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109 posts with category “Tech”

The New last.fm

Audioscrobbler has now been subsumed by its cousin last.fm. Aside from the bold new colors, there are a lot of additional features that are really easy to get sucked into. Each user is provided a blog, whose posts appear on that user’s profile page and can contain links to artists, albums, or tracks that are relevant to the post. Arists, albums, and tracks can all be tagged with keywords such as “noise” or “indie pop,” and these tags can then be tuned into using the last.fm player. The player has seen a redesign too; rather than being controlled with a web interface and streamed as an .m3u, a stand-alone program is required. This isn’t going over well, but I much prefer it; it’s cleaner, less buggy, and contains a few nice features such as a channel history to see what you’ve listened to previously. And maybe most importantly, charts are updating almost daily now.

There are many other small improvements that I’m not mentioning, but basically I think the whole site is just way, way better. The new interface takes some getting used to, and there are some obvious improvements that could be made and that I’m sure will. If you haven’t signed up yet, you should. I’m looking forward to their further integration with MusicBrainz.

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NASA’s mixtape for aliens

Mathematical definitions

I am kind of a science geek, but really this is about being a sociology geek.

In 1977, NASA launched two “intrepid” Voyager spacecrafts. Their primary purpose was to photograph distant planets from ranges never before achieved. It succeeded beautifully, but of more interest to me is the secondary purpose of this mission.

After passing Pluto (or Neptune?), what’s left to do with the most distant object we’ve sent into space? Obviously, propel it to a speed of one million miles per day and hope it reaches some alien society. But what do you send to an alien society?

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A Flat Hierarchy for Subjective mp3 Tags

I’ve always been anal about the way my mp3s are tagged. Before the iPod, Audioscrobbler, and foobar2000, it was an irrational obsession, since I keep my music well-sorted on my hard drive. But there’s something so “official” about mp3 tags that I find appealing.

A few years ago this fixation extended to a program called MoodLogic, which applies a user-maintained database of really specific information about songs to construct playlists to match particular moods. In the end it proved more work than it was worth for me, so I abandoned it, but I’ve always wished for a similarly intuitive method of music browsing and playlist creation (come on, alphabetically?).

The genre tag has always been the most elusive. The subjective if not totally baseless distinctions between “Pop/Rock,” “Rock,” and “Pop” are enough to aggravate even the mildest case of OCD. I never bothered with this kind of categorization until recently when I realized that foobar2000 can handle multiple values for one tag field. Interesting…

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MST128K

Talk to JOEL!My life in the past few days has been overtaken by MST3K. I discovered that there’s a video version of Winamp’s ShoutCast, with some channels streaming tv shows 24 hours a day. Two of these channels stream MST3K, and though the streams are usually maxed out on viewers, for $4 my IP is on the VIP list of this stream, which means uninterrupted MST3K until March 31.

When a KTMA-era mini-marathon was scheduled last weekend, I knew I had to “tape” it. I probably could have guessed that these episodes are readily available via various p2p outlets, but I also would have guessed (rightly) that the files are kept extremely large for the sake of quality. Ideally I wanted to save video from the stream in very low quality; nearly all of an MST3K episode is silhouettes and bad movies anyway, so this could hardly be considered “compromise.”

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Firefox, video, MST3K

Joel

I still don’t get why Firefox is better and more popular than Mozilla ever was, but okay, I’ll play along. Especially given these enhancements:

  • Cookie Button: one of the best features of Mozilla that inexplicably didn’t make it to Firefox.
  • Flashblock: Only see Flash when you want to! This is a miracle.

Finally found a video player to be happy with: Media Player Classic. It’s also bundled with Real Alternative, which allows you to play Real format files without relying on the nightmarish RealOne player. This week I also discovered Net Transport, which does the best (i.e., quickest, easiest, and most free) job of saving streaming video I’ve seen so far. And finally, MST3K is still kicking: there’s this gigantic reference site, the still-existent info club, and a legally ambiguous ShoutCast video stream. Shhhhhhhh.

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