There’s a neat thing called “Time Capsule” which Apple started pushing recently… Problem is, if you’ve already got a backup disk, you probably would like to keep your backups in order without starting anew. After all, what if you DID delete something you’d like to get back someday already? As far as I know (and I did a lot of research, but several months ago) there’s no way to port a Time Machine Backup Disk to an Airdisk backup (they use sparseimages or something).

An interesting note is, if you connect an external drive (like this My Book, similar to the one I use) to an AirPort Extreme (I have the 100mbit one, sadly), start the backup, then cancel it and connect the disk to your Mac (like my MacBook), it will start to back up to that sparseimage.

The annoying thing is, I would really like to just convert my time machine backup into one of those sparseimages, so I could turn it into an AirPort Disk and back up wirelessly. I think someone could make a few bucks selling (or asking for donations for) an app that did just that.

I know this may come as a shock to many diggers (as that seems to be where the inaccurate story was popularized), and I know they’ll bury this story because it doesn’t play up to their fanciful notion that Mozilla is a rogue crew of hackers subverting Steve Jobs control on the Mac OS X platform, but Mozilla didn’t reverse engineer shit. If you belive a random unsourced blogger, I’ve got some WMDs in Iraq for you to tell congress about. Let’s go into detail, with sources this time!

Let’s look at Bug 412486, the Mozilla bug for adding support for multi-touch trackpad gestures. In particular, let’s check out comment 3:

Comment #3 From Samuel Sidler (:ss | :sps) 2008-02-05 10:26:52 PST

See also: http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html

Check it out, a post on Cocoadex from February, 2008, shortly after the new macbooks with multi touch were released. Pay attention to the bolded portion especially of this quote:

So, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Macbook Air and it’s revolutionary multi-touch trackpad, borrowed from the iPhone technology. The basic gist of it is that it provides application specific gestures that can be triggered by performing some gestures on the new trackpad. With that in mind, every Cocoa developer should be asking themselves this question: What has Apple done to NSEvent [and friends] to facilitate gestures in their own applications and how can I do it in mine?

With the help of my local Apple Store’s Macbook Air, and some NSEvent knowledge, I’m going to answer exactly that.

Yes, he went to the Apple Store and did his own digging to find out how to code multi touch support shortly after the new Air came out. Unfortunately, Elliot of Cocoadex does not work for Mozilla nor on Firefox. To make super sure that I was getting this correct, I contacted Tom Dyas, the person the bug is assigned to and the author of the patch adding multitouch support. He responded early this morning:

Nobody from Mozilla had to reverse engineer the undocumented API as the information had already been discovered by someone in the Mac OS blogging world. Go to
http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html for the blog article that had the information. This is the same link that is listed in Bug 412486 and in comments in the patch itself.

I know this won’t quell the massive spread of this complete lie, but did you know who Edward Lee was and why TG Daily didn’t link to their source? Because Edward Lee said nothing of the sort about Mozilla REing it! Here’s what he actually said:

From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!

He doesn’t know for sure (he’s right, though), but he definitely didn’t say Mozilla did the reverse engineering.

TG Daily is taking facts, turning them into lies, and then not citing sources to hide this. I’m really not surprised, and what’s even less surprising is how the lie spreads. A good reporter would do a LITTLE bit of research, it took me barely any and I only e-mailed Tom Dyers to make absolutely sure I was getting it right. He didn’t take long to respond at all, only a few hours. I hope this inspires other journalists to do more investigation before posting.

I have an album from the Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It’s a double album, disc 1 is titled Dawn to Dusk, and disc 2 is titled Twilight to Starlight. However, iTunes does not treat subtitles separately from the actual title, and sees these as two separate albums. I checked the ID3 spec, and 2.3.0 does not have an option for subtitles. 2.4.0 does, it’s called TSST and the description is:

The ‘Set subtitle’ frame is intended for the subtitle of the part of
a set this track belongs to.

