foobar2000
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Software
Of late I’ve been keeping busy experimenting with foobar2000, an extremely functional music player for Windows. In the process of converting over to foobar from Windows Media Player I also ended up doing a little of re-structuring my music collection.
In the past I had all my music sorted via:
- Music \ [Artist] \ [Album] \ [## Track Name.mp3]
But since I decided to finally incorporate all the Hindi music I have with the English music I realized I had to change things a little. Doing so meant I could also include all the music that I’ve collected as single songs, and not part of an album. In addition to what I already had I also developed an ear for classical music around the time I started using foobar, so I ended up with a structure inside my Music folder like so:
- [Folder] \ [Artist] \ [Year] [Album] \ [## Track Name.mp3]
- Where “Folder” is one of the following six folders, and “##” is the track number.
- \Artists
- All my english music that I have in complete albums falls into this category except for soundtrack releases.
- \Classical
- The Beethoven’s, and Tchaikovsky’s of this world rest within.
- \Hindi
- All my Hindi music, even though the majority of it is all movie soundtracks.
- \Playlists
- Foobar has built in dynamic playlist support, but occasionally it is useful to save a hard (soft?) copy of a playlist.
- \Single Tracks
- All the singles of my youth, I’ve had some of these files for 5 or so years.
- \Soundtracks
- Black Hawk Down, Mary Poppins, Metal Gear Solid, Pirates of the Caribbean, Phantom of the Opera…the list goes on and on.
One of the many things that make me “as happy as a pig in shit”, is the ability to browse my library via “facets”, a dynamic list that sorts using AND and/or OR logic in a hierarchal manner. It’s one of those times when a picture does indeed say a thousand words.
Thanks to Frank Bicking for his work developing the Facets component.
I’m sure I’ll write more on foobar in the future.
New theme
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
In all fairness to me, it has been quite a few months since I last changed themes not quite a year, but decently close.
I’ve also added a “lifestream”, a collection of my social feeds all in one place. Probably more useful to me then to anyone else as I can use it to prove to myself that I actually did something on any given day.
Still have plenty to iron out, I manually added Gravatar support, still need to add a mini bio in the footer. I also need to figure out what I’m doing with categories vs tags.
Tags: Web
iPhone new pricing from Fido
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Hardware
Well, after a bit of trouble in connecting to Fido’s 1800 number, I got through and spoke to someone about switching my current contract with them to an iPhone.
Turns out that because I’m still in my 3 year contract, I’m not elligble to upgrade to the iPhone, but I should call them back after July 24, as they are trying to work out a solution.
Well of course they are, they can’t resist having so many customers up their monthly fees.
But as where pricing is concerned, it’s become much better, where before $80/month would get you:
- 150 Weekday minutes
- Free evenings from 5PM
- 10,000 text messages
- Call Display
- Voicemail
- 400MB Data
The same $80 will now up the data to 6GB, making it a very competitive pricing scheme.
Now if only they can get some sort of solution up in place for existing customers like myself.
Tags: apple, Cost, Fido, iPhone
iPhone launch, followed by epic crash and burn
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Hardware
Well last night I was browsing around and ran across TWiT Live, which was broadcasting Leo Laporte’s 24 Hour iPhone Launch Coverage. He started Thursday morning, and the stream just ended today (Friday) at 1PM (my local time), damn I hope I’m still able to do that when I’m 51. What an awesome job Leo.
I caught about 2 hours last night, as I only stumbled across it in the wee hours of the morning, and another 2 and a half just now. Leo started his global coverage by talking to people in Australia, moved over to parts of Europe (Austria, London..), then over to various places in the US and Canada.
Out of the couple of hours I got to participate in his broadcast, we learnt a few interesting facts. The lineups at various stores were almost non-existent, specially when you compare with the launch of the previous model, and even more interesting was that a lot of the people who took the time and effort to get in advance lines were already iPhone owners!
We also found out that some of the Australian pricing actually puts Rogers attempts at playing the miser to shame, not only is there no unlimited data plan, but the maximum data you can get is 400mb. For well over $100 of course. And on the opposite side of things, the British plans for the iPhone are roughly the same price as any other average plan for any other phone, yes with all the necessary features.
