Yes, you’d think I’d remember to check this after a billion FreeBSD & Linux installs, but… how come when the install process asks you if your BIOS clock is set to UTC, it doesn’t show you the current time? How hard would that be? I never can remember how the damn hardware clock is set up. Maybe some distro does this, but FreeBSD and CentOS don’t, which are pretty much all my installs these days.
I don’t understand why when an English writer has an American character, he doesn’t show the draft to an American before publishing. It seems like an easy step to avoid some howlers. Last night I watched Bunny Lake Is Missing, and the lead character, an American woman, says she’s about to go “marketing”. I didn’t know what on Earth she meant until the next scene in a grocery. I remember reading an English murder mystery in which a Miami police inspector described a suspect, saying that he “usually speaks English with an American accent, but can shed any trace of an accent if he wishes and can even pass for an Englishman”.
Even Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore will make mistakes like this. The Joker referred to a “ghost train” and “softbacks” in The Killing Joke, and in an issue of Sandman an American girl visiting England for the first time says she’s from “the States”. I know they have lots of American friends, so why won’t they do some basic sanity checking?
Of course, this works the other way as well. See this list of goofs in Frenzy for a couple Americanisms; apparently Hitchcock had been away for so long at that point he didn’t notice, although it’s odd the Brit actors didn’t point them out.
I wanted to extract all the cover images from my MP3 library, and it was surprisingly difficult, so I’m noting it here for future reference, and perhaps for Googlers in the same situation. I’m on OS X, FYI.
The hardest thing was finding a CLI program that reliably extracts the image from the ID3. After much searching, I found just the thing: Image::Exiftool. I just did a CPAN install, which worked fine.
Now, when extracting, I only wanted to do it for one song per album so I wouldn’t have zillions of duplicates. I also wanted each image to have the name of the album, not the song. After a bit of trial and error, I ended up with this:
cd ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music && find . -mindepth 3 -name 01\ \* | while read X ; do exiftool -B -Picture "$X" > \ ~/Documents/Projects/covers/"$(basename "$(dirname "$X")" | sed s/\ /_/g).jpg" ; done
Ugly! I know, but it works. The find assembles a list of the first song in every album directory, then the list is sent to exiftool to grab the image, which writes it to your chosen directory with as “ALBUM_NAME.jpg”.
There are two small problems. There’s no real way to test ahead of time if an MP3 has an image embedded (exiftool gives the same exit code regardless), so this will create an empty file for each album without an image. So you’ll want to delete all the zero byte files (although you may want to make a list of them first so you know what images you need to find). Also, this script assumes the embedded image is a JPEG, which is usually true but not always. You can just do file * | grep -v JPEG (after you’ve removed the empty files) in the directory to find PNGs and GIFs.
Of course, this assumes that all your cover images actually reside in the ID3s. If iTunes has downloaded them for you, then that’s not the case; they’re stored externally. See this article for a fix for that.
The punchline to this post reminded me of something absurd I saw for sale at a used bookstore a couple months ago: this. An audio tape of a novelization of a movie of a comic book. Maybe someday there’ll be a musical comedy based on the tape.
Had to try this:
Created by OnePlusYou
Not too bad. However, Dinosaur Gardens is another story:
Created by OnePlusYou
Heh. This post from Trademark G probably put us over the edge.
Does the Treasury have an annual prize or something given to whoever can make the money uglier? Every new revision looks worst than the last. I thought this was a joke when I first saw it:
![[image of new $5 bill]](http://kim.scarborough.chicago.il.us/do/sites/blog/wp-content/files/new-5-dollar-bill.jpg "barf")
Yes, that is a giant purple Helvetica 5 in the corner there. What’s next, getting the guy who designed the Murray’s Discount Auto logo to redo the Lincoln portrait?
This is the first time I can remember that I was actually tricked by an April Fool’s joke on the web. The Paul Rand part is true, though.
