Space Elevator
Looks like no-one was able to claim the $500,000 prize for the Space Elevator – meaning that I still have a chance next year. Better get cracking with my Lego Mindstorm…
It’s not all sorrow…
Apparently we won the conker world cup!
Bad week for English Sport
It’s been a bad week for sport. First we are out the European Championship (okay, but Israel isn’t going to beat Russia are they?), then England go and lose to South Africa in the World Cup in part to two silly penalties in front of the posts. And today the nation was crushed again when Louis Hamilton first made a mistake which was recoverable but then hardware gremlins crept in and Louis dropped places till he was amongst the also-rans. He finally ended 7th and that means second, not first, to Kimi Raikkonen.
WinAMP 5.5
The latest version of Winamp, version 5.5, has been released. It’s also its 10th anniversary. It seems like a couple of years since Gavin showed off a program at a LAN party he’d got off a cover disc that could play music but small enough that you could carry several albums on a CD. If my memory serves me right that was 1996 (I went to Uni the following year) which makes this their 11th anniversary but hey – they should know. Also I believe it was version 1.2 I saw way back then.
The problem with MP3′s is the tagging. Several programs have been released, that try to automate the tedious problem of labelling the albums but they all rely on human input to a greater extent and as such takes a lot of time, effort and above all else, patience.
The best of these tools was TagScanner, which is rapidly updated. This removed a lot of drudgery from the task, but the best feature was the album tagger which used the FreeDB database for the track info. The only drawback was that the renamer would only do one album at a time – if you tried anymore it would fall over without warning. Also since it uses the FreeDB not all albums are registered and some which are incorrect.
So Winamp 5.5 appears with a clean up of the interface, a new skin and several new features the coolest of which is the Auto-Tagger. This is similar to TagScanner, but Winamp uses Gracenote’s service and works per song. It is more accurate than TagScanner, faster (because you can select every song, set it going and write a post about it) but not perfect: Some of my rarer goth compilation albums have the tracks listed as being from other albums (usually the album it was originally released on).
So its running and running. It has 6,900+ tracks off of ~550 albums to rename and write to disk. The writing of the tag has taken the longest part so far. I think it will take around 4 hours to do all the tracks.
Another cool feature is that it can also get the cover image of the album playing – a feature I started using Last.fm for inside Mediaportal.
An old post
Found my old website stored away in a dusty corner of my hard-drive.
Here’s the highlight of the posts:
2005-11-24
Also something I have mentioned to people over the past year, but don’t know what to do about it is an Amazon book club. I don’t know about you but my Amazon wish list is huge (feel free to buy something off there for me) and doesn’t look like it is going to shrink any time soon. What the book club would do is a) make Amazon money without giving away products (more on this in a bit) and b) guarantee Amazon a higher monthly revenue stream.
Why would Amazon make money without selling product? Well take my instance. I am a voracious reader – I can read a 500 page novel in under a week if it is a good book. I also have a lot of these books I borrowed off friends in my wishlist. However there is always newer books to buy. What I would do is set up my Amazon book club for say twenty pounds a month (SO or DD), check the boxes that say “Select the products that have been on my list the longest”, “Remove products from list once they have been bought”, “Send product if possible” and then sit back and wait for the stuff to arrive. Which is fine but what about if the book(‘s)/DVD(‘s) don’t come to exactly twenty quid? Well the remainder is held over for the following month when another £20 is taken from your account. Hence Amazon get’s to shift product while getting the interest from money without actually shipping product.
You may wonder what the “Send product if possible” means. One of my longest wishlist items costs over £100 (and it is a book). That will take 5 months to get using the above example. A long time to wait. The option to send product will select the next option on the list but only that one option – no others will be selected to be shipped as well – saving money for the expensive product, and giving you something to read in the mean time.
The guaranteed revenue will be a bonus because they will know in advance what stock to order and thus become more efficient. I also feel that this feature will be popular and encourage more people to spend more money than they usually would at Amazon. I spent maybe £200 in the year at Amazon before I stopped working. About £125 of that was for myself, the rest was presents for people. Now just a £20 a month would give you £240 over a year on your own stuff – not including the presents.
Maybe they have this feature and I haven’t heard about it (I haven’t bought anything from there in the past year or so while I have been unemployed) or maybe they are currently writing the software for it.
If anyone at Amazon would like to thank me (or kind soles in general) my wish list is here.
Also if anyone at Amazon is reading then please make a section on getting the link to your own wishlist. After an hour of fruitless searching I ended up sending the wishlist to myself so I could get the link out of the email. Also I wouldn’t mind a job…
Congratulations
Congratulations to Tabatha and David Wood who are now married!
Celebrity Fat Cat Club
Just a little post before we dash off to a friends wedding.
Gizmo, our ASBO cat, has just been to see the vet about her weight problem. Last time we visited she was 8kg – a full 60% more than what she should be or a full 3 kilos heavier!
So she was put on some special Hills r/d diet food but alas when she went back for her monthly check up she was 200 grams heavier. So they decided to take some bloods and run some tests. However being as aggressive as she is the Vet and the Vet Nurse were scared for their safety and was returned to us wrapped in a towel.
She has an appointment on Monday to be sedated so they can run the tests on her so fingers crossed for then.