Mat Harden

Something that bothers me everytime I see a advert for Apple Mac, is the way they refer to Microsoft Windows as PC. PC means ‘Personal Computer’, as in a computer that can run independently of others and is suitable for personal use; a household computer.

See what I’m saying? Therefore a Apple make PCs. iMac: a desktop PC. MacBook Air: a lightweight notebook PC. Mac Pro: professional standard desktop PC. Mac mini: compact home PC. They’re all PCs.

There seems to be a little confusion when descibing Apple’s main OS rival, Microsoft Windows. Windows and Mac are both operating systems which can be installed onto a PC. I’ll spell it out…

Fair enought if they were talking about any PC (e.g. Windows, Linux), but they’re not, they’re specifically referring to MS Windows. So they’re wrong.

Rant over.

There’s a lot of information out there on the Web. And I mean a “lot”! I’ve often wondered how many blades of grass there are in the whole world and nobody has every been able to satisfy that query. But now I wonder if there’s more info on the Web than grass on the Earth? Hold on, what the hell am I talking about?!

Anyway, I’ve always tried to stay up with my chosen field by reading .Net magazine, various über geek blogs and now in this “Web 2.0″ world, I follow things like jQuery news on Twitter.

Sometimes it all gets too much. Some days I’ll turn on the PC and be totally overwhelmed with the information I’m presented with. I find myself in a quandary; I want to know everything, but I also need to sleep. But there are times when I think I’m too deep. Like the other day I read a jQuery Tweet that said…

Parse JSON with jQuery and JavaScript redux using the Flickr Services API
http://twitter.com/jquery/status/2799132940

…and I thought to myself “oh good, that’ll be useful”. And then I realised that this sentence wouldn’t really mean a lot to many people. Or does it reach more than what I imagine?

Then today, I opened-up PopURLs. Now from what I’ve just said about too much info, I know this is asking for trouble. But I just wanted to take a quick look. The top of the page looked like this.

PopURLs instantly exposes so much information

What I mean is there’s so many abbreviations and mash-ups of terminologies. Looking at this tiny snippet of the Web, I can see “GTD“, “Palm webOS“. These I can decrypt and understand. But then there’s the slang terms, swear words and vulgarities that seem to be more commonplace since the explosion of the social Web. Here I can see “WTF” and “rimjob” right there at the top.

I’ve got a baby boy who’s only 11 weeks old. When he’s old enough to talk, I need to be a good Dad and know the answers to everything, like: the major capital cities of the world. When this little guy gets control of a PC, then there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do! So when he comes across a page like PopURLs, is it right that he should turn around to his Dad and say “what’s a rimjob?” I think not. So what do we do?

Don’t say “NetNanny” or some other Internet kiddy-safe software. Also, we’re talking about another 10 years or so from now. So who knows what the Web will be like by then? He’ll have access to it from everywhere. Or should I say “it’ll have access to him everywhere”?

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.