meddlingBanter

So I’m at work late right now scanning about a thousand pictures.  See I’ve put off looking for a real job for a long time, several factors are involved there, but mostly I’m just lazy.  Last week the owner of the company I work at kinda gave me the hint that I need to get off my ass, make a resume and find a real job.  To compound that he has assigned me the job of scanning and organizing all of their company photos for the past 30 years of business, more on that later.  In an effort to get a real job and actually make money to live on, I’ve taken my boss’s advice and put together my resume and am starting to look for a real job, since they’ve out grown my usefulness around here.  I guess considering this was only supposed to be an internship for the summer, and I’m still working here I have been lucky.  Plus I’ve been able to build up my resume with the additional projects I’ve worked on.  Now that I’ve been reduced to office lacky I suppose its about that time to get going from here. 

The scanning though has actually been kinda fun.  We don’t have the best scanner here at work, well not the best scanner for scanning in thousands of photos.  The document reader blows for photos, either adding huge white bars on the sides, scanning in sideways, or adding flares to every photo it scans.  That leaves me with the flatbed.  I started scanning individually, but that took forever so I decided to read the scanner docs and find out if there was anything I could do to make things easier.  A couple hours later, configuring the shitty HP scanning software and I was able to scan multiple photos and then crop the photos individually with relative ease.  Today though this didn’t suit me so I started to look at photoshop, maybe that could lead me to an easier time.  I found out photoshop has a crop and straighten fucntion built in, perfect for what I was doing.  All you have to do is import a set of photos from your scanner, say three, the max I can fit on the scanner bed.  Photoshop imports those photos to one file, then just click on crop and straighten and you get three individual files.

This led to another problem though.  Photoshop was saving the files as PSDs, so I needed a way to convert those PSD files to JPGs.  Saving each file indivually would take forever, which again wasn’t what I was looking for.  I did a little googling at that point and figured out you could create things called actions in photoshop.  Wow, those are time savers.  So basically I recorded an action of me saving one file as a JPG with the setting I wanted.  I then used photoshops batch function to apply my Save to JPG action on all the files I had open. 

After all that and learning about actions I created a few more actions that when clicked would scan in the next set of photos, crop them, and close out the file I cropped the individual files from since I didn’t need them anymore.  Pretty slick and way useful when I do projects like this in the future of my own at home.

Unrelated to that Abby’s doing some HDR photos for one of her classes and sent me her first HDR photo (not finished) so I thought I’d post it here for all the world to see.

 I guess I spoke too early yesterday, it seems I wasn’t the only one who noticed IE7 wasn’t available via windows update.  Follow the link.

Link to Neowin.net - IE7 for Windows XP Moves to Optional Updates

I get about as many comments to my blog as neutered cat gets layed, but if you can provide any incite as to whether my question above is true or not let me know.  This morning I was updating a new laptop and several desktops at work and noticed IE7 wasn’t being pushed out with Automatic Updates.  I know that it used to be pushed out because of all the media coverage, and that’s how I installed IE7 on most of the desktops around the office.  I searched around various news sources and googled my heart out but I couldn’t find any information to prove or disprove my question.  The IE blog had this to say back in November:

Don’t be surprised if you see AU distribute new updates for Windows in November, but don’t see IE7. The rate of delivery and when IE7 reaches you will be based on several factors including the release of other higher priority updates and support call volume. You may have IE7 delivered by AU at any time over the next few months. Of course you can go to the Windows Update website and get it whenever you wish.

The only thing I can conclude from this statement is that the lack of IE7 in Windows Update today could be from the high number of windows updates this month (13 at least on the desktop) and they chose to remove IE7 so their servers don’t get hammered.  In reality this is no big deal since I can just go and download it anyway, but this seems like a significant change in policy. 

Last night I downloaded the new (relatively) Ani Difranco cd for Abby, but it was only available in FLAC, a lossless audio format.  Usually I prefer downloading in this format, so I can have more control of what I do with the audio at a later time, be it burning it to a cd, making MP3s, ect.  It’s obviously better to start with something like FLAC to burn Audio CDs, instead of what most people do, downloading MP3s and burning Audio CDs from those, but that’s another blog post.  My burning software of choice is Nero.  By default though Nero doesn’t burn FLAC files directly to cd, and converting FLAC to WAV is just one extra step I’d rather not do.  In the past I would download the Nero plugin’s to burn FLAC and then install them manually.  Today I found a nice little program, Nero Plugin Pack, that will install the FLAC plugin, and many more, exactly where they need to go, nice.  So whether you work with MP3s, AAC, FLAC, OGG, SHN, ect, you should be able to burn things directly in Nero, no questions asked.  Now this is good for quick burning, but for simply the very best/accurate burning software around, you should probably check out EAC.  

On a side note I last posted about my troubles deleting audio off my Razr and the fix I had for that.  Well it turns out you can delete audio files off your Verizon Razr, they just put the option in the most retarded (for my lack of a better term) place.  Instead of putting it in the sound settings, some genius put it in the download music section….WTF?  Since then though I’ve been able to connect directly into my Razr and even uploaded a couple of new ring tones.  In fact there’s a pretty good tutorial on how to do this over at Lifehacker.  The easiest way I’ve found to make them actually comes from the comment’s of that same tutorial. I’ll post it here so I can find it easily at a later time.

