Download the latest version here

It auto-fills the "site" field with the URL of your current opened tab, and there's an options panel to tweak how your passwords are hashed. It basically has the exact same functionality as the original Firefox extension, with a few minor exceptions.

Of course, though, I didn't check to see if anyone else had created one before I started. So there's already an extension for Chrome that does this, but it's kinda ugly, and I trust mine a lot more! So use mine!

Since then, TOTALLIES hasn't changed much. Until now. I figured since the wiki was really only used for uploading silly images, that I should reduce some of the unnecessary load on my server and switch to something a little more appropriate. So I set up a Tumblr account and changed my domain's name servers, and said goodbye to an old friend.

Say hello to: TOTALLIES 2.0

I decided to take the website in a new direction as well; All of the images I am uploading are going to be weird/and or gross. Yep. Sorry if you don't like it (not actually sorry). I hope everyone still finds it entertaining. 

I also created my own theme because I wasn't 100% happy with any of the ones they let you choose. I looked through a lot. I like the one I made and I am going to improve on it over time. I still need to find a place for the TOTALLIES mascot, happy cat.

Enjoy.

Over lunch today, I (with a lot of help from Brent (thanks Brent!)) created Papmic Sansrus. Papmic Sansrus has the ability to make any webpage the most offensive webpage in the world... but only if you are a designer. It will replace the font of every word to an alternating combination of Comic Sans and Papyrus.

Click here to see Papmic Sansrus in action, or drag the link to your bookmarks bar for easy use on any website. (If you are reading this in a feed reader, you might need to visit my actual website to witness the glory.)

My original intent was to alternate fonts between every letter, but for simplicity's sake, I decided to make a lite version that limits it to every word instead. Through a happy mistake, however, we got it working the way I originally wanted. Click here to see the ultra version, though you might want to refresh the page if you're reading this with the lite version active. This ultra version works well in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but has some trouble in Internet Explorer. It also might break some page layouts slightly, but I feel it only adds to the effect. It will also cause your browser to chug/crash if you try it on a very text-heavy site.

Brent is also the author of another fun bookmarklet called 3D. Using this without 3D glasses will probably induce headaches. A couple more hideous ones I've found add drop shadows to everything, or add drop shadows to just text. I am unaware of the author of these gems.

Combine Papmic Sansrus with 3D for the ultimate web experience.

So it's 2010 and it officially sounds like we're living in the future. Twenty-Ten. I guess it's a pretty big deal. I originally wanted to write up a "best of the decade" list of music albums, but there are too many. Do I limit it to ones I listened to as they were released, or do I include ones from the early-mid 2000s that I have only discovered recently? So many options. So I'm not doing that.

Instead, I decided to focus only on 2009 and create a party mix CD of some of my favorite tunes from the past year:

Jeff's 2009 Party Mix

1. Röyksopp - Röyksopp Forever
2. The Golden Filter - Solid Gold
3. Black Moth Super Rainbow - Tooth Decay
4. Simian Mobile Disco - Audacity of Huge
5. Calvin Harris - The Rain
6. Danger - 00:01
7. MSTRKRFT - 1,000 Cigarettes
8. Boys Noize - Starter
9. Huoratron - Gbay
10. Infected Mushroom - End of the Road
11. Dan Deacon - Snookered
12. Condo Fucks - Shut Down, Part 2
13. Street Sweeper Social Club - Promenade
14. Them Crooked Vultures - Gunman
15. The Flaming Lips - Watching the Planets

Oh and look, somebody hosted it right here, and it's totally not even on my web server, completely absolving me of any legal issues. How convenient! Total playing time comes in at just under 70 minutes, so you can burn it to a CD which everyone totally still does.

And now for some miscellaneous fun statistics for the past year:

Top 10 Google Queries

1. php date
2. zenses
3. totom
4. foobar
5. wamp
6. sabnzbd
7. adsense
8. edmonton ab
9. zend framework
10. totallies

I can never remember how to format various dates in PHP, I guess.

