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I recently started to explore other mac media players, iTunes has awesome functionality, but sadly it’s a pig memorywise, so my day to day music listening software has become VOX whose small footprint and clean UI hits all the right notes for me. I needed a simple way to create m3u playlist files (which are really just filelists saved with a ‘m3u’ file extension - every solution I could fine seemed overkill, most of the Automator workflows I found were predicated on you already having a iTunes playlist you wanted to export - I wanted just a clean ‘right/control click on folder full of music - ‘save as playlist’ kind of functionality.

Attached is such a workflow. I’ve used it successfully recursively on a folders containing 10,000 songs, and (although Automator takes a few seconds to actually startup) the action it self is pretty fast.

A few notes:

• It attempts to filters out the kind of CRUFT (.txt,.jpg,.png,.nfo) that you might have in a folder if you <cough>[acquire]</cough> music via some type of distribution network.
• It asks you what you want to name it, but by default it’s going to save it to your desktop.
• it includes subfolders as playlist items, VOX ignores these so I didn’t bother to exclude them - I suppose other players might actually choke on them so YMMV.
• The attached file is the full-fat editable automator workflow - you’ll probably want to save that as a finder plugin

I haven’t had any issues with it, let me know if you find it helpful.

DOWNLOAD: Create_M3U_Playlist.workflow

function friendlycase($title) {
$title = preg_replace( "/(?< =(?<!:|'s)\W)(A|An|And|At|For|In|Of|On|Or|The|To|With)(?=\W)/e", 'strtolower("$1")', ucwords(strtolower($title)));
return $title;
}
add_filter('the_title', 'friendlycase');

Short sweet and it works… so “HELLO SAUL…THIS IS MOTHRA” becomes “Hello Saul…this is Mothra” particularly handy when someone has a tendency to type in all caps. Painfully simple to add your own exclusionary words..

Recently I switched my launcher of choice to ‘Alfred’ a nifty indie project that I became aware of via Twitter, in the past I’ve been both a Quicksilver and LaunchBar user - both extremely powerful apps that although I used them religiously, each had quirks I never could really get past (QS had stability issues, LB was stable but I never wrapped my head around it’s particular method of bringing back results, and it wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants)

Alfred is in beta, but seems stable, visually pretty, and actively developed (which I really appreciate) - And has most of the features you’d want in a launcher - but I want to talk about a single feature, that I really like, Alfred’s use of spotlight comments allows you to create groups of essentially unrelated apps, it’s so simple, so obvious (and honestly it may have worked with LaunchBar too, but I never checked) just add your desired key work to all the apps you want in a group and BOOM! done - I add ‘webd’ to Transmit, Coda, Textmate, Cssedit and Espresso and evoke Alfred and it just works, you can assign as many keywords to an app as you want, for example I add ‘ftp’ to transmit as well.

It’s a simple feature I really appreciate, and we all know how hard simple actually is. So if you’re in the market for a nifty, pretty, deceptively powerful launcher that’s only going to get better - take a look at Alfred.

For the past 6 months I’ve had this interesting mac issue - once or twice a month my internal drive which generally has about 90GB free on it would drop to 25GB free or less, I originally thought perhaps the drive was dying because rebooting off a system dvd and repairing the drive generally fixed it - about a week ago - that fix stopped working, and I thought hmm.. maybe something just isn’t cleaning up after itself - since we’re talking about 65GB I immediately thought it must be iPhoto/Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks since it’s pretty unlikely coda/textmate/expresso (and YES I use all three) ever use that much of anything - so I dug deeper, I have a demo of DaisyDisk hanging around that showed me my ‘CodeEquivalenceDatabase’ (which lives in: var/db) file was 64GB - it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was likely that file was the problem - but I wasn’t sure, maybe that file was supposed to be that big - some more googling and that file is tied directly to 1password and keychain - I ran repair ‘keychain’ BOOM crashed/reboot/won’t restart/lovely - reboot again and it came back - some more googling led me to believe I could just delete ‘CodeEquivalenceDatabase’ and it would be regenerated, so I did - and it was, the new file was 16k UNTIL I launched Transmit, it seems that every time I launch Transmit the file doubles in size - I suppose that might shed some light on how often I launch Transmit (I’d love for someone to do that math).

Conclusion

I deleted Transmit and reinstalled, and the problem seems to have gone away, it’s important to mention that it’s highly unlikely this was a Transmit problem, it more likely that it was just a very ugly anomaly on my machine, I haven’t experienced anything like this on any other system.

Every good story need some pictures, this story was about a whirlwind service experience with America’s largest cable company…the girl?, we don’t know for sure, we call her ‘Julie’, say hello to Julie… because I couldn’t figure out how to sell the shirts at cost, I will be donated proceeds to ‘Hope for the Animals’ a no-kill animal shelter in Langhorne, PA. Buy merch here.

