So Shtaggle has reached a point where I have let it loose in the world…
It is now on versiontracker and the hoards of other sites that read versiontracker’s RSS feeds.

Shtaggle gets music tags from last.fm, and then allows you to tag the tracks in iTunes using either the tags from last.fm or your own.
You can choose tags by record label, mood and instrument too.
Shtaggle will then send any tags back to your last.fm profile (if you have one) that you haven’t already added to it for a given track.
Shtaggle will also let you auto-tag your music, using the top tags from last.fm, if you don’t have time to do it manually.

I’ve had some good feedback from it, and will be making it even slicker soon I hope… (the windowing is pretty odd).

Anyway, if you are using OS X 10.5 then please do check it out, and blog about it as you like (yeah I need some advertising to beat off Moody and QuickTag, both of which look a lot slicker, but do less :-P)

http://shtaggle.co.uk

e.g.
- Starbucks have fairtrade coffe, but they still use other coffee too and they still open up shop every 100 metres down a street, knocking out the little local cafes
- MacDonalds spend money on researching ‘green’ things, donate veg oil for use in vehicles and try and make their packaging degradeable/recyclable. Do they still cut down acres of rainforest to graze cattle though? Thats open for debate i guess (I don’t know all the facts) but its true that what they do as a company is get kids hooked on shit food, causing health problems and a support a culture of greed and corporate reliance.
- take any power company; investing in green tech is good, and these companies have the money to do good stuff in this sector - so why arent they pushing it harder and faster? Cos they still make a load of money from oil… and they will only make more and more as the demand/supply ratio changes… green tech will provide dirt cheap power - and there’s the problem, there’s no money to be made.

Stu just posted this which is another example of companies ‘greenwashing’ their customers into thinking they are all wonderful… from Marks and Spencer though, is slightly upsetting (although, they still use far to much packaging for their food too, so perhaps not surprising.)

I’m not going to do any more falling in love.

Love is going to happen of its own accord.

It will find me through good friendship, not affection.

I’ll know because she will be the one who takes the risk.

No more risks.

This is like one of those new years resolutions… give it a month.

Now, not only does it get tags from last.fm but it will also push your tags back to last.fm (so if you tag a track, or have tagged it before, but hadn’t tagged it on last.fm, the tags will get sent!)

Also, you can now register an account on shtaggle.co.uk and then you can have your tagging stats online (soon to become RSS feedable) - so, you get to see what you have listened to most per day/week/month according to tags!

Fixed a few bugs too, so its a bit nicer to use.

Here is the latest zip

PS- Sorry its still a zip and annoying to install… I can’t work out how to package appscript into it (there is a way, but I’m not so good at the build scripts to make this happen) and also, I can’t make a mpkg that works to copy the Shtaggle directory into your /Library/Application Support/ so I guess for now you will have to just copy/install things manually :-/
Sorry!
Chances are I’m the only one that is gonna use it anyway, so nevermind!

Also, released a new version now that will check for updates and a couple of other bug fixes…
See downloads

Feature list:
- Direct interface to iTunes via AppScript
o Skip tracks
o Play/pause
o Rate track
o Tag track (the whole point!)
- Tags pulled from Last.FM
- Tags pulled from artist’s previous taggings
- Predefined customisable tags, including:
o Moods (or whatever, but most sensibly used for moods)
o Record labels
o Instruments
- Custom tags (type whatever word you want) with auto-suggest
- Lyrics pulled from LyricWiki.org
- Alert sound when tracks aren’t tagged

Apologies to ROBERT Pointon for calling him Richard on shtaggle.co.uk! Wups!

Enjoy.

Here’s a first-draft remake of Tagginator, which is more grounded in reality…

Shtaggle

Again, Python-Cocoa, using appscript (included, but you will need to tweak install.sh to install it).

More limited than Tagginator at present (but I’m working on it…)

Features:
- Tag from Last.FM
- Tag ‘by hand’
- Tag from artist’s previous tags
- Tag by predefined ‘moods’ (with images — placed in /Library/Application Support/Shtaggle/mood/)
- Fancy looking tag clouds thanks to … ??? (Dave?!)
- Basic iTunes transport
- Track rating
- Lyric pull from LyricWiki.org

Enjoy

Leave bug reports below or mail me

I have now ported this (fairly hackily, in true Steve-style) to an app.
It’s still a bit premature but feedback is welcomed…

Basically it presents you with tags, labels and instruments and you drag the ones you want to a box and this tags them in iTunes using the comment field.
It gets tags from last.fm for the current track, it gets tags from your library from the artist (so where you have already tagged the artist), and it uses pre-defined tags of your choosing for you to select from. you can of course just type your own too, but thereafter they get added to the suggested tags which you can then drag too! lovely.

Tech stuff:
It uses the django base to run a server on localhost:8001 which then serves up webpages, which get shown in a WebView. You can of course just hit up localhost:8001 in a webbrowser once the app is running. This is pretty nasty cos it means you need django and so forth, but it works.
Uses scriptaculous/prototype for ajax and pretty UI things (draggables/droppables)

… there are lots of loose ends, but do have a look!

more explained in the README!

http://synfinity.net/code/Tagginator/Tagginator.zip

enjoy.

UPDATE (2008/05/18 @0030):
I put some prefs in so you can easily change the port and the moods/instruments/labels.
same URL as above for download.

COMMAND LINE TO THE RESCUE!

Horrid, but it works:

cd /Volumes/Some\ iPod/
for f in `grep -R -H -a -m1 -o THING . | egrep -o “.*m[p|4][a|3]“`; do b=`basename $f`; echo cp $f /Some/Path/On/Computer/$b; done;

Where THING is some string that will exist somewhere in the ID3 tags of the files you want!

Slooowwww too. But it works.

What if: people could claim small amounts of tax back for taking litter to the dump… or by putting it in public bins.
So, this doesnt work if the gain is too high that EVERYONE drives to the dump, but if the incentive is enough- say just to give pennies back per kilo of litter, then people will take responsibility for litter more seriously.

Imagine streets with no litter on, fuelled by the teenage desire to buy lots of stuff - to get money ‘for free’ they either pick up other peoples litter for profit, or take their litter to a designated ‘exchange’.
This exchange could even be a sort of auto-bin, where you load it with rubbish and it spits out some coins based on the weight or constitution of the rubbish…
Not sure how this might work as poeple might end up loading it with liquids or soil…

Hmm..

So, currently producers want to make new stuff so they stay in business (cos, if their products are too good or too long-lasting, they will eventually go bust when demand is met).
The problem here is that people dont want old stuff so producers get away with churning out new stuff.
The other problem here is that producers dont get anything if something they made is second-handed.

If stuff that was sold on as second hand could somehow reclaim some money from the gov’t and feed it back to the producer company, then their incentive to make new stuff would diminish, their incentive to make their product re-sellable, and long lasting would increase…

This would also help suppress consumerism - stuff would go cyclic so people could feel like they are getting new stuff but really its just recycled, and the companies stay happy.

This would only work for a set period with tech stuff, and fashion, but these things can be modularised.
Modularising tech could be useful so companies CAN bring out upgrades but are inclined to do so in a modular way (becuase now, they are gettign revenue when the old stuff gets re-sold, so they dont really want to sell the entire unit (unless they are very greedy, which is likely, so this probably fails…))

Again, a not-fully-thought-through post but needed to write it down to reflect on later….

Thoughts/ideas about how the second-revenue system could work are welcome.

We discussed how it could work if those that wish to be educated ARE educated and those who wish to be creative are allowed to do so…
Basically, the premise is that kids don’t really get enough choice or flexibility and our society demands very similar things from very different people. This probably doesn’t make a lot of sense without an example:

Chris is an engineer, he likes making things, tangible things. He is creative. He plays & listens to music. He likes coursework projects.
I don’t really know what I am at the moment, but lets say I’m a computer scientist, I write software but not very well; a less creative process and less tangible. I’m reflective. I listen to music. I like exams.

The distinction here is that Chris is better at doing tangible things and I am better at doing theoretical things (NB: thats not to say I enjoy it…)

Society demands that everyone eventually get a job; which is fine if you can find your niche and fit in- no doubt Chris will end up making things and will enjoy his job, because he’s bright; which is great. However, this doesn’t always work - some people who are creative in the same way may not get the opportunity to follow their career path because of exams - some people totally suck at exams - because its not the same as making something tangible. This is noted, and worked around, to some degree by getting students to do coursework.

Sadly this isn’t enough, because the weightings are often mis-matched.

We thought a character-trait test could be conducted early in academic career, whereupon a student is allowed to choose a more creative path or a more theoretical path - make stuff or read stuff… There are bound to be psych. tests that can determine this sort of thing, and with the consent of parents and a change in the education system (perhaps a more dyadic one), kids can:
- Play to their strengths
- Feel more empowered by their choices
This may even have secondary benefits - if kids are happy and are encouraged to do the things they enjoy then they might not go round spitting at things and breaking cars.

Ok so this is a bit blazé.

Anyway.

The original point i was going to make in this was that if society could be reconfigured it might not go down the pan… not sure how and these are more random fireworks of thought than a concrete argument for change….
- A dyadic society where some members are allowed to be wholly creative and receive a sort of support fund until they get to a point where they can support themselves (because art takes time, and you gotta live while you create your art)

Wow i went off tangent in this one…

ME ME ME I WANT THIS NOW GIVE ME THAT SUGAR YUM YUM MORE I WANT SOME OF THAT NO I DONT WANT TO GO TO BED NO I DONT WANT TO GET OUT OF BED I WANT THAT ME ME ME.

According to Dylan Moran, anyway. He’s probably not far off.

Fortunately children are also like sponges that can not only absorb large quantities of whatever ’substances’ you throw at them, but have the ability to grow the substances, and cross-contaminate the sponges of their peers. This is how marketing works. Make one over-sugared up kid want something and eventually the parents will cave to shut them up, cos its easier than looking bad in front of other parents (nobody wants a screaming kid anchored to them). This sugared up child will likely go and show off their exciting new thing, whatever it may be, to a host of other equally sugared up kids. They too then want it cos its ‘cool’, shiny or possibly just contains more sugar.

Explosive purchasing follows.

Good news for the producers and banks (and, I concede, the economy), bad news for the parents and the environment.
Why? Because it will be in landfill within a year.

Marketing folk (or ‘evil geniuses’ as I shall now refer to them) use these sponges so very effectively. However, kids tend to care about something else as much as themselves - fluffy animals. They also are pretty adverse to (although also morbidly attracted to) gruesome imagery (this being the reason why films have those certificates that people ignore). This is fantastic news if you want to make them do that isn’t about them.

So, a (somewhat twisted) proposal:
- Take a marketing campaign (such as … I dunno, Nike trainers…)
- Find out what it is that destroys the credibility of cool (the DoCoC) for this product (there will always be something)
- Find out how to make a short video (kids like things that move and flash and make annoying noises, thats why they are constantly glued to TVs) about the DoCoC, and make it suitably terrifying (pictures of child slave labour in the case of Nike, for example)
- Deliver this content to the children via a mobile phone (all kids have mobile phones these days, cos they want to be old… idiots)
- Wait for them to become horrified by it, and share it with their buddies (because of the morbid curiosity thing, everyone will want to see it as soon as one goes ‘URGH! GROSS’)
- Watch kids grow up respecting their peers in other nations or whatever fluffy animal was killed previously.

Not sure how effective that would be, but it strikes me that it is vitally important to raise awareness of just how bad some companies are… there is always the undertone that is carried by some companies, which gets ignored because it is not made visible enough. It seems kids, being one of the biggest market forces on the planet, are a good target because it will instill some sense of social/environmental conscience before they become corrupted by consumerism, and then grow up and instill those morals into their own progeny.

It is too late to affect people past the age of about 16 I’d imagine as they have already fallen prey to peer pressure, consumerism, wealth, and the X-Factor (or Pop Idol, or whatever get-rich-quick shit happens to be on the TV when they are growing up).

Planting seeds of caring when they are a bit younger should prove fruitful later in life when they become independent even if they suffer a period of hibernation during adolescence…

…just a thought.

OOH! We could do this with digital stories………… uh…. somehow…. right?

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

It CAN be done on a Mac, and this: http://stephendv.livejournal.com/722.html post tells you how!

I am eternally grateful that someone has worked this out and explained it so thoroughly so that I don’t have to use Windows.

Weird.

I’m on a bit of a campaign to save the world a little bit at a time and I was wondering if you would all consider helping me:

Sometimes we leave our computers on for no good reason… they just sit there, and maybe once in a blue moon we will remotely log into them to do something… but on the whole, they are just idling.
If you don’t use your computer when you aren’t in, it is really worthwhile turning it off - the idle draw of a tower like the ones we all have on our desks is about 100 watts… so, this is like leaving a 100watt lightbulb on all the time… which, of course, we are all advised not to do!
Chris and I did some calculations and research last night (which might be horribly wrong, as the sources of info weren’t necessarily accurate) - and we found that:

2 kilowatt hours requires 1 kilo of coal to be burnt
so, leaving your computer on for a day burns more than a kilo of coal…
so, if you leave it on all the time… you burn more than 400 kilos of coal per year.
… and that’s only when it’s idling! Imagine what it burns when you’re rendering some hefty graphics

It turns out that if you have a 21 inch CRT, it uses 27 watts more simply for displaying a white screen rather than black. (So, get an LCD if you can - they dont contain as many nasty chemicals (arsenic, mercury…) too, but make sure you dispose of your CRT properly!). Interestingly, the power blocks for the LCDs we have in the lab consume 2 watts even when the screen is fully off (i.e. no lights)… so consider unplugging/switching off the wall socket.

Some other stuff that isn’t lab-related but is kinda interesting:
An NTL (or, Virgin media) set top box consumes 14watts on standby and 16 when in use. Thats about a kilo of coal burnt per week (on standby). You can get ‘PowerDown’ adapters which are meant for desktop PCs, but can be used with TVs - they consist of a master socket into which you plug your desktop/tv, then the peripheral sockets into which you plug, say, a printer, speakers (or your set-top box). Assuming you turn off your desktop/tv using the switch as opposed to the remote/standby, this will turn off the peripherals too. If anyone is interested in trying these, I can try and blag some from the Conservation society…!

Kettles are awful. They consumes 2100+ watts… Our kettle, with a litre of water in it consumes 0.12 kilowatt hours per boil. That’s 60grams of coal… if you boil it with 1.5litres it consumes 0.17 kilowatt hours - so it seems boiling more water is more efficient (but only if you are going to use it immediately!). Boiling enough water for just one cup (which is generally the case of people in the lab) it consumes 0.05 kilowatt hours - 25grams of coal… so think about that next time you brew a cuppa! (Only fill enough for a cup!)

Apex fet. Ayah - Space between us
High Contrast - Days go by
…

Suggestions welcome/encouraged via comment!

This is good news, because it applies mostly to Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) but surely it applies to food packaging too? A crisp packet reaches the end of it’s useful life as soon as it is empty - is the manufacturer still responsible for it then?

What does ‘responsible’ mean anyway?
- Is it that they should provide means to dispose/recycle it?
- Is it that they should offset the cost of waste collection/landfill?
- Something else…?

How about this for some act of law/regulations (applies mostly to WEEE, but could be used to a limited extent in other markets)

1) Force manufacturers to specify the end-of-life (EOL) value of components in their product (so, in my Apple MacBook Pro, the actual cost of the hardware (and software), if intact and fully working should follow market values at time of disposal.)
2) If the item is non-functional at the end of its life, take the raw material cost of hardware/components as EOL value.
3) Enforce a scheme of refundable returns; allow the consumer to (voluntarily) return the product to the manufacturer, and force manufacturer to return a proportion of the EOL value to the consumer.
4) Force reuse/recycle policies on returned products (where applicable)

This will act in a number of ways;

i) the consumer has an incentive to return the product to the manufacter at the end of its life.
ii) the manufacturer will make more careful decisions when designing products as they will have to deal with the ‘aftermath’
iii) the consumer will be aware of the material costs of their purchases, and will then make rational decisions on their expenditure (i.e. realise they are getting ripped off most of the time.)
….

Problems;

a) qualifying ‘broken’ value - most components of a broken product are probably reusable/recyclable, but what value do they have? How does one qualify this?
….

Thoughts…?

Why?
Because I’d like to perpetuate the sugar and e-number overload in kids’ diets.
No, not really.
I want to hit the second of the 3 (or 4, if you take Harold’s view on things (see chapter 1 of his book, Press On)) R’s - RE-USE.

I reckon people are becoming environmentally minded enough, and there are enough people willing to save a bit of money for this to work:

1) Get factory, ingredients, workers, health and safety certificates, sterilisation plant
2) Make delicious (and healthy-ish) soft drinks
3) Pack drinks in glass bottles.
4) Put a deposit on bottles.
5) Make a deal with some local shops (say, Niche, for example, or Tesco if you’re feeling a little evil) to supply your beverages.
6) Make another deal with said shops to store returned bottles and either issue deposit return or use a voucher to get money off the next one.
7) Take bottles back to factory and sterilise them.
Repeat, ad nauseum….

Why is this not happening already?
Cai - this one’s for you and your milkman buddy - let’s make it happen!

I made a claim to Amy (and others) that we have stopped evolving, simply because we can cure most diseases, provide food and shelter en masse, and support more and more people as science finds a way to solve the problems that natures presents us with - removing the onus of nature to rid the a population of the weak - removing the cause of natural selection and thus halting evolution.

I’ve just read an article (http://dieoff.org/page95.htm) published in Science that was written by a chap called Garrett Hardin, in 1968 - this is apparently a highly controversial article, from a highly controversial man. Anyway, the main thesis of the article is tackling the problems of over-population, and related problems therein.

Following from what I said previously about how those who don’t care will continue to outgrow those who do, this article agrees with my thoughts and adds some new ones.

Basically, we will evolve ‘further’…

1) People who give a toss realise that they have to do something.
2) This fact implies they have a conscience, and perhaps some intelligence (though I expect the intelligence isn’t necessary as indoctrination is sufficient to make people do things that are irrational, so it follows that indoctrination can make people do things that are rational.)
3) People with a conscience of such affairs will realise that a long-term problem is that of over population - the classic petri dish experiment one might have performed at college (take a petri dish of agar, introduce bacteria, watch it grow and eventually consume all resources, spill out effluent into the rest of the population and ultimately starve the entire population of all resources until extinct).
4) The conscientious may find the solution to this problem is to have less children, and therefore act on that.
5) The non-conscientious may not even consider the consequences, and so have as many children as they can (because, you know, the supermarket is only a 10 minute car journey away, and besides, all those benefits mean they have to do less work to survive).
6) A shift in population arrives, forcing the conscientious out of the gene pool by natural selection.

Perhaps not as succinct an analysis as possible, but I hope (in the context of the article at least) it provides a thinking point…

I’ve been criticised from previous posts (and IRL, too) for categorising people too easily - this is perhaps true, and perhaps my ‘categories’ are mis-understood. I should qualify that my idea of a ‘chav’ or more importantly a ‘chav family’ is one that leans on the rest of the population, doesn’t care about anything other than themselves, is perhaps somewhat less intelligent than average… but, it seems, is at an evolutionary advantage (that is, until there are too many such families, removing the supporting population, and leaving them resourceless - as with our petri dish).

I think it was Agent Smith in the Matrix who said “Human beings are a disease, and we own the cure”. Sadly, he was right in the former part of the statement, only there is no cure - I believe we are ultimately doomed to regress.

PS- Read the article (or at least the “Tradgedy of the Commons” and “Conscience is self-eliminating” parts), because this post will otherwise not make sense or (perhaps worse, maybe better) sound sensationalist.

Having become more and more aware of this concept recently, especially after watching the excellent short video on www.storyofstuff.com (which I recommend you watch), and a common problem of which I was reminded from a chat with Ailsa about the general state of our society WRT the environment, I’ve had An Idea (TM)…

Problem:
a) Companies, specifically food/drink companies, externalise the cost of their packaging (i.e. they make it as cheaply as they can) by putting the responsibility of the consumer to dispose of it - be that through recycling or landfill.
b) Certain types of people who don’t care about our planet, the environment, and probably anyone or anything except their own ego-driven selves, are quite happy to dump any thing they like anywhere they like. Example: A bag of MacDonalds packaging along a hedgerow in a country lane.
c) Those mentioned in part a) have no responsibility to prevent those in part b) from doing as they do.

Solution:
d) Gather a group of people, be they employed or volunteers.
e) Go for litter picks.
f) Create statistics of litter, perhaps weighted on recyclable-ness, naming and shaming the vendors of each item.
g) Charge the responsible corporations for it.

How would this work? Well, people like me who hate companies like MacDonalds would be all too happy to go and f**k them over, not to mention being pro-active in clearing up the environment. So, parts d) and e) are (reasonably) easily fulfilled. Part f) is a matter of a simple tally chart. Part g)… well, part g) requires some legislation, and proof that parts d), e) and f) were done reliably and honestly (because yes, if I’m honest, I might fiddle the statistics sheets too screw over MacDonalds, but make Tirrell’s crisps less damaged…)

This puts pressure on the companies to:
1) Make their packaging recyclable
2) Provide schemes/incentives for consumers to carry out the actions of cleaning up their waste (say, put a deposit on the waste like they do with bottles/cans in Central America)
3) Take a little more responsibility instead of simply taking!

Thoughts, please?

I just looked at my top 10 artists on last.fm, and I’m glad to say I think they represent what I say I like well! (That should be obvious really, but… sometimes what I say gets disproven or is slightly hypocritical…)

So here we are; my top 10 artists of all time (well, since i started scrobblin’, like)

Nitin Sawhney; Indian/Electronica
The Prodigy; Techno/Rave/Electronica
The Pharcyde; West-coast Hip-Hop
Zero 7; Trip-Hop
Red Hot Chili Peppers; Rock
ILS; Breakbeat
Massive Attack; Trip-Hop
Incubus; Rock
People Under the Stairs; West-coast Hip-Hop
Pendulum; Breakbeat/Drum’n'Bass

So leaning heavily toward Electronic + Hip-Hop, I guess, but … still! I’m quite pleased with myself.