For example, you may have an album by one main artist—such as Santana—who joins forces with a guest artist for some songs (in Santana’s case, that would be pretty much anyone else in the music industry). In that instance, iTunes 7 may display each Santana-and-guest song as a separate album. The fix is to select all the tracks on the album, choose File: Get Info, and make sure that the Album field is the same for all of them. If that field is blank, the selected tracks have different album names, and you’ll have to type the album name you want. Then, also in the Get Info pane, enter the name of the main artist in the Album Artist field; leave the Artist field blank.

Macworld: Feature: iTunes remixed, Page 1

Maybe everyone knew this but me, but I have a lot of soundtrack albums that are just scattered across iTunes Cover Flow. Turns out if you set the "album artist" then they join back up all magically like. The nice thing about this is that it doesn't muck up the artist displays. For example: I have several Norah Jones albums. I also have the OutKast Speakerboxxx/The Love Below double album, which features Norah Jones on one track (and it actually has several tracks with guest artists listed). So the OutKast album used to have 11 entries for the different artists. Well now I've set the "Album Artist" as OutKast and it's only one entry. But if I search for Norah Jones I get her albums, plus the one track from the OutKast album (since the regular artist is still "OutKast & Norah Jones".

Very handy!

technorati tags:iTunes, CoverFlow

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As of today, all Xbox 360 consoles are covered by an enhanced warranty program to address specifically the general hardware failures indicated by the three flashing red lights on the console. This applies to new and previously-sold consoles. While we will still have a general one year console warranty (two years in some countries), we are announcing today a three-year warranty that covers any console that displays a three flashing red lights error message. If a customer has an issue indicated by the three flashing red lights, Microsoft will repair the console free of charge—including shipping—for three years from the console’s purchase date. We will also retroactively reimburse any of you who paid for repairs related to problems indicated by this error message in the past.

Xbox.com | Open Letter From Peter Moore

If I'm reading this right I should get my $140 back, which goes a ways towards making me happier. Of course, I still have a 1st generation system (my current system - the 3rd unit I've owned is OLDER than my original purchased unit), and I got mine what a month before they started putting an additional heat sink in. This all leads me to believe that my 3rd one will croak eventually as well.

So everyone who weighed in my last "I hate Microsoft" post saying I should expect such service - you're wrong :-) Make no mistake about it, this change happened because some European countries were considering slapping Microsoft with some sort of "lemon law" due to the 360 failures. And that only happened because enough people made a stink, such that Microsoft could no longer claim it was "business as usual".

Of course, the DRM situation is still fucked - all those Live Arcade titles become locked. I predicted in the comments of that post that it will continue to worsen until Microsoft does something about the DRM policy. I still stand by that prediction. As more first-wave consoles get the Red Ring of Death, more people will become impacted by the DRM policy, and it will become a bigger and bigger deal. Now I just need to get the EU involved and we'll see a fix ;-)

technorati tags:Xbox360, CustomerService, Warranty, DRM

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So, it's the fourth. Yay! Blah, blah, tea in the harbor, blah, blah we can make pretty explosions, yadda, yadda! What's really important here? Out of nowhere my PSP and my PS3 have both been getting regular play time all of a sudden. WTF?

On the PS3 I've been playing Super Stardust. This is a solid little arcade shooter. I might go so far as to say I like it better than Geometry Wars. At the very least, it has more varied gameplay than Geometry Wars. The PS3 has racked up a reasonable stack of games that aren't epic, you aren't going to buy a PS3 to play Super Stardust, but if you HAVE bought a PS3 it is easily worth $8.

On the PSP I've rented a game called Crush. Crush is somewhere between a platformer and a puzzle game. The main gimmick is that the world is in 3d and you can rotate the camera orthographically, so you can see any of the four side views of the world, or up for the top-down view. At any time you can hit the left shoulder button and "crush" the world into 2D. When that happens lines that were decorative in 3d become platforms you can run on, but a solid block that you could jump on before becomes an impassable wall. So you rotate the camera around and flip things about in order to progress through. Things like you might flip into top-down, crush into a flat plane, and walk two steps and uncrush. Those two steps can traverse what was an impassable cliff in 3d, and when you uncrush you're now at the top of the cliff. It's pretty ingenious - it's basically a brand-new puzzle mechanic. I find that I play a level and then turn it off again, but it's certainly worth checking out.

technorati tags:PSP, PS3, Crush, SuperStardust, Gaming

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(sigh) I like Wikipedia. It's useful. At the same time I'm pretty sure it's passed an event horizon it will never recover from - the stories about stupidity in editing are legion. Ironically enough Wikipedia itself preserves them all, so you can at least see how their policies have made it an insular little playground more concerns with rules than with truth. And the thing that was originally charming about Wikipedia was that it had pages of stuff on webcomics and Klingons and whatnot. I never wanted Wikipedia to become stuffy Brittanica - we can use Brittanica for that.

This rant is triggered by the flamewar here. In short John Scalzi tried to edit the page on Fred Saberhagen to note his death, and some officious twit explained that the sheer fact of his death could not be noted until an acceptable reference was generated. Harlan Ellison was specifically defined as "not a reliable source by any definition" and the SFWA website was questioned as being reliable. The fracas went on until Locus put up an announcement - very likely informed by Harlan Ellison, but apparently it doesn't matter "how the sausage got made".

Sheesh.

Somebody needs to take the spirit of Wikipedia - a huge open source repository of information to be taken with a grain of salt - and clone it. Because Wikipedia is someday going to consist of locked set of pages about politics and the infamously huge collection of entries on Pokemon.

technorati tags:Wikipedia, stupidity, JohnScalzi, FredSaberhagen

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I have a cool little OS X app I use that I've never talked about. It's called Nocturne, and it is freeware from BlackTree, makers of QuickSilver A.K.A. the best OS X application EVER. Nocturne is nowhere near that useful, but it is quite nifty. I think I originally saw it at 43folders, but in a nutshell what it does is make your screen monochrome and white text on black backgrounds. That doesn't sound that exciting, but I use it when I take my laptop outside. Today was a day where it didn't quite get hot enough to turn on the air conditioning but it was close. Come say 5, 6 PM it was hot enough in my office to be uncomfortable, but it's ridiculous to turn on the air then. So I grabbed the Powerbook and headed for the back yard. In the evening we get a consistent breeze/wind that falls somewhere between "pleasant" and "uncomfortably strong" depending on your mood and temperature. But it's still too bright for my screen to hold its own at 5 PM in the summer. (As I write this at 8:23 PM I've shut off Nocturne but I used it for a couple of hours before turning it off.) Nocturne cranks up the contrast just enough to make the Powerbook usable in direct sunlight.

If you've ever tried to use a Mac laptop in bright sunlight and found it difficult to see, definitely give Nocturne a try. There is a magic keystroke you can hit to do something similar (see the 43folders link for it), but it's not something I'd ever memorize. Nocturne is an app I can run, and then just quit when I want the effect to go away.

technorati tags:Nocturne, OSX, BlackTree, screen, contrast

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