But as my title says, there were some unexpected hurdles surrounding the launch. As Leo spoke to various people around the world, we learnt that there were problems activating the iPhones, and that some stores even opened late (possibly as they tried to remedy the problem?). In fact, I thought it quite ironic, as a huge part of the “iPhone 3G Experience” was the fact that it had to be purchased and activated at the same time in the store. You couldn’t walk out without have a signed contract looming over your head for the next 2-3 years.
But, since the procedure was that once you have purchased the iPhone, you were then to activate it in a separate transaction, it turns out, that a lot of people ended up purchasing the iPhone but then walking out because of the activation problems.
Which of course meant that ebay has finally received their shipment of the new iPhone 3G.
But on positive side of things, I finally received my Dropbox invitation!
And since MobileMe is out, I get to now debate real hard whether to get it or not.
Tags: apple, Dropbox, iPhone, Launch, MobileMe, TWiT
The downfall of Flickr
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Software
Yes, that’s right…
Every night I creep down to my tool shed and find the hidden trap door, which leads to a dark and dreary room with nothing but a lone bookshelf that I feel my way towards. I depress the hidden button which slowly but surely starts the mechanics that proceed to revolve both me and the bookshelf, all the time creaking and complaining, as I emerge into a laboratory that one could only associate with a mad scientist.
Creative writing aside, and on to the topic at hand.
Flickr is an amazing web site; or service, or application, depending on what floats your Web 2.0 boat. If one is looking for a reliable, easy to use, method of sharing their pictures Flickr is definitely the first name that comes to mind. It is my own opinion of course, but I have spent an extensive amount of time looking at various sites and hosting solutions and while some are very good, very few - if any, can match Flickr in all areas. Not to mention the enormous Flickr community, that as of this writing is uploading approximately 5000 pictures a minute to the Flickr servers.
But after saying all that, I do have some personal gripes with the service, mainly when it comes to the browsing experience. In trying to make Flickr as easy to use as possible, it has been made into an experience that is extremely limiting to someone of my particular nature.
A couple of examples that come to mind are:
- Inability to fully customize the photostream layout
- Mass organization becomes harder as one adds more pictures to his account
- Tagging of pictures is extremely hard to do online when you have more than a few to deal with
- Hidden and/or poorly documented features, (eg. search via multiple tags, hidden layouts)
- Interface in general is hard to navigate for a new viewer
- No offline sorting/editing applications
- No advanced tag management services, (eg. syncing with local images, create albums that auto propagate with tags)
So I have come to the decision that instead of further aggravating myself while using Flickr, I shall instead rely on building my own CMS to host my family pictures. To achieve this end, I have chosen Drupal (at least to start with), as it has an excellent user community and has very active development under works. Drupal has also been an active participant in Google’s Summer of Code since its kick off in 2006, if they’re good enough for Google - they’re good enough for me :P
I can’t wait to implement OpenID into my Image Gallery!
Now in the past I’ve had some horrible experiences with Drupal, namely due to its development cycle. I installed the latest version of Drupal, but all the essential modules were for the previous version, which just caused huge amounts of frustration. And even last night, I made the same mistake of installing Drupal version 6.3, as that’s the latest version..but all the essential modules are still only on Drupal 5.x (Which ironically is the version that they didn’t work for me before).
So I started over and went with the stable release of the last major version, and things have been going extremely smoothly. I expect something to be in production in the next week or two.
Regarding the blog theme, I was in a little frustrated mood and so decided to change the colouring to vent my frustration.
iPhone price comparison
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Hardware
Thanks to Andy Peatling for creating a price comparison between three of the countries that the iPhone 3G will be first releasing in:
OFFICIAL: Rogers announces iPhone 3G plans
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Hardware
Unlimited data isn’t one of them…
Prices start at $60/month, and don’t include the basics like Caller ID and extra text messages above the standard 75. Two features, when bundled with early evenings cost an additional $20/month.
You hear that sound Rogers?
Thats the sound of hundreads of prospective iPhone owners banks breaking, not that you care, as a corporation you probably can’t wait for the day the bill is due.
