I've used the Escape Pod AA theme on my Rockbox-running ipod (which came back from the dead after lying around as a hunk of inert scrap metal for a couple days) for a while now. I've also been using builds with Album Art support for a while too. But the thought of actually going through the trouble of getting album art into the right places kept me away from actually using that feature.

Today I decided to bite the bullet and use Amarok to do the heavy lifting. I modified the RockBox WPS cover creator script to use album names…

As I've mentioned in a previous entry, I got a 5.5g ipod last winter from my dad, who in turn got it free from his former company. Just from the version, you know Apple's gone through a ton of hardware revisions in a very short amount of time. And yet they still can't make one that doesn't suck. I've had it for about 9 months and the problems include:

- incorrectly complaining about low battery when powering on
- buttons not registering immediately after toggling off the hold switch
- consistently inconsistently requiring menu+select to power on

and yesterday

-…

I was listening to Give me convenience or give me death while websurfing and ended up at this Onion AV Club article about banter. Of course, the track I was on, Jello Biafra's improv story Night of the Living Rednecks, just happened to be mentioned prominently in the comments!

The article's top pick audio sample was a total waste of time.

So I didn't want to go, but I ended up at Fri 27 Jul – Capitol Hill Block Party 2007 because Jen bought a ticket for me. I skipped last year because I didn't feel like hearing any of the bands, but I did go in 2005 when there were some interesting artists like The Gossip, Crystal Skulls, and The Stereo Future.

Block Party headliners have never interested me, and this year was no different as Silversun Pickups were so bland that I had no difficulty completely ignoring them, staring off into the distance and noticing for…

I think these are pretty top-notch so I listen to them:
The Arcade Fire
ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION
The Beatles
The Cardigans
Catch 22
Death Cab for Cutie
The Doors
GO!GO!7188
The Flaming Lips
Foo Fighters
The Killers
L'Arc~en~Ciel
Mogwai
No Doubt
noodles
NOFX
Reel Big Fish
The Rolling Stones
Save Ferris
Shena Ringo
Tokyo Jihen
Yoko Kanno

I'm generally fine hearing stuff from the following:
advantage Lucy
ART-SCHOOL
THE BACK HORN
BEAT CRUSADERS
David Bowie
Everclear
Franz Ferdinand
Joy Division
Kaela Kimura
Matchbox Twenty
ORANGE RANGE
Ramones
Sex Pistols

Don't have an opinion on:
Anti-Flag, Big D and the Kids…

Jen and I went out for brunch to this one neighborhood place for the first time yesterday. It had rave reviews all around, with the caveat that the wait times were guaranteed to be extremely long. Luckily, it's right next to a Half Price Books, so we scavenged around and found some clearance CDs for $1 each. Had they not been a dollar, I doubt I would have bothered to get:

* Electric Honey
* Return of Saturn (actually I would have spent more for this, but I've had all the songs for years *ahem*)
* Short Bus
* This…

Went to the Annuals/Pilot speed show at Neumo's the other night. Pilot Speed impressed me so much as one of the openers that, after buying their U.S. release Into the West, I proceeded to figure out how to add them to MusicBrainz.

They have a solid sound remniscent of U2/Muse/The Bends-era Radiohead. Gauging the reactions from the audience when Annuals said let's hear it for Pilot Speed, they made a good impression.

I've written about the pain of id3 tagging in regards to ReplayGain. I just spent the afternoon semi-automatically hunting down mp3s that haven't been properly replaygained. One problem I ran into is that EyeD3 craps the bed whenever it gets improperly encoded characters (this happens when people using Microsoft add non-ascii letters in MS's infuriatingly non-standard and conflicting charset). I found that both id3v2 and mid3v2 handle it fine, so I merrily hack away and rewrite my replaygain APE->ID3 script to use them. Both because mid3v2 can't write TXXX tags properly but displays them fine, id3v2 because I thought it…

The funny thing about having an awards show that is centered on the past year's pop music is that after a year, said pop music is so obviously, painfully, and unsurprisingly stale.

Also, if the "Academy" could have repeat winners for new artists, you know they would. They hate giving first-time awards almost as much as the Baseball Hall of Fame Veterans Committee hates voting in new members.

RHCP are the top band of last week on lastfm, displacing The Beatles. I feel guilty for contributing to the RHCP listens, which happened because I ripped One Hot Minute. I cannot stand anything by them since Love Rollercoaster. They were tolerable back when they only had one song about Los Angeles, back when they knew how to write about something besides California. F- 'em.