Mat Harden

I’m not sure what the point in hidden tracks are. Y’know - you get an album with 10 songs on it, then track 10 it followed by 5 minutes of silence until an unannounced 11th tracks is aired. Maybe it’s because they’re not so confident about the quality of the song or maybe it doesn’t seemed to fit anywhere else in the track listing. For me it’s usually a pain. If I’m listening to music, I want sound, not nothing.

My solution to this is to break-up that last track into two separate songs, simply using iTunes. It’s easy, here’s how…

1. Add ‘(Original)’ to the name of the song in question
2. Play the track and find the time at which the first song ends
3. From your menu bar select ‘File > Get Info’ and go to the ‘Options’ tab
4. Type that time into the ‘Stop Time’ field making sure the tick box is checked
5. Select ‘Advanced > Create MP3 Version’ - this may say AAC or another encoding type depending on what you have selected in your import settings, see Preferences. iTunes will then create a second copy of that track with a cropped ‘Time’ matching the what you entered in step 4.
6. Rename the new track with it’s correct title
7. Now repeat the process from on the original track from Step 2 for the second song, but of course this time altering both the ‘Start Time’ and ‘Stop Time’
8. Remove start and stop times from the original track
9. Delete the original track from iTunes but leave the actual file on your PC - (optional)

That’s all there is to it. Now you can listen to the album without any big gaps and rate the hidden track, fantastic!

Oh and also, those functions I selected from the iTunes menu are also available from the contextual menu (this little pop-up menu that appears when you right-click or ⌘-click).

Best before June 1989

My wife was making a carrot cake at the weekend. When she went to use the baking powder, she found it was 3 months out of date and threw it out. We had just come back from the supermarket, but forgot to pick up some more. I offered to ask our retired neighbours for a teaspoon. They very kindly invited me in whilst they had a look whilst telling me it’s been a while since they had done any baking. Out of their flavouring and colours tray came this old looking ‘Butterwicks’ [I think] backing powder. I accepted the packet but thought I’d better check the ‘best before’ stamp - June 1989! That’s 20 years passed it best before date. Twenty years!

We got the other one out of the bin. Cheers though, good cake.

I’ve given up with MovableType. I’ve always liked it, but it’s just too difficult to do some simple things. The template/widget system is too confusing. I got very frustrated trying to remove file extensions from post URLs - I can’t believe they don’t make this easier to do. The final straw was when I somehow couldn’t allow comments even though the option seemed to be on in the admin.

WordPress 2 has so many great features and is a joy to use. I’ve taken me about 30 mins to sit down and get it all set-up including importing posts from MovableType. It took longer than to update MovableType from version 3 to 4! Let’s see how I get on with WordPress.

I’ve had the iPhone for about 6 months now and I’m extremely happy with it. My previous phone was a Sony Ericsson W880 - that really flat one with the fiddly buttons. It had all the features I [thought] I needed and I was pretty pleased with it. I’d just got myself the Jabra BT500 Bluetooth headset and was getting used to the voice dialling. For me, the main thing was the size of it. This dinky little gem would be totally forgotten about in my sky rocket, and provide a handful of music which was just enough for commuting. I’d also installed the Java app which gave me good access to Gmail.

I’d seen the 1st iPhone in the stores and not really thought much of it. Thought the touch-screen might be a bit of a pain and the applications gimmicky. Little did I know…

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Not much blogging going on yet, but I’ve added my micro-blog feed from Twitter today. At least I’m serving bite size nuggets of my mundane existence for you to scoff whole.

Courtesy of Damien du Toit’s neat little jQuery plug-in. This little feature uses JavaScript, so if it doesn’t appear it may be because that’s not available.

Since the move to WordPress I am no longer using this JavaScript plugin, but rather the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools.