[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…)

Normally, I’d do an intro. However, I figure the contents of this are pretty obvious. Five mini articles about the top five geeky fashion items/accessories. These are the items that are so geeky and so awesome that people who aren’t geeks would seriously consider buying them. So without further Ado:

5. Rubik’s Cube Key Chain

Prove that you too have too much time on your hands… or on your keys for that matter.

The Hip: Just being able to solve these things impresses those that can’t. It’s an easy way to keep a constant source of awe in your bag. Plus, for that reason, chicks dig Rubik’s Cubes. You have no idea how many times solving a Rubik’s Cube on a date has ended well*. I know, logic defying. (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…)

I’ve found that, on the whole, science doesn’t lie to me. Science is like that irritating relation at the dinner party who tells you shitty ‘interesting facts’ when you really just want to drown your sorrows in brandy-soaked fruitcake. But you can still trust Science, because Science generally knows what the hell it’s talking about. And yeah, sometimes Science might be wrong. But, along the way, science sorts itself out via this little thing I like to call ‘peer review’ and ‘experiment validity’. Mmm. Tasty.

So, to drop the metaphor, I basically get the funny feeling that when a whole lot of people working independently reach the same conclusion it’s more than likely to be reasonably accurate. And if you don’t agree with me, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re a dirty communist.

Of course, when along the way we start to see some results that might have an impact politically people get all antsy in their pantsy about it (see: evolution). And a big one that’s going on right now is the issue of climate change.

So, basically today I’m going to focus on the people who believe that climate change is either not happening/incredibly unlikely to happen. In fact, all those people who don’t think we should bother doing anything about it. Essentially this post is just going to be one big bitchslap, which I understand you can do across the internet nowadays.

Image from UnKnownViper

Don’t get me wrong, though – I don’t ever want to stifle scientific debate (more…)

Recent data released by the Newspaper Association of America show that advertising revenue in 2007 fell from about 46 Billion to 42 billion a loss of 9.4% and 4 billion dollars. This is huge.

the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years >> Editor and Publisher

This reduction is another indicator pointing to the growing move to online media for content and advertisements. The second worst reduction in revenue of the industry was only 6 years ago in 2001, a fall of about 9%. Losses were experienced across print advertisement, national print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year, retail slipped 5% to $21 billion, classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.

Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms

John Sturm(Sturm’s a pretty cool name, “sturmarbeiter” is stormtrooper in german), president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.

Personally, I still like newspapers, there’s just something about reading the newspapers, the feel and the texture that you get when you hold it in your hand. Not to mention the ability to roll it up and hit people with it. That said, the convenience and dynamic format of online newspapers totally out weights the said advantages. I mean, you can’t link to youtube or other newspapers in a paper newspaper, you can’t type a comment in and have people be able to read it instantly, and you can’t send people links to a article in a (paper) news paper, the closest thing to that is folding the piece of paper with the article on it into a plane and throw it at the person you want to give it to. The most important thing that online newspapers has got going for them is that most of them are free. The two dollars or so you pay is pretty cheap already, but not as cheap as free. (more…)

Wow, Obama girl critizes Clinton? Really? How the hell did that happen?

But on a more serious(or not) note, Obama is gonna get alot of votes from Obama girl. She’s pretty damn hot.

First thoughts on this video? This is pretty effective propaganda, the video might as well have been 3 minutes of Microsoft Sam saying “VoteObamamVoteObamaVoteObama….”. In the whole video it was just “Vote Obama” in various different reincarnations, it wouldn’t be as bad, if it weren’t for the fact that none of the claims are substantiated. Actually I was a bit hesitant in calling it propaganda before. I change my mind, this s*** is propaganda.

In the video, and various other videos on the Barely Political site, it points at various television networks and shouts “biased!“. What the hell? What is Barely Political if not biased? Barely Poltical is biased on a level that no news service (except maybe fox) is, it only avoids backlash because it makes itself to be a light hearted comedy site. Which it is, but it’s comedy that’s manipulating people’s opinions through positive associations with the candidate it supports, not through reason as political coverage should be. If you look at the dynamics of the site, the traffic and popularity it has, is built supporting Obama, so if you think about it, if they want to keep the popularity and traffic(and the revenue they gain from the traffic), they have to more or less present pro-Obama views. Imagine if they were to start supporting Clinton, I doubt they’d get as much traffic, and the scantily clad women would create conflict with the pro-feminist part of Clinton’s campaign. It raises the possibility that Barely Political support Obama, simply because they want to retain their traffic/popularity. (more…)

The rain has come as the writers’ strike is over. But the long drought has left Hollywood brittle and parched as the writers’ strike has halted many plans and events. Who would have known a bunch of off screen paper churners would bring the whole entertainment industry down to the extent that the Golden Globes was desiccated.

It seems the WGAs (writers’ association) are so fired up because the writers aren’t getting a slice of the DVD sales pie. TV show DVD’s are not a very big seller. They’re lucky that the DVD buyers haven’t discovered p2p or torrents. What they should be more scared of is the internet. (Lets hope they never get fired up about the internet. Imagine what they’ll do. Kill the internets?)

This squabble over a slice of old pie about to be rotten pie has caused havoc already. Without the writers creating the scripts for shows has been left many shows without a storyline. Many shows have had to end their season early and continue later in a new season. Show like Heroes, Pushing Daisies and Bones had to or will run until they ran out of episodes and end the season abruptly. Most of these shows are betting on the next season overcome the disturbance. Some of the more resilient names in show biz such as Desperate Housewives, The Office and Scrubs have just gone on a break or temporary gap (a nice interseason holiday for the crew). Then there are the shows who were left out to dry with their futures uncertain. The seventh season of 24 is the hardest hit as it was scheduled to begin during the writers’ strike and it was necessary for the season for the show to have 24 episodes. The dwindling franchise would have problems keeping ratings if they had to halt seasons as it is episode intensive. The writer’s strike also weeded out those shows that were not faring well. Show like Bionic Woman that had horrid ratings was put on hiatus with future episodes or seasons in limbo. Reports say that Bionic Woman has been cancelled has been raised but not confirmed. (more…)