Epistles to the Corkonians

Living most of the time here in Barcelona, I am slowly but surely learning Spanish (and a bit of Catalan by osmosis, but one language at a time, please!)
I go to Spanish classes twice a week with Laura and Jorge in the dime barcelona school. Good as they are, it’s still down to me to do the memorizing of Spanish verbs, rules and vocabulary. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a royal pain.

Enter Anki.
One very helpful resource I recently stumbled upon is Anki – tagged as “friendly, intelligent flash cards”. Gazillions of free decks in subjects as diverse as guitar chords and Swahili are available. What is special about Anki as compared to traditional cardboard flash cards is that you rate how easily you answered the question on the card (“Hard”, “Good”, “Easy”, “Very Easy”). Anki uses this rating to decide when it is going to show you that card again. So short-term memories get moved into long-term memory by reviewing at ever-wider intervals. Well, hopefully ever-wider intervals.

Anki is open-source and free, but the developer works on it full-time so make a donation! Anki clients are available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, iPhone, Android, and more – plus there’s also a low-bandwidth web interface which works from just about anywhere.

For what it’s worth, I’m making my way through a deck called “Spanish Grammar and Vocabulary” which has some 13500 flash cards. 20 cards a day means I should be finished in 2 years or so!

Afraid I’ve been a lazy git on the Epistles front, apologies! However I’ve been slightly more active elsewhere – here are some of the Picasa photo albums I’ve done over the last few months:

A week in Lanzarote	Strolls around Cork	Cork Harbour Trip	Sherkin Island
Boat trip on the Shannon	Carrigaline – Sailing	Climbing Stoompa	Barcelona Snow

FinderPop 2.3.0 finally released

Hey, it only took me 8 months longer than planned – apologies!

FinderPop is a Universal PrefPane for Mac OS X 10.4 – 10.5; almost everything works on 10.6 but I still have to port a couple of features.
FinderPop allows you to extend those contextual menus you get when you right-click or control-click on something in the Finder. It has a few other features besides.
(I will be the first to admit that the FinderPop configuration UI is klunky, it’s on my list of things to do!)

A previous version was reviewed in MacWorld and somehow got 4.5 stars.

The FinderPop Support Forum is here. I’ve been releasing beta versions every couple of weeks for the last year or so there, and it’s also a good place to go if you have questions or suggestions for other features…

Sean Stiegemeier created some excellent timelapse photoshots of “that volcano no-one can pronounce the name of” in Iceland. Very impressive! And here‘s the motorised timelapse dolly he created it with…

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Finally got around to putting up photos of our recent weekend in La Coruña in Galicia, north-west Spain. It seems to be about as wet as Ireland… Even the churches have paragueros every second pew for people to stash their wet umbrellas during mass. (At first I thought they were rubbish bins.) And nearly all the public buildings / museums we went into had machines just inside the door which would wrap your wet umbrella in a bag, so you could take it with you and not be trailing a pool of water behind you.
Hmm, it seems they’re much more civilised when it comes to handling the rain than we Irish are!

Funky Elevator, Monte de San Pedro, La Coruña 
This is a photo I took while waiting for the restaurant at the top of the Monte de San Pedro to open one night. They have a funky transparent elevator running up the side of the hill. That’s the famous Torre de Hercules on the opposite peninsula.
 
Highly recommend the whole place. Bring your umbrella, though.

From: tescovaluecards.com – the “Value” Valentines Card:

 

I got sent one of these. Nice to know how much I’m valued

“Show your loved one how much you really care this Valentines Day,
with our fantastic Tesco Value Valentine Card.”
 

I presume the full wrath of the Tesco Legal Department will shortly be descending on these lads
- get ‘em while they’re hot!

Remember, kids – look both ways before crossing the road!

Special offer on self-tapping titanium screws…
My original walk-in-front-of-a-bus accident is described here. I broke my clavicle and 4 metatarsals in my foot. Nearly six months later, the medicos decided that the clavicle wasn’t healing properly, so they operated and added the above piece of mechanical engineering a few weeks ago (taking some cartilage from my hip to add to the mix.) The aftermath of the operation was more painful than the original accident, oddly enough. But now I’m fine, not in any real pain unless I put weight on the shoulder – it looks worse than it actually is. I have some impressive scars to show off too.

