dolphinling’s weblog

A week or so ago I bought all the albums by The Seatbelts off of eBay. With shipping/etc. the total came to ~$62, which is an awesome deal. The first group (6 of them, one of which was a re-release of one on one disc and a compilation of two others on the second disc, so actually 8) came on Tuseday? Wednesday? and the other group (CD-Box, which has 4 CDs and a little booklet that I can’t read because it’s mostly in Japanese) came on Thursday. So I’ve ripped all except CD-Box (gotta finish that up soon…) to my computer, and am listening to them as high quality .oggs now instead of pirated .mp3s.*

To go along with it, I got a new music player. XMMS has served me well for a long time, but I’ve really missed the ability to have playlists automatically generated by band/album/how much I like the song/etc. It also has a really annoying minimization problem. So now I’ve tried Rhythmbox and amaroK and I like both, and I think I’ll stay with amaroK. They both need a lot of work, neither of them is as good as they could be, but they’re more what I need than XMMS.

* That’s the main reason I don’t pirate much music. You can never get the format you want, and even when you do the metadata is in a billion different formats and you have to fix it yourself. In this case, though, they’re good enough that I had ~15-20 anyway. Oh, yeah–Take that, RIAA! Yet another testimonial of someone first getting pirated music to try it out (my friend told me about them), and then buying it! Not that this music was from the RIAA, I’d never actually support them.

So today, though it may be a bit late, I finally decided to honor the Pope’s death—by downloading The Vatican Rag by Tom Lehrer.

Actually, it was really hearing Scott Joplin that made me think of it, but oh well.

I’m not really sure what this is supposed to be, but it’s cool: http://a.parsons.edu/~christine/fall_03/organic_html/flash/main.html

Anne’s site is boring, mine is boring, http://dwergs.com/ mentioned on the site Anne found it on is pretty cool, but http://news.google.com/ is easily the coolest site out there. http://neopets.com/ has a bee flying around. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ is pretty interesting, though all black and white. http://slashdot.org/ looks very pretty.

Via: Anne’s HREFS

CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders (a new version) was just released a couple days ago. I’m reading through it now, and I’ll post some nice things as I see them.

• background-attachment:local, which applies to background images in elements with their own scrolling mechanism. However, it really should be expanded to local-scroll and local-fixed.

That’s odd… there’s a fly buzzing against my monitor, but it’s backwards, its legs are facing me and its back is to the monitor. Bugs can be so strange.

ThinkGeek got a new T-shirt in. I’d seen the poem before, but it still made me laugh for several minutes.

Let this be considered prior art in case anyone tries to patent it (unless someone’s already patented it, or it’s in process, which would be unfortunate):

So I was thinking today about iPods (my friend got one recently, and I was listening to it), and about the problem of battery life and how battery capacity has increased approximately linearly while the power and speed of portable electronics has increased around exponentially, meaning battery life has gone down, and I came up with an idea.

Hard drive based players have to spin to read data, whereas flash based ones don’t, meaning (as far as I know) hard drive players get worse battery life, but they have larger capacities, which people like. So my idea here is to put both hard drive storage and flash-based storage into a device, and let the most popular data be stored on the flash so it takes less power to access it.

This really isn’t my forte, so I may have terminology errors, etc., or the entire idea might be completely stupid, but it might work, and in case it does I don’t want someone else patenting it.

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