This website www.MusicBrainz.org has a great piece of software called “Tagger” and a not so great, but supposedly getting great program called “Picard.”

I am still trying to figure out Picard, to see if it can download album covers for me, but I am not having much luck as of yet.

But Tagger is awesome.  You basically point it to your MP3 collection, and it will attempt to match up your MP3s with their database based on a “music fingerprint” and then it will automatically set all the tag info as well as rename the file.

So this means if you have an MP3 of Pink Floyd’s Breath from Dark Side of the Moon but the MP3 has no ID3 info and is named PinkF.-Breath.mp3, it will most likely look at the audio and match up the mp3 with their database and put it into Pink FloydDark Side Of The Moon1 – Breath.mp3 or however you tell it to rename files.

Pretty sweet!

I just need to find a similar program to get album covers too.

The HTTP spec specifies that you can not have more than 2 transfers when using HTTP 1.1, or more than 4 transfers in HTTP 1.0.

So what this means is that you can’t download a bunch of files from the same server at the same time.

More info on this problem can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/183110.

You can configure WinInet to exceed this limit by creating and setting the following registry entries:

Note By changing these settings, you cause WinInet to go against the HTTP protocol specification recommendation. You should only do this if absolutely necessary and then you should avoid doing standard Web browsing while these settings are in effect:

These settings are made for a particular user and will have no affect on other users who log on to the computer.

In Internet Explorer 5, it is possible to change the connection limit programmatically by calling the InternetSetOption function on NULL handle with the following flags (note that it will change connection limit for the whole process):

Note If the process has established a connection to a server, if you change the connection limit by calling InternetSetOption, the function does not have any effect to subsequent connections on the same server. This occurs even if a previous connection is disconnected prior to the call to InternetSetOption. Connection limit does affect all other servers.

Keywords: IE Downloads, Concurrent Downloads, 2 downloads

Ever wish you knew how to get around those stupid automated messages and talk to a human?

Enter www.GetHuman.com

This website keeps a list of companies, and the shortcuts to get to a human (e.g. “don’t press or say anything”, “press ‘#’ 3 times”, or “press 1, 0, 0”)

Ichiro Suzuki has a cannon for an arm.

I wish this guy was on the Sox!

I am getting a little sick of this.

Starting with a few days ago I started getting a lot of these errors.  Mostly in IE, but also in VS.Net.

Looking at the details of the error I see it is coming from mytilus.dll, which is a DLL used by VirusScan 8.  I have patch 11, which I guess is up to date.  I will be keeping an eye on it.

Almost all of my friends have IPods, but I have held off. 

There are a number of reasons why:

1) ITunes:  It sucks.  I hate it.  My current MP3 player simply allows you to drag and drop the files you want onto your MP3 player.  No syncing, no problems.

2) User interface.  I know a lot of people think the wheel is really cool, but I think it overly involves the user.  Tell me what is wrong with up/down buttons before you redesign the interface to use a wheel.

3) Batteries.  As noted at http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/.  The battery in an IPod can not be removed, and some say they start to fail after 18 months.

Well I came across a site called http://www.idont.com/, which went live today (before today it had some anti-ipod message up there). 

Turns out it is a site for the new SanDisk MP3 player.

The e200 (really catchy name… not) looks pretty cool, and might be worth me looking into more: http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2006/03/sandisk-sansa-e200-series-review.php

This weekend I went to see a band called Secret Machines, or The Secret Machines.  They seem to split the naming thing about 50/50 between using the “The” and not using it.

Anyway, they were playing a show at midnight at the Metro, which was kinda cool.  There was no opening band, so we got in around midnight and they came on around 12:20 or so.  I hate waiting hours for a band to come on stage, so that was as big plus.

It was crowded in there, but not too croweded.  When I saw 311 in the same place it was insane.  They couldn’t have packed more people in there if they wanted to.

Secret Machines played most of the songs I know: they only have 3 CDs.  And, they did this cool thing at the end of the show they setup their guitar in some kind of loop and left it on stage with the strobe lights and fog machines going full blast as they exited the stage.  The loop continued for another 20 seconds or so before snapping off and the lights for the venue came on.  Pretty cool!

I don’t often need regular expressions, but when I do need them it is nice to have a page that gives you a quick index and even a place to test it out.

That is exactly what this page has:

http://www.quanetic.com/regex.php

keyword: regexp

I never ever ever want to click on the “Help and Support” button in the WinXP start menu, but I frequently do when trying to click on something else (usually “Run…”).

I found this info on http://www.winxptutor.com/hidehlp.htm

To remove the Help and Support link from XP Start Menu, try this:

• Right-click Taskbar, choose Properties
• In the Start Menu tab, click Customize
• Select the Advanced tab
• Uncheck Help and Support option.
• Click OK, OK and close the dialog

For Windows Classic Start menu, you may need to modify the registry directly:

• Click Start, Run and type Regedit.exe
• Navigate to the following location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER Software Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion Explorer Advanced

• In the right-pane, create a new REG_DWORD value named NoStartMenuHelp
• Double-click NoStartMenuHelp and set it’s value to 1
• Close Regedit.

This is really funny!  I used to joke that I was going to write a book about this stuff, but this page about sums it up.

GirlSpeak to English Translator

Example:

She says                               English
———                              ——-
We need                                I want
Do what you want                   You’ll pay for this later
We need to talk                      I need to complain