Monthly Archives: July 2009

July 17, 2009

Why Are All The Nutjobs Here In St. Louis, Missouri?

By Dave M.

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I just found a news article at iLounge which quotes an article from AppleInsider:

A new lawsuit from a Beverly Hills, Calif., man alleges that Apple conspired with the Italian mafia to secretly track him, transmit threatening messages to his iPod, and insert the word “herpes” into the song “Still Tippin’” by Mike Jones.

Not just his iPod, Gregory McKenna is convinced that many things in his life were bugged, including his bedroom, living room, upstairs bathroom and Toyota Camry. McKenna alleges in his lawsuit that two iPods he owned – an iPod shuffle bought on eBay and an iPod mini purchased in an Apple Store – were affixed with receivers that allowed the Mafia to transmit threats to him.

McKenna believes that these well-coordinated “threats” from Apple and the mafia were accompanied by an uncanny sense of rhythm: Recordings of mafia members saying “I’m going to kill him” supposedly played in unison with a song on the man’s iPod mini in 2008.

…

Filed Wednesday in a U.S. District Court in Missouri, the 124-page complaint lists Apple among a host of other defendants, including the St. Louis County Police Department, a local auto mechanic, and “unknown agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

…

People like these should be sued for wasting tax-payers hard earned money, not to mention the court, judge, and lawyer’s time. Why isn’t this man in a mental hospital somewhere? For all appearances, he needs to be!

What is really embarrassing to me is that this nutjob lives here in St. Louis!

1 comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Humor, News

July 14, 2009

How To Get Lyrics For iTunes Songs Quickly and Easily

By Dave M.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: (1/14/2012) I’m afraid I have some really bad news here. The program MassiveLyrics which I have been promoting as a great way to grab lyrics for iTunes has finally stopped working. It’s not the program’s fault. Gracenote has forced sites that MassiveLyrics and others use to change the way lyrics are displayed on their sites. They are requiring JavaScript. Looking at a sample lyrics page and viewing the page source for that page shows the problem. All the lyrics are sent to the browser as &#nnn; notation. From what I can tell by looking at the base code that MassiveLyrics used (MassiveLyrics.rb), the script looked for text in the clear, not that weird ampersand notation.

This probably means that other programs that would pull lyrics won’t work anymore either.

Fortunately, I did find a “good news” situation here. There is an article on the site Cult of Mac! Automatically Add Lyrics To All Songs In Your iTunes Library [How To] describes how to grab lyrics with little effort. You just have to wait much longer for them to come down. The gist of the article is to use an AppleScript that will play songs in a playlist for about 10 seconds. When you are running a Dashboard widget that gets lyrics from a couple of sites serving them up, this widget will save the lyrics to the iTunes song playing (hence the need to play the song for about 10 seconds).

This process can take a really long time compared to MassiveLyrics, but at least this one works for now. :)

I have looked long and hard for a way to get lyrics into my music files. I have about 8 programs that attempt to insert lyrics into songs, mostly while the songs are playing. I have even looked at a couple of iPhone/iPod touch apps that display lyrics. Unfortunately, they don’t store the discovered lyrics into the music because AppStore applications are not allowed to store data outside their little sandbox. I felt like I was never going to find a “fast and easy” way to add lyrics to my music, until I found the Mac program “Get Lyrical“.

The Unoffical Apple Weblog had a post about getting lyrics using a program and AppleScript combo that doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but its very slow. They suggest using an AppleScript program that plays the first 10 seconds of a song along with GimmeSomeTunes to find and insert lyrics. With my collection of music, it would take just under 2 DAYS to get all the lyrics it could. My method only took about 30 minutes.

UPDATE (8/28/11):Looks like the link to MassiveLyrics to download it doesn’t work anymore. I have just sent an email to the developer hoping that he has an alternative link. If not, I’ll have to find another app that works as well to suggest for folks. MassiveLyrics is a great app, but if the developer doesn’t let folks download it, I guess that’s his right. I’ll let you know what I find out.