Tagged: merch

So stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Everynight at 5:45 — 6:30 my Comcast Broadband internet connection drops, it doesn’t just drop a little, it doesn’t just drop now and then – it drops to 0kbps [I suppose it doesn’t matter what unit of measure I use to communicate zero does it], it drops everyday - after a handful of laughable calls to tech support [unplug modem, reset router, die a little more inside] and troubleshooting on my own I’m fairly certain the issue is twofold:

1. The splitter in my backyard is dead/dying, this isn’t a difficult assumption because it’s been replaced 6 times in 2 years [more on this later]
2. The added traffic/strain of everyone on my block surfing online, talking on the phone and
   watching TV diminishes my already splittered-weakened signal to a whisper

Reach out and tweet someone

I’ve been twittering with a gentleman named frank [@comcastcares] who works for customer relations for Comcast, he has a thankless job - he’s basically doing damage control to the twittering community - but the interesting side effect of following frank on twitter is that I can read the issues everyone else is having - and my issue is fairly typical, lots of folks with a near identical problem. That being the case, you would think Comcast would have some type of handle on the issue, or at the very least their techs would acknowledge it.

IMHO if Comcast would public admit they have a problem would be an excellent first step, but to help them along I may print a few 1000 [unplug modem, reset router, die a little more inside] t-shirts, let me know what size you need.

My Spin on the Underlying problem

This is purely conjecture, but 800lb Gorilla Comcast has been pushing their ‘triple pack’ very hard in the northeast, it’s success is putting additional strain on their network, and that strain is exposing flaws in the coaxial/splitter networking that’s been in most of their customers homes for 15 years - how do they react, they announce a ‘wiring protection plan’ only $3.95 a month - and pimp it heavy on every tech call - lovely, aren’t I already paying for service I’m not getting? Wasn’t it your technicians who originally wired this crap originally? Isn’t my/our continued patronage worth 50 feet of coaxial and a two dollar splitter? Needless to say, Hearing service plan offers when I’m not getting service is not an effective sales technique, at least on me.

Possible Solutions

Obviously the first thing that comes to mind as a solution is switch providers, FIOS is readily available in my area, and the pricing even without bundles is fairly competitive. I could just go to Radio Shack and buy myself a handful of splitters, and replace them one by one as needed, Honestly they are $1.49 this is costing me 1000 times that in lost productivity and found aggravation.

I think it’s significant to mention that I have chosen to use what little bandwidth I currently have to write this post, so are you having issues with Comcast and your broadband connection? let me hear about it.

Update here

Tagged: comcast

So courtesy of the auto update plugin - I have a brand new wordpress (really it feel’s like that) - I must say that aside from a few things (most notably the location of the categories list in Publish) I like it, and that the boys and girls at Happy Cog did an admirable job on the facelift.

I’ve posted before about how my original 40GB ipod died, and lived, and died - and how I eventually excepted it’s death and moved on. Well I couldn’t just throw it out, ‘T’ had it engraved and gave it to me for our anniversary - and even non-functional that means something to me. So it sat on a shelf for 8 months, dead, but I guess I’m far too OCD to let it just sit there, so I made a snap judgement to try changing the battery - a quick visit to ipodjuice.com for a $30 battery and a bit or surprisingly simple fiddling (I would say that opening the ipod case and removing the old battery is no harder than putting RAM in a laptop) - my 40GB ipod is once again in fine working condition, as a matter of fact I’m listening to it right now.

Tagged: Ipod Battery, Ipod Repair, Ipod Repair Success Story

In case you missed it Endeavour launches at 2:28am this morning. Something about a shuttle launch that makes me feel all giddy - not quite as awe inspiring as the original NASA Apollo launches (which where true media events) watching the shuttle depart is still an awesome thing.

Space shuttle Endeavour thundered into orbit early Tuesday morning carrying seven astronauts and Japan’s dreams for a space-based laboratory at the International Space Station.

• High-res Image
• Video of the launch (Video is now offline)

I don’t hide the fact that I’m a geek, for a designer, I think I hold my own with most webdev programmers - In most regards I know my shit, but until recently I haven’t spent anytime learning regex (regular-expressions) and let me tell you, if you don’t know regex - simply put, you’re working too hard.

Regex is a way to filter strings that match a pattern out of text from a file or from standard input. Regular expressions (or RegExs) can be used with a big choice of programs, most notably grep (the global regular expression parser) and sed (the stream editor).

I know, even the definition is somewhat intimidating, but the power of regex is worth the pain I promise - let’s look at an example, take a look at the following list of fish (assuming that the number was a quantity).

1. One Fish: 1
2. Two Fish: 15
3. Red Fish: 9
4. Blue Fish: 0

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