Last week I bought a bottle of Diet Pepsi from a vending machine. I opened it up, and woohoo! The cap was a winner – buy one 20 oz bottle, get one free.
I held onto the cap until Monday, when I was having a bad caffeine craving. So I redeemed it, and when I opened the second bottle, guess what? Another winner.
Fast-forward to today. I turned in that winner and got another two-fer. I opened the second bottle, and guess what? Yep, another winner.
I think it’s a trap.
I have been looking back through my Google Reader archive and realized that I have a lot of stuff that I’ve starred that hasn’t made it into a link dump. So here’s your chance to catch up with online stuff that I’ve been enjoying!
Tom Wright Talks. Links to two recent N. T. Wright lectures. I haven’t actually listened to them yet, but I”ll get around to it.
We Need the Gospel of Jesus in America. A plea from the Internet Monk. Always good stuff.
A review of Voddie Baucham’s Family Driven Faith. I need to get a copy of this book.
iMonk again: John Piper on why Christian Children should be confused.
Summary of the “Confessions of a Pastor” talk from the Buzz Conference. Powerful stuff. Can’t wait to hear the audio.
You Need to Smile More. Or, reasons you might not need to. iMonk is one of my favorites.
5 Reasons to have Family Worship. Good reminders from Joe Thorn.
Yesterday SimpleHelp.net posted 10 Alternatives to iTunes for managing your iPod. (They have since been dugg and their website is down. Bummer. You can still see the guts of the article from the Google cache.)
At my work location iTunes is verboten, so I’m all for exploring other ways to manage my iPod, or at least to play the tunes off of it while I’m at work. Here are my basic requirements:
- It needs to run smoothly. (Duh.)
- It needs to be Windows-based. (No Macs or Linux boxes here.)
- It needs to support the AAC audio format. I’ve got a bunch of .m4c files on my iPod.
- It shouldn’t be a system hog.
Nice to have’s would include portability, support for Last.FM and the ability to copy songs off the iPod back to the PC.
There are 5 alternatives on the SimpleHelp site that are available for the Windows platform. Here are my reviews of them:
This was the first one, and at first glance was a strong contender. It has support for Last.FM, is portable, and has a pretty nice UI. Once I got it installed, though, I found some issues. Even though it appears to support proxy servers, I never could get it to talk to Last.FM. Secondly, the thing was a system hog – regularly freezing up for 30 – 60 seconds at a time when I tried to do anything. No thanks. And then the kicker: no support for AAC. Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Uninstall.
Gave this one a try next. The install was quick, the software came up quickly, and it immediately recognized my iPod. Off to a good start! Didn’t seem to hog the system too much. Tried to play an AAC file… no joy. Skipped three albums in the playlist before it got to one that was .mp3 format. So much for that. Uninstall.
When I downloaded this one, it warned me that it was just a developer’s version, that there isn’t an official release of Songbird yet. Well, I’m brave, so I gave it a try. This is definitely the slickest one yet – good graphics all the way around (icons, skins, etc). This one is built on the Mozilla browser platform, so it has way more overhead than a player really should – about 60 MB installed. Then I had to install a plugin to get it to recognize my iPod. Once I got the plugin installed, it found the iPod fine, but then I had to wait for it to load the library. So I waited. And waited. And waited some more.
It must have taken Songbird about 45 minutes to load the library information from my 25 GB media library. Still, if that was a one-time startup thing, I can live with it. And it appears that it is – though who knows if it’ll have to do a full library re-scan when I change something? No telling. I was about sold on Songbird until I actually started playing music from it. AAC support? Yep. But as I played the songs, it hiccuped my audio on a fairly regular basis – every 15 seconds or so. This wasn’t due to CPU spiking – I had plenty of free CPU left – so there must be some inefficiency in the program itself. Uninstall.
The UI on this one appears to be a lot more barebones than some of the other contenders. The sorting options are bad; you can sort only by one field at a time (artist, album, etc), but then it doesn’t sort below that. For instance, I can sort by artist to get all of U2 grouped together… but then there’s no guarantee that the U2 albums will be grouped together. Given that I’m a guy who likes to listen to a whole album at a time, this is no good for me. Still, I should give it a try, right?
So I gave it a whirl with some .mp3-formatted files. The sound was OK, the playback controls simple but marginally adequate. Then I went to AAC. It won’t play AAC. Not only that, it doesn’t give you an error, or skip the tracks, or anything – it just sits there on the file and acts like it wants to play it, but it won’t play it. Unacceptable. Uninstall. Wait, don’t have to uninstall – this one is totally portable. Thank God for small mercies.
