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great scifi
please donate if you can
and of course listen to the podcast

Time-Lapse Video of San Francisco Bay Bridge Construction Closure

by Scott Beale on September 9, 2009 · 1 comment

Here’s a time-lapse video of last weekend’s San Francisco Bay Bridge construction closure made using a script that grabbed images from the bridge webcams.

seen on posterpous

Create complex Smart Playlists in iTunes 9
Fri, Sep 11 2009 at 7:30AM PDT • Submitted by Anonymous

Smart Playlists in iTunes 9 can now be more than just (A and B) or (A or B or C) to build a playlist. Now the rules can be combined and nested. In addition to the plus and minus buttons, there's a new three-dot (ellipsis-like) button to generate the nested rules. For example, A and (B or C) was previously not possible. In iTunes 9, you can now do this. First add rule A and set the top "Match" criteria to All. After you have rule A done, click on the three-dot button to get a lower level rule, add rule B and set its applicability pop-up to Any. Finally, click the plus sign and add rule C. This will create the logical structure of A and (B or C). You can get even more fancy and click the three-dot button again, and add a D or E conditional, giving you a final rule structure of A and (B or C and (D or E)). The iTunes 9 help is silent about this new feature, but it's quite powerful.

excellent for us smart listers

How to get the miniature player window in iTunes 9
Thu, Sep 10 2009 at 7:30AM PDT • Submitted by Anonymous

When I installed iTunes 9, I pressed the green zoom button, expecting to get the ultra-small iTunes player window. But this time it didn't come out that way, it just made the window much larger. So I tried some modifier keys, and found that Option-clicking the zoom button now creates the mini player window. (A standard click on the zoom button will return it to normal size.) [robg adds: In iTunes 8, you could also use the Window » Zoom menu to activate the mini player, which could be very confusing for a new iTunes user ('zoom' and 'really small window' don't usually go together). In iTunes 9, there's a new menu item for the mini player, View » Switch to Mini Player (Shift-Command-M), which is a much better solution. As before, you can also drag the lower right corner of the mini player's window to remove the song display area, making for a very small controller-only window.]

this was bugging me until now

Battle of The Billboards in LA: Giant Boozy Ladyparts are OK, Criticizing Insurance Companies Ain't.

Posted by Xeni Jardin, September 11, 2009 7:30 PM | permalink

In LA's Koreatown district, two dueling billboards over on Wilshire Boulevard. Two enter, one leaves. Guess which?

At left, Consumer Watchdog's ad, arguing that you can't trust Mercury Insurance. Yup, you guessed it -- THAT billboard was dismantled last week when the subject of the ad issued lawyergrams.

At right, the Absolut vagina Mango ad, which still flaps proudly in the Southern California breeze:

"If you drive three to four blocks east of where ours was," said Jamie Court, "there's a huge Absolut Mango ad, and it's really not a mango." Court said he was alerted by his wife, who happened upon it while driving and made the following observation: "There's a five-story vagina on a building."

So, happy mutants, lesson learned: You may or may not be able to trust Mercury Insurance, but you can trust humongous hoo-hahs.

I think I know someone at Mercury Insurance...

Tip: Using The New Automatic Import Folder In iTunes 9

10:26 am, September 10th, 2009, Giles Turnbull

iTunes 9 has neat little new feature: it will automatically import any music or videos you throw into a specific folder.

That folder is called “Automatically Add to iTunes”, and after installing iTunes 9 you’ll find it tucked away inside your “~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/” folder.

Anything you drag into it will be imported into iTunes immediately – and it’s worth noting that the original file (the one you put into the Automatic folder) promptly disappears afterwards. It doesn’t get trashed, but moved to the appropriate place inside the iTunes Music folder.

I’m slightly bemused about this folder’s location. It’s a bit, well, tucked away. If you move it elsewhere, the automatic import function stops working. It has to be inside the iTunes Music folder.

Still, now at least we know it’s there and we know what it does; perhaps there’s some scripting or Services potential to uncover. One benefit is that you no longer have to keep iTunes running to add new stuff to it, you can simply save files to this folder instead. The files will sit there until iTunes is next launched, and get processed then.

great been waiting for this

The Way the Future Blogs

Frederik Pohl

« The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard, Part 2

Dick

  Dick Cheney

I was never a fan of Dick Cheney, but since he has been out of office he seems to have got even worse. Some of the things he says simply can’t be defended.

In just one example, he says that the blame for al Qaeda’s bloody and brutal destruction of the World Trade Center and the death of the thousands of people it murdered belongs to one man alone, namely Dick Clarke, because Clarke had the responsibility for warning President Bush in such matters and failed to do as he was sworn to do.

