Categories
technology

iTunes did a weird thing

I added a bunch of new music to iTunes lately (not bought from the store) and a bunch of songs started doing this weird thing where somewhere between 90 and 30 seconds from the end, the song would just skip to the next. Which was super aggravating. I tried deleting the songs and reimporting, which was the common fix I found online, no deal. Skipping problem persisted.

What I finally got to work was going in to the iTunes folder and deleting the iTunes Library.itl file. Open iTunes back up and it thinks there’s no music at all; then you just have to reimport the iTunes Music Library.xml file using the “Add to Library.” I backed up the xml file right before I did this just in case, but using the one already in the folder brought back all my music and playlists just fine. (Also preserved all the play counts, etc.) It just took a while to reimport everything. But now all the songs are playing their full length.

Just figured I’d mention this here in case any of you ever run into this problem. It took a stupid amount of time reading through forum threads before I found the one person who mentioned this fix. So now it’s in two locations!

Categories
technology

Facebook? Bah, humbug.

I actually have a Facebook account. I just only log in to it when I’m extremely bored, because I’ve never had much use for it. And to be honest, while I do like everyone who I’ve friended, I also really don’t care what they’ve been doing in Farmville or Mafia Wars. At this point, I am seriously considering just deleting the account.

Aside from my general apathetic feelings toward Facebook, there’s also the privacy issues, as well as security and possibly even ethics problems. While I don’t feel as if much of this affects me personally (I don’t use any Facebook applications and about the only pictures I have are ones of my cats) it certainly doesn’t paint FB as an attractive place that I want to spend a lot of my internet time. Plus people I don’t even remember from high school keep friending me, and it’s starting to get a little creepy.

Considering how little I actually use the thing, I doubt this would be much of a blip on the radar. Maybe I’m just more of a Twitter girl.

Questions of privacy and fairness and seem to abound these days. I’m looking forward to when I can get an iPhone finally, but at the same time feel more than a little trepidation about, say, Apple being the gatekeeper for the iStore and all the concerns with the DRM as well. I’m not a sophisticated user of technology here; when I get a new toy, I’m basically stuck with what it can do when it comes out of the box because I lack the dedication and brainpower necessary forge my own path through the digital jungles. So it makes me rather nervous to know that by buying a product, I’m ceding a lot of control regarding what I can do with that product to the manufacturer. I recently got to see an iPad; it was sleek and shiny and I immediately wanted one.

It’s just that whiff of “Borg” that has me worried.

Categories
awesome technology volcano

Spiderbots!

From the Department of That Is Some Awesome Technology You’ve Got There: Scientists invent ’spiderbots’ that talk amongst themselves inside active volcano.

I think this is some pretty exciting stuff, and I’m glad to see that NASA is working on it. Basically, they’re developing robots to form a self-healing network for sensing seismic data. The fact that they’re developing these little bots to use in volcanoes means that we’re going to get some incredibly hardy technology out of it. This latest permutation of the bots communicates with satellites.

It sounds like a very good set-up for eventually going extraterrestrial with them. Just imagine being able to put a bunch of these little guys down on Venus, or one of the very seismically active moons of Jupiter. Since the little guys are autonomous for setting up and routing the data they collect, they’ll be able to respond very quickly if one of the other robots gets damaged or disabled, so there would be very little interruption to gathering data. Which would be important, since the sort of event most likely to damage a little robot like these ones would be the very sort of events they’re supposed to monitor – earthquakes and eruptions.

Of course, beyond the geeky squealing I’m having over exploring other planets in our solar system, just having this sort of monitoring in place in our own volcanoes will do a lot to advance geological science. We still can’t really predict volcanic eruptions with real accuracy. Right now the best you can do is look at things like the amount of toxic gas a volcano is putting out and monitoring earthquake swarms that indicate magma is moving. Which gives you an answer of “soon,” but in geology, “soon” is a very fuzzy concept that’s not fine-tuned for short human timescales. So my hope is that maybe with much more precise, detailed, and constant monitoring of this sort, we could eventually come to a better understanding of the internal workings of volcanoes, and thus the warning signs when an eruption is imminent in the human meaning of the word.

Also, I admit that I just love it whenever I read about self-healing networks. I actually started out my working life as a technician for AT&T, at a time when self-healing fiber optic and sonet rings were getting their real start in the network. I still think that sort of technology is incredibly cool.