UPDATE (10/02/10): MassiveLyrics is a program, similar to GetLyrical, that retrieves lyrics from LyricsWiki. Its got a great UI, even better than GetLyrical’s, and works exceptionally fast. The developer posted a note in the comments here to let me know about it. I downloaded it and checked it out. It is way better than GetLyrical in the speed department. Otherwise, its workflow is pretty much the same as GetLyricals. You simply select the songs you want to add lyrics to, then click the Get button. It then starts looking up the songs about 5-6 at a time. GetLyrical only does one at a time, so that’s probably the biggest reason for the difference in speed.

A big thanks to the developer Dade for letting us know about his great application!

Get Lyrical is a free (donation-ware) application that one thing and does it very well. It gets lyrics for songs in iTunes and adds them to the songs ID3 tags.

The UI is very clean and simple. A button to add lyrics to a selection of tracks in iTunes, a button to add lyrics the currently playing track, and a button to add lyrics to songs as they play. There are two “quick look” buttons that open up a HUD type window to show you the lyrics found for a particular track.

The best feature of Get Lyrical is the Tag Selection button. I selected all 16,000+ tracks in iTunes and clicked the button. It told me how many tracks it had found, and started processing. About 30 minutes later, it showed me how many tracks it had found lyrics for. That was it, over 10,000 tracks in iTunes with lyrics added with very little effort at all.

You can use the “Active Tagging” feature to work like other programs out there. However, I found it very frustrating to have the song you are playing pause for a second or two so that the lyrics can be inserted into the ID3 tags. Other programs also seem to “lockup” iTunes while it’s searching for the lyrics as well as inserting the found lyrics into the tags. I really hated this. If I was using iTunes to look at something in the AppStore, I found I had to wait for the other lyrics program to finish its search before I could do what I wanted to do. I just don’t find this method the best way to get lyrics.

This program doesn’t get album art or do anything other than get lyrics for iTunes music. However, it does this exceptionally well. If you want lyrics in your music so that you can see them when playing the songs on your iPhone/iPod touch or iPod, this is the program to get the job done and get it done quickly.

Update (8/8/2009): It looks like the RIAA is putting the hammer down on sites like LyricWiki that give Get Lyrics the ability to download lyrics easily. Check out the new post I wrote about this news.

10 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in How To

July 11, 2009

New Favorite iPhone Game App: GloBall

By Dave M.

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For the longest time, my favorite iPhone game app was Gemmed! [appstore link] by Wasted Pixel. You can play that game for 15 seconds or 5 hours due to the ability to leave and comeback at “any” time. It’s a simple match-3 game, but with a twist of monsters in the game grid eating gems to move toward their color’s exit. There some great power-ups that appear when you match enough of a specific color, etc… Really fun and not overly expensive for $1.99.

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Now there is a new iPhone game I found called GloBall [appstore link]. It’s kind of a BreakOut or Arkanoid game without the paddle. You just tilt the iPhone around to move the ball into boxes in the playfield to gain points. There are bonus blocks to increase your score potential and odd little creature like things that threaten your glowing ball.

The graphics are really wonderful and very pleasant on the eye. Controlling the glowing ball is pretty easy and is not nearly as frustrating as other games I have played that are like this one.

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Another very interesting aspect to the game is it’s high score board. They take your iPhone’s location and compare your score to others in it’s database. It then tells you your overall rank. It also tells you that you have the best score within a specific distance. So far, I haven’t broken over a mile and my current high score is broken just over 1,000 feet away.

If you look at individual levels, you can see the same info for that specific level instead of your total points. I really like this and love the sphere of the Earth with all the blue dots representing other players. I wonder if those are “active” players vrs. ones that have high scores in their database.

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This game is currently going for $0.99 as in “introductory” price. So if you are even remotely interested in the game, I suggest downloading the free version to check it out then, buying the full version before the “introductory” price goes away.

Update: There is a small downside to the game. the 43 levels it has goes very fast. I finished all the levels in about 1 1/2 hours. It’s certainly replayable, and there are high scores to beat, but it would be nice to have more levels.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Games, iPhone/iPod touch

July 11, 2009

'Torchwood: Children Of Earth' – The Best Television On Television To Date, Ever!

By Dave M.

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I just finished watching the BBC’s new Torchwood Miniseries called “Children Of Earth“. I watch a lot of television. Probably more than I should for someone who isn’t working right now. Mostly though, when I am battling illnesses. This series of 5 Torchwood episodes have to be the best written, acted, directed, etc… television I have ever watched… Ever! I don’t write this lightly. If this miniseries went as long as the new Battlestar Galactica did, it would be the “must see” series of 2009. However, it’s only 5 hours of television that can not be missed.

