I have gotten behind and have been collecting links for a couple weeks, and it is a rough backlog dump for the NY Times:
This is quite a birthday present:
If I may blow your mind for a second… this is the birthday gift that I received from our friends Curtis and Karen last night. It’s a suitcase - perfectly fitted for a bottle of bourbon and a set of brass knuckles. The outside says, “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. Sack up.” The inside offers, “The two roads to courage.” They built/screenprinted the whole thing. It’s incredible. And my friends are amazing.
Click through for more photos, really nice work!
It is worth clicking through to Amazon’s listing for English Grammar For Dummies just so you can read the top review. Or here, you can jump right to it.
I thought I had this contraption all figured out until the water wheel started spinning. (thx kenny)
So good I donated: Everything is a Remix Part 2 (here is part 1).
I know I’ve linked to this before, but Ben Heine keeps adding to his Pencil vs. Camera series, and the results always catch my eye. For example:
Oh man, I totally gotta try Spaghetti with Fried Eggs. Sounds awesome, and what could be simpler? I found it via The Minimalist Chooses 25 of His Favorites, compiled because Bittman’s weekly column is closing up shop.
My daughters have a lot of music they bought in iTunes, but unfortunately Ella lost her iPod, so she replaced it with a cheap Coby MP3 player. I wanted her to be able to get her iTunes music on there as painlessly as possible, and for her to continue to have access to newly purchased iTunes music going forward without having to go through an explicit conversion step. I was looking for a music manager that would reencode the iTunes music as vanilla MP3s on the fly during the sync process. So it leaves the iTunes files alone, but sticks MP3 versions of those files on the MP3 player during sync.
Tried Songbird, but if it supports this it wasn’t apparent. I had this same problem trying to use it for podcasts a few months back. If it does it, it’s not apparent. I want to like that program, but the things it doesn’t support are exactly the things I want.
Tried MediaMonkey, which I like, but it only supports the autoconvert feature I need on the paid version, which I was on the verge of paying for when I discovered…
MusicBee! Free, and supports autoconvert right out of the box:
Synchronise music files, podcasts and playlists from your library, or music files from any folder to many portable devices. These include iPods, iTouch/ iPhone, MTP devices (most portable devices other than iPods), and USB devices. You can also drag and drop files to the device yourself.
Artwork, tags, ratings and playcounts are all synchronised, with the option to add the track playcounts from the device to your Last.fm library.
Files can be encoded to a format supported by the device on the fly. And you have the option to normalise tracks so they play back at the same volume.
It also looks like it has podcast support baked in, although I haven’t played with that yet. Very happy with it.