So i have finally taken the plunge and dreaded up my hair.
As i type, i am gently waxing my keyboard as my fingers are pretty waxxy and there isnt much i can do about it!
A couple of pics, before and after:
and 8 hours, a lot of backcoming, a few yelps and half a tub of wax later…
they need time to settle yet but hey! i got a month before i go to the jungle :-S OMG!
GIMBO! Your turn next 
Yes iPods are lovely things.
Except when they break. Then they are a South African non-ability (you Partridge watchers know what I mean).
Anyways, my iPod recently started to decide that the battery was dead even when it was showing half full, and doing this randomly (especially when I pressed skip, for example). It would be OK if i reset it and waited a bit and maybe shook it or something.. it all seemed a bit random.
Anyway, the other day at the bus stop it stopped and I got pissed off with it. So, safely seated on teh bus amidst strangers, I decided now was the opportune time to rip it open and rejig the insides a bit.
I did so using my thumbnail, an old bank card and a blockbusters card. Woot! The guy next to me probably thought I was bonkers.. anyway, iPod open, wires poked, all working again. I decided to run it with the cover open for a while in case it acted up again (its a pain to get into, see paragraph 2).
When I got home i ordered a new battery (just in case) from www.ipoddoctor.co.uk which offered a battery with 40% extra capacity and a kit for fitting it for about £15. Not bad. This was saturday, and today (Monday) it turned up - even better!
A few minutes poking around and the iPod was spudged open, torx’d unscrewed and the battery ripped out and swapped over.
All is well! I hope.
I realised then that my mobile had torx screws, so I went about dismantling that too! Compeltely diassembled it (looks so much cooler with the cover off), cleaned it, and re-assembled it! Works much better now too! Fantastic.
Lesson - Things out of warrantee aren’t a pain - they are fun, they give you an excuse to go “Oh well its not like it would be free to fix anyway, might as well try myself.” Hurrah!
Antony Lewis of the Jersey Evening Post decided to try and knock off the crap that inevitably fills the Christmas music charts by releasing his own song… Apparently he has 500 copies at the local HMV, but no producers are (strangely) picking up on it… Anyway, he has got the music video on YouTube and its quite cool, and kinda funny too.
It does carry a message with it and its one I think we can all slightly relate to in some way- even if you disagree with it.
So here it is, the video for Hug A Muslim.
Ok, here’s the first release of iSing for Linux. It’s not as complete as the OS X version (for obvious reasons) but it can tag stuff and send the data to the site. If you fancy using it/improving it please do so, but send the modified source back to me please so I can add it to the next release.
If anyone _does_ fancy improving it, the most essential feature at the moment is probably colouring the marked text in the main textview. That and building the artist->track tree in the browser. (Shouldnt be too hard… ?!)
here it is:
http://ising.synfinity.net/static/release/iSingGTK.tar.gz
Its Python with GTK so needs pygtk. and python 2.4+
A quick comparison; How to get the text from a TextView (NSTextView or gtkTextView)
self.uploadHistory.get_buffer().get_text(self.uploadHistory.get_buffer().get_start_iter(),self.uploadHistory.get_buffer().get_end_iter())
self.uploadHistory.string()
Now tell me again why we love linux so much?
NB: For the pernickity among you, yes I DO know that Linux != GTK, however it’s a fine representation of how much more difficult and unnescessarily verbose everything seems to be in Linux, and how simple and intuitive it seems to be in OS X)
I thought seeing as python is so wonderful and the various GUI wrappers for it are also pretty great that I’d port iSing to GTK…
…It’s going well! Almost finished in fact and I only started working on it at about 2pm today. It is not, of course, nearly as sexy as the Cocoa version, but it does mean that it can be used on Linux.
Currently it will work with Rhythmbox, but if anyone uses any other music programs and would like to provide an interface to it which can query basic info (artist, title, rating if poss, lyrics) and set the lyrics, that would be awesome. It doesn’t HAVE to set or get the lyrics, these can be stored elsewhere but it would be cool to do this (my version currently doesnt).
If anyone is interested in helping out I have the project in svn so it can be poked 
I will also be moving all the iSing guff to http://ising.synfinity.net (kindly hosted by Dave) where we shall be making shiny shiny pages for perusing lyrics and so on.
Cai is also working on a .NET version of iSing, so soon we might have the complete set!
Cai suggested centralising the iSing Lyric database.
What a grand idea.
So here is the new, shinier iSing: [Download]
New features include:
Any tagged and uploaded lyrics will appear on http://synfinity.net/code/iSing/ which is basic at the moment but we are working on it Expect prettiness by the end of next week!
Please have a play around and uncover bugs etc.
…is a little helper app i decided to make to allow quick copying of tracks in a playlist into a self contained directory (maintaining the artist/album/track.extension structure within that directory)
It’s not of much use but if you want an easy way to copy tracks out of iTunes and don’t want to go hunting through your filesystem, use this. It kindof assumes the tracks are in at least a depth of 2 directories (i.e. if files are in / it will probably break. but maybe not, i dunno. try it.)
Here it is
Its 2.20am so apologies if this makes little to no sense.
After a long week of coding into the small hours I have achieved 2 things:
1 - I now know a little more about PyObjC and Cocoa and Interface Builder and XCode
2 - I have created (what I hope) is a vaguely useful application for OS X called iSing
So what is it?!
It’s a little app to get the lyrics of the currently playing track in iTunes.
“Its been done” I hear you cry.
Well yes, but iSing lets you tag the lyrics according to what you think of them… I hope to be able to do the same with the actual songs too (i.e. putting tag words in the comment field for easy searching!) but that will come later.
What’s the point in tagging lyrics? I’m not really sure, but sometimes I listen to a tune and think “Thats a really cool lyric”, then later on I’ll be thinking “Aha, its just like so-and-so says in their track, blah, — ‘The Really Profound Lyric’”… Yeah so anyway, my brain doesnt really need to be storing all that in there, so iSing can do it instead.
You can retrieve lyrics by Artist/Title or by tag word. You can tag them with colours too but as yet cannot retrieve them by colour. (Though they will display in colour.. I suppose that makes it the iSing on the cake… uhhh…. 
)
Couple of bugs i know about:
1 - the thread that ‘auto detects’ track changes leaks objects like a … well like my car leaks radiator fluid actually.
[EDIT: FIXED... but it might still randomly hang if you are 'auto detecting']
2 - if you try and get lyrics when it says “Not Playing” it explodes. I can’t work out how to disable the toolbar button.
Ummm yes. That’s about it. I hope to add a lot more but at the moment I’m pretty pleased with it.
Thanks to Dave for writing the tree source class, I adapted it and that allowed me to bosh it in in about half an hour! woop!
Also - if you put this file into ~/Library/Application Support/iSing/lyrics.cache (you might have to make that dir, ~ being your user’s home) then you will have some pre-tagged stuff (erm… it will probably not show anything if you don’t have the tracks… but try it… it should still work and fail gracefully) to browse.
End!
PS - PLEASE let me know if it breaks, and also what you think! (If you can be bothered it will spew into console.log if it breaks, the last 10 lines of that would be useful)