This feed is currently unavailable

Ascetic Minimalism Adam "rampage" Meltzer's Weblog mp3val special unicode edition The other day I was looking through my MP3 collection and found that for some reason, iTunes was showing several tracks as having a time of 0:00 and refusing to play them. Fearing that my files were bad, I tried them in VLC and SongBird and they played without any problem. A definite WTF moment. Some web searching later, I found that this is not an uncommon problem and that you can use a free tool called mp3val to validate and fix these problem files. I began using it and it was working great except for a "small" problem: it refused to read files that had any multi-byte characters in the filename. Oops. I spent a few hours hacking together a solution that will read filenames with multi-byte characters without any issue. The logging is horked, and it doesn't seem to work with the mp3val front-end software (that probably needs some refactoring as well, but I'm too lazy to do that at the moment), but it gets the job done and seems to work perfectly at its job, and that's fixing busted MP3s. I've provided my modified sources and the executable for those who just want to fix their stuff without fiddling with it. Link is at the end of this post. This is provided as-is with no warranties or guarantees. Use at your own risk! Don't blame me if this hoses up your MP3s. :) I've only tested and built this on Windows, so I have no idea if these changes are portable to other OSes or not. Sorry. As to what originally hosed these files, I blame Picard as that was the last thing I ran against these files before iTunes started pitching a fit, but it could have just as easily been iTunes. mp3val-unicode.zip... Oops Looks like syndication has been broken for a while, at least since I updated to MT 4.0. If you can read this and you're not looking at my site, then it's obviously been fixed. :)... Question for electronics nerds I know a bit about electronics and electrical theory. As an amateur radio operator, a big part of the licensing exam had to do with electrical theory, and I've done a quite a few projects in the past building things like radio transmitters and other basic projects, most of which use a 555 timer :). However, there's this aspect of electronics that's always baffled me that maybe someone can answer for me. Why is it that it seems like with every device that has a digital volume control seems to have this point where one click is too quiet, then the next click is too loud. It seems that every device with a digital volume control I've used has this issue; my car stereo, my iPhone, my iPod, and so on. Just like horsepower and torque always intersect at 4242 RPM, there seems to be this magical point in audio devices where there needs to be a volume point halfway between whisper quiet and ear splitting, and it's just not there. Is it a quirk of MOSFETs, a conspiracy, or something else? Edit: fixed confusing grammar... The Donald Appreciates Ficuses Even though he has to relocate his ficuses, Donald Trump expressed his appreciation for the fine foliage by stating, "There's no plant as beautiful as the ficus and no plant that does the trick like the ficus." Ficus. Respect.... We've shipped! Bill Anderson, one of the lead program managers just announced on his blog that the product I've spent the last 2 years working on just went gold. Right on schedule, too. The last week was a whirlwind of craziness wrapping everything up, and it sure felt nice to end the week on a positive note. I came into the product team a few months before the Beta 1 release shipped, and it's been really being a part of seeing the product progress from that point to what was signed off on yesterday. Yay.... Things that make you go, "huh?" I've seen plenty of crazy errors before, such as these two that made the DailyWTF a while back. But this one really made me scratch my head... Text: --------------------------- Remote Desktop Disconnected --------------------------- This computer can't connect to the remote computer because an error occurred on the remote computer that you want to connect to. Contact your network administrator --------------------------- OK Help --------------------------- Screencap: Well.... alrighty then!... Test Testing MT 4.0 Update: Guess it works.... Update #2: Fixed comments. Now I just need to fix this funky-ass stylesheet.... Shadow is now famous! We all knew that Shadow was big. But, now it looks like he's big time. Thanks, Cute Overload!... ... It was weird enough seeing an album cover with me on it a few years back, but now I get an e-mail from my sister and find out my parents have become corporate media darlings (I say that in the kindest of ways). 40 years too late, mind you. Click through the picture for the actual story..... Custom Wired Cover Custom Wired Cover Originally uploaded by rampage. I jumped on the invitation to create a custom Wired cover as part of their recent Xerox promotion. After keeping this secret from Leslie for months, here's what I ended up with when the July 2007 issue arrived.... Newsfeed display by CaRP