Top 10 Last.fm Artists

1. Nine Inch Nails (821 plays)
2. The White Stripes (561 plays)
3. Atmosphere (350 plays)
4. The Beatles (285 plays)
5. The Smashing Pumpkins (278 plays)
6. Infected Mushroom (270 plays)
7. The Flaming Lips (269 plays)
8. Modest Mouse (264 plays)
9. Beastie Boys (264 plays)
10. Brothers Backword (179 plays)

No surprise here, except for maybe The Beatles being so high up there. I decided to listen to every single one of their albums chronologically since they were all remastered in 2009. It was neat. I might do it again.

Top 10 Last.fm Songs

1. The White Stripes - It's My Fault For Being Famous (29 plays)
2. Danger - 00:01 (feat. Vyle) (27 plays)
3. The White Stripes - Astro (26 plays)
4. Röyksopp - Röyksopp Forever (24 plays)
5. Danielson - Did I Step On Your Trumpet (24 plays)
6. Infected Mushroom - End Of The Road (22 plays)
7. Street Sweeper Social Club - Clap For The Killers (20 plays)
8. Nine Inch Nails - Not So Pretty Now (20 plays)
9. Jane's Addiction - Chip Away (20 plays)
10. Peter Bjorn and John - Young Folks (20 plays)

This list differs quite a bit from my 2009 Party Mix album mostly because a lot of these songs weren't released in 2009. Go figure!

I wrote 34 blog posts. My website had 5,719 visits, 9,920 pageviews, and 4,276 unique visitors. I sent 92 emails. I wish I had more stats. I basically wish everything kept incredible stats and let me see them. How many tweets have I made in 2009? How many people did I befriend on Facebook? How many people did I remove as a friend? How many gigabytes did I download? I guess I could keep track of these things myself, but that's way too much work and requires way more discipline than I'm prepared to invest.

Anyway, here's to living in the future.

I present: Broprah Winfrey. (Thanks Ryan Leland for the idea!)

Sadly, though, I'm not the first to have this idea. The Twitter username "broprah" was already taken for this exact purpose, but it hasn't been updated since August. Also it appears to be manually updated rather than with a translator. So basically: it sucks!

I'm still tweaking the translator quite a bit, as there are a lot of improvements that can be made. I'm going to use this Twitter account as a way to monitor and test REAL WORLD examples so I can make improvements.

To help you, I've created a rudimentary bro-speak translator, and I'm currently accepting suggestions for missing words or phrases that you think should be included. Try it out here. It works particularily well with certain phrases like "Hey man, how's it going? Are you going to the bar after work?", but not so well with others.

THAT'S WHY I NEED SUGGESTIONS.

Right out of the box, Picard will scan your music library and find the proper band names, album titles, release dates, and song titles for your music. It will also find all kinds of extra information such as the publisher, country of origin, catalog number, and barcode for specific albums. If you agree with the information it suggests, you can click "Save" and rest easy knowing you're on your way to MP3 tag bliss.

So what's this about Last.fm tags? Picard Tagger supports plugins, and more specifically, there is a plugin called LastFMPlus. LastFMPlus extends Picard's tagging capabilities to include very specific genres, grouping (more broad genres), moods (happy, sad, trippy), occasions (summer, driving), and more. What's even better is Picard will perform searches on a per-track basis, so you don't have to worry about artists or albums that cover more than one genre. There is a pretty detailed tutorial on how to install and use it on their website, but it's been down for me more than once, so I've hosted the tutorial myself which you can download right here. I've also hosted the plugin myself, which can be downloaded here. Their tutorial doesn't cover everything and assumes you already know how to use Picard, so I'll quickly go over the main points so you don't have to read any more than you already are.

Installation & Setup

After you've downloaded Picard, install it but don't open it yet. Download the LastFMPlus plugin and extract it to the plugins folder within your Picard installation directory. Once you've extracted it, there should be a lastfmplus folder in the plugins folder. Within that, there should be two python (.py) files. If you're hardcore, you could open these in a text editor and modify the plugin yourself, but you probably won't need to.

Run Picard and do what any self respecting geek would do first: open the options. You can click through and enable and disable whatever you like, but in order to enable the plugin, you'll have to click Plugins and enable Last.fm Plus. You can also enable other useful plugins that came bundled with Picard, like Disc Numbers, which will properly tag multi-disc albums. When you're done, click OK to close the options panel, and then open it back up again. Next to Plugins on the left side, there should be [+] icon indicating there's more underneath that menu item. Go ahead and click that to reveal the Last.fm Plus plugin options. You can play with these settings or leave them all at default, but what you have to do is go over to the 2nd tab and click the bold "Load Defaults" button at the bottom. Now click OK.

