Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Screen - two years later

A couple years ago, I wrote about screen. Blogger Bill Clementson recently saw The Light about screen as well and I reviewed my original post. In it, the first link was to a very nice collection of pages maintained by Sven Guckes. For his own reasons, Sven has decided that he could no longer maintain his information pages about screen. After a little probing, I found a couple ways to see what they used to look like. There is a working mirror or you can see an archived copy from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The mirror was linked to from a wiki page on screen over at aperiodic.net -- which I found from Bill's post.

Tags:

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Surf rock covers and fixing mp3s for iTunes

In the April Fools day show of Coverville, Brian Ibbott claimed that Blondie's "Call Me" was a cover, originally done as a surf rock instrumental by a group called The Original Onions. While that was a fun gag (and the whole show had some other great psuedo-original versions), I liked the surf rock sound. The mp3s from the now-defunct Original Onions are available for free download under a creative commons license at archive.org.

The trouble I had was that iTunes wouldn't load the mp3s and it wouldn't even tell me what was wrong. After a few futile attemps at fixing ID3 tags and attempting on both windows and mac, I searched the support forums at apple.com and found this thread which pointed me to VBRfix, a tool for repairing mp3 files. I barely skimmed the docs, pointed the tool at my directory of Onions mp3 files and it magically Just Worked. The Original Onions' album "Grill Skills" is now in iTunes and will shortly be on my iPod as well.