Recently, my 20gb archos bit the dust (not from a hard drive issue; actually a cracked LCD screen), and all I have wanted since is a decent MP3 player. As far as I can tell, what I consider good is no longer produced. I have a few simple requirements:
must use a USB mass storage interface. I mean that the thing is just an external hard drive that can play music, no oddities, and no needed software. This is the simplist way on both the manufacturer’s end and the user’s (at least for people like me).
Let me view and play by folder. ID3 tags get messed up, don’t follow standards across a library, etc… I prefer to sort by file, rather than metadata, for no other reason than it is an easier way to sort, and I can add in structure that one could not extract from ID3 anyway. I spent time to sort my library this way.
use a hard drive. I want something substantial. In the past, that was 20gb, now it is 30gb; the trend now seems to be towards small things. If I ran (or really exercised at all), I would get one for just that use. Really, I think many of the problems with hard drives is blown out of proportion. I don’t think I have ever actually seen a hard drive failure on any computer of device I have ever had any control over. That is on well over 100 machines. I have seen plenty of power supply failures, liquid cooling failures (it is always sad to see a Mac cry coolant…), memory errors, etc… but never a hard drive failure. I believe the statistics, but my personal experience differs.
Not an iPod. iPod’s have and always fail the first two requirements (they loath their users–seriously), the price is high, etc…. There are only two arguments that I have ever heard that have been at all convincing to me for why an iPod is worthwhile: 1) you can return broken one’s easily, 2) stuff is made for them. I don’t care about 1) because I don’t break shit that much (the MP3 player’s I have used for normal walking around/traveling/etc use both lasted around 4-5 years), and as far as 2), those devices are nice, but headphones still work fine. Really, you should use a computer to power anything else. Style isn’t worth $200+ extra and reduced functionality; that is just stupid. I respect anyone a bit less for buying an iPod. Plus, I can’t even use it on my computer without installing rockbox or something.
For the most part, Archos has served me well on these points, but they have moved towards making any hard drive mp3 player huge with crazy video options and their portable ones small flash based things, like any other manufacturer. Ogg, etc support would also be nice, but I would be willing to live with just the first two. Battery life is also a factor, but my definition of usability takes precident. I think I have found one or tow from extensive searching. I don’t care about video; I just want music. These used to be made, so what happened? This is simple! Why can’t some weird Chinese compnay do this?
I recently bought a Playstation 3 Eye, which has been pretty fun to play around with (I recently bought a 65″ LCD TV, which I should really write about as well). There are a few games for it that are pretty similar to “do stuff with motion” exhibits at museums and fairs, and there is also a basic capture and edit feature, with a few features such as time lapse, etc… The camera itself is pretty decent considering it is about the size and price of a cheap webcam, but is much better, especially the microphone. I had some fun with the time lapse feature after I got it. I was eating my lunch at the time:
My friend Megan and I repeated the same sort of thing here, but with ribs this time:
Both are better when you can set the video the repeat, but I enjoy both still.
This post is really for myself. I started a new project for myself last night, just another simple utility, mostly for my own use, that shouldn’t take me anytime at all. I say that before I start most things, but I think it will probably be true in this case. Anyways, I have a pretty large pile of projects that I have to work on or complete, and I wanted to make a list so that I might be able to judge which ones to work on and to just have a list.
(Mostly) Completed/There is Always More to Do
pyXSD – pyXSD was my first big project. It was what I worked on at ORNL as a student intern over the summer of 2006, between high school and college. It was also my first program in Python, my favorite language. It is an XML Schema Validator, which works in some funky ways. It fills a small void in th python+xml world, but it still has a few bugs to work out, and there are a few features I would like to add. It has stayed at 0.1 for some time now, and I don’t know when I will get back into it. I have been kind of hoping for a few people to submit some changes, but only one person has (and that was barely anything). I really just can’t get excited about this project anymore. I don’t use XML Schema (RelaxNG all the way!); I really don’t have a reason to do much more with it. I am guessing it will stay at 0.1 for a while….
ACLUofC Website – I mostly included this one, because I didn’t want this section to be one item long. There is really very little to this site. It has a simple design that I am mostly happy with, considering that I did it fairly fast. It needs content still, but I don’t really worry about that one too much.
Almost There, but Still Needs Some Work
xmlViewer – My project at ORNL over the summer of 2007. Basically, it is an xml-based expert system to create an editor for a specific xml format. The system is currently written in javascript. It is a really nice system, and there is a lot in it that I am proud of. It just has a few bugs at the moment. I have been planning to write an xhtml editor with it as well, as I figure it could really do some interesting things. It also needs a better name.
lambdaCarte – I was working on a project for a class, and I needed a nice command-line menu system in which I could associate actions, which usually are small. I did some quick searching, but I didn’t find any python packages that did just what I needed. I wrote it mostly in a night, and it seems to work surprisingly well. It needs a lot of cleanup, but it works. It’s really simple, but such things just make life easier.
