no more safari ?

Ho appena scaricato flock, il nuovo “social browser” sviluppato sulla base di Firefox/Mozilla, e sono davvero senza parole: integrazione totale tra web browsing, blogging e photoblogging !

No more Safari or Firefox ?

Sembrerebbe il destino di Flock… peccato che tutti i browser basati su Mozilla siano un po’ troppo pesanti per il mio vecchio iBook G3 (che continuo a usare per scrivere, mentre il macmini e’ diventato un mediamulo).

Questo era tanto tempo fa… adesso (agosto 2006) uso con gran piacere Camino; nonostante abbia un iMac intel e quindi potrei usare tranquillamente anche un browser piu’ pesante, preferisco avere un browser che faccia il browser e il resto lo faccio online.

update 2008: ho smesso con gli esperimenti… ormai sono fisso con Firefox !

to convert ‘ape’ audio files

Lots of sites nowadays offer digital music as .ape or .flac files; what’s wrong with mp3s ?

I should include a technical note here together with a bit of history, but since I’m not the most qualified for this sort of thing I’ll keep it short and simple: mp3 is a format that stores music in compressed format, therefore with some quality degradation (high compression=high degradation=low quality music=small file); wav/aiff is the format that is used for audio CDs, highest quality, uncompressed, large files (size ratio is 10:1 for CD-quality files versus mp3 files). So a bunch of people came up with some new formats for digital music, such as ape and flac. These are lossless compression formats; which means that they have exactly the same quality of the input CD music, but they’re half the size.
So if you don’t want to trade on quality, go for ape/flac.

What if you just want to play this music and convert it in mp3, add it to iTunes, etc ? The answer is xACT. This is a little Mac OS X wrapper for a set of command-line tools available also for Linux and Windows..

So here we go:

1. make sure you have both the music.ape and the music.ape.cue file (the .cue file contains the split points and the name of the tracks).
2. launch xACT, go to the “shntool” tab
3. select the “split” option; select the output format (usually I’d use aiff, then leave the conversion to mp3/aac format to iTunes)
4. drag the music.ape file in the drop area on the left
5. click the “Call Shntool” button; the app will now ask for the location of the file with split point data; that’s you music.ape.cue file ! Just select the .cue file, choose an output folder and the splitting/conversion process will begin.

A few notes to finish up:

• the cue file should begin with the “FILE” line; if it doesn’t then delete the first lines (they could have other information such as performer and title of the album).
• there’s very little information about what xACT is doing; if you’re worried that it might be stuck just have a look at the output folder, where you should see the output aiff files being created. Or just fire up the Activity Monitor, and look at processes called “sox”, or “mac” (usually with a fairly high degree of cpu usage).

xACT has lots of other options which can be helpful (you can, for example, create an .ape file with its .cue info sheet), but unfortunately has no automatic file renaming tool based on the cue files. So you’re kinda stuck with a set of music files called “split-track001.aiff”, “split-track002.aiff”, etc.
It should be simple enough to put together a perl or ruby script which has as input the cue file and does the job for you.

tv shows (2)

I’ve been stuck at home due to a minor major incident in the past 4 weeks, so I had the chance to enjoy a couple of TV series: Seinfeld (1st and 2nd season) and Huff.

Seinfeld is a wickedly funny show “about nothing” as the americans say; never heard of it here in Italy, and I suppose that it’s a kind of show that would not translate as well to the italian taste as Friends. So there’s Jerry Seinfeld (a real first class stand-up comedian), his ex-grilfriend and two other buddies, New York and a local cafe’, nice intermezzos where Seinfeld plays himself doing the stand-up comedy thing, and lots of brilliant jokes and comedy setups that you really love to watch’em again and again.
Mind you, it’s really addictive stuff: once you begin watching it you will not stop. Believe me.

Huff is a serious one. I like it because it’s really got an adult, un-adulterated content. Harsh at times and sometimes dark as the Sopranos. A brilliant cast with that favourite of mine, Hank Azaria (some of you might remember him in Friends, playing Phoebe’s geek scientist fiancee’). Sometimes a little bit too sugary. Thanks god there’s Russell Tupper, a cocaine-fueled sharp-mouthed lawyer that I’ve just elected my personal hero of the month.

punch drunk love - minireview

Punch Drunk Love, a.k.a. il lato oscuro di Adam Sandler.

C’e’ un lui che e’ schizzato. Schizzato di brutto. Ma all’inizio non sembra.
E’ gentile coi suoi colleghi di lavoro, si mette giacca e cravatta, dice sempre si’ alle sorelle rompipalle.
Ma !
Ma dice di no ad una tipa che vuole uscire con lui. Ed e’ pieno di tic. Quindi tu inizi a sospettare che lui e’ schizzato. Poi una sera va a cena dalle sorelle rompipalle, qualcuno dice qualcosa, e lui distrugge una vetrata in un moto violento dall’incredibile potere cinematografico.
Ok, e’ schizzato. Ma e’ simpatico, tifi per lui.
Si mette nei guai con una telefonata ad una hotline sexy. La sua carta di credito, dove vive, quanto guadagna, tutto gli riescono a carpire ’sti delinquenti. Che sono capitanati dal (sempre bravissimo) Philip Seymour Hoffmann (quello di Magnolia e Capote).
Si innamora della tipa di prima, quella a cui aveva detto di no.
I delinquenti le fanno del male e lui s’incazza. Finalmente una valvola di sfogo appropriata per il nostro schizzatissimo Adam Sandler.
Ok, il film finisce bene. C’e’ un lieto fine. Ci sono loro due che si vogliono bene. I cattivi sconfitti. Classica americanata, dirai tu ?

E invece no. Perche’ lui (Adam Sandler, lo schizzato) e’ bravissimo. Perche’ i dialoghi sono anticonvenzionali. Perche’ ci sono tre o quattro scene da vedere e rivedere come fossero belle fotografie (ad esempio: l’inizio del film, con il camioncino che si ribalta e perde l’oggetto misterioso con un schianto che rompe la l’alba di una L.A. periferica; la distruzione della vetrata nella casa della sorella; la violenza nel bagno del ristorante).