Let the tagging begin

Now you're ready to really get started. Picard has two main windows: the left side which shows you unmatched files, and the right side which shows you songs that are ready to tag. Use the toolbar buttons at the top to add individual files or an entire folder to the left window. Once they are listed, click "Cluster" to group them by album. If you're tagging individual songs, there's no need to cluster. If you already have fairly well tagged music, you can select which songs from the left window that you want to look up and click "Lookup". The selected songs will be moved to the right side and let you know it's "loading album information". A few seconds later, you should be able to see which, if any, of your selected songs were found. There will be a rectangular meter next to the matched songs indicating how well your song was matched to the one in the database. If it was a perfect match, you'll see a fully green meter. You can right click on the song in the right window and inspect its details to see the custom tags that were added by LastFMPlus. If you're happy with the results, select the song(s) you want to save and click "Save".

If your tags are a mess or the "Lookup" button is finding incorrect matches, there's still hope. Picard uses fingerprinting to determine the origin of your music even if you have completely incorrect tags or no tags at all. Add your music to the left window as you normally would, except click "Scan" instead of "Lookup". It takes a little longer than usual, but it will more than often find a match. There were a few cases when, despite proper pre-existing tags, "Lookup" failed to properly find a match, but "Scan" did. 

That wasn't so bad

With my 1000+ album music library, Picard was unable to find proper tag information for about a dozen of them. One of the downsides is that if the album isn't in Picard's database, then you can't use the LastFMPlus plugin to at least get proper genre information. Even with this limitation, a 1.2% failure rate is something that I'm willing to live with. Not to mention it even found some rarer bootlegs that I wasn't expecting it to find. I also had some bizarre matches with a few albums, specifically in cases when it finds matches across multiple releases of the same album (like deluxe editions), so I had to manually move around the matched tracks so that they made up a single complete matched album. You also might have problems finding albums if you're searching for them on (or before) their release date. This is because Picard uses a user-contributed database, so if nobody else has added that album before you, it's not going to pull any matches. This is a good opportunity for you to contribute!

So it's not perfect, but it's damn good. It has satisfied my need for perfect tags the most out of any solution I've tried, and it allows a wide range of customization. Now we can all create incredibly specific playlists depending on any mood or occasion. 

What started out as an experiment turned into a pretty cool way to find some totally sweet banners for my site. I came up with the idea after thinking It would be cool to have some pictures of dinosaurs and robots and space ships to use as a banner background. Having absolutely zero photos of any of those things, I turned to the next best source: Flickr. I started out doing random searches for single tags, but I wasn't finding anything worthy at all. It was mostly just portraits of people in front of dinosaur statues or people's home-made robotic experiments. Boring.

Having no way filter out tags from a search, my next thought was to search for pairs of tags. One tag would be the primary subject of my search (like a dinosaur), and the second tag would be something like a verb or photographic technique that might filter out portraits and other boring photos (like macro). The results were immediately improved. I set about creating two lists of words that when randomly paired up might produce interesting photos. The banner up above was the end product. So far I'm incredibly pleased with some of the results:

I'll admit that a lot of the photos which look good as a banner wouldn't even be considered great photography as photos on their own, but that doesn't even matter. The secret to transforming them into a great banner is simple: Offset by -50 pixels on both the X and Y axis and crop to 650 by 300 pixels. Instant background art.

It's not always this awesome, though. Even with this great formula for success at your fingertips, you'll still encounter some duds. To help remove terrible and/or inappropriate photos, I've implemented a system that will check to see if a photo has been viewed in the past, and if so, check it's voting score. Once a photo has reached a score of -3 (it has been given a thumbs-down three times), it will no longer appear on the site. Here's a few duds I'll be glad to never see again:

And finally...

So there you have it. That's all I have to say about that.

First thing: I decided to play with HTML 5 because it's the new hip thing to do. I later found out that there's no real benefit for me to use HTML 5 tags over regular ones right now. As a result, my website is severely crippled in Internet Explorer. I'll fix that in the next day or two.