DOIT Fortune Library- I am not going to try and justify this thing’s existence here, mostly because I have none. It is not as much a project as it is a mission; I feel it is my duty to make available in any form I can conjure (that doesn’t take that much time and requires no money) to spread a list of bad ambiguous sex jokes from USENET I found when playing on the twenex.org computer. There are few things to work out on what I have so far, but I have been planning to make a DOIT of the day rss feed, and I recently started to look into making a DOIT facebook app. I must DOIT to the world.
Partially Complete
xmlTools – I wanted to work with xml from the command line or in scripts, and there isn’t any easy to use toolset that I am aware. It is written in python and it uses the lxml library. A bunch of them work, but it needs further tests, and there are a few functions I want to add.
pySchedule – A python scheduling library. I haven’t touched this thing in a while.
packagemapWriter – A simple utility to create packagemaps for google code search. It is really a simple utility; I just wanted to something to pass the time over this last break, and I wanted it for some of my projects.
deviceXmlFileSync – I have a bunch of gadgets with file storage, specifically mp3 players. I often will get a new album and need to load it on to several different devices, but I don’t remember which ones I have put it on. This python utility helps to queue up transfers. I haven’t worked on it in a while.
fireScraper – The project resulting from the method I outlined to screen scrape using Firefox from the command-line. Still has a lot of work to be done, but I have already done much of the needed work.
Political Networks – A research job I have.
rstDocs – I write a lot of technical documents in reStructuredText (rst). Basically, I wanted something like google docs to write rst on and render it (except just for me and maybe some friends). I started this thing a couple nights ago. It was partly an excuse for me to play around with php.
New Print System Interface – I work in the Mac and Linux Lab at the UofC, where we have a print monitor to prevent users from printing things they didn’t write and to enforce a quota. As staff, we have to be able to make exceptions and correct errors. We also have to maintain kiosks so that users can select which jobs they want to print. I started to rewrite it to use ajax techniques as opposed to a simple php script with a page refresh every few seconds. I also wanted to add a few possible actions that maclab tutors and users could use on documents.
Barely Scratched
xmlDebt – I didn’t want to use any of the account tracking software I found, and it seemed like something simple enough to code, so I started on one, but I guess my love for accounting is not that great….
rsoFundTracker – Simple system designed for RSOs (clubs at UofC). Financially, most have a lot in common, as they all have to fight..err…..deal with ORSCA.
cssExtended – Basically, I think css sucks. It would if it was written using JSON instead, and it would be nice if the selectors included XPath and regular expressions. I started outlining this format, and a javascript engine to implement it. I was also thinking of writing a python script to implement it in the xhtml server-side or to files after any changes are made. I was also thinking of calling it jss.
So now I have a list to remind me of all the things I started so I don’t start more when I want to code. For the ACM, Cord and I have been working on PhoenixForge, a gforge server for UofC students wishing to work on projects on campus. Hopefully, it will cause me to be more productive.
World of Warcraft, the popular Massive Multi-User Online Heroin Alternative (MMUOHA) almost killed my friend. True story… sort of. My friend, I will call him John, has been playing WoW for a few month, and, like many players of the game, it has sucked away his life. Anyways, he recently had some surgery. Apparently, his arm started to hurt, so he went to the ER. The doctor came out and asked John if he had been in “an extended sedentary state.” John had developed a blood clot in his arm. I don’t know if this would have killed him, but it couldn’t have been good. I think there is only one word to describe this story: WOW. Granted, WoW had little to do with this problem, but it is true that WoW claims many lives each year, even if it is not in the physical sense.
Really, its amazing how addictive certain types of games can be. They tend to be games that allow players to have stats and doesn’t have any clear end game. When you add in the internet factor, it just means that one can find others who care about something so meaningless. Maybe people should carry around a notepad with “exp” written on the front. Anytime the carrier does something favorable in his (it is probably safe to assume that anyone who do this would be male) life, he adds some points to his score. Every so often, he can level himself up once he gets to a particular number of experience points. He could keep a board with various characteristics like dexterity, strength, etc… and just add a few points to a some of them each time he levels up. Would it be anymore absurd than those who spend months playing these games just doing tasks to level up? From what I understand, most of what you have to do is go around killing small animals. WoW.
Be the First to Comment