Drinking whiskey clear!
From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending February 5, 2012:
1) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
2) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
3) Freezepop – “Pop Music is Not a Crime”
4) Two Door Cinema Club – “Something Good Can Work”
5) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
6) Ambra Red – “It’s Just A Dream’
7) Rolla Scape – “Heaven is Real (feat. Marsheaux)”
8) Ladyhawke – “Black, White and Blue”
9) David Sylvian – “Waterfront”
10) The Jody Grind – “Eight-Ball”
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You might have seen the story on other websites: Dropbox is offering up to 5GB of free space to any account that updates to the latest version of their software. While this is true, it’s a bit more involved than some websites make it out to be (I’m looking at you, Neowin!)
Basically, you need to go here and download the latest version of the Dropbox software for Windows (although beta clients are also available for Mac and Linux, I can’t tell if the free space upgrade applies to those versions or not. The feature Dropbox is testing is the photo importer, and the FAQ at the linked site says “photo import feature is not available on Mac 10.4 and Linux”). So just use the Windows version if at all possible.
Anyway, after updating the software, connect a camera or cell phone to your computer. If you have Autoplay enabled (and you’ll need to for this), you will see this:
Click “Import pictures and videos using Dropbox”. The software will create a folder called “Camera Uploads” in your Dropbox folder, copy the pictures from your device to the new folder, then upload them to its servers. So you can disconnect your phone after the import is done, even if the upload to Dropbox will take a couple of hours. And here’s the crucial thing: you get 500MB of free space for the first picture you upload using this method, and 500 free megabytes for every 500MB of pictures you upload thereafter, for a total of 5GB. So it’s really 500MB + 4.5GB in 500MB batches, assuming you upload 4.5GB worth of pictures.
For the first few batches of imports, I was a good boy and copied pictures to my phone, disconnected the phone from my computer and then reconnected it to allow the import to start. I don’t know if this counts as “cheating” or not, but on my final round of imports I figured out that I could just copy some pictures to a flash drive and they’d import as long as they were in a DCIM folder (Dropbox won’t import images on a flash drive outside a DCIM folder). Also, know that once you’ve imported the pictures, you can delete them from the “Camera Uploads” folder; you don’t have to keep them there to earn your free space.
Be warned, however, that there is one giant pain in the ass with Dropbox’s import feature: it renames all the imported pictures based on the time and date in the EXIF data. This would be fine for importing pictures directly from a phone; after all, one could easily argue that “2012-02-06 12.35.30.jpg” is a more useful filename than “IMG_20120206_002.jpg”. But if you’ve carefully named your pictures, you’ll find this feature infuriating. And my phone’s camera has a bug where around 20% of the pictures I take are dated 12/8/2002 at 12:00, which makes the feature less than useful. I could also imagine someone going to swap out the battery in their digital camera and getting distracted for a few minutes, and the date resetting, thus screwing it up for Dropbox. This feature is not well liked by users posting in the Dropbox dev forums, so this feature may be altered or removed before going live.
In any event, I started my Saturday with 2.6GB of Dropbox space, and I now have 7.6GB of storage space for free, all for just shifting some pictures around. So I can’t complain!
Yep, it’s been a while… so here are a bunch of new banners for the website! Enjoy them… until July or so, when I update them again!
Alexander Hamilton: As George Will once said, “we worship Jefferson, but live in Hamilton’s world”.
Bobby Dodd: Georgia Tech football coach from 1945-1966, compiled a record of 165–64–8.
Bernard Cornwell: Author of historical fiction, esp. the “Richard Sharpe” series from the Napoleonic Wars.
Katy Perry: I just don’t care what anyone says… Katy is America’s Sweetheart!
Neptune: This gas giant, the last in the solar system, is my favorite non-Earth planet!
Pecan Pie: Why? Because it’s just the best damn dessert in the whole world!
Richard Hooker: Along with Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker, considered a father of Anglicanism.
Sylvie: This is taken from the cover of Saint Etienne’s “Sylvie” single.