But that is not simply untrue, it is the opposite of true. On several occasions Clarke sent clear and unambiguous written warnings, one of them just days before the actual attack and they were ignored. That is a matter of public record.

So there are only two possibilities. Either Cheney is flat-out lying though aware that his lies can be proven on him, or he has simply lost touch with the real world.

Either way, whatever he says, he is not to be believed.

You don't know dick!

Earlier this week, Steve Jobs characterized iTunes 9 the "the biggest release of iTunes in a long time." We naturally grabbed a copy and took it around the block a few times to see if we could verify that claim for ourselves. Though the biggest changes (aside from the Home Sharing feature) are mainly connected to the highly revised iTunes Store, what we discovered is that iTunes 9 has many refinements that are hidden all over the application. Unfortunately, many of these little settings and features aren't easy to discover, and may be buried in menus you rarely think to check.

UI changes

The first thing we noticed when launching iTunes 9 is that the user interface has been revised yet again. And no, standard scroll bars aren't part of the changes. Instead, iTunes 9 looks unlike any Leopard or Snow Leopard application.

Note how almost every UI element looks different, even the sidebar icons.

The new UI look has been hinted to be the actual "Marble" interface theme rumored to appear in Snow Leopard; it's now suggested we won't actually see it until Mac OS X 10.7. iTunes 9 has an interface that departs heavily from that of iLife '09 and standard Snow Leopard UI widgets and styling that was earlier claimed to be Marble. In particular, iTunes 8 tended towards a darker, more flat look to UI elements, giving it a smoother appearance. It also used the same darker "unified window" appearance that came with Leopard and is carried over to Snow Leopard. iTunes 9, in contrast, has a much lighter window gradient near the top, and all the UI elements have a subtle, but notable 3D appearance. All the buttons, the information display window, and even the icons in the sidebar all have this slightly smoother, slightly shinier look to them. Honestly, it's not a bad look, but I don't see why Apple is always changing the UI look for iTunes, and why it never quite seems to be in sync with the OS.

The other notable UI change, and one I found confusing after I first launched iTunes 9, is that in the "browse" mode, columns are to the left of the tracklist, instead of on the top. By default, iTunes 9 shows a single artist column in a long vertical column on the left, with the track list on the right. I vastly prefer the old method of having a series of shorter columns on top, and after some playing around in the view menu I found an option to move those browse columns back to the top.

Other UI changes, which are more subtle, include column headers in white, a lighter blue background on the sidebar, and an extremely faint blue background on the browse columns and an alternating light blue stripe in the track list. Personally, I don't care too much for these changes, but, c'est la vie.

A new library management scheme

The next thing we noticed is that iTunes was rebuilding the library file, which has become pretty much standard practice with each major (and occasionally with a minor) revision of the application. What we didn't notice is that iTunes 9 brings a new default library management scheme. That's because iTunes will only use this new management scheme if it makes a new library, or you specifically tell it to use it. The command to do so is buried under File > Library > Organize Library.

This new scheme puts a folder inside ~/Music/iTunes called iTunes Media (unless you upgrade a previous library, it which case it inexplicably remains named iTunes Music). Inside iTunes Media, there are folders for Downloads, iPod Games (if you have any), Mobile Applications, Movies, Music, Podcasts, Ringtones, and TV shows. Previously, these folders were scattered in a few different places, and the new scheme is much better organized. We noticed that a few folders were left over after running the organize command—after some digging it turned out to be either some duplicate files or, in one case, a corrupted file from trying to import a very old, scratched-up copy of Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation. It's safe to trash these leftovers. (Several folks have noted that redoing the organization will result in a major Time Machine backup happening of your library, even though only the location of the files have changed—keep that in mind if you decide to opt for better organization.)

The other new thing added to this iTunes Media folder is—finally!—a watch folder to automatically add media to iTunes. Why Apple buried it in iTunes Media is beyond all logic, but you can make an alias of the folder and stick it anywhere you like. I put it on the desktop—you could also put it in the Dock or in the Finder Sidebar for easy drag-and-drop importing into iTunes. If for some reason the file isn't compatible with iTunes, it'll get relegated to a "Not Added" folder inside the "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder. Good move to make the watch folder—people have been asking for it for years—bad move burying it in the media library hierarchy.

now you're talkin'

Poe archive from UT Austin goes online

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 11, 2009 1:29 PM | permalink

Lori sez, "UT Austin's Ransom Center has digitized their Edgar Allan Poe collection, and it's pretty cool. I especially like the copies of his books, with his notes in them."

Oh, there's tons of Poe treasure here. I'm in hog heaven.

The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe's manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.

I have read the Poe short stories multiple times - a master many times over