Cross-section of a Nikon D3 D-SLR

January 24th, 2009 •
Tags: camera, cross-section, digital slr, dslr, Nikon, photography

This isn’t one of those wimpy illustrated gadget cross-sections. This is the actual camera chopped in half and photographed by Tokyobling. It really is a thing of beauty. The shots are pretty amazing too. This is sure to tickle the photography geek’s fancy.

Nikon D3 Cut In Half

Jets’n'Guns Gold promo pricing

January 23rd, 2009 •
Tags: Apple, deals, games, mac, Software

Today’s MacUpdate Promo deal is the critically acclaimed shooter Jets’n'Guns Gold. The game is normally $30, but today it can be yours for $10! Mac gamers and shooter fans rejoice. If you happen to be both a Mac user and a shooter fan, you are probably already in some kind of shock coma due to rapture.

Eversave insures you won’t lose your work

January 22nd, 2009 •
Tags: Apple, eversave, mac, Software, utility

Eversave is not a mega-church as you may have guessed. Cult of Mac has caught wind of a cool Mac application which will periodically save open documents automatically. It sounds like a pretty cool idea. I have heard a million horror stories about how people lost 20 hours of work because they hit the surge protector’s power button with their foot. It’s really discouraging to have to start over. I personally have been saved numerous times by Gmail’s autosave feature. Thanks to this app, your documents will be saved whether or not your other applications have an auto-save feature.

White Macbook gets serious upgrades

January 21st, 2009 •
Tags: Apple, Macbook

Apple’s best-selling computer ever has gotten a pretty decent upgrade. The plastic $1,000 Macbook now has a 1066MHz frontside bus, twice the RAM (2GB), and Nvidia’s 9400M graphics processor. The most significant item is the graphics card which will really give gamers a big boost. This leaves the $1,300 aluminum 13″ Macbook very few selling points over the little white book that could.

Thanks to Wired for bringing this my attention.

Automatically add lyrics for your iTunes tracks (for Mac)

January 21st, 2009 • 7 comments
Tags: Audio only, howto, itunes, lyrics, mac, music, tutorial

Reposted from me.raddevon.com.

I don’t have a lot of music in iTunes, but a lot of the music I have is not the easiest to automate lyrics downloads. There are a number of one-step automated solutions, but unless your collection is limited to Justin Timberlake, The Beatles, and Madonna, you may have trouble getting lyrics for all your songs. Even this method is imperfect, but it finds the most of anything I have tried.

First, you will need to make a stop by Doug’s AppleScripts. There are two scripts we need for this process: No Lyrics to Playlist and Needle Drop. The former is fairly self-explanatory; it makes a playlist of every track in your library without lyric information. The latter allows you to specify a number of seconds to play of each track in a given playlist. After invoking Needle Drop, it will load up and play each song in your playlist for the time you specify.

There is one more piece of software needed to complete the process: TunesTEXT. This is a dashboard widget that finds lyrics for the currently playing iTunes track and adds them to your library.

Now, we can put the pieces together. Install the dashboard widget by double-clicking on it. The scripts have to be installed manually. Unzip the downloads and drag the scripts into (your home folder)/Library/iTunes/Scripts/. Once everything is installed, start your iTunes. If iTunes is already open, you will have to close and re-open it so that it will pick up the new scripts.

Once iTunes has started, you should see the scripts you just installed in a menu on the menu bar that looks like an unfurled scroll . Switch to the music section of your library. Click the scroll and choose “No Lyrics to Playlist.” This script will take a minute to comb through your tracks to find those that have no lyrics. Now, you may have to clean this list a bit. If you have podcasts, they will also be included in the list. Sort the list by Genre and delete any tracks that you don’t want lyrics for (e.g. books, comedy, classical, podcasts).

Now, you should have a playlist with only the songs you want to search lyrics for. We can use Needle Drop to play just enough of each track so that TunesTEXT has time to find lyrics. I found that, on my connection, five seconds was plenty of time for the lyrics to be found. You may have to experiment to find the perfect balance. Especially if you have lots of music, you want to choose the shortest playtimes that are enough to find lyrics to reduce the time the search will take.

While still in the No Lyrics playlist, click the scroll and select the Needle Drop script. You will see a dialog box where you can enter the playtime for each track. Enter the time you determined was ideal for your setup (or just try five seconds—it worked for me!). Now, the tracks will begin to play, the lyrics will be searched and added by TunesTEXT, and all will be right with the world. Enjoy!