Like many other people online, I’m a heavy user of the Google Reader application now left to find some replacement for this aggregator of interesting news that I’ve subscribed to. I know that Reader had some social features at some point, but I’ve never actually used them. There was a single thing that I valued about Reader: it allowed me to leave off checking my feeds on one computer, and resume later on a different box. It’s a “cloud-based” RSS…
As an implementation of support for translating or transliterating the tracklists on foreign releases, MusicBrainz has something called “Pseudo-Releases.” They are meant to be used alongside the database entry for the original, real release to contain alternate tracklists. Unfortunately, many MusicBrainz users weren’t quite sure on when the “Pseudo-Release” status should be used, and incorrectly set it instead of the correct status like “Official”, “Bootleg”, or “Other” on some releases. And a few translated tracklists have the status set correctly—but…
I’m pleased to see that two of my MusicBrainz contributions have been merged in time for the 2012-01-26 server update, and are now live on the site! The first change isn’t exactly visible to the naked eye, but it should hopefully provide improvements in the Google Search result listings for MusicBrainz artist pages by providing a nicely formatted <meta description> tag to help Google (and other search engines, of course) list a more relevant “snippit” of the page in the…
So, what did I spend 2011 listening to? As it turns out, quite a lot. This is the first year that I’ve had a portable music player capable of holding (nearly) my entire music collection, and I have a habit of listening to everything on shuffle. That said, a few things managed to stand out. My “top 10” in reverse order, from my Last.fm listening statistics: Tied for 8th place いとうかなこ – スカイクラッドの観測者 The opening theme song from the Xbox…
Aw, man… Why did HIMEKA have to come out with a new album right now? himekanvas [w/ DVD, Limited Edition] If I calculate that up, it’s nearly $60 with shipping to where I am in Canada. Maybe I can convince someone to get it for me as a Christmas present? Who knows :) (Why yes, I am blatantly including an affiliate link for myself in this post. Why not?) Update: I decided that I could actually afford it after all. And the Limited…
So, I just bought a cheap 16GB SD card today. My original plan was to use it as a replacement to the failed flash drive in an old EeePC laptop. (As it turns out, the SD card reader in said netbook is broken, so the plan failed.) But I got curious; what benefit do you get by paying more for an SD card? I have two to try today: An ADATA class 10 16GB card, and a rather older Lexar…
When developing Riker, I had a bit of a choice – I could either write (from scratch) a new library to interface with the MusicBrainz XML webservice, or I could create bindings to access the existing libmusicbrainz library from within Vala. Up to today, I’ve gone a little ways down both paths, and both have problems. If I write new bindings from scratch, they’ll have some nice features like integrating into the Glib main loop, and automatically determining proxy settings from the…
Maybe I’m just used to having too much power at my fingertips. Git was designed, from the ground up, to provide operations to do absolutely anything to a repository, right down to the most basic level of manually creating individual objects in the repository. Using user-visible command-line tools that can be operated from scripts. It is literally possibly to reimplement most of the user visible Git commands (such as “commit”!) using shell scripts and some of the more-basic Git “plumbing”…