Steven Levitt: American economist and co-author of Freakonomics.
Marsheaux: Greek synthpop band. I’ve fallen in love with them the same way I fell for Jenni Belle in 7th grade:
Marsheaux: instantly, overwhelmingly, and giggledy. Seriously: I get love pangs when I listen to them!
Stilton: Is there any cheese that can compete with Stilton? It’s the King of Cheeses!
Thomas Aquinas: Highly influential theologian, one of the 33 Doctors of the Church.
A meal from The Varsity: Because sometimes you just jones for hometown deliciousness!
Thomas More: English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist.
“The next time we have this conversation, it won’t be a conversation.”
– Timothy Olyphant as
Raylan Givens, Justified
So… Honda convinced Matthew Broderick to star in a CR-V ad for the Super Bowl in which he skips work and has a very Ferris Bueller-like day:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhkDdayA4iA
There are a lot of “Easter Eggs” hidden in this commercial. Here’s what I’ve been able to find so far:
– The opening shot – with Matthew in bed – is almost identical to the one in the movie, although Matthew is using a cell phone.
– Matthew’s agent’s office is one giant Easter egg: “Walter Linder” was the name above Abe Froman’s on the reservation list at Chez Quis; Walter tosses a baseball in his hand while he talks to Matthew; there are three bottles of Wite-Out on his desk, just as there were on Grace’s desk; a trophy similar to the one Ferris used to rig the sleeping dummy sits on the desk behind him; and over his left shoulder you can see the same “horse chair” that was in Ferris’ room.
– There are also three pencils on Walter’s desk. Edie McClurg (Grace) felt that her character should have a 60s hairdo in the film, but the on-set hairdresser had only been hired to work on Mia Sara’s hair and had no idea how to do a big 1960s-type hairdo. So McClurg did her hair herself. When she arrived on the set, Hughes jokingly asked her how many pencils she thought she could fit in her hair. So they tried one, then two, then three… but a fourth fell out. That’s the origin of McClurg’s first scene in the movie, when she pulls pencils out of her hair.
– The framed drawing seen next to Walter’s lamp was on Ferris’ fridge. In the original script, Ferris had younger siblings. They were written out of the movie, but their refrigerator drawings made it into the film… in case you were wondering why there were children’s drawings on the fridge when both kids were in high school:
– When Walter hangs up the phone, we see the name of his agency on the glass: Roeman, Peterson, and Frye. Mia Sarah played Sloane Peterson and Alan Ruck played Cameron Frye in the film. I’m not sure who “Roeman” is, unless it’s a spoof on “Abe Froman”:
– The next two shots – of Matthew sitting up in bed and then opening the blinds – are almost exact duplicates of scenes from the film. However, his line was changed slightly. In the film he asks “[h]ow can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?” while in the commercial he asks “how can I handle work on a day like today?”
– Matthew is then seen holding a toothbrush in his hand and saying “one of the worst performances of my career and he never doubted it for a second”, a scene from the original film (however, in the film he says “they” instead of “he”, in reference to his parents buying his story).
– The next shot has Matthew with a towel wrapped around his head like a turban, speaking on a red telephone. Both the turban and the red phone were seen in the movie, although if I remember correctly, they weren’t seen onscreen at the same time:
This one has a long setup, so bear with me:
I was watching the Pro Bowl (football) game the other night, but had several other things going on at the time. I paused the DVR several times to do this or that, and ended up falling way behind “real time”. I wanted to use the NFL 11 app on my phone to check the score, but the app crashed upon opening. Several times. I figured that the app had been updated, and that was somehow causing a problem with the old version on my phone.
But I just couldn’t check the Market app to look for an update: for some reason, the NFL app is “not available on your carrier” (and no, I’m not talking about the NFL Mobile app that’s Verizon-only). For some reason, the NFL (or Google) doesn’t want me to install their free app on my Virgin Mobile US phone. So I’d found the apk on a message board several months earlier and side-loaded it (for newbies: Android Market keeps track of your apps and offers to update them when such updates become available; side-loaded apps aren’t tracked by Market and therefore must be updated manually).
