My Personal Infocloud
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If you are the sort of gadget person who needs to have the top of the line (ie the bigger number) of everything Hasselblad has the new H3D-31, a 31 megapixel camera that will set you back around $25,000USD. I can only imagine what lenses for this thing are going to cost.
Technorati Tags: gadgets, photography
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Friday evening saw the crash of my iTunes library (and me basically spending the weekend trying to recovery from it). I have been running iTunes since, well, there was iTunes (I started with OS X 10.0.0). This meant that I had 5+ years of play counts, ratings, playlists, etc built up that were basically lost in the crash.
I'm not even sure what caused the crash. I was listening to my iTunes library while ripping a new CD I had just purchased. The only out of the ordinary thing was that the Software Update dialog had popped up telling me about the new security update. About five seconds later, I was presented with a 'iTunes has quit unexpectedly' message. Then the fun began. I restarted iTunes, only to be told the my iTunes library was damaged and that the file was being renamed with 'damaged' appended to it. This seems a rather purposeless thing to do, because I have yet to find a tool that will allow you to recover your damaged library or even analyze it. However, the file it should have made a backup of is the 'iTunes Music Library.xml' file. It turns out that you can recover from a library crash if you have an intact copy of the .xml file.
Assuming that you have a good copy of the XML file, you can recover by moving the XML file to another directory, deleting the binary iTunes Library file and starting iTunes. You will notice that iTunes is empty — don't panic, simply go to file, import and point it at your saved copy of the XML file. All of your play counts, ratings etc will be restored. IF you have a good copy of the XML file.
As luck would have it, my XML file (which was around 29MB), was replaced with a nice fresh one that was around 8K, so basically I was screwed. As I have about 100 GB of music (yes, it's all legal, trying to find storage for all the CDs is a pain) I had a big task in front of me to recreate playlist and reassign music to the playlists.
You can bet that that the next thing that I did was setup an automatic process to make a copy of the precious iTunes Library XML file and tuck it in several safe places. What a great time to have the time machine feature that will be available in Leopard!
Oh, and Apple, you might consider having iTunes make its own backup copy of the XML file, especially when a crash is involved. Having a copy of the binary library file is useless for recovery, whereas the XML file is vital. Think about it.
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This site has some of the most creative photography that I have ever seen. These are definitely in the category of created images, but they are incredibly creative.
Technorati Tags: photography, design, style, imaging
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Interesting article at ComputerWorld about how network attached printers may become the next security threat. It is difficult to say from the article the extent of the threat and how much is theoretically possible versus likely (or already hacked for that matter).
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22 Ways to Overclock Your Brain.
Technorati Tags: ideas, intelligence, brain, neural
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Casio has recently celebrated the sale of its one billionth calculator. It is amazing to think about the progression of calculator functionality and form factor over that period of time as well as how they went from being an expensive novelty to an everyday item that is practically given away.
Technorati Tags: gadgets, technology, history
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There is just so much high quality writing over at the Britannica Blog that you really should add it to your feed roll and read it everyday. Recent favorites include:
Auguries of Innocence
More Americans to Die for Iraq’s Pro-Iranian Theocracy
Some Notes on Orion
Technorati Tags: blogging, britannica
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Apparently one of the disadvantages of having a place like eBay where you can sell most anything with so questions asked is that it makes for a fine fencing mechanism for stolen merchandise. Just be a little smarter about including serial numbers, etc in your listings (not that I am in any way encouraging criminal activity or this particular use of eBay).
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Got back on New Years Eve from a week on a lovely island. A few photos can be found on flickr. Now to get re-organized enough to find time to blog the backlog.
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Interesting post about how Shakespeare's use of language in his writings stimulates a positive reaction in the brain that is observable via EEG.
technorati tags: brain, shakespeare, neural