[Plasma Shield]

Itunes really sucks for fixing the tags and loading the album art. It doesn’t do the former at all and only does the latter after you’ve given Apple your credit card details. Yeah, fat chance.

Here’s the best method I found so far. It involves a couple of programs, the process is kinda tedious, but since iTunes insists on being a piece of sh…

Tags:

The best tagger that I’ve found is Musicbrainz Picard. It tags and fixes file automatically by either scanning the metadata and tries to find the metadata in its databases with the closes match, or it scans the content of the file and tries to find a set of metadata with a similar content signature. I think. It’s easy to use and finds almost all the right metadata. (more…)

TIME magazine recently (I think), made their archives available for free online. That’s very article from 1923 onwards, since TIME magazine was created by Briton Madden and Henry Luce. That’s an amazing amount of articles.

A good single-lined description of what the magazine is the suggest acrynomn of “The International Magazine of Events”. The magazine summaries significant events of the week, it being a weekly publication, and provides excellent editorials, thorough journalism and insight into events. The magazine is written in a comprehensive format and honestly, it employs some of the best journalist around.

TIME Archive

The TIME archive has all the articles archived and indexed, which means it keyword search able. Lets test it out, the magazine was started before the Second World War, so it should feature articles concerning such a prominent world-wide event. (more…)

Chuck tells the story of a computer geek called Chuck. Chuck works at a computer store called “Buy More”, as a part of the “Nerd Herd”, think Nerds on Site. Chuck has been working at Buy More for a couple of years, and he’s bored out of his mind, but he doesn’t know what else to do. The monotony of the Nerd Herd gets to him, as does the disappointment he feels about himself. After all, Chuck did go Standford. Chuck envisioned himself a successful software developer 5 years after he leaves school. All his dreams and ambitions were shattered his best friend betrayed him and got him kicked out of Stanford.
Just as Chuck finishes up a game of Call of Duty, he receives a email from his old Stanford roomate, the same one that got him kicked out of Stanford. Whilst not exactly being on speaking terms with his old roomate, Chuck opens the email and the attachment out of curiosity.

The attachment was an executable, a line reminding Chuck of his old text based RPG he wrote appeared, figuring out that it’s a kind of a authorization pass, (more…)

SYDNEY-A 19 year old man in the suburb of Bella Vista has been charged with interfering with a crew member while in an aircraft(with a laser).

The helicopter was flying at about 6pm at an altitude of about 1600 feet, when a green laser allegedly targeted the crew. The crew members were “momentarily distracted and disoriented by the incident”, according to a New South Wales Police press release, but were uninjured and managed to identify a yard from which the light originated. The officers landed the helicopter nearby, and contacted local police who arrested the teen and confiscated a laser device. He was taken to Castle Hill police station, where he was interviewed and charged, before being released on bail. He is scheduled to face Hornsby Local Court on June 2

Wikinews - News South Wales Government

People seems to think that you can do this with a normal laser. There is no way a normal laser can be strong and coherent enough to hit planes a kilometer or so away. (more…)

For those who haven’t, check out the Engadget LiveBlog and Popular Mechanics LiveBlog of the Keynote from WWDC.

Apple showed many demos of programs that have been developed on the iPhone with the SDK, and they also introduced a service similar to Microsoft-exchange, but geared more towards the consumer than enterprise.

But what everyone was sitting on the edge of their seats for was details on the the new iPhone.

Image from Engadget

An iPhone with 3G and GPS for under $200? GPS makers, PDA makers, Smartphone makers, the Windows Mobile team, portable media player makers must all be shitting themselves. (more…)

I found a book review I wrote a while back, thought I’ll post it here.

Ah, the tangled webs of conspiracies begin. Dan Brown writes amazingly intricate and complex storyline that keeps you lost and confused, in a good way, in your armchair as you progress through the plot in his books. Deception Point is no exception. It lacks the historical mythology of The Da Vinci Code, but it more than makes up for it with Digital Fortress styled modern edginess and mystery.

Deception Point
by Dan Brown

The story begins with an NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) employee called Rachel Sexton, her father is a prominent Senator residing in Washington DC. Rachel Sexton is the security liaison for the white house, her job is to summarize and analyze intelligence data and turn them into one page briefs. (more…)

Brina Lam from Gizmodo met Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell and inquired about the Ultra portable Laptop he was carrying. Dell was gracious enough to let Lam get some photos of the laptop.

bumped into Michael Dell at All Things D after his interview, and he was nice enough to show me this laptop that he was carrying that he said no one’s seen before. It’s a small form factor notebook, just like the Asus Eee and the HP 2133. He wouldn’t tell me what OS it’s running, or the pricing, but that it’s a low-cost notebook meant for developing countries, and I hope here. Maybe it’s Atom-powered. Who knows? But I do see three USB ports, a card reader, VGA out, Ethernet, and that red candy shell.

Gizmodo

The laptop looks pretty cool, hopefully it’s got a similar sized keyboard to the HP Mini Note, and runs on the Intel Atom processor. (more…)

Plastics are polymers formed by hydrocarbons from crude oil. I’m surprised that there are bacteria that feed on that. Given how there are no proteins, or bio-organic matter to decompose.

A high school junior from Waterloo, Ontario conducted an experiment that involved mixing landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic, and left it in a tissue culture chamber I assume, and tested the decomposition rates against the decomposition rates if plastics without the mixture. It was found that the rates of decomposition was higher for the plastic in the landfill dirt mixture. After changing temperatures and growth variables, the bacteria was isolated and it was found that two were of the bacterial genera Pseudomonas and Sphingomonas.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an bacteria from the Pseudomonas genu.

Wikipedia: Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative, aerobic, rod-shaped bacterium with unipolar motility.An opportunistic human pathogen, P. aeruginosa is also an opportunistic pathogen of plants. P. aeruginosa is the type species of the genus Pseudomonas (Migula 1894).

I have no idea what any of that means, but it has been shown in various studies (more…)

Check it out, this is an awesome example of Parkour.

Wagging is of similar meaning as skipping school, if the term is unfamiliar.

Sometimes, you sit in class and you get nothing done, and you sit there thinking you probably should have gone to the library, the toilet or something, and you probably would have gotten something done then. Then you get tired of not getting anything done and/or tired of the boredom of class and/or the lack of productivity during class and wag school. Well, now I have someone to quote should I try to explain my wagging. (Yeah, wagging class because you don’t get anything done is a bit paradoxical)

Here’s a few quotes from a blog:

Why do we assume that time = productivity instead of talking about the kind of results the person is actually getting?

Isn’t it funny that we rush to work everyday and then spend the first hour at our desk reading the paper and drinking coffee?

Isn’t it funny that if you’re done with your work for the day at
four, you can’t just leave? Why do you have to stay that extra hour and
pretend to be busy?

The quotes are from a blog called “The Four Hour Work Week“, those who pay attention to the New York Times bestseller’s lists (more…)