Manchester United plays Barcelona while Liverpool while play Chelsea. I think we will see a Man Utd/Liverpool final.
ManUtd will beat Barcelona because Bacrelona has injury and some other off the field issues, most notably with Ronaldinho. ManUtd has been playing very well and is sitting on top of the EPL after some comfortable victories. Bacrelona, however, has slipped to 3rd in La Liga and just squeaked out a win against Schalke in the Quarterfinals.
Man Utd 5-1 Barcelona over 2 games.
Liverpool seems to have the edge over Chelsea in the Champions League. The have played several time in the last few years, and liverpool has always found a way. In the EPL, Chelsea done better. I give a slight edge to Liverpool 3-2 over the 2 games.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
New job start Monday
On Monday I start my new job with Franciscan Medical Group as a systems analyst. I am excited, and I can't wait to get going.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Audiobooks and iTunes
I love iTunes for Podcasts and playlist sharing, but I have come to love it for another reason - Audiobooks.
You can acquire books from Audible, the iTunes store, or from Audio CD. I used audible for a while, but my library has a good collection of Audiobooks. My library also uses a service called Overdrive media to provide downloadable Audiobooks, but these are in an encrypted WMA format. There is a way to remove the encryption and then import to iTunes, but I won't be going in to that here. Also, there is BitTorrent. Since this isn't a legitimate way of getting Audiobooks, I won't cover that either.
Prepare iTunes - This only needs to be done once.
Click Edit, Prefernces. Click the Advanced tab, click the Importing tab.
Choose these options:
On CD Insert - Show CD
Import Using - AAC encoder
Setting - High Quality (128 kbps) - You can use a higher quality, but I can't tell the difference
Uncheck the box Play songs while importing or converting.
Click OK.
Step 1 - Insert Audio CD and edit disc information
iTunes will try to get the CD information, but I have noticed that is wrong sometimes for Audiobooks.
If information needs to be updated, Click on a track, then click Edit, Select All. Then right click on a track and click get info. I try to have the Artist, Album, Disc Number, I use Audiobooks for the genre, and uncheck compilation.
Click ok.
Step 2 - Import CD
Click Advanced Joinc CD Tracks. This will have a line go down from from track 1 to the last track. Then click Import CD at the bottom. This will import the CD as 1 track.
This is desirable if the CD would have 20 tracks, and the book was 15 CDS. This makes the tracks more manageable.
Repeat this process for all CDs for the book.
Step 3 - Finish editing book info.
Now that all the discs have been ripped, you can finish editing the info. I update the track information to indicate the number of discs, and the track number to be the disc number. For the track title is use "Book Title - Part XX" where XX is the disc number
For an example, see the screen shot.
You can also add the Album art if you wish. There is a site called thejosher.net or you can use amazon to get the artwork. I won't go into all the steps, but basically you save the art to your desktop, then while you have a get info window open in itunes, you drag the picture to iTunes, then click ok.
Step 4 - Convert to m4b.
The CD will be imported into your Music library in iTunes. It it is better to add them to the Audiobooks library. The best way to do this is:
Make a folder on your desktop - for example book.
Select the track of the book, then drag them to that folder.
Mac - There is a program you can use called Lostify to convert the type to Audiobook.
--Add more?
PC - Open a command prompt. This defaults to your directory, so we need to navigate to the book folder.
Then type the command - ren *.m4a *.m4b and hit enter.
Then type exit, hit enter to close the command prompt.
This renames the files with the extension m4b. iTunes uses this extension or the metadata that Lostify on the Mac to put the tracks into the Audiobooks library.
Step 5 - Import to iTunes again
Delete the track for the books in iTunes, then re-import the new tracks. The books will now be in iTunes correctly.
An advantage to this is if you have an iPod. There is a setting for playing books at a faster speed on iPods. Also, it helps keep iTunes organized. It is lame to start a book, while listening to music.
You can acquire books from Audible, the iTunes store, or from Audio CD. I used audible for a while, but my library has a good collection of Audiobooks. My library also uses a service called Overdrive media to provide downloadable Audiobooks, but these are in an encrypted WMA format. There is a way to remove the encryption and then import to iTunes, but I won't be going in to that here. Also, there is BitTorrent. Since this isn't a legitimate way of getting Audiobooks, I won't cover that either.
Prepare iTunes - This only needs to be done once.
Click Edit, Prefernces. Click the Advanced tab, click the Importing tab.
Choose these options:
On CD Insert - Show CD
Import Using - AAC encoder
Setting - High Quality (128 kbps) - You can use a higher quality, but I can't tell the difference
Uncheck the box Play songs while importing or converting.
Click OK.
Step 1 - Insert Audio CD and edit disc information
iTunes will try to get the CD information, but I have noticed that is wrong sometimes for Audiobooks.
If information needs to be updated, Click on a track, then click Edit, Select All. Then right click on a track and click get info. I try to have the Artist, Album, Disc Number, I use Audiobooks for the genre, and uncheck compilation.
Click ok.
Step 2 - Import CD
Click Advanced Joinc CD Tracks. This will have a line go down from from track 1 to the last track. Then click Import CD at the bottom. This will import the CD as 1 track.
This is desirable if the CD would have 20 tracks, and the book was 15 CDS. This makes the tracks more manageable.
Repeat this process for all CDs for the book.
Step 3 - Finish editing book info.
Now that all the discs have been ripped, you can finish editing the info. I update the track information to indicate the number of discs, and the track number to be the disc number. For the track title is use "Book Title - Part XX" where XX is the disc number
For an example, see the screen shot.
You can also add the Album art if you wish. There is a site called thejosher.net or you can use amazon to get the artwork. I won't go into all the steps, but basically you save the art to your desktop, then while you have a get info window open in itunes, you drag the picture to iTunes, then click ok.
Step 4 - Convert to m4b.
The CD will be imported into your Music library in iTunes. It it is better to add them to the Audiobooks library. The best way to do this is:
Make a folder on your desktop - for example book.
Select the track of the book, then drag them to that folder.
Mac - There is a program you can use called Lostify to convert the type to Audiobook.
--Add more?
PC - Open a command prompt. This defaults to your directory, so we need to navigate to the book folder.
Then type the command - ren *.m4a *.m4b and hit enter.
Then type exit, hit enter to close the command prompt.
This renames the files with the extension m4b. iTunes uses this extension or the metadata that Lostify on the Mac to put the tracks into the Audiobooks library.
Step 5 - Import to iTunes again
Delete the track for the books in iTunes, then re-import the new tracks. The books will now be in iTunes correctly.
An advantage to this is if you have an iPod. There is a setting for playing books at a faster speed on iPods. Also, it helps keep iTunes organized. It is lame to start a book, while listening to music.
JungleDisk
The issue of backing up files has become complicated. I found out about a cool program called JungleDisk to handle this.
JungleDisk uses Amazon's S3 storage to mount a network drive to store files. The files are encrypted, so Amazon or anyone else can access your data. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Amazon S3 is a cheap network storage service provided by Amazon.com
Go Jungledisk!
JungleDisk uses Amazon's S3 storage to mount a network drive to store files. The files are encrypted, so Amazon or anyone else can access your data. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Amazon S3 is a cheap network storage service provided by Amazon.com
Go Jungledisk!
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