Art for my music

After I got the NAS up and running, I've been copying my CDs to it. Now, I use iTunes to play my music, but intend to buy a Sonos player not too far into the future. And as both iTunes and the Sonos makes nice use of CD covers (or album artwork) I also want to store the covers for my music. (Btw: funny how we like to "see" the music and hang on to old-school CD covers when music has been freed from the physical medium.)

But, as I don't intend to scan all my CD covers, and cannot add album artwork through iTunes because I don't have an iTunes Music Store account, I had to look elsewhere. Another argument against that built-in feature is that iTunes 7 no longer embed album covers into the song files, but keep them in a separate database. Nice if you intend to stick with iTunes--not so nice if you play music with a Sonos player.

So I've been searching for applications that can add album artwork to my music files. After reading web page after web page, these programs made it to the final and was tested in real life: iTunes Art Importer, Mambo, mp3Tag, and TunesSleeve.

And the winner is... (drums rolling...): TunesSleeve! Because: The program is easy to work with and efficient. It embeds album covers into the music files, and let you actually see the various covers it finds before downloading. But the best feature is that you can initiate a Google search for additional covers, and drag the one you prefer onto the album in TunesSleeve! The one single thing I don't like is that you can only select music through playlists--it would be nice to select music by artist(s) or album(s) too... So now that I've made my contribution to the author of TunesSleeve, it is time to present my wishes for future versions...

Is your brain male or female?

Find out with a simple test at BBC's website.

Apart from being a little less than average male, my results indicate that I should be a heavily published rocket scientist caring for my colleagues well-being. But I'm not. Yet. ;-)

The NAS was buggy, but works now

As most gadgets I put my hands on, the NAS I bought before Christmas was too good to be true. First, my computer spent three nights and two days to copy my pictures and music to it over my wireless network (I must optimize that WLAN). Second, believing that everything was all right, I deleted all the music and most of the pictures from my laptop.

But things were far from right--it turned out that a huge number of pictures from 2005 was missing! Luckily, I had decided to keep this and last year's pictures on my laptop and had a backup of all the missing pictures. So I tried copying them once more (using wired LAN this time...), but again pictures didn't get copied.

I turned to Google and found that others had similar problems and that the solution was to update the firmware and reformat the disks. So I had the firmware updated and tried to reformat the disks. But formatting stopped, and I had to visit Ole Kristian (my sister's fiancée) to put the disks into a desktop PC and delete the partitions as described. After that, formatting was a dream, and the NAS is now up and running again. I haven't checked for lost pictures yet, but will do once they are (supposed to be) all copied.

During the process I learned that updating the firmware of the D-Link DNS-323 involves reformatting the disks every time! I hope I won't have to do that often...

Continental bells in Oslo City Hall

To make my ginger snap model of Oslo City Hall as true as possible, I'm studying it's dimensions in a book. Among the more exotic facts I have come across, is that all but the six largest (original) bells in the carillon on the eastern tower was made in Colmar, France. In addition, the machines making the bells chime, the clockwork and the striking mechanism was all made by Ungerer & Cie in Strasbourg!

For those who don't know: I lived in Strasbourg last year. Cool!

All set for Christmas

My Christmas tree

After spending afternoons making marzipan, cutting it, dipping it in various chocolates, leaving the pieces to rest for the chocolate to congeal, and finally wrapping them all up, I am now done with this year's Christmas presents (including other things than chocolized marzipan). In the midst of it all, I found time to buy and put up a Christmas tree as well, which probably made the whole job a little easier bringing some Christmas mood into the apartment. Tomorrow I'll finish by building a scaled down model of Oslo City Hall in "pepperkakedeig" (a dough similar to ginger snap).

Skiing again!

White mountains in Hemsedal

In extreme contrast to last year's cold, snowy and accordingly bright autumn, this autumn has been extremely warm, wet and dark in Oslo--and most other parts of Norway. Thus, as the local newspapers reported plenty of snow in the mountains and a corporate cottage had several rooms available, I turned my back on the dark city and Christmas preparations in favor of a weekend in Hemsedal ski resort.

And what a weekend! The valley of Hemsedal was totally dominated by its surrounding white mountains, and conditions in the slopes were magnificent! In an attempt to teach Hege how to twist and turn, I spent Saturday on rented slalom skis while I had my snowboard serviced. On Sunday, however, I was all over the mountains on my snowboard!

Another cool NAS disk

Some time ago, I wrote about the Thecus N2100 network disk (cabinet) with RAID support and cool design. After that, I withdrew from the idea of buying an expensive RAID-based storage solution for storing my pictures and music--instead, I've been thinking about buying a single-disk network storage device. Simply because it is cheaper.

Now, D-Link has introduced the DNS-323; a two-disk network storage device (cabinet) with RAID support, just as the Thecus N2100. Almost simultaneously, Thecus has released new firmware for the N2100 increasing its performance. However, the D-Link disk not only looks better, but it appears to be even easier to install with no need for tools when mounting the disk(s). The D-Link also has UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) AV support, making it suitable for media streaming--which means that players supporting UPnP can connect without hassle, at least in theory. Alongside a lot of other useful features, of course. To top things off, it is cheaper than the Thecus N2100--almost as cheap as the Synology 106 single-disk NAS--and comes from a more well-known manufacturer than Thecus.

It seems I might end up with a NAS capable of running two disks after all...

Update, Sunday December 17:
The D-Link DNS-323 NAS and two 500GB Samsung Spinpoint disks have been ordered. As Christmas won't be white, I won't spend time skiing anyway...

Superb statements!

It is not in my nature to declare someone an ideal, but Norwegian politician and former prime minister Kåre Willoch has a tendency to utter the most brilliant statements. In today's article in Aftenposten about economical incentives to fight global warming, he forth two gems of wisdom:

First he cites Reiulf Steen (another Norwegian ex-politician) who once said that "a leader should be in front of his supporters, but not loose them out of sight".

The second is Kåre's own, and a response to the journalist pointing out that last winter sported plenty of snow (as opposed to the rainy winter we're experiencing in Norway these days): "I will warn against basing global environmental politics on local conditions in Oslo and Akershus" (Oslo and Akershus is the two most densely populated counties in Norway, located in the south-east).

I would like to see our current politicians bringing these words of wisdom to life.

New language magazine

Spending another Sunday dining with Ragna, I ended up buying the first edition of a new Norwegian magazine named Ordforord (Eng: Wordbyword). Judging by first looks and the editorial comment, it discusses literature in diverse contexts (political, philosophical and other) and language development or deterioration--the last being a completely separate, and very interesting, topic in my opinion.

Funnily, last time Ragna and I walked into a magazine-/bookstore I walked out carrying the small book Hva er språk? (Eng: What is language?) in my hands. It seems Ragna makes me attentive to non-material values, ironically enough resulting in the materialistic act of buying...