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The episodes take place in 5 days, one for each episode. A little like 24, but a way better story. I’m not going to give away any spoilers since the miniseries is scheduled to run here in the United States on BBC-America a week from Monday, July, 20th. So this post won’t be very long. I will say that the story holds up to fine scrutiny with very little if any errors. Unlike the recent American miniseries, Impact. They even made a point to point out that America was still “dark” when the first event in the show took place at 8:40am GMT. Unlike Impact which seemed to be the same time all around the world.

Only other thing I am going to say is: If you have to miss watching something on television the week of the 20th, don’t let it be Torchwood on BBC-America. You won’t regret it!

Update: Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks this Torchwood was a true winner: Torchwood Was Amazing, But What Happens Next?

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Science Fiction, Television

July 3, 2009

Letter To iPhone/iTunes Dev Staff At Apple

By Dave M.

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I’m sure this letter will never see the light of day at Apple HQ, but I feel it really needs to be written. If not for me, for all the other iPhone/iPod touch owners out there that collect AppStore Applications like philatelist collect stamps. You see, we have this unique problem with our beloved device. Organizing our applications in the devices SpringBoard.

I’m sure there are not many of us. Otherwise, Apple would be selling 20,000,000,000 (Billion) applications by now instead of just over 1 billion. That said, there is an average of 25 purchased applications per iPhone/iPod touch.

Now, 35 (10 Applications by Apple that can’t be deleted and come with an iPhone or iPod touch taking into account various OS versions and device versions) applications can easily be managed by existing means. In fact that’s barely 2 full pages on the SpringBoard.

However, there are a few of us crazy people that have way more than 25 purchased apps. I’m currently just 5 shy of 500 in iTunes.

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(Link to full image of all apps in my iTunes Applications list)

Clearly, not all of those apps are in my iPhone. Here is what my SpringBoard looks like currently:

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You’ll notice that several of the SpringBoard pages have only 15 of 16 icons on them. This is because, even with the 3.0 OS, moving icons in the SpringBoard app causes all kinds of problems with other pages as you scroll from one page to another to another.

In the 3.0 OS update, Apple allowed users to take an icon, drag it over to the right or left edge of the screen which causes SpringBoard to move to the next or previous page. If you don’t move your finger while on the edge, SpringBoard will continue to move to the next/previouos page until you move your finger back into the screen. This should allow a user to move an icon from page one to page 9 without messing up icons on pages 2 through 8. However, this is not the case. I don’t understand why, unless they just have a bug, but it causes all kinds of problems with the intermediate page icons.

Say you have all your pages full from page 1 to 11 except for one space on page 10. Also, you want to move an icon on page 1 to that open space on page 10. You hold your finger on the icon you want to move. SpringBoard starts jiggling all the icons. You drag your finger and the icon to the edge of the screen and SpringBoard starts sliding pages from left to right. For some reason, when sliding past page 3, SpringBoard gets confused and thinks you moved your finger back into the screen. This causes the last icon on page 3 to move to page 4, the last icon on page 4 to move to page 5, etc all the way to page 9 which moves its last icon to page 10. It stops on page 10 since there was an open spot.

Now you have a problem. You still want to get that icon to page 10, but doing so will knock the last icon on page 11 off the SpringBoard completely, assuming you are able to get the icon to page 10 without further incident.

Leaving an empty space on most pages allows for this weird error to happen and not mess up your organization.

A very bright person setup a Keynote presentation showing his/her ideas of how to use iTunes to help organize applications in the SpringBoard app:

Now, this video only shows two SpringBoard pages, but it would still save much time using iTunes to layout your apps and then sync to make the adjustments in your iphone/iPod touch.

Apple, you have made some great strides in the iPhone OS to make our beloved device the best that there is. However, there is always room for improvement. The SpringBoard app is one place that definitely needs improvements. Please, do something to make organizing applications on the iPhone/iPod touch as easy as the rest of the functions of the devices are to use.

3 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Appeal/Letter To, General, iPhone/iPod touch

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