Top Gear **_Twin Peaks Twitch City Veronica Mars **Whose Line is it Anyway? (US) Whose Line is it Anyway? (UK) Will and Grace

You may have noticed I like the Chaser. Whilst watching episode 18, there was a segment bagging The Da Vinci Code, as The Ken Done Code. You’ll need to be Australian to understand it. You won’t need to be Australian to get this bit though:

I’ve just found FreeMacWare, and love the look and feel of the site. Haven’t found anything I’ve downloaded yet, though.

It’s been a while since I did this, but here are my favourite (or, in one case, least favourite) items from this week’s PostSecret: And, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks that the media coverage of someone’s passing was a bit too much (Smack Dab in the Middle). And now we have Brocky to mourn for, too.

While mindlessly surfing tonight (I was actually following referrer links, and seeing where I got to), I came across a great post, over at Breathe in Now: Bus Tickets in Bed. Basically, the idea is to take the nice little messages that appear on the back of our bus tickets: This is the front at the top, and the bottom underneath. My personal favourite:

Do not choose to be wrong for the sake of being different in bed.

Well, last night was the final episode of The Chaser’s War on Everything. Those of you who missed this series should rush to your nearest Torrent-site and grab it all. I missed a fair chunk of it, and so when they started Vodcasting it, I subscribed to the feed. However, the quality of the video available from the ABC website is crap, to say the least. So, I’ve begun downloading all episodes, even 22-28, which I have as vodcasts. However, episode 17 is missing. I’ve found a torrent for it, but noone seems to be seeding it. I’ve got episodes 1-14 complete, and partway through 15, 16 and 18. At 235Mb per episode, it’s fairly slow going. But it most certainly is worth it. As for legality issues - I can’t get reasonable ABC reception in my house, so I feel perfectly justified in doing this. I have a right, after all, to view stuff on the ABC.

I listen to Podcasts rather than music most of my commuting time now. One of the ones I subscribe to is The Science Show, from ABC Radio National. Back when I was on dialup, I used to wget the podcasts, and then add them to iTunes using a cool little hack, where I made my computer think it’s own IP address was the address of the abc.net.au server. Then I didn’t have to worry about iTunes not finishing a download, and having to start over. Resumable downloads rock. However, sometimes I would not get all of the file, and not realise. Thus, the other day I was listening to a great segment on Mathematics and the Brain, when the program stopped. I had only grabbed 33 minutes of the 48 minute program. Trying to get iTunes to re-download a podcast is tricky, so instead I used wget to grab the full file, and then deleted the original iTunes file. I then replaced it with my new one. All fixed. This is a side-effect of the fact that iTunes doesn’t keep that good of a track of files. You can move files out from underneath it, and it can’t find them. I’ve come across this from the other perspective - we share the same directory for storing two people’s iTunes libraries, so we don’t have duplicates of all of the same music - but in this case, I used it to my advantage.