MrBalky Heavy Industries

For whatever reason, iTunes sometimes just screws up the the USB device I plug my iPod into. It’s toast, and no device will work; not the iPod, not a flash drive, nothing. No amount of being careful with iTunes and “ejecting” the iPod will help.

Rebooting the computer fixes it, but this happens with such regularity I’d be rebooting several times a day.

But I discovered that if you disable the USB port/device, and then enable it again, the problem is also fixed. Going through the device management dialogs is incredibly cumbersome, so I wrote a script.

fixusb.bat:

@echo off
echo "disabling usb device..."
devcon disable "@USB\VID_0424&PID_2504\5&18F4DAC0&0&5"
echo.
echo "enabling usb device..."
devcon enable "@USB\VID_0424&PID_2504\5&18F4DAC0&0&5"
echo.
pause

The @USB\VID_... bit is the USB device ID. To get the device ID, you’ll have to go to the Device Manager dialog. Figure out which device the iPod is attached to (I don’t remember exactly how I did this; sorry). Then on the “Details” tab of the device “Properties” dialog you can get the “Device Instance Id”.

I have to use this all the time, so put a shortcut to it on the desktop.

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.

I won’t lie; I’m gonna miss you and the good times we had. Like parking directly in front of Target on Christmas Eve.

And I’ll never forget the Saturday night we freaked out Kate and Joseph by driving past open spaces downtown. Ah, the look in their eyes when we picked up the best spot in the garage.

Sniff…

Well, despite the fact that the picture on our bitchin’ new Sharp Aquos LC-37D43U looks like shit (but that’s another post), I’m going ahead and buying the HDMI cables. After a little A/B test I did with my brother John years ago between 22AWG lamp cord and Monster Cable, I have not been tempted to buy the Monster Hype.

In a timely post, Gizmodo points me to some backup. Coathangers!

James Randi also lends a hand.

Thanks! I’ll be buying my cables from the oddly-named Monoprice.

I’ve been a fanboy since 1999 when VStream gave them out for Christmas. TiVo is essential; I can’t imagine being without. Still, TiVo’s come down a few notches in the last 12 hours.

Our new HD TiVo arrived last night, and the initial setup went fine, just as expected. So now there are two TiVos in the room. They’ve thought of this, and the remote has a little 1-2 switch so commands to one don’t affect the other:

Fine. Cool. So I click around to the Settings menu and look for this configuration. Nothing anywhere, just how to set the remote up to control the TV. Sigh; off to the manual. Yes, there it is, and I have to do some convoluted operation going to the System Information display, and then enter an elaborate key sequence on the remote while shielding the TiVo from the remote. Sorry, I only have two hands.

Still, I made it through that, but it just doesn’t work. WTF? Well after poking at the buttons for a little while, I finally worked out how to do it, which was almost nothing at all like the manual said, and I’m not entirely sure how to get there again.

That hurdle cleared, I discovered they come with the Home Media Options turned off. Fine, I’ll go turn those on, but are they in Settings? Of course not. You have to navigate to the Music and Photos menu, select Media Options and press the thumbs up button 3 times then enter. Huh? Why can’t this just be on the Settings menu?

So eventually the old TiVo’s going to be displaced, so I want to transfer my recordings from that to the new one. But the TiVos don’t see each other at all. HMO is on, and I know this is possible; how do I do it? Nothing in the manual this time. Surfing up the TiVo site, it turns out the only way enable this functionality is via the TiVo website? Again, WTF?

I used to think TiVo had the usability and intuitive menus down, but now I’m not so sure. It really irks me to have to spend all of this time to hunt down these different places to configure the box, when one would expect them to all be one place.

I still think TiVo is essential, but some of the setup stuff truly sucks.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the credit card class action settlement? It revolves around the major credit card companies overcharging on exchange rates and service fees for transactions made overseas, including ATM withdrawals. Basically, if you had a transaction outside the U.S. between 1996 and 2006, you are entitled to a piece of the settlement. There are 3 options: a flat $25, 1% of an estimated total or 1-3% of individual yearly estimations.

Well, since we lived in Paris for 16 months, one can imagine we racked up the activity. For the entire time, I was paid by direct deposit to our U.S. bank, and we did everything with our cards.

So I’ll be itemizing, thank you very much.

Now the interesting thing about the whole deal is that the bank and credit card statements are kind of like a diary. By looking at the locations for the transactions, you can see when we went to Cologne for Mardi Gras, the trip Steph and I took to Positano and Capri, Christmas in Muenster, London, Bruges, the Camarque… all of it.

And at the end, I had to laugh out loud. After a final visit to Muenster in June, we got home on July 2. The first three visits were to an ATM, Conoco, and Liquor Mart.

Apparently our priorities are cash, gas and booze.

My knee has been feeling pretty good in the last week, aligning this weekend with warm temps and very little wind, so I put flats on it and took the hardtail out for a spin. I gotta say that after years with clipless, the flats just killed me. Or maybe that was the surgery.

Eventually I got to a section of trail still in meltdown; PPDM (postponed due to mud).