I’ve been using the social bookmarking and news site digg.com for awhile, but thus far haven’t had much luck making submissions. Recently I posted a couple of my Apple related posts, but they never made it out of the upcoming stories pile (probably just as well, not sure if the WordPress setup I’ve got here could stand the load).

Anyways, I apparently lucked out the other day when I got not one but two stories on the front page! First was Complete Free iTunes Downloads List, which made the leap to the front page practically while I was watching (it was sitting at like 27 diggs in the upcoming after 14 hours, then next time I checked a few minutes later it was at 45 diggs and on the front page). Its now at 2119 diggs and was the second most popular story for the day.

The second post, iTunes 7.0.1 Released for downloads and in software update, was a “target of opportunity” as I noticed the update pop-up in Software Update while watching my other post. Decided to try just for the heck of it. It got dugg up fast, I think it was promoted to the home page in under an hour! Guess not so surprising considering how many people apparently had problems with version 7.0.

Anyways, just thought it kinda cool to have two stories on the front page at the same time. They’ve both passed off the home page, but are ranked reasonably well on the “top stories of the week” page at the moment.

One of the new features of iTunes 7 is that it will download missing album artwork for your music. However, it apparently keeps these images separate from the actual music files and doesn’t add them to the ID3 tags of the music files. As a result, you see the art on your computer but not your iPod (or someone else’s computer).

So I’ve written a quick-and-dirty application to extract these images from where they’re stored in the iTunes directory. The application is written in AppleScript and uses a couple of the UNIX command line utilities to do its work, so you need a Mac with OSX and the BSD Subsystem installed (which is usually installed by default). Sorry, no PC version as a result — but read below if you want to write a similar program for the PC, its really a CS 101 project.

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Yesterday Apple released their latest version of iTunes, including the much anticipated movie store. Even though I’m an Apple user, I haven’t been sure that this is the solution for me (namely because the files currently can only be played on a computer or an iPod video player — no burning to DVD and playing on my PS2, etc). But I was never-the-less curious of the quality of the video and how well the system worked.

So, I decided to purchase one of the less expensive titles that I had a DVD copy of on hand for comparison — The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie. So here are a few screen shots to compare the iTunes version and the DVD version. The screen shots were captured at their respective native resolutions using OSX’s built-in screen capture utility. The iTunes version was, of course, grabbed while playing it in iTunes. The DVD was captured while playing it back in VLC. In the DVD captures, I trimmed the letterbox region. Sorry if they aren’t exactly the same frames in each case, its kinda difficult getting frame perfect in the iTunes player. Take these more as representative samples.

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After a week of “training” my brain with Brain Age for the Nintendo DS, I’ve finally gotten the score to match my real age (I started out at something like 71 ^_^;; ). That’s despite how amazingly slow I am at simple math, though that’s not helped by it having problems recognizing my writing on occasion. Also there’s something about how I say the word “blue” that gives it trouble during the Stroop Test (where you say the color of the word, not the word itself — which is the name of a color). My reading test results have been completely flat, at around 3.4 syllables/second. The passages they use are mostly older texts that have a different flow to them that makes them harder for me to read aloud. Aside from the tests, I’m starting to get into the sudoku that are included — so I can fit right in with the older guys doing their math puzzles on the train here…

I used my remaining Seishun 18 Kippu to take a daytrip to Yamaguchi. Saw this pagoda, some parks, St. Francis Xavier’s church and an old steam train in use. Also went to Yuda Onsen.