MrBalky Heavy Industries

iTunes album art is a disaster. In fact, I keep thinking I’ll write about how bad iTunes sucks in general, but for now, let’s stick with album art. Long story short, the best thing you can do to make album art work on an iPod, is to embed it directly in the MP3 tag.

Well, I’m pushing 10,000 tracks, and I have them backed up, over a network, using an application that diffs them by hashing the content. Essentially this means that if I change the tag, I will have to back all the files over again, but the application will first generate new hash values for all of the files. It’ll take hours and hours.

Furthermore, this will expand the size of every file by the size of the album art. Not so bad if it’s a 15K jpg, but if it’s a high quality image, it could add up to GB.

But I finally succumbed. Still, though iTunes gives a way to embed album art, it’s not automated, and doing this manually for the hundreds of individual albums I have, well, that’s not pretty either.

Googling around I stumbled on this post on Brent Evans Geek Tonic that runs through how to automate with the application Mp3tag.

While these are clear instructions, I’m not much of a keyboard shortcut guy with applications I rarely use. Mp3tag’s menus are pretty convoluted; it took forever to find the way to get it to give you the tagging option in a menu.

1. Add your library directory and select a track as described in the linked blog post
2. Select “Convert” -> “Actions” from the menu bar. This brings up the Action Groups dialog:
   
3. Click the “new” button on the right. Name it something like “embed album art”:
   
4. Now you should see the “Actions” dialog:
   
5. Click the “new” button on the right, and select “Import cover from file”:
   
6. You will need to give the name of the artwork file that resides in each album directory. Mine is “folder.jpg”:
   
7. Close all the dialogs. Now you should see your new “Action group” under the Actions toolbar button:
   
8. Select your tracks and go

Geez. After all that, maybe the undocumented keyboard shortcut is the way to go…

Way back when; seems like the dawn of time now; I was told by a famous and skilled surgeon that it would be 6 months after the surgery before I could start to work on getting back to my previous fitness level. He was about right. 6 months, and my first bike trip out to Moab with the team. I took my place at the back of the peloton.

A couple bad crashes, and cleaned a couple things I’ve never managed before. I’ve had better trips, but I’ve also had worse. My knee held up pretty well; I joined the body armor crew, though just knee pads. I was mighty grateful at least once.

We checked out the shiny new Free Lunch trail in GJ on the way out. I didn’t hit the big stuff, but had a little fun anyway:

I was putting together the panorama photos from our recent trip to Utah and Arizona, and for some reason, Autostitch couldn’t work out what to do with them. But it freaked out in a strange and interesting way:

I also though it would be interesting to try to intentionally include people in the panoramas. Unless the person remains very still, the result is also strange and interesting:

One of the best things I got from my brother when he moved out of his huge house into a small apartment was his compressor. It’s amazing how useful air is.

So most bike tires these days have presta valves, which are not nearly so easy to deal with as schraeder valves like those on cars. There are adapters that sort of convert presta to schraeder, but they’re kind of a cumbersome, and I wanted something more convenient. Surfing around, I found a tool that does it commercially available for $50.

But since I already have a blower tool, and I’m terminally cheap, I decided to try build one for less.

Voila:

And just screwing around a little, I turned it into an Instructable.