I left this one for last because it wasn’t new to me – I’ve been running YamiPod for a few years now, but only for the ability to be able to pull files back off the iPod onto the PC. I’m not real find of the UI, but it works, which is way more than I can say for some of these I’ve evaluated.
I haven’t actually tried to play anything back on it until just now. So let’s give it a try.
Amazing. It won’t play any of the files. What’s going on? Controls seem unresponsive, it’s not playing anything back. Well phooey on that. At least it’s portable, and it’ll copy files off the iPod neatly. I’ll keep it around just for that.
Winamp
Winamp hasn’t been allowed on my office network computers for at least 5 years.
Conclusions:
Each of these alternative players has their strong and weak points, but when it comes down do it, none of them were good enough for me to use as a regular player. I will keep waiting for the Windows version of Amarok; right now it’s Linux-only, but there’s a Windows version coming, and Dan swears that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Until then, I’ll keep using Foobar2000. It doesn’t manage my iPod; I have to point it to the Control directory of the iPod and then have it just search for files. But it plays consistently, manages playlists nicely, and has a Last.FM plugin. So, it’s a keeper. And I guess I’ll keep using iTunes at home. It’s a resource hog sometimes, but it does what it needs to.
Thomas Sowell has a good column of random thoughts on NRO today.
A few good ones:
Few things are more scary than the number of people who rely on talking points, instead of weighing serious issues in a serious way.
In politics, there are few skills more richly rewarded than the ability to misstate issues in a way that will sound plausible and attractive.
“A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years,” said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. If so, then we may be hearing about “diversity,” “social justice” and “a living wage” for many years to come.
Has anyone actually seen Rachael Ray measure out the ingredients she puts into her cooking, instead of using a pinch of this and a handful of that?
It’s worth going to read the whole thing.
Yesterday morning I was awake early so I went to the gym and hit the treadmill and the weight machines. I have been doing at least a bit of running, so the treadmill part wasn’t bad; however, I haven’t hit the weights in two or three months, so this morning I find myself pretty sore. It’s a good kind of soreness, though – feels good to know that I actually did something.
I’ve pretty much been a slacker the last couple of months in going to the gym – time to get it cranked up again. Need to break the weight plateau I’ve been at for the last 4 or 5 months and get to losing some more pounds.
Laura decided to come into our room about 4 o’clock this morning. She needed to go back and sleep in her own bed, so that was a struggle from about 4 to 5. I’m OK with that, hey, it’s part of parenting, but I really want to know how my dream was gonna turn out.
I was one of a group of about four people, and we were heading into some medical office to interview someone that the authorities didn’t want us to talk to. We had Dr. Greg House along to help out. And he was wearing one of those cool little chain mail headscarves that the knights wore in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It could only get better from there… right?
Well, it was a busy weekend. The whole family showed up Friday night for one last get together before we head our separate ways this fall. The result was two days of playing cards, music, football, and making at least one obligatory Hubbs shopping trip to Walmart and Sam’s Club. Aaron and Andrew also got haircuts… Andrew opting for the “I wanna look like Chris” haircut. I don’t think he’ll be maintaining his, though, so he should have hair again by the time he gets out out to Oregon.
Hit the gym this morning to run and do a little lifting, and yeah, it feels good to be sore again. I’ve been too much of a slacker the past couple of months. Gotta get back to it. The pounds don’t lose themselves.
From Charles Spurgeon:
Fits of depression come over the most of us, usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, the joyous not always happy.
This morning’s visit to the bathroom here at work revealed that someone has again been leaving tracts on top of the toilet paper holder in the men’s room stalls. Now, the efficacy of leaving tracts at random as opposed to other evangelistic techniques is a discussion for another blog post. But if you’re going to leave a tract in the men’s room, should your first choice really have a pink rose and the words “You’re Special” scripted on the front? *sigh*
It appears that Google is doing some weird things with the links that it returns as search results. They look fine, and work fine, unless you want to right-click and copy link location on them. Strange.
For instance, while writing my last post, I wanted to look up the web address of George Fox University, where my brother will be attending in the fall. Now, I had no idea what the address was. Fox.edu? GFU.edu? So, in my typical fashion, I opened another browser tab and did a quick Google search for George Fox University, and there is the first result: georgefox.edu. So I right-click on the link and do a Copy Link Location, and go to paste that link into my blog post. However, when I post it, instead of getting “http://www.georgefox.edu”, I get this:
Note: I added spaces to that link so that the text will wrap around.
The weird thing is that if I hover over the link, Firefox’s status bar reports the link as georgefox.edu. If I click on it, it takes me to georgefox.edu. But right-click Copy Link Location doesn’t work. Grrr. So now I guess I’m going to have to start highlighting the link and doing a copy rather than just copying link location. What a pain.