Update: I somewhat fixed things for ol' IE. The random photo banner doesn't really work past the first page-load, and there are no fancy CSS 3 rounded corners. 

Second thing: The banner at the top uses photos sourced from Flickr searches using a combination of two words that are chosen at random from a pool of about two dozen. I tried to use more abstract words that might filter out photos of people. At the bottom of the page, you can see what words were chosen for the currently displayed banner photo. I spent hours on Saturday and Sunday (about 7,500 Flickr API requests in 24 hours) tweaking the list of words so that I get more interesting results. It's not perfect; I still get a lot of really bad photos. Some really good ones, but some really awful. So right now I am risking you coming to my site and seeing a completely inappropriate or confusing photo in my banner! To deal with this in the future, I've set up a little voting system where anyone can "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" a banner photo if it's particularly good or particularly bad. I'll also take suggestions for new words to add to the pool if you've got a good one!

Update: There's now a handy tooltip at the top that links directly to the Flickr photo used in the banner. Hovering over it will tell you what tags were used. I also added the words "bokeh", "catadioptric", "vignette", and "lomography". Thanks Keith and Brent!

Other things: Everything is way more simple. I completely got rid of comments! I may bring them back, but I don't really see a purpose for my site. If somebody really has something to tell me, they can send me an email. There's no search right now, mostly because I was really excited to get my new design up and running and some features didn't make make it in yet. There are some other minor CSS things that I need to fix too.

I was just really excited to get it online, guys! 

It's been just over one year since I started this site. I've actually had the domain since about 2004, but it's never been a true blog until last year.

Anyway, I tried not to force myself to think of topics to write about, and I think for the most part I was successful. I wrote my first entry on August 14, 2008 and I was planning on re-designing my website for its anniversary, but I'm a really good procrastinator, so that didn't pan out. I have a possible design I would like to roll out by the end of this month, but I've been pretty busy at home the past few weeks so it might have to wait until mid September.

So over the span of a year I wrote a total of 60 entries (if I counted correctly). In my first post I made a joke that I would probably look back at some with regret, but honestly I don't. At least I can't remember writing anything I regret. I thought about giving it up a few times, mostly when I couldn't think of anything to write, but I'm glad I kept it going.

Overall the experience has been pretty interesting. I've never been much of a public person, so writing about myself felt a little strange at times, but I kept personal details to a minimum and just rolled with it. I don't know if my writing skill has improved at all, either. It's hard to tell over such a long period. I have a lot of ideas for how my new blog is going to work, so I'm actually pretty excited to get it launched. This means it's going to be online sooner than later. I might make it a tradition of re-designing it once a year, but we'll see.

So here's to another year of posts mostly about organizing my music collection and/or complaining about my Zune!

It's been just over a month since I launched PrettyPreez.com, my little campaign to get funds for a free camera via strangers on the internet. It started out with moderate success, though all of the donations were from friends and co-workers. I kept up my part of the offer, but things kind of got put on the backburner when I took a 10 day holiday. I feel bad about this, but I fully intend to complete the final set of drawings and kick back into spamming people on Twitter. My goal (besides getting enough for a camera) is to at least get one single donation from a stranger.

Space space space space space.

It's no surprise to anyone that knows me that I've dabbled in the evil realm of MMORPGs from time to time (though "dabbled" might be a bit of an understatement, depending on who you ask). A few weeks ago I read an article about a game called EVE Online, and a player who was part of an in-game "corporation"  that acted as a bank for other players. This bank corporation would loan in-game money to other players and corporations, collect interest, and essentially act much like a bank acts in real life.

The interesting part I discovered was that there is no in-game mechanic that allows people to form banks, which means that it was completely player created and managed based on the honor system. And as it turned out, there are corrupt people in virtual banks just as there are in real ones. One of the members of this bank ended up stealing 200,000,000,000 ISK (that's interstellar kredits, and two hundred billion of them is a lot) from the bank, effectively causing everyone to withdraw their money and almost cause a collapse of the in-game market.

Okay so I realize that this post is getting really geeky really fast, but guys, you should read the article because it's actually pretty interesting. So interesting in fact that I decided to play the free 21-day trial and I was incredibly impressed. I've been complaining to Billie for a while about how every MMO is essentially the same and I want to play something different, so when I heard about this I had wondered why I hadn't tried it sooner. You can pretty much do anything you want and there are no rules, plus it's in space.

