I found this nice MacWorld article that discusses some of the newer (or at least new to me) functionality in Preview for OSX, which details some really nice features, including document merging and annotation, as well as some nice formatting features. Looking forward to using this for making designeriffic podcast/mix PDF booklets, multipage Illustrator-formatted resumes, and whatever else.

Update: the chumby widget can be found at http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/Japanese Syllabary Flash Card. Enjoy!

It seems that you can do a few nice little searches that aren’t well publicized, so that you can, for instance, get an RSS stream featuring the union of two different Flickr tags in your stream (in other words, an OR search). The feed URL looks something like this (for the tags blue and green):

feed://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=74517463@N00&tags=blue,green&tagmode=any&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Replace the “tagmode” parameter with all, and you get an AND style search (only photos featuring all the specified tags). The problem is that the RSS feed provided by Flickr only allows you to grab 20 photos. If you perform the same search, you get a large amount of paged data, if there is more than one page. So, basically, this means that if you want to see ALL the photos of your children in your own home-grown chumby, OSX, or other widget, you are sadly stuck at seeing only 20.

“What about using something like Pipes?”, you say. Well, I checked out using Yahoo pipes to create a custom RSS feed. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, you are really limited to what you can get via the Flickr API. You can get more than 20 photos in 1 person’s photostream this way using the flickr.people.getPublicPhotos method, but that method does not provide the capability of filtering by tag.

I’d just about given up (well I still have for now) until I realized that you can do just this in the media bar in Flock, so there must be a way to do it that I am missing. In Flock, you can view your photostream and *fliter* by tags, and even use AND and OR for multiple tags. Not sure how they are doing this, because you can see way more than 20. I sent them an email to see what they are doing today. Anyone else have any idea?

Speaking of slightly evil, I recently joined eMusic for my free downloads, which I thanked them for. You have to download a special, er, downloader to, er, download your music, and it looks a little something like the picture I’ve included here. It works rather well, and apparently can download hell itself. Now, with variable bit rates, how else can you *really* explain the download size for the track My Demons (a dollop of dubstep download). I mean, its one thing for an artist to craft a song such that the time corresponds to the title, but come on…

On a totally different note. VMware just released the Beta 3 Fusion player for Mac. This incorporates some improvements on the last release. My latest use for the player is for the “play now” option that is now supported at Netflix. At the moment, Netflix only supports windows XP SP2 and Vista, so I fired up Fusion to take a swag at watching films on my Mac from Netflix. I have to say, I was pretty impressed, the sound and video performed just fine. The only glitch was viewing the film with Fusion in full-screen mode and the Netflix player in full-screen mode. For some reason the Netflix player cut off the bottom part of the video (right at, say the second line of typical sub-titles and below). Switching Fusion to *not* full-screen and watching the video that way worked fine. I think maybe it has something to do with the way that Fusion is communicating screen size to the guest OS, but not sure. Other than that the performance was pretty solid.

Well, as it turns out, as one “television” vice I have is watching downloaded episodes of the show “Lost,” this email was in reference to a downloaded show. Having started only watching shows via download not too long ago, I’ve discovered that I approach the TV show files very diffferently from music. The file size is large and the files are often part of a series, still part of the ritual experience of watching television and keeping up with an ongoing cultural event. In my opinion, if I could download them for free with commercials, as long as the mechanism worked correctly and didn’t mess with the way that I *watch*, I think I would actually be fine with it. However, $2 is a small price to pay (cheaper than basic cable) per episode to keep up. The funny thing is, I treat it as a service, the same way that I would treat forking over $8-10 to see a movie or see a music artist play. I take away from it the experience, and honestly, I could care less about the file itself.

This leads me back to the question at hand. What was this email all about? Well, as it turns out, one of the episodes of Lost 7 episodes back, had some sort of glitch in it. Thinking back, I do think I remember something odd happening at some point, but it didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the show. (In fact, I believe it was one of the more lame episodes from this season.) Apple has informed me that it has put the episode in my download queue free of charge for when I choose to download it, but I really kind of don’t care. If they had informed me that my next download was free as a result, I would have been impressed, but I’m not really sure I have the patience to re-watch the episode to get the untainted experience of watching the show without the “glitch” in it.

I’m guessing the solution created is to process every song file in your library and stick info about your silent bits either in every file or in the library information (haven’t looked at it yet). Unfortunately, the problem with this is that if you are like me, you’ve lovingly set aside your old G4 machine and given it the new job of file serving, media serving, and also jukebox. Every time Apple introduces such a fix, my G4 has to struggle through our entire Mp3 library, rebuilding the iTunes library file. The result — it’s crashed twice so far while “Determining Gapless Playback Information”. I’m glad there is a solution for gapless playback, but it seems like there would be a better way for updating the library than choking your computer for 30 minutes the first time you run iTunes after an update…

(Btw, what’s with the missing alternating horizontal lines in the music list view – are my eyes supposed to be spreadsheet enabled now?)

It takes a few minutes for your tracks to start showing up on LastFm once you are running the “Scrobbler” app as I think they call it (it “scrobbles” your played tracks to LastFm, I guess via flying turkeys or something). After a few days to a week, you start getting “neighbors” and recommended radio and what-not. The freaky part is the “neighbors,” or people with similarities in their playlists. My number 1 neighbor has a startling number of the same top artists, which is weird since my track plays so far have ranged from James Brown to Boards of Canada to Thee Michelle Gun Elephant to King Tubby and Mos Def to Boris the Sprinkler and Nation of Ulysses and the Birthday Party. Not to sound self-eclecticized, but I decided to just let my library play at random, which represents all the music from the past 15 years or so of Jenna and my music purchases (so I’m effectively channeling 2 people’s diverse tastes).

Anyway, check it out, its pretty interesting if you’re into that sort of thing…(you know, blindly gathering contacts that you don’t know from Adam or Eve on the internet based on some sort of herding algorithms…)

On a different note, Jeremy sent me this link – http://www.onebitmusic.com/ – which is absolutely crazy. In a time when artists like Beck have just launched 8-bit gameboy music into the public eye, its nice to see that we’re getting back to our roots…