Escape from boredom

Two weeks ago we bought an Apple TV so now I have to start the work of ripping our entire cd collection. Have spent some time figuring out the best way to do it, which software to use and most important of all, which format to rip to. The Apple Tv is as any product from Apple superb when it comes to iTunes integration. But, and that was a huge but for me, you are then bound to any file format Steve Jobs decides are ok. So to h#$” with iTunes and Apple formats. I went for the lossless format flac, Free Lossless Audio Codec, because then I can do pretty much whatever I want afterwards, keep it and use only flac, or even transcode it all to mp3, mp4 or whatever iTunes support and import it to the iTunes-library.

Anyhow, after doing some heavy Googling for a few days here is my software stack of choice: Using Max to rip the cd’s to flac. One thing that I realized was a little drawback of choosing Max is that is uses MusicBraninz to lookup information abut the cd’s. Since we have quite a lot of Norwegian music, considered rare when it comes to Musicbrainz I initially had to type in a lot of info. That was pretty annoying when I knew that iTunes could retrieve the info from Gracenote. But then I found this apple script created by the same guy behind Max, which grabs the cd-info from iTunes and updates Max with it…cool stuff, which saves me A LOT of work!! Just not enable Max to automatically encode cd’s when inserted, first make sure that all info is present, then encode. Or else you will get a folder structure like this “Unknown artist / Unknown album / 01 Unknown trac.flac” which is kinda messy.

I also bought a 2TB external harddrive, formated it to FAT32, since I did not want to bother to install any NTFS drivers on our MacBook (found a forum post which said it had messed up that guys MacBook). Since I’m not going to save any > 4GB files on the disk, FAT32 is the weapon of choice since it is the file system supported by most operating systems. (Mac OS can only read from NTFS out of the box right now, not write to it, blame Bill Gates for that!!!)

Must admit that I do not find translating everything into Norwegian a good thing, for instance I have Gimp installed on our MacBook. Since I’m not a hardcore photo editing kinda guy I need help from online tutorials to even do the simplest things. But that is almost impossible when you have menus in Norwegian and all tutorials are referring to menus and such in English. So I had to do a bit of surfing on Google, and luckily I found http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070423133918443.

More simply, I dug into The Gimp’s package, and moved the locale folder (found in Contents » Resources » share). I created a new folder, at the same level as Resources, named Resources Disabled, and dragged locale into that folder. This way, I can get the other languages back if I need them. The application now is running smoothly, in English. And one icon in the Dock is enough for either launch or launch via drag-n-drop.

Read this article digi…/slik-sporer-facebook-alle about how Facebook keeps track of your websurfing, even if you are not a member of Facebook at all. The article is based upon this paper Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like This!.

Numerous websites have implemented the Facebook Like button to let Facebook members share their interests, therewith promoting websites or news items. It is, thus, an important business tool for content providers. However, this article shows that the tool is also used to place cookies on the user’s computer, regardless whether a user actually uses the button when visiting a website. As an alternative business model this allows Facebook to track and trace users and to process their data. It appears that non-Facebook members can also be traced via the Like button…..

It clearly raises some issues, realizing that the best way to avoid being tracked by Facebook is to keep a separate browser only for checking your Facebook account, where you also deletes all cookies everytime you shut it down. If I bother I would then use on my corporate laptop IE for corporate websites (it is the default browser with much autologin enabled), then Firefox for normal surfing, and at last Chrome for Facebook. It will keep me anonymous when it comes to Facebook, they will still be able to keep track of me, but by deleting the cookies each time and only surf on Facebook, the data will be quite irrelevant.