Oh yeah also:

Billie and I got new neighbors (a young couple) and although they're relatively quiet in the evenings, we still find reasons to complain about them to each other. For example the guy always parks his car in the visitor parking stall because it's conveniently close to their back gate. So I am officially taking suggestions for passive aggressive notes that I can place on his windshield.

I've also heard him blasting the end portion of Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine (you know the part, if not, watch this at 4:35) a total of three separate times in the parking lot. It's really classy. Also we're pretty sure wife beaters and track pants are the only clothing he owns. Despite this I once overheard him say "Gucci is alright, but Armani is better" and I am pretty sure he was completely serious.

We don't normally judge people like this, I swear, but it's just so easy in this case. It's hard not to.

The whole point is to see if I can raise $180 to buy a new digital camera. In the first few hours of launch, I got $12 in donations (just from friends), so now it looks like I'm going to have to rely on complete strangers to complete my goal.

I am getting some free advertising out of Project Wonderful, which is a bid-based advertising service. I'm also periodically searching for things on Twitter like "what should I spend it on?" or "what should I buy?" and linking them to my site. OH YEAH, the site is PrettyPreez.com.

GET DONATIN'

Back Yard Adventures

Billie and I have been slowly working on our new back yard to make it a little more presentable. This weekend we finished staining the old and weathered patio and patio furniture. It started out kinda fun but turned into a monotonous job by the end. I got sunburned which was NOT FUN. We also finally cut the grass for the first time this summer (it was overdue) and gave it some much needed fertilizer. Our new satellite dish is mounted on a tripod at the end of our yard, and the tripod is just sitting on a few cinder blocks. It looks incredibly hick-ish and stupid, but we're planning on making it prettier.

Kitty Kwest 2009

We've been getting visted by a local stray cat every day for the past month or so. Her ear tips look frozen off, so unless she has REALLY AWFUL owners, we're confident she is definitely a stray. Billie thinks she has kittens, so we've been leaving out little bowls of cat food. Now we're worried that when the summer's over, she'll have to survive the harsh winter again. So if you or anyone in the Edmonton area wants a really cute and friendly kitty, let me know???

TOP SECRET

I recently started somewhat of a secret web project. I haven't been working on it very long, but I am pretty excited for it and I think it will be fairly impressive when it's done. That's just about all I want to say about it right now. I have the domain bought and everything!!!

Look out world here I come.

I eagerly clicked the first result that was presented to me and it brought to FreeMusicConnection.com. I was greeted with a very low bitrate song playing in the background and an animated Flash intro. After clicking "Skip Intro and Take Me to My Music!", I suddenly had a form to fill out. I'm sure they just need a little info and I would be on my way to FREE MUSIC.

So secure.

I guess now everybody knows my password is "Gordon". Please don't tell anyone, guys. Also, at least they're up front with you about how little they respect your privacy!

After filling out the form with fake information, I came to a screen asking to verify my phone number. Rats. I guess they're too smart to let bogus sign-ups get past them. The scary part, though, was in the fine print:

The Service is available to customers of Rogers Wireless, Bell, Fido, Sasktel, Telus, MTS Mobility and Virgin Mobile for a monthly fee of $5.00/week.

Yup. $20/month for FREE MUSIC if you weren't careful enough to read the fine print. Sadly, my relationship with FreeMusicConnection.com was at an end, but I wasn't ready to give up my search.

Back at fun.com, I found another site offering free music, this time it was EZ-Tracks.com. Upon clicking, I had to mute another low bitrate song playing in the background of a flash animation. EZ-Tracks didn't force me to fill out a form before I knew what my options were, which was nice, so clicked a few songs in their "Top Song Downloads" section. Before attempting to download, I checked out some of the comments at the bottom of the page. This was for Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot":

wow i would like to drop it like its hot too. because i am hot and sexy

Sounds reasonable. This one was for Queen's "We Are The Champions":

I think this song is very cool to listening to if you are happy

I was sold. I clicked "Download Now" and I was prompted to enter my email address. I gave them a fake one, and I was brought back to the exact same screen that FreeMusicConnection.com sent me to earlier, asking me to verify my phone number. I guess I wasn't getting any free music today.

