I received Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows from Amazon via the USPS today. If you think this is a stupid topic, screw you it's the literary event of the season unless you're too highbrow to admit you like children's books sometimes.

It is 759 pages in total. After some thought, I'll blog something brief after every 100 pages, roughly speaking. 110 pages cover the first six chapters, which I've just finished. If you can't define a "Horcrux" offhand you should reread book six before tackling seven. I reread book six last week in preparation, and it was a good catching-up point. I think the movie that just came out is five, and five is my least favorite book (it's the one where Harry is a whiny teenager). But reading six got me all the bits I needed so far. The first seventh of book seven is a rolller-coaster ride, you need to remember the plot heading in.

Karin walked in where I was reading as I finished a chapter around page 62 or so. She said jokingly "Has anyone died yet?" and I replied quite seriously, "Yes." By page 100 there are two deaths, although one isn't confirmed (they haven't recovered the body - in true comic-book fashion this is discussed as a maybe-they-aren't-dead.) I'm not saying who. The first death is somebody that nobody will ever predict, even giving that my statement will cause odd predictions.

I have some Xbox Live gaming scheduled for 7 PM, we'll see how far I get by then. I don't expect to read any RSS feeds or most web sites until I finish - I'm avoiding spoilers!

technorati tags:HarryPotter, BookReview

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Two unrelated topics for today's post, but I want to cover them both.

First was that my web server was down for some maintenance earlier this week. I thought it needed a new power supply, and then was chagrined to find out that it needed a new CPU fan instead. I was even more chagrined to find out that Central Computing doesn't carry CPU fans for old machines like that. Ultimately I had to mail-order a part from Newegg, rush it out here. In the meantime I had to put the old fan back on and just deal with the fact that it was incredibly noisy. So if you tried to access the blog and was denied, that's why. Apologies. It's even remotely possible you got some sort of complainy message about my mail server not being available, and apologies there as well.

The other topic is that all of the "Starcraft II? OMG" coverage actually got me to reinstall Starcraft (and Brood War) and start playing through the campaign again. Notice that this is different from Bwana's playing of old games because I'm replaying them. I'm not going to complain if I see a spoiler about the plot of Starcraft. It's sort of a mixed bag, really. It's still a really tight RTS of course and the story is decent for such a game, but a few things are problematic. First off, although Starcraft exists for the Mac (and OS X) it is a separate product than the Windows version I own, so I have to reboot into Windows to play. On a more substantial note, the graphics of course suffer. It's stretched on my 16:9 monitor for one. For two, I was surprised to realize how much I'd gotten used to being able to zoom in and out in a RTS. For three, there are few innovations I didn't realize postdated Starcraft. You can't put a drone on patrol and have it automatically repair units nearby. That seems so basic these days. Lastly - the cinematics? Wow! I remember being impressed by them at the time, but today? the compression is terrible. 256 colors and big-ass macro blocks as soon as the camera moves. It's stunning to realize how much compression has improved since then. Still, I'm about halfway through the basic campaigns (I finished the Terrans and I'm halfway through the Zerg) and it's fun to sit down and play a scenario every week or so.

technorati tags:maintenance, hardware, Starcraft, gaming, RTS

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Back in the misty depths of time I recommended a Preference Pane called SizzlingKeys for controlling iTunes from the keyboard. While I still like SizzlingKeys for that, lately it's been getting flaky. It just . . . stops working. And I've been meaning to start working on song ratings as well, but that needed to be low maintenance. Then the amazing Ethan Schoonover (of Kinkless GTD fame) started a series about iTunes. Turns out that Quicksilver has fairly robust iTunes support built-in. That particular article talks about adding a "Vaporize" script so you can hit a keystroke from any application and kill a particular track. Zap it from the hard drive, yank it out of iTunes and report back via a Growl notification.

(Side note: I've also never talked about Growl. But it's awesome and you should have it. It lets any application register and display messages. That may not sound awesome, but it is. Just off the top of my head I have a timer application (Minuteur), my IM client (Adium), a Twitter client (Twitterific), and now I have iTunes hooked up to Growl. All these apps communicate the same way, in the same place, and that's because of Growl. Check it out.)

In that Macworld article that I linked here, it also recommended the Amazon Album Art Dashboard widget. I second that recommendation, this widget makes it very easy to find album art that iTunes won't (by getting track info from iTunes and then looking the album up on Amazon.) It made going through and getting album art for like 95% of my library pretty easy.

Turns out that Growl has an app called "GrowlTunes" tucked away in the installer image (under Extras), as well as some scripts for changing song ratings (in the Scripts -> iTunes folder). So here's what I've done.

• I turned on the Play/Pause trigger in QS. (to opt+cmd+Z)
  
• I turned on the Next Track and Previous track in QS. (to opt+cmd+right (or left) arrow)
  
• I put GrowlTunes in my Applications folder and made it start on login.
• I added Ethan's Vaporize Current Track to Quicksilver's action folder and triggered it from opt+cmd+delete.
• I added CheckRating.scrpt from the Growl scripts and bound it to cmd+F7. (I'm used to that keystroke from SizzlingKeys.)
• I added Rating+ and Rating- from the Growl scripts, bound to opt+cmd+up (or down) arrow.

Now I can easily start or stop iTunes, see what the current playing track is (via the CheckRating script - nice album art, preview). When the track changes I get a growl popup (via GrowlTunes), and I can set the rating of the currently playing track easily (via rating+ and -). If I hate the track and wish it wasn't in my library, the Vaporize script kills it dead. If I don't hate it, but I don't want to listen to it today I can skip to the next track. Sweet!

technorati tags:iTunes, Quicksilver, Growl, OSX

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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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