Conversation bait

Mar
29th

Mon

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Ingram Media Manager fail

Rant mode.

My library offers ebooks, which in turn requires the installation of Ingram Media Manager to access and convert them to something useful. IMM is not. Having it transfer the audio book directly to my iPhone (on MacOS X 10.6, running current iTunes (9.0.3)) corrupted its music database so I had to restore it from backup. Having it convert to MP3 failed once per audio part with the error message “Error occurred while converting the file <insert part name> An unknown error occurred (-50)”. Here’s a way to fix that:

In iTunes’ Advanced settings tab, uncheck “Keep iTunes Media folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”. Conversion now works, if you are lucky. (In my case, it transcoded five of 22 files the first try and left the rest empty. A second try managed to get the rest, too.

Before I came up with the above solution, I tried running the Windows version, too. It, too, depended on an iTunes installation for mp3 encoding, but supposedly could do wma encoding. No such luck, though; “You are not currently licensed for this operation. One or more arguments are invalid.” was all it left me with.

Ingram Media Manager will not popularize audiobooks.

Dec
28th

Mon

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macbook syslog overflow

My (Snow Leopard) /private/var/log/DiagnosticMessages is overflowing with console warnings and errors, repeatedly creating full disk conditions. Every 10s, there is one from com.google.keystone.daemon. Testing the tips at Stopping all OSX Google background ‘updater’ apps to see if it alleviates the issue, after a sudo launchctl remove com.google.keystone.daemon which seems to have taken away the immediate pain.

Jul
26th

Sun

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“Jeff Bezos advised us, when he left at the end of the expedition: Make the clock inaccessible. The harder it is to get to, the move people will value it.”

Jul
18th

Sat

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Live like a hobbit: building instructions

Jun
26th

Fri

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How many million people helped you toast your toast?

It’s difficult to think on the scale of our civilization, understanding its fractal depth.

Apr
20th

Mon

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“Faith in God means believing absolutely in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.” — Joss Whedon

Dec
8th

Mon

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Sonos Controller for iPhone

Such a wonderful solution to a problem I don’t have: play music in different rooms of your home, sync them up, centrally change volume, et cetera. :-D

Sep
18th

Thu

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Graph of original code in the Pike programming language left from prior releases, showing how much of the original code is still intact and unchanged. (Graph by Martin Bähr, tooling by Marcus Comstedt.)

Jun
23rd

Mon

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Why more is less. (~1h Google talk)

May
8th

Thu

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Voronoi Treemaps for the Visualization of Software Metrics (pdf)

Neat way of visualizing hierarchical data sets (like disk usage or lines of code for a directory tree) as a 2D graph where surface area in proportionate to the metrics. Would be even prettier if the graph was evolved to a minimum-energy state (as soap bubbles would have organized themselves).