Just out of curiosity, I clicked their Terms & Conditions and I found this gem:

Many of the songs available through the Service are performed by their original artists. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you understand and agree that most of the available songs are performed by other musicians in the style of the original artists.

I am pretty certain that the only people that get reeled in by these offers are naive moms that just don't know any better. I weep for them.

I have been an iTunes user for years, but it was only recently that I decided to force myself to switch to another music library application. I've tried a few over the years, including Winamp and more recently Songbird, but I felt they all seemed to lack some pretty basic functionalty that a picky user like myself just needs. Winamp was alright, but its lack of drag-and-drop always bothered me. I liked how iTunes let me drag a song directly from my playlist window to an MSN contact so I could easily initiate a file transfer. Songbird is open source and seemed to have an abundance of features, but it ended up using even more RAM on my computer than iTunes did. A music library application does not need to use more than 150-200 MB of RAM when it would be better off spent by another application that is better suited for it. I could go on about why I like to have a buffer of free RAM versus the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument, but I won't.

So although I have been fairly pleased by iTunes over the years, I was starting to get a little annoyed by the sluggish interface, especially when scrolling through a library of 8000+ songs. Add album art into the mix, and your RAM usage skyrockets while the interface gets even more sluggish. So I decided to finally make the switch to a little piece of software called foobar2000. Foobar2000 is an application that you can tell was made by programmers. The interface is ugly, menu items are hard to find, and there are no handy "getting started" wizards when you first launch it. The appeal of it, though, is its blazing speed (launches in about 2 seconds), low RAM usage (15-25 MB with over 9000 [har har] songs) and most importantly, the fact that you can customize anything in the application. The difficult part is figuring out how.

Ugly as sin.

Foobar has a fairly active community of programmers constantly making and updating components that add all kinds of features and tools to the application. One of the first things I did was download a custom UI component (columns UI) that let me create an interface that closely matched iTunes. There are numerous UI components available, some that can completely reskin the player. I also changed the color scheme to something that was a little easier on the eyes. It's not quite as slick as other applications but it does the job nicely.

Much better.

So now to the reasons why foobar is a complete dreamboat:

• Complete customization of the interface - Besides being able to customize where interface items are laid out, I wanted to see how many songs were inside each of my playlists, as well as how many hours, minutes, and seconds each playlist was. I made it show me. I wanted to see the codec and bitrate of the file I was playing in the status bar. I made it show me. You can pretty much do anything you want.
• File format support - Besides the standard MP3, foobar will also play pretty much anything you throw at it. If you find a format that isn't natively supported by foobar, you can be pretty sure somebody made a component that adds support for it. AC3 is one example.
• Folder monitoring library - Instead of dragging files into foobar to add them to your library (like iTunes), you can tell foobar to monitor one or many folders on your PC and it will add them to the library automatically. Delete a file from the folder, it gets removed from your library. You can also tell it to ignore certain file types.
• X to X file conversion - Want that FLAC file converted to OGG? You can do that. Though that is a little obscure of an example, I've found myself needing to convert AC3 files (ripped from a DVD) to MP3 a few times.
• Mass tag/rename/move - Pretty self explanitory. You can retag, rename, or move large amounts of songs at once. Format the target file names however you like using built in variables. Have it sort files into an organized folder structure based on artist and album tags.
• Statistics - With an optional component, you can keep track of ratings, play counts, and dates songs were last played. By default, your tags are not modified. A nice option for those (like me) that hate when applications sneakily rewrite your tags.
• Autoplaylists - These are basically the same as Smart Playlists in iTunes, except probably a little more powerful. You can literally write your own queries that are actually quite similar to SQL. If you want a list of songs from the 90s that you haven't listened to in the past week, you can achieve it with: NOT %last_played% DURING LAST 1 WEEK AND (date GREATER 1989 AND date LESS 2000).
• Album art - Displays album art embedded in files or saved externally (folder.jpg in Windows).

It even lets me drag-and-drop songs into MSN. It's pretty much perfect for me. A few other features worth mentioning are gapless playback, keyboard shortcuts, and yes, it can scrobble to Last.fm.

