Entries from July 2007 ↓

I am seeing many innovations in desktop / interfaces these days. Two weeks ago, I was amazed by Microsoft Surface. And now it’s BumpTop.

From their website:

BumpTop is a fresh and engaging new way to interact with your computer desktop. You can pile and toss documents like on a real desk. Break free from the rigid and mechanical style of standard point-and-click desktops. Interact by pushing, pulling and piling documents with elegant, self revealing gestures. BumpTop’s stunning interface makes clever use of 3D presentation and smooth physics-based animations for an engaging, vivid user experience.

I saw the video of Anand presenting BumpTop at TED Talks, and think this is cool. Wish I could see the preview of the documents on the desktop instead of just icons!

PS: If you have not seen it yet, you should check out Jeff Han’s multitouch screen. iPhone did it one year later, and MS Surface is doing similar!

A poster Edwin Tofslie created, is making rounds on the web these days! I must admit, it’s rather good!

This shows the evolution of Apple products over time. Looking at the poster, I started thinking about what computers I used in those years! I was still on PC AT and XT in 1990. Would get my hand on a BBC if I fought with batch mates in the school computer class. No mouse, very little color. “Floppy” disks to boot!

And in 1997 I got my Compaq Presario 1425. Then a few other ones in between. Then a Compaq laptop, a Powerbook and now a MacBook.

Do you feel like doing a poster like this of the gadgets you have owned?

I had multiple mp3 audio tracks of a lecture. They worked fine in iTunes since I could create a playlist and tracks would play one after another. I moved the tracks to my phone to listen to them on the move, but the phone has some weired sorting method that played the tracks in wrong order. So I needed to combine these tracks in one.

Tried with GarageBand first. Placing one track after another. This got a bit tricky, and somehow did not allow me to add tracks after a particular number of seconds of playback. I don’t know why it happened like that, but importing and adjusting tracks in GarageBand was taking too much time, so I abandoned it.

Did a bit of Googling around to see what else is possible. Found that if I had QuickTime Pro, I could join the tracks into a single file by copy pasting them into a new audio track. I do not have QT Pro so this wouldn’t work.

Found a $10 software called iTunesJoin that could do the trick. Obviously, the task wasn’t worth that money!

And hey, on a forum posting that initially looked useless, I found the gem! You can simply cat mp3 files!

So the following command in Terminal:

cat *.mp3 > newfile.mp3

Will join all your mp3 files in the current directory. It’s a simple file concatenation operation. Multiple mp3 files stringed together work like one big file! Even if they had multiple ID3 tags, it worked for me. I just added a new ID3 tag using iTunes once the file was created.

Later, I also got Join Together on Doug’s Applescript for iTunes library. BTW, this library has tons of useful AppleScripts.

I can happily move the file to my phone now! I just wished Windows XP within Parallels detected my phone!

Anything less than a conscious commitment to peak personal performance, is an unconscious commitment to weak personal performance.- Robin Sharma

Ashok’s travelogue has been published in Outlook Traveller. Ashok writes really well and you can experience being in Sri Lanka in this travelogue. I was with him on the tour and I can tell we had a great time! The Sri Lanka trip was full of surprises and shocks! There are some nice pictures too with the article, some more on my gallery. Check it out!