From poster Debijit:

Here’s an easier way to make a ringtone:

(iTunes does a good job — which all Macs (and most Windows machines) have — so you already have all the software you need)
Pick a music file, and here’s what we need to do in a summary:

(1) Find out which part of the song you want — typically the first 20-30 seconds or so

(2) Downsample it. (Gina, I think you could mention this)

This converts your song into a lower bit-rate.

Why? Well, typically, mobile phone speakers are a little tinny, so a 128-kbps sound sample of an MP3 and a 96-kbps sound sample will sound almost the same on your phone. Also, you’ll end up with far smaller files on your mobile, saving a lot of memory.

Here’s what we do:

(1) Play the song in iTunes, and note the start and end times for the part you want for your ringtone.

(2) Right click on the song and select Get Info. In the Options page, enter the Start Time and Stop Time accordingly. Click OK.

(3) Open iTunes Preferences (Command + , on a Mac, Edit -> Preferences on Windows I think). In Advanced -> Importing, change “Import Using” to the encoder you want (MP3 encoder or AAC encoder, or if you’re phone can’t play these formats WAV is fine but will result in significantly large files. I use AAC, my Nokia supports it). Now, change the bit-rate in Setting to whatever you want — I use 96kbps — the higher the bitrate, the better your ringtone will sound and the more memory it will take (I’ve heard friends’ ringtone’s that were 48kbps MP3 and sounded fine). Click OK.

(4) Right click on your song in iTunes, and click “Convert Selection to XYZ” where XYZ will be whatever encoder you selected in step (3). Your ringtone will now appear on the iTunes library.

(5) (Generally your song will have the same name as the original song — to know which is which, right click on columns and select “Bit Rate”. Now we know that the downsampled song is the one we need)

(6) Drag the audio clip we just made from iTunes onto the Desktop or any folder you want.

(7) Now from the Desktop or folder, send your ringtone to your mobile.

(If you use Bluetooth and a Mac, the easiest way to do this is to select the file in Finder, and hit Command+Shift+B to send to a Bluetooth device)

(8) Now, on your mobile, you’ll simply need to set your new clip as your ringtone.

Simple

In other news, the Super Bowl is coming up.  I heard on NPR this morning Go Daddy’s stirring things up……AGAIN, with a racy commercial.  They do this every year though, probably on purpose for all the free publicity they get for it.  You can view the two rejected videos here and here.  Read more about it at Bobparsons.com.  I’m heading out to Grand Rapids for the weekend, and obviously for the game as well. 

Next week should be fun as I start Physical Therapy for my shoulder surgery I had a month ago.  Then next Thursday after work I’m heading up north with my brothers and friends for the Tip-Up Classic.  Should be lots of drinking, and some ice fishing thrown in for good measure.  Should be a good time.  Ok, this is getting to be too long of a post so I’ll end it now.  So long.

Sometime back in the summer I dropped my Nextel and got Verizon.  They had decent plans and I could get a Razr which at the time is what I wanted.  So fast forward 6 months or so and I’m pretty happy with my choice, I never go over my minutes, have plenty of texts and all calls between me and Abby are free as in beer.  In the past I had heard of the Verizon version of the Razr, in particular the Razr V3m was quite limited compared to other versions of the same phone, ones that work with Cingular or T-Mobile.  Before I never really cared enough about the features my phone was lacking because it does did all the things I wanted it to do. 

Today I saw on digg someone had taken the ring tone from the upcoming iPhone played during Steve Job’s Mac World keynote address and made it into an mp3 for all the world to download.  I downloaded the file in hopes of adding it to my phone.  I needed a way to get the ringtone on to my computer.  A while ago I figured out that I could send music and or pics to my phone by emailing them to it.  To get your phones email address, all you have to do is send a text to your email address.  Now if you’re sending a ringtone or pic, on Verizon you have to send it to a different address than if you were sending just plane text.  Ok, so I hadn’t yet emailed myself a ringtone, so I gave it a shot. A minute later my phone had downloaded the text and I had the ringtone on my phone.  From there all I had to do was save the sound file to my phone and change my ringtone.  Everything was working beautifully.

Once I did all this I noticed that I had all these sound files on my Razr that either were old and useless, memos I had recorded, or files from concerts.  I decided I wanted to delete them from my phone.  Should have been a pretty painless operation right?  Wrong!!!  I couldn’t find the option anywhere.  I downloaded the manual, still no sign of how to get them off.  I searched around on Google for a little while and nothing, then I found a post in some forum, didn’t save that link, but I had concluded Verizon had crippled the phone so this wasn’t possible.  Huh?  So if I record a lot of audio I would use up all my storage space on my phone and have no way of deleting it?  That’s just wrong if you ask me.  I went in search of a way to get around this.

That led me to a site called Hack The Razr, a site set up to specifically get around all the shit Verizon had done to my phone.  After a few hours on that site, a couple guides later and some trial and error and I have successfully hacked my phone, though so far all I have done is enabled the ability to have a vibe than ring, ringtone.  I have also been able to now sync my phonebook to Outlook, though I don’t use that trash, and I have also backed up my phonebook to a separate file as well as moved all my pics off my phone, without having to email them to myself like I use to do.  That just completed so now I’m going to see about removing audio files. 

1 hour later

Looks like I can remove audio files, but I don’t think I can play them, I’ll have to figure that part out later.