The only gripe I have with it, is that it doesn't have built-in searching of album art, and it can't import album art downloaded by iTunes. For this, I had to download a separate application called Album Art Downloader (accurate name), which can search an entire directory for missing artwork (if you tell it to look for folder.jpg files). Once it's figured out what you're missing, you can get it to search various online sources (Google, Amazon, Last.fm, Discogs...) for artwork and automatically save it to the appropriate directory. The awesome part is, its possible to integrate into foobar if you download the foobar COM server component.

The thing that turns people away from foobar the most is how much time and effort that needs to go into configuring it to look and function exactly how you want. Since components are all made by third party developers, the options interface for most of them are all different, adding that extra level of complexity. Luckily there are plenty of people online in forums willing to help you out.

oh my god options

I guess my point is that if you're looking for that perfect player for your music, you're probably going to have to make it yourself. Most of the work is done for you, you just need to spend a few hours customizing it to meet your needs. It'll be worth it.

Nine Inch Nails - Rexall Place, Edmonton, AB - 7.28.08 - photo by Warrren Hrycun

My first impression was that the album was "okay". I had been aware of NIN as a band (if you can call one guy a band) for years, seeing as they were fairly popular in the mid-late 90s, but I never actually gave them a chance. I gave With Teeth a few more listens, though, and it started to grow on me. It wasn't until several months later that I decided to buy The Downward Spiral on a whim when I saw it for $9.99 at HMV. I was out of town at the time (Billie's brother's wedding), so without a CD player, I had to wait until I got back home to listen to it. Unknown to me at the time, I had just planted a seed that was soon to grow into a full blown obsession.

In the next 3-4 years, I managed to track down not just all of their full length albums, but each of their singles and EPs as well, which usually contained many good remixes. It was easy to keep track of which albums I was missing, due to a convenient little numbering system for each release called Halos. Each release (with a couple rare exceptions) was given a Halo number. Their first single was Halo 1, and their very last release to date is Halo 27. In 2005 they were only at Halo 19, but I still had quite a bit of collecting to do. To this day, the only ones I am missing are 12 and 15. One being a rare out of print VHS tape, and the other being an also out of print, three-part single that usually sells for $80 per-part on eBay.

Nine Inch Nails - Rexall Place, Edmonton, AB - 7.28.08

My obsession took another turn for the worse when I bought a record player some time in 2007. Now I had the need to go back and buy all of my absolute favorite albums on wonderful vinyl (Billie was initially opposed to this idea, but she's now somewhat grown fond of collecting records). I held back a little bit, partly due to the rarity of many older NIN albums on vinyl, but I eventually managed to find copies of every full length album, including Broken and The Fragile which have never seen repressings beyond their original release. My absolute prized possesion that came from all of this has to be the ultra-deluxe limited edition of Ghosts I-IV that was released in 2008. It's pretty awesome, you guys.

By now you're probably wondering why I'm sharing all of this, and if you're still reading, here's why: It has been recently announced by Trent himself that the current NIN tour is going to be their last. Their last forever? Nobody knows, but at least their last for a long, long time. In the short time that I've been a fan, I have been lucky enough to see them live three times. Once in 2005, and twice in 2008, and they were by far the favorite concert experiences I've had. Though I am probably a little biased. Just a little.

Single tear.

So here is where my obsession ends, or at least slows down, for now. Trent prematurely announced he was in talks with HBO to pitch an original TV series revolving around the story of the album Year Zero, but that was a while ago and there hasn't been much news about it in some time. I guess I am lucky to have enjoyed new NIN music in the short time it was available, seeing as though the older fans commonly had to wait 4-6 years between each album prior to With Teeth's release. At least now other fans and I can follow Trent on Twitter to see what he's up to. I guess it's time to play the waiting game.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about an authentic retro 80s boombox that I got from my grandparents' basement. I thought it would be fun to record a bunch of albums onto cassette just for the novelty of it, so the first thing I did was look at what kind of audio input plugs it had. I found out that the only kind it supported was this weird thing called DIN which basically looked like a larger S-Video plug except it had 5 pins. I did a little research on this mysterious 5-pin DIN audio cable, and I found out that it's an old German standard that I guess has been long abandoned in North America, except used rarely for some brands of keyboards (the instrument, not the computer kind).