The “set” they refer to is actually their term for which disc (it can mean other things, but disc number from a multi-disc set is what I’m talking about). It seems there’s a “Grouping” field in iTunes that might be used for this, but after reading What is iTunes grouping column for?, it appears this is incorrect:

grouping (Unicode text) : the grouping (piece) of the track. Generally used to denote movements within a classical work.

Which is not what lifehacker thinks it is, it’s actually TIT3 as described by the earlier versions of the spec:

The ‘Subtitle/Description refinement’ frame is used for information
directly related to the contents title (e.g. “Op. 16″ or “Performed
live at Wembley”).

However, after checking in ID3 Editor from Pa-software, the text put into grouping is actually TIT1, as it’s in the Content field, described by the help documentation as

Content:
The ‘Content group description’ frame is used if the sound belongs to a larger category of sounds/music. For example, classical music is often sorted in different musical sections (e.g. “Piano Concerto”, “Weather – Hurricane”).

Which is the exact description, verbatim, for TIT1. The description in ID3 Editor for subtitle is the same as TIT3.

VLC itself is confused as hell by all this, as it just shows hexadecimal bytecode in the Description field, and I don’t know what it’s trying to show there. In fact, VLC shows very little data.

Interesting tidbit: neither ID3 Editor nor VLC show artwork for the mp3s, but iTunes and the Finder do. My guess is iTunes is storing it oddly.

Also, ID3 v2.4 is 8 years old, with the most recent edit made five years ago in 2003. It’s apparently not widely adopted because there are disagreements with some of the revisions, I don’t know why these disagreements exist nor what they are. I think TSST is a worthy addition, perhaps backported to ID3 v2.3.1 (a not-yet-existing standard).

I’m working on a ID3 page for VideoLAN, if you’re interested in helping.

Tomorrow is Apple’s big announcement where they release the cure for cancer, er, a new display or something. And all the internets are abuzz with rumors. Apple Insider is running this story of rumors about a new MacBook. If you notice, the photos are signed by <3 jr who is a known and proven liar. My proof? Well, first there’s this “leaked 4g iPod Nano” post over at Engadget. The problem is that JR stole the photo from the real source who sent his original un-watermarked photo to Gizmodo. He also sent Engadget another FAKE iPod Nano photo in which the nano isn’t even real, it’s a pure Photoshop production, and a poor one at that. Any photo with JR’s watermark on it is immediately suspect as either stolen or fake.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Update: The phot was real, I was wrong about that. Given JR’s record, I don’t believe he took the photo, so I stand by my statement that he’s an unreliable source. Stealing photos from others doesn’t make you a source.

Has anyone else tried to contact someone by e-mail about their blog or site or something and noticed there’s just nothing there?

I’ve seen it many times (and might be guilty of it here, and if so, that’ll be corrected poste haste, but in general you can put our first names, used under the post, before at (this domain) and it’ll work just fine.

Recently I tried to get in touch with Jonathan Blow, developer of Braid.  I succeeded only after getting the whois information for his newer domain, which had his gMail address in it.  Come on man, you sell products, let your customers contact you.

Today I saw Chris Messina mention Netflix is getting an API, and because my dumb ass bought Netflix Freak (the first result in google is some messed up infinite refresh/redirect page), I wanted to let the developer know so he could continue the project. Welp, they’ve redone their site and gotten one domain per application (can’t blame them), but in doing so, removed the contact information page from their site and the awesome “omg, you found a 404 page, here’s a code for 10% off” treat. So I checked Connoisseur’s contact page, and it’s friggin blank. Based on the text from iPodRip’s help page, it looks like The Little App Factory is no more and the apps have been sold off? That kinda sucks.

I went to the “Developer Blog” link for Connoisseur, went to his about page, and saw that he hadn’t gotten around to putting his e-mail there. I just now noticed at the bottom of the Connoisseur site that it’s owned by Concept Development, where as iPodRip is from Happy Hour Code, LLC.

Welp, goodnight, The Little App Factory. I wonder what happened to you.