But then I had a thought: I logged out of Google on my phone’s browser and searched the Market website for the app. I found it, and clicked “Install”. I logged in, and amazingly, the app downloaded and installed! But there was something odd: the Market was in Spanish! And it remained in Spanish the next day, too! As usual, Google support was little help, basically coming down to “check your language settings in Chrome!” even though I was using Firefox and IE on my computer.
So I tried using the following address to access the Market:
http://market.android.com/?hl=en
This reset my Market language to English, and I haven’t had a problem since. People who use the Market in a language other than English can substitute the proper ISO 639-1 code for their language in place of the en in the address above. For instance, use de for German or fr for French (assuming Google has a version of the Market in your language, of course).
As to why that happened in the first place… I have no idea. A quick look through Google’s support forums suggests that the Big G might be using some type of IP geolocation, as there were many complaints from English speakers in Puerto Rico about getting the Market in Spanish, and English-speaking Canadians getting the French version whilst in Quebec.
From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song list for the week ending January 29, 2012:
1) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
2) Ladyhawke – “Black, White and Blue”
3) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
4) Freezepop – “Pop Music is Not a Crime”
5) Cloetta Paris – “Secret Eyes”
6) Ambra Red – “It’s Just a Dream”
7) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
8) Katy Perry – “The One That Got Away”
9) Marsheaux – “Eyes Without a Face”
10) The Sound of Arrows – “Into the Clouds”
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iTunes is supposed to keep track of the songs you play on both your computer and on your iPod. Unfortunately, this feature seems to break early and often for a lot of people: songs played using iTunes on your computer will update their “last played” dates and “play count” totals, but songs played on the iPod simply do not.
Frustrated users at the Apple Support message boards report that this is a persistent and intractable problem. Folks there say the problem happens on both Windows and Mac, so it’s not OS-specific. Every version of iTunes seems affected, although version 10.x seems worse than others. It can happen on any model iPod, although Nanos and Touches seem to be the most affected. This started happening way before Apple released iTunes Match, the cloud-based service which backs up your songs (and complicates the play count process, since plays can come from multiple sources). Users have uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, gone back to previous iTunes versions, and reset their iPods. A couple of people even went out and bought new iPods to see if that would fix the problem. But sadly, nothing seems to fix the issue.
But board member MVLaing came up with (what appears to be) a solid workaround… and it’s bizarre that it actually works! He (or she) suggests that before you sync your iPod to your computer, briefly play anything (on your iPod) that’s not a song, such as a podcast or an audiobook. 30 seconds is enough. Then connect your iPod… and be amazed that play counts are updated! Hooray!
Try it out and tell me what you think!
And lastly, a bit of a rant here. I went to several message boards looking for help with the problem, and was surprised by the amount of ridicule directed towards people who asked for help. Many responses were along the lines of “OMG! What a moran! Why do you even care when you last played a song! Your a tight-ass! LOL!!1!11!!”.
Well, Internet Tough Guy™, I can give you two good reasons why people care about play counts.
The first is Last.fm. It’s a website that keeps track of which songs you play, and offers streaming radio stations based on that info. It can also hook you up with other users who have similar music tastes, and you can see what music they listen to. It works so much better for me than either Pandora or Spotify. In fact, neither of those services have ever offered me a single new band that I liked. Not a one. Last.fm has introduced me to 14 new bands in the last month alone. And guess what? The whole thing stops working if play counts aren’t updated.
Secondly, there’s “Smart Playlists”. iTunes has a nifty feature where you can create a playlist consisting of (for instance) “every song I’ve added to my library in the past 60 days and played more than three times in the last 30 days”. And such playlists are dynamic, so they automatically update themselves as time passes. And guess what, Internet Tough Guy™? If iTunes isn’t updating the play counts on songs from your iPod, then this feature doesn’t work, either!
“Moran”.