I figured my only option at this point was to find some kind of 5-pin DIN to RCA or 3.5mm adapter much like this one. I checked the obvious retailers, Best Buy, The Source, but nobody had the adapter I needed. My next stop was eBay. There were a small handful of people selling them, but all at ridiculous prices. After some searching, I actually found somebody from The Republic of Cyprus that was selling the exact adapter I needed, and for a reasonable price. I bought it, and it came to about $12 CAD after shipping. Then I waited.

Finally, yesterday, it arrived. I immediately ran upstairs to see if it worked. I set the tape deck to line-in mode, connected my Zune, and turned up the volume. I heard music. It was awesome. I grabbed one of the blank tapes that I had nearby, put it in, and pressed record. After about 30 seconds I pressed stop, rewound the tape and pressed play to see if it worked. Silence.

My only guess was that the line-in mode is meant to be used as kind of an auxiliary system, so you can use the speakers with another audio device... But it doesn't actually let you record using it. So then I was back at square one. Today at work, though, I was reminded about a relatively simple and common piece of technology that could help me. A tape adapter.

It was so simple, I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. I've used tape adapters since I got my own portable CD player back in '95 or '96, but instead of this simple solution, I decided to order some archaic cable adapter on eBay from The Republic of Cyprus. So on my way home from the dentist today, I stopped and picked up a cheap tape adapter from Zellers for ten dollars (I had to laugh when the packaging said "compatible with iPods"... Oh, marketing). When I got home, I set everything up again, this time my Zune hooked up to the tape adapter which was inserted in the first tape deck, along with a blank tape inserted in the second deck. I pressed record and waited. After a few seconds I rewound the tape to give it a test. This time I heard music.

All this trouble was for nothing, though, because I'm assuming since the unit itself is so old, parts have been worn out and things don't move quite as smoothly as they used to. As a result, anything I play back in the deck ends up sounding just ever-so-slightly too slow. There is also a significant amount of distortion that can be heard on the tape, which pretty much destroys any enjoyment you can possibly get out of listening to music. On the plus side, I do now have a cable that lets me hook up my Zune or any other audio device so I can listen to it through the unit's speakers. The radio works pretty good, too. Now I just don't know what to do with 10 blank cassette tapes and a tape adapter.

On my way home I stopped and picked up a 10-pack of blank tapes from Zellers along with a tape cleaning kit. I plan on creating a few mixtapes, as well as recording a bunch of classic 80s albums just to keep it legit.

To my dismay, the only line-in jack that it supports is some 5-pin format called DIN, and of course all modern electronics either use a plain 3.5mm jack or stereo RCA cables. So I have to find a place that will sell a 5-pin DIN to 3.5mm audio jack if I want to record directly from my PC or MP3 player. By the time I found this out, the only place open was London Drugs, but they didn't have it there. I'm going to try Radio Shack or The Source tomorrow.

I did get a chance to try out the radio, which sounds very clear and actually packs a lot of bass. I expected it to sound very flat and junky, but I was actually completely surprised at how good it sounds.

Oh, and IT HAS LIGHTS:

Hello !!!! :) I am Piter Kokoniz. oOnly want to tell, that your posts are really interesting And want to ask you: what was the reasson for you to start this blog? Sorry for my bad english:) Thank you! Piter.

That's it. No links to follow, nothing. I googled his name, and it turned up several posts on other blogs with the exact same comment from Mr. Kokoniz. Either he's new to the internet and doesn't "get" the whole spamming business, or he is legitimately curious as to why I created this blog. If the latter is true, then Pitir, let me tell you:

I started this blog because I am a web developer and I love the internet and technology. I wanted a place to share interesting things I find, and sometimes talk about little things that happen in my life. That's it, really. A simple answer.

So there you have it, Piter. I hope that answer was satisfactory. And don't worry, your english is fine.

The above paragraph is the same as the one below, except it has been "eaten".

Brent showed me this site that translates any website into hilarious gibberish. There are multiple options for how your website of choice gets "eaten", but "Eat word endings" is my favorite. As far as I can tell, it replaces every word with another word that shares the same first three letters as the original.

The result is entertaining.

Try it here.