But I strongly recommend avoiding all this and looking both ways before crossing the road

When IBM’s godawful Bloatus Gnotes crashes, which it does at least once a week for me, sometimes it will pop up a window much like the following:

 

Is that horribly long pathname selectable/copyable to clipboard? No, of course not. Note the bizarre formatting. And look at the imperious “make note of the name of this file and its location”. And then, without the hapless user doing anything, the dialog disappears of its own accord after 30 seconds or so. And then you can’t start Notes again unless you restart because it will complain about not being able to find a window.

I am very glad indeed that Notes’ days are numbered… I still have the very first email I sent from Notes when I was first forced to use it back in 2002. The email reads “This is a piss-poor excuse for an email client”. Multiple Notes versions in the intervening 7 years have not changed my opinion.

How any company’s IT department gets hoodwinked into using Notes is completely beyond me.
The free Google Mail / Google Docs / Google Calendar have far better UIs than Notes, and they’re written in Javascript…

Long time no post!
I recently updated to iTunes 8.2 on my Mac and discovered that more than 5000 of my MP3 files no longer had album artwork. Gone, missing, disappeared. Worse, some of the files no longer had album/artist/song information associated with them. Given that I’d been using iTunes – and its predecessor SoundJam – to maintain all this info, this came as somewhat of a surprise, but many of my MP3 files date from the late 90s so perhaps a bit of bitrot was to be expected. I should probably re-rip and re-encode my CDs too, but who has time for that?

FinderPop could see the embedded album artwork in these files, but neither iTunes 8.2 nor the 10.5.7 Finder could. Investigating, it seems that iTunes 8.2 wants the “image/jpeg” or “image/png” MIME description in the ID3 frame for said artwork. Likewise, while some of my MP3 files had ID3v2 album art, their album/artist/song info came from ancient and deprecated ID3v1 tags. So the info was there, but not in a format usable by the new iTunes.

Nothing for it but to write a once-off program to fix these problems! While I was there, I added an option to tag the album artwork as “FRONT_COVER”, which means that my Nokia N85 can finally display album artwork.

Rather than rolling-my-own ID3 I/O routines, I searched the web for ID3 tag libraries. I finally settled upon id3lib which it unfortunately turns out is old, orphaned, and buggy. Also it only handles ID3v2 2.3 tags, but that was fine by me. I discovered that id3lib screwed up writing Unicode titles etc, but a quick google pointed me at someone else’s fix for this, so I applied a patch to id3lib, then rebuilt and installed the shared library.

The attached quick-and-dirty source code (fixmp3s.cpp) grovels around inside MP3 files and cleans them up enough to work with my iTunes 8.2 setup and my N85. As the Americans say, Your Mileage May Vary. Always ensure that you have backups of your music – I am not responsible if this program eats your music!

Example usage:
    find . -name \*.mp3 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 fixmp3s --cover=1 --update

Some of the options:
    --dump         textually dump the ID3 tags found in each file specified
    --[no]v1tov2   [don't] convert ID3V1 tags to V2 if no V2 tags present
    --[no]mime     [don't] fixup album art MIME type
    --[no]cover    [don't] set album art type to 3 (FRONT COVER)
    --[no]cover=N  [don't] set Nth embedded image as FRONT_COVER
    --[no]update   [don't] write back changes
    --warn-no-art  scan file for album art and warn if none present
         NOTE: no fixes will be applied until you specify --update

Build instructions on OS X and Unix:
Download id3lib, apply Unicode writing patch to id3lib, then configure, make and finally sudo make install for the library. Then build the attached fixmp3s.cpp file using:

    c++ fixmp3s.cpp -O -Wall -Werror -lid3 -lz -o ./fixmp3s

Unfortunately I cannot build this statically for some reason, so I can't supply binaries... this is a source-code-only post. Use the Source, Luke!

Enjoy

Further to a previous post about Heineken’s takeover of Beamish, well, the game is now being played out as I thought it would. Heineken have just announced that Beamish will no longer be available outside of Ireland.

Mark my words – in three to five years’ time, Beamish will be completely dead, killed by Heineken purely for marketing reasons (it will be something like “Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit with our brand image.”) I’m pretty sure the Heineken Marketing Manual has a chapter titled Killing the Competition: how to bury a prospering local brewery and how to justify it. Bah.

Update 31-Mar: Heineken to sell Cork Beamish site – As expected

Support your local brewery – while you still can! Avoid the big boys whose beer is insipid and whose main interest is marketing…