Software

I was only able (or rather, willing) to do the cool, long screen captures on my previous post because of Easy Screen Capture And Annotation—a nice and full-featured software that allows you to capture the entire content of a scrollable window, among many other things.

It’s shareware ($30), but you can use it for free without any limitation other than a welcome-nag and a red-watermark when saving your image (which can of course be easily bypassed by copy-pasting your capture to another graphic-editing program). Very useful if you ever need to do serious scren-capturing.

Except for its nasty tendency to crash unexpectedly (great strides have been made, but it still does it once in a while), Azureus is pretty much the BitTorrent Client. My favorite thing about it (and this seems to be a pattern of open source projects) is its extensibility. There’s everything from a Flag plugin (to get a kick out of how international piracy is!) to a Web (HTML+JS+CSS) UI to the program.

But my favorite plugin is far and away 3D View—a dense, beautiful 3d representation of the torrent process (really, just the standard swarm graph writ 3d). Like the 12/60 clock, it comes with no instructions but it doesn’t need them. If you’ve read anything about how torrents work (and you should!), everything will fall into place after some staring. Its pure infosight—real-time infoporn of the best kind¹.

¹ Which reminds me: I heard somewhere today that “there is no such thing as bad porn, there’s only better porn.”

I stumbled upon the .CBR extension some days ago and it was interesting to read its description, via filext:

Think about it, to create the ultimate comic-book format you simply wrap together some images (GIFs, JPGs, PNGs) and some (optional) introductory text (a .NFO or a .TXT) in a .RAR file and rename it. That’s it. A batch of pictures has been converted into a black-box, into a comic book. We’ve reified a comic out of thin pixels. That’s all CDisplay needs to let you seamlessly experience those images as a comic, but you could get as baroque in your specification of a file format as you like. For, say, a hypothetical .BIO file-extension used to store people’s biographies, you would specify a .RAR wrap of that person photo (that must be named, say, “mypic”, and must be a JPG), one photo as a kid (named “kidpic”), one photo of each parent (“mompic and “dadpic”), a curriculum vitae (“vitae”, must be a .TXT file),... you get the picture. Half of the magic, of course, resides in the reading-program, but that’s the easy part.

Here are two extra, contradictory advantages of creating file-formats thru .RAR wrapping:

What struck me about this file-extension thing was how such a seemingly low-level nitty-gritty construct as a file-extension can be blackboxed mostly thru the high-level path of drag-and-dropping icons to WinRar.

1. Given a sufficiently complete Beatles discography, every song will include at least one song from the Beatles among its best-acoustic-match recommendations.

(Read more on the wonderful Predixis Mixer.)

Oh, the beauty!

I’m on the verge of screaming. The thing I’m going to tell you about is that good.

Even though I’ve got 9,165 songs in my library—my collection exploded some months ago when I started donwloading entire discographies (which is a brave new way of listening to music)—I find myself falling into the same old ruts, much to my chagrin, with only the occasional shuffle surprise showing me something unexpectedly good.

Enter Predixis MusicMagic Mixer, a new function of the just launched Winamp 5.21. There are detailed instructions of how to use it here, but it’s all incredibly simple. Basically, after letting MusicMagic acoustically analyze all your library, you can now select any song and ask MusicMagic to generate a list of best-acoustic-match recommendations. It’ll surprise you. This thing is so sufficiently advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic (there’s a beautiful relevant eemadge on the statistical process behind this). I can’t stop using it, I’m looking at my music library as I’d never been able to and, my god, it’s full of wonderful songs!