Taking it easy

As of 40 minutes ago, I have decided not to let the Reds affect my mood the way they have done for the past half a dozen years or so. That is not to say that I will be supporting them with any less fervour, but I will try to curb the win-and-I-love-life and the draw-or-worse-and-I-hate-myself (until the next game, when the cycle repeats) pattern that my life revolves around. Of course, how successful I will be remains to be seen (to be honest, I don’t think I have a chance with this “hands-off” style of support, that just isn’t me), but let’s give this a shot. No more obsessive checking of Newsnow every 5 minutes (on non-match days also), no more RAWK, no more thinking about formations during tea breaks.

Aside from the Reds’ away form in the premiership (there I go again!), I have had little to complaint off late. Things been pretty hectic at work (up to 6 days a week now), bordering on the unmanageable as far as deadlines and pressure are concerned, but when I contrast that with the times I longed for meaningful work a couple of years back, you won’t hear me complaining too loud. Thankfully, there’s a break round the corner and I am looking forward to enjoying the nice Delhi weather at this time of the year with some good Vodka as well as catching up with friends and family.

All that should explain the lack of action around here – and whatever little time I have had, I have blown away in a newly discovered fetish – pumping iron et al, which of course sucks out whatever little is left in the tank at the end of the day. Thankfully, it hasn’t yet turned into an obsession (and something tells me it never will) so I allow myself off days like today which in turn allows you to read meaningless drivel like this!

Amongst other things, I completed 1 year with my current employer a couple of days back – a big, big thing in my part of the world. As an anniversary gift to myself (okay, I decide to masquerade it as a gift as an afterthought), I got myself a shiny new iPod video 80 GB (yes, it’s black) – hey, the price was too good to refuse! I was out shopping for a M2 card for my phone to allow me to listen to music while travelling/ gym-ing, but those chips don’t look like settling at a decent price anytime soon – so I bought something that costs 6 times instead! Genius! I thought of getting a 30 GB video iPod as the music “warehouse” AND :p a 2 GB Nano for the gym, but settled on the biggest, meanest iPod out there instead. Zune what? Still need to solve the gym music problem though.

Some more feedback on the phone like I promised. The M600i has been by and large nice – especially since I upgraded the firmware. I can actually view the messages with the email client now! And I don’t recall any “out of memory” messages since the upgrade either. There have been a few lockups while using IMAP mail that have required me to reinsert the battery (force reboot), especially when the connection quality has been dodgy, but hey nothing’s perfect, right? Also, I am still looking for a decent (preferably free) Yahoo! Messenger client. I have tried IM+ and it does okay for most part, but surely there’s something better out there (no, Elite Messenger doesn’t cut it either). BTW why don’t Yahoo! and others have official IM clients for the mobile platforms yet?!! Crazy.

[tags]iPod, M600i, UIQ 3, M2, Yahoo Messenger, YM, IM+[/tags]

Album Art For The Rest of Us

March 11, 2009
Version 1.1 released. Universal binary, works on Leopard + Tiger.

Download here.


With the release of iTunes 7, album artworks are a minor rage. I downloaded my fair share of artworks (even though I do not have an iTunes account) and wanted a way to display them in a screensaver. As all regular readers and their grandmas know by now, I’m still running Panther, so I couldn’t (obviously) use the screensaver that apparently ships with Tiger for this very purpose.

I wanted one very badly and since I couldn’t find anything out there, I had no option but to “get my hands dirty”. The result is Album Art For The Rest of Us version 1.0.

When I conceptualized I had imagined one artwork on the screen at a time, but somehow this (screenshot below) seems better. Some of the “features” are:

  1. Displays an artwork on a random position on the screen.
  2. Adds an artwork every two seconds.
  3. Scales down “bigger” artworks to 300 X 300 pixels before displaying them. If the artwork isn’t “sqaure”, it scales down the image such that the larger edge is 300 pixels.
  4. Uses 50% Transparency to display the images on top of each other.

Note: Since the screensaver uses Applescript to get the artwork, iTunes needs to be running in the background for it to function. If iTunes is not running when the screensaver starts, it will be started automatically.

I have tested this on a machine running Mac OS X Panther 10.3.9 and iTunes 7 and it works fine. It should work with other versions, but I have no way of verifying that works fine on PPC Tiger. If you happen to get it running (or run into any problems) under any other setup than one mentioned above, either drop me a line or leave a comment.

I appreciate encourage any/ all feedback. If there’s enough interest I would be willing to convert some of things (above) into user configurable options.

Download (16 KB).
If you are having trouble downloading, try this page instead.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or later (Tiger PPC compatible), iTunes.
Screenshot:
Screenshot

[tags]Album Art For The Rest of Us, iTunes, iTunes 7, artwork, album artwork, Panther[/tags]

Oops we forgot!

I’m sure everyone’s noticed the change by now:

⌘1 and ⌘2 used to be the shortcuts for the main iTunes window and Equalizer windows, respectively. These shortcuts were removed when they moved the Equalizer command to View menu in iTunes 7.

But take a look at this. In iTunes 7, Help -> Keyboard Shortcuts and scroll to the bottom:

Window menu shortcuts
Put the iTunes window in the Dock	Command-M
View the iTunes window			Command-1
View the Equalizer window		Command-2

Looks like someone forgot to update the help file.

Not to mention, it’s an annoying change for someone like me so used to pressing ⌘2 and expecting the Equalizer to pop up. I have had to set it to an inconvenient Shift + ⌘ + 2 via Keyboard shortcuts (as it won’t accept “only” ⌘2).

[